The Brooklyn Rail

“Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”

–Joseph Butler

“Say what you mean. Mean what you say.”

–Richard Serra

There have been many artists who made important contributions to their discipline and to a specific medium, but only a very few have changed how we think and feel about their discipline or their medium. Undoubtedly Richard Serra is one of those few. And in addition to admiring his work, we also greatly admire the way in which Serra lived his entire life in service to his work—which he knew, as we do, was a feat of mythical proportions.

Although Gaston Bachelard has warned us about trying to explain the flower by the fertilizer, and we are aware that knowing about an artist’s milieu can never quite explain the work they produce, if the milieu is seen as a fertile ground, then some components of the fertilizer must undoubtedly have something to do with the flower. It is worth noting that Serra found his footing at a time, during the 1960s and 1970s, that was shaped by the perpetual political, social turmoil here in the US, including the struggles for Civil Rights, endless anti-Vietnam War protests, the Women’s Rights movement, and other global conflicts. All this to say: Serra’s profound contribution to the art of sculpture has deep roots in the radical experimental culture of film, dance, music, theater, and philosophy, all of which were clearly demonstrated in his 2007 retrospective Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at the Museum of Modern Art. From a personal perspective, I must confess that Serra’s complex evolution as an artist has greatly inspired how I, myself, mobilize, often with tremendous difficulty, ways of deploying the cross-pollinations of our creative communities from which the strength and wisdom of the older generation can be passed to the young one through a conduit such as the Brooklyn Rail. Serra was a guiding spirit—however it may seem from afar, I always felt his presence to be viscerally close.

As famously told by the artist himself, when he was four or five years old Serra experienced two ever-lasting impressions that haunted him as reoccurring dreams throughout his life: In the first, he had walked along the beach for a couple of miles in one direction, then in walking back, while looking at his footprints on the sand, Serra was astonished by the differences between the concavity and convexity, positive and negative space that gravity had fixed upon the forms. The second experience seems impossibly different, yet it anticipates this same little boy who was taken to a ship yard to witness the launching of a ship that his father had worked on as pipe fitter: this moment of celebration was simultaneously infused with a blaze of high anxiety; as once again, one may assume that what Serra saw, as a physical process, was perceived both as a public spree and a solemn blessing, for this dualistic either/or perception would seem to have created an unusual self-inquisitiveness from such a young age, which fortified what would be a lifelong endurance that sustained his own Argo ship that sailed the seas. One can only hypothesize about how these two distinct memories set forth his exposure to modern European literature and philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, then at the University of California, Santa Barbara (during which time Christopher Isherwood, Margaret Mead, Reinhold Niebuhr, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Marcuse, among other known authors, scholars had taught and lectured in both institutions). Another important experience was a drawing class Serra took in his senior year with Howard Warshaw who prompted Serra to his next consequential chapter, namely at Yale University graduate school as a painting major. Although we don’t want to read too much into this, still, the degree of absorption in-between of the post-Bauhaus’s experimental pedagogy spearheaded by Josef Albers and the friction that lies between the tail end of Abstract Expressionism and the emergence of Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art—exemplified by artist professors and visiting critics including Jack Tworkov, Al Held, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Dore Ashton, Elaine de Kooning, among others—would be hard to comprehend, at least in my own capacity.

What followed, after having graduated from his Yale MFA in 1964 alongside such remarkable classmates as Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Rackstraw Downes, and Janet Fish, was an epic chapter. Despite having tried hard in the previous two years in college to translate drawing into painting, it was due to a one-year traveling fellowship from Yale to Paris that he had a significant revelation, when he contemplated two modernist masters: namely on one hand the serene exploration of biomorphic forms in their surface materials, as well as the radical integration of the sculptures with their bases in the works of Constantin Brâncuși; and on the other hand, the existential angst embodied in Alberto Giacometti’s painting and sculpture alike, especially Woman with Her Throat Cut (Femme égorgée) (1932), a writhing, punctured figure intended to be placed directly on the floor, ensnaring viewers to be in the same physical space. Both discoveries I believe were immediately carved into Serra’s mind in preparation for his Fulbright Grant the following year in Florence, Italy. Again, he absorbed every master work of art he encountered, in particularly his trip to the Prado Museum in Madrid where he saw Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)—a painting Serra must have felt reached the apex of the art of painting, hence leading to his decision to give up painting altogether by throwing all he had made into the Arno River.

It was from this point onward that Serra began experimenting with nontraditional sculptural material, for he had his first one-person exhibition Animal habitats live and stuffed. . ., featuring live and taxidermy animals inside various crates, cages, and other “habitats” at Galleria La Salita in Rome 1966. Decisively, upon Serra’s return to New York City in the same year, he continued to explore working with experimental materials such as rubber, latex, fiberglass, neon, and lead. One could only project how Serra keenly observed all the excitements generating from experimental films and dance in particular while he largely began formulating his own pictorial lexicon in response to what was being made according to the prevailing critical issues at the time in the downtown art scene. Here, most of us suspect Serra must have taken the structuralist films of Michael Snow, particular his legendary Wavelength, to heart while it was being edited in 1966. He was equally aware of the floor-bound square modules that Carl Andre showed at his first one-man exhibit at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and Barbara Rose’s seminal “ABC Art” essay from the year before in 1965. These led to the radical experimentation that was associated with the Judson Dance Theater movement, a loose collection of dancers and artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Joan Jonas, for example, whose performances crossed fluidly between the fields of dance and visual art, creating a striking and intellectualized form of performance that denied the theatricality and emotionalism of modern dance in favor of movements that seemed casual, spare, cool, and most importantly experimented with movement in relation to matter and materials in time and space on the floor, on the street, anywhere on the same horizontal platform as the viewers, hence eliminating the pedestal once and for all. I can only imagine the racing thoughts in Serra’s very active mind while feeling the urgent need to express his own emotional content stored in the body. During these artistic shifts and inventions, what was at stake for Serra, as for the other artists of his generation, was an activation of his own dialectical thinking, which involves considering multiple perspectives on a topic and reconciling seemingly contradictory ideas. Perhaps if we were again to think how Serra had found his own personal synthesis or pragmatic mediation of what could possibly lie in-between the mind and body division—the former advocates for enlightenment, putting forth Cartesian logic with the rational mind presiding over sensation and the perception of reality which are to be regarded as the source of ever-endless illusions; while the latter, also known as counter-enlightenment, reclaims the sensual, spiritual life in relation to nature as one organic conception of social and political structure.

As we look back to Serra’s extraordinary ability to think with his head and feel with his body, thinking back to the pivotal year of 1967, leading to the decade of 1970s, during which time the legacy of Jackson Pollock’s work was being explored in varieties of form, especially with the emergence of Land art, performance art, and Post-Minimalism, Serra must have understood the intense predicament and the essential implication of everything that was being materialized internally as an artist; while at the same time being mindful of external surroundings that would potentially alter or challenge his own identity as an artist. To me, as well as to others, the way Serra invented his now famous Verb List (1967) is the most important turning point in his maturity. What he compiled was a series of what he called “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Whatever one may have thought of his head as a thinking mind on the pictorial issues of verticality versus horizontality, positive versus negative space, convexity versus concavity, enlightenment versus counter-enlightenment, so on and so forth, his body had always been equally essential to his art. Each of Serra’s works of art is consequential as a singular and iconic creation, from To Lift (1967), and Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up (1968), Splashing (1968) to Casting (1969); from Strike: To Roberta and Rudy (1969–71) leading to landscape works, including To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted (1970), Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation (1970–71), Shift (1970–72), Schunnemunk Fork (1990–91), East-West/West-East (2014), then urban works such as Sight Point (1972–75), Clara-Clara (1983), Berlin Junction (1987), The Hedgehog and the Fox (1999); the legendary works Serra had made over the last five decades for gallery presentations, Berlin Block (for Charlie Chaplin (1977), Elevation for Mies (1985–88) to say the seven “Torqued Ellipses” (1996–2004), The Matter of Time (1994–2005) to Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2017).

When looking at his work one often thinks of his physical being: brilliant head and big emotional body, both strongly connected with a solid neck. However stable each may seem to be, in the way it embodies or evokes stability, weight, solidity of form, in matter it also calls forth the total opposite: our own emotional fragility. For the neck, however solid it may appear to be, can barely sustain the intensity of this dialectic as we deeply feel Serra’s hard-won unity. Which at once is a result of his being receptive to life experience without succumbing to the dangers of obedience and adherence to dogma, yet at the same time having the aspiration of ennobling the working body and elevating the mind—which is mightily present as we recognize this perpetual struggle within ourselves.