The Brooklyn Rail

Some shadows illuminate. Richard Serra’s sculpture Fulcrum (1986–87) seldom provided shade during the appalling winter when I worked nearby. Richard’s contribution to a redeveloping London initially appealed to me as grist for a romantically unsentimental view of my native city: a gruff, severe, hard-edged vortex that served well as a metaphor, and occasionally as a windbreak for commuters milling around. I liked its style, its swagger, its timeliness. I knew almost nothing.

I did not see it on a sunny day until I was studying art history a few years later, by which time I had softened (or hardened) enough to appreciate the fluid rigor of Richard’s artistic decisions. Fulcrum was now evidence for me, and I spent an afternoon dissecting its properties and qualities: the resilient oxidized patina that both recorded and resisted its environment; the production values that I now understood as the common ground of industrial and artistic excellence; the echoes of austere non-objectivity in Russian Constructivism, postwar “geometry of fear” in Britain, and other grainy historical notes that I cheerfully misconstrued as a tune; and all kinds of other real and imagined elements that I could compile into an idiomatic misreading.

As I walked around Fulcrum, however, and wandered inside the space it describes, what I could know about sculpture became utterly subordinate to what I could feel. The sky seemed richer for the steel tunnel through which I saw it, the shifts in wind direction more pronounced. The shadow that Fulcrum cast seemed consonant rather than merely consequential, as though the sculpture could cast its shadows the way that Richard could cast sculpture, or a theatrical producer can cast actors, or a philosopher can cast doubt.

Plenty of artists have an instinct for revelation. Few have the more rarefied talent for releasing revelation into the wild. Richard Serra, I think, flourished in the fertile ground between the subjective, immersive realm of things, thoughts, and forces that he deployed in his works; and the amorphous physical world in which perceptual moments beyond his control would ultimately shape those works in countless configurations. It did not really surprise me to find Fulcrum so surprising in the days when I was scarcely formed. I was much more surprised to discover that I could walk into Richard’s studio years later and find drawings that seemed to redefine the medium—and to discover that the redefinition involved was an indeterminate, ongoing process.

Much of that was a consequence of Richard’s stringent adherence to the inherent properties of matter and dynamics, properties that a less confident artist might have burdened with an interpretive agenda. I do not really know why Richard seemed to appreciate what I wrote about his practice over the years, but I suspect it had something to do with my reluctance to hang an ideology or convenient story around his neck.

That made Richard difficult to write about, which is the highest praise I can offer for a visual artist of his stamp. His work tested the limits of metaphor and analogy as valid surrogates for what we might see or how we might move. His voracious curiosity, and his active engagement with the intellectual secretariat that flourished concurrently with his career, made the inherent philosophical complexity of his approach all the more agile—and, at times, elusive. Writing about Richard’s work was a glorious, humbling, inspiring challenge. To write about art that exposes the inadequacy of words is to flirt with misadventure.

That challenge certainly brought out the best in several of my favorite writers. Perhaps they, too, appreciated the cocktail of unswerving standards and delegated authority that he offered. When Richard said no, he meant it; but I almost never heard it, and he never constrained what I wrote. I certainly expected him to set me straight one day, and part of me relished that formidable prospect. Instead, I was fortunate to spend time with a warm, gruff, incisive, and very cogent aesthetician. It is a little discouraging to realize that Richard and I will never again agree to disagree about a fine point of apperception, or the subtleties of a technique, or some similar detail that allows the shadows of art—the inenarrable, deep currents that resist glib paraphrase—to cast us in a new light.

An exhibition reviewer once cast me as a “true believer” in a heroic mode of late-modernist resistance to imagery. I never took Richard’s work as resistant to imagery so much as resistant to glib paraphrases of all kinds, including the pseudomorphism that can lead us to badger works of art until they conform to our visual repositories. I certainly think that he had a knack for exposing the truths within beliefs, a purpose no less important than exposing the beliefs within truths. He also revealed falsity and misapprehension. He knew how to slow us down until we can think straight.

None of this made Richard heroic; aesthetically streetwise, perhaps. The quality that I most appreciated in Richard was more about the extraordinary in the ordinary: greatness as a property, not a quality. Difficulty in art can be a matter of hermetic self-regard, or encryption that demonstrates how clever people can be. Difficulty can also be a matter of complexity and richness: a realization of how remarkable things, forces, and people inherently are. Deep currents outlive the merely current, and I would say the same of artistic legacies. Some shadows illuminate.