The Brooklyn Rail

If one has had any sort of personal relationship with Richard Serra it is difficult not to speak of the man and the art together. This is especially true now, in his absence.

When I think back on our conversations, one thing in particular stands out: a phrase he often used, “the logic of the work.” It always struck me as a kind of key. Its significance is self-evident: that a deep, authentic encounter with an artwork requires one to look no further than what might be called the aesthetic function of the work in and of itself. This aspect of it is accessible to us in the most direct structural and material ways, and that very directness is something we should trust. Obviously, consideration will always be given to a multitude of historical factors. But starting out with the work’s own terms is a matter of respect, and everything else follows.

It goes without saying that such a premise is specific to Richard’s work and is, in the best sense, self-serving. But it is directly related to the occasional times I recall spending with him in galleries or museums, looking together at the work of other artists. The experience was often revelatory. Richard would stop before a painting, a Picasso still life of the 1940s, for example, quickly seize on one or two things about it that were convincing or sound, share with me what he saw, and move on. He approached the work of others almost entirely from the vantage of his own, but that vantage was acute, and it gave him access to what he believed was a work’s basic moves.

I see the logic of the work as an ethos. Richard’s sculpture is often characterized as either monumental or intimidating, but I would claim for it an intimacy instead. The early, verb-list-based exercises in process; the balancing act of the lead props; the experience of space for the mobile observer in the works comprised of standing steel plates, flat or curved—the space of the site and/or the habitable interior of the object itself; the deployment, in the late works in forged steel, of equivalency, elevation, and scale and the sheer sheerness of weight and mass: these means are elemental. As daunting in its presence as the work has long been, its chief quality is its openness. Encounter is its operative term, starting with its one-to-one relation to the body. In turn, the logic of the work takes the form of a what-if proposition, there to be apprehended—sometimes slowly, sometimes at a glance.

Richard told and retold many stories of the development of his practice, and they came to seem like parables. Some date back to his early youth in San Francisco, before he had begun making art. Witnessing the launch of a ship, in which something enormous and heavy becomes, in an extended instant, buoyant and light. Before that, as a child of four, walking on the beach, first in one direction, then, turning around, back in the other. Two sets of footprints in the sand: the same line of trajectory moving in two ways, with the land and the sea, and therefore the horizon, changing sides, from his left to his right.

These are epiphanies—also elemental—of orientation as a function of sensation and time. The practice begins there, and so does the logic of the work.