The Brooklyn Rail

It is odd when a person dies who is as potent a presence as Richard is.

It is paradoxical, and then some—his potency will never be subtracted from.

You feel both things each so intensely—the fact he is gone, and the fact he isn’t gone.

The slabs at Gagosian, and the more recent forged rounds, offered some of the most memorable experiences I ever had. Like, including the Grand Canyon. Being addressed as an embodied being.

I keep remembering the forged round at Zwirner, alone in the large room. I could believe a blind person could feel that form’s roiling of spacetime—measuring the universe, taming the universe, practically—like a lion tamer with a chair. A serious training—not without the type of respect a lion tamer has for a lion, of course.

The sense of it influencing time and space around itself seemed as centering as the sun is for the planets. 

You could think of Stevens’s poem maybe, “Anecdote of the Jar.”

No—inappropriate of course—the jar is gray and bare “and tall and of a port in air.”

And as Phong taught me: “Richard Serra does not fuck around. Richard Serra never made no hollow nothing.” 

I guess we have some idea about how the Florentines felt about their Michelangelo when he lived among them. Unaccountable—something of an order of genius that is not entirely and always without terror. Terribilità.

“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,” is what “sublime” means, but the words are from Rilke. He goes on to say “every Angel is terrible.”

My favorite of all Angels is the Angel played by Peter Falk in Wings of Desire.

Such a beautiful story.

If there were something “God”—then this world, if it hadn’t existed yet, would have to be created. If God, then God would need beings through which to have arms to enwrap others. In such a slow and majestic pace the Angel observes all that humans experience, from horrors to beauty to love and loss—slowly and majestically choosing a human life, giving up its eternal life in the divine order, giving up perpetual fulfillment. If God, then God needs us as much as we do God. The divine would appropriately yearn for embodied life, for sharing that with others, and a range of opportunities that you wouldn’t have in heaven. In the particular way that this world reveals love is what would make it indispensable.

Richard manifest such potent, ever-active moments in the fabric of time and space. It’s really hard to wrap my brain around.

“You listen, and you love, and you say nothing,” Einstein said of Bach. I like to have words for important experiences, but this is where words fail.

His sculptures are far too active to settle for being nouns. They aren’t without time. They are cinematic, turning viewers into camerapersons, while addressing all our senses. Sending us on walks, circulations.

I can never pinpoint years in memory, but I was a student at the time in the 1980s that I first encountered Richard’s works—ten years before we started framing.

It was the list of verbs/drawing that opened the door for me. It was stunning. Silencing.

That was words as well as silence, it was like the ringing of a gong—not an intellectual transfer from artwork to viewer, but an embodied one. Impacts that serve us toward instants of forgetting, so that we can experience our own presence.