The Brooklyn Rail

I responded to Richard Serra’s art from the start—my start with art, not his, for he was a few years older and, I suspect, forever more clued-in to what might be possible as “art.” My immediate appreciation of Richard’s work was due to my generation somehow being primed for it, unconsciously attuned to art that presented viewing as a process rather than as an image. Instead of offering a coded message, Richard caused his materials to generate unrelenting feeling. With Richard as a prime instigator, the anti-formal turn from image to process arrived as an irresistible force of nature. His works struck chords of sensation to which my generation—many of us anyway—instinctively responded. So, my enthusiasm for Richard’s art wasn’t due to some prescience on my part. I had an intuitive—or should I say emotional—feel for this art long before I realized that it had the potential to communicate with most of the global population: those experienced in modern Western art along with those having no need to acquire this experience. The visceral, profoundly human quality of Richard’s art has proven oblivious to cultural barriers. It calls everyone—everyone—to attention. Western critics who fault this art for its connotations of power and grandiosity allow their localized ideological prejudice to obliterate raw, human feeling. Richard Serra was an intellectual, but he never over-intellectualized his art.

I probably saw nearly every Serra show to appear in New York and London and many at other venues. In recent years, I made a habit of sending Richard unsolicited comments on his exhibitions, my take on how the latest works might affect a viewer. Those who constitute Richard’s public become temporary inhabitants of his art, whether by walking within a volumetric work or a configured installation or confronting a riveting wall-work heavy with Paintstik. As a writer, I produced my circumstantial fragments of commentary solely for the challenge of it, because the work was intensely physical yet also—in strange ways—cerebral. It played on and with the mind-body connection. How it did so was my self-assigned problem.

Richard created art with words as well as with materials. His “Weight,” which recounts his early childhood experience of a massive ship launch, reads like a prose poem. Powerful yet elegant, it bears re-reading repeatedly. It represents the quintessential Serra, who, along with Michelangelo, invented weight as a medium. At least for me, another of Richard’s childhood memories, that of walking the San Francisco beach, is comparably revealing. He noticed that on returning in the opposite direction, everything changed; it was not the same beach. The distinction between Pacific-to-the-right and Pacific-to-the-left or down-the-beach and up-the-beach was no longer a mere conceptual formulation of parity and reversal; it demanded to be lived as an ineradicable difference. Nothing in life repeats, nothing is equal, all is ever new. I continue to feel this living newness in all of Richard’s art.