For a site-specific project on a private California art ranch, minimalist sculptor Richard Serra made a series of hyperdense Cor-Ten steel blocks. They are so heavy that they have their own gravity, or at least, when you walk past them, that’s how you feel: as though you might very well fall over, and into them.
Click on the image above to see more images of Serra's work
The pieces installed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art aren’t quite that heavy, but the weight of a Serra work is so expected that the late museum curator Kirk Varnedoe made sure that an extreme floor load was engineered into the brief for the museum’s recent redesign.
And that’s why, this summer, you can go to the second floor of the MoMA to see art that usually rests on concrete foundations on the ground, and walk through three new site-specific Serra sculptures: Band, Torqued Torus Inversion, and Sequence. The pieces take up almost all the floor space of the H-shaped gallery (after the show ends in September they’ll move to a room in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that is virtually - save for a seven-foot difference - identical), and to walk through Sequence is to remember just why almost everyone, when you mention Richard Serra, smiles.
Serra himself doesn’t smile all that much. He’s serious about his work, which he repeats ‘comes out of work,’ serious about making space with massive plates of Cor-Ten steel. He’s not going to tell you what it’s all about – ‘I’m not going to interpret my work for you,’ he says at the opening press conference on Tuesday, but he admits later, sitting in the corner of the H-shaped room and facing the outer edge of Sequence - an edge that you still can’t quite believe will stand but somehow have absolute faith it will - that he does want people to feel something. ‘If it makes them think thoughts they hadn’t thought before, then the work is helpful,’ he says. ‘Everybody brings their own baggage to the work.’
The exhibition Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years opens 3 June. It includes those three new pieces and a series of work from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, smaller pieces that start developing his interest in metal and balance and rubber and space. It’s good to see his history, but everything on that sixth floor feels a little hurriedly put-together; a visitor who accidentally walks through the exhibition backwards the first time finds it much better than a second take in the suggested order.
It’s tough to fit Serra into a museum, especially one as sanitized as the MoMA became after its 2005 re-opening. There’s something about the disconnect between the emotion that Serra’s steel inspires and the corporate minimalism of the room it’s in, that makes you wonder how these would look out in the open. And that’s why we thank the garden, where Intersection II and Torqued Ellipse IV, both from the 1990s, meet the outside of the museum and the sky. It’s easier there, for a moment, to think it’s just you and Richard. And he doesn’t need to interpret a thing.
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Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years
3 June to 10 September
- Website
- www.moma.org
- Telephone
- 1.212 708 9431
- Address
- Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St
New York, NY 10019
