Steel-Drivin' Man

By ROBERT HUGHES

Now pushing 60, Richard Serra is the John Henry, the steel-drivin' man, of American sculpture at the century's end. There are a few other sculptors of comparable distinction around--Martin Puryear comes to mind--but in the handling of heavy metal Serra has no peer; there, he is the most original figure since David Smith, who died more than three decades ago. It was Serra, with his ability to involve the human body as a participant in his work--demanding something more from a spectator than the sole act of looking, and yet harshly rewarding the eye as well--who began in the 1960s to rescue sculpture from the dematerializing effects of Minimalism. His work has always demanded reaction. In the past it has occasionally got more than it bargained for: Tilted Arc, 1981, a 120-ft. steel wall running across Federal Plaza in New York City, was taken down after its intrusiveness provoked a hailstorm of public controversy.

Since then Serra has had few public commissions in America, and much of his major work has been done in Europe--for example, Exchange, 1996, a soaring array of seven trapezoidal slabs, 65 ft. high, propped together over a highway traffic circle outside Luxembourg City. The chance to see any number of his large pieces together is rare. They tend to be too big for museums, too heavy for their floors, and their installation is brutally costly. And so the current show of seven new pieces, the Torqued Ellipses, in the Geffen Contemporary building at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, is--to put it mildly--quite an event.

Picture an ellipse drawn on the floor. Now take that ellipse and hoist it up, rotating it as it goes. Stop it 13 ft. or so in the air, when it's at an angle to its floor position. Its perimeter, in rising, will have generated a curving shape, an extremely twisted or "torqued" elliptical cylinder. Not a section of a cone (the cone diminishes towards its vertex) but something else, a curvature whose radius does not alter but whose walls constantly change their angle. Then make it out of steel plates, 2 in. thick. You will end up with a shape that has not been used in sculpture before, and that has no precedents in other arts like pottery (it can't be thrown on a wheel) or architecture (it is inherently weak in compression and can't bear large loads, though if made in a rigid material like steel it can support itself).

Its nearest relation, though, is architecture. Through a gap in the wall, you can walk into each of Serra's Torqued Ellipses and contemplate its interior space. Serra got the idea from a Baroque church in Rome: Francesco Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, whose plan is a quatrefoil stretched to a near ellipse. Standing in it, Serra wondered, "What if I turn this form on itself?" But the closest architectural sibling of these new sculptures is the work of Serra's friend Frank Gehry, the designer of the spectacular Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, with its freely twisted and flowing curves sheathed in metal. To calculate the full-scale enlargements of the Torqued Ellipses from their sheet-lead models, Serra had recourse to CATIA, the same computer program Gehry used for Bilbao.

"They are vessels that you walk into," says Serra. Well, yes, if vessel means ship rather than pot. They hark back to, and in a sense make concrete, a vivid childhood memory that is quoted in the show's catalog. Serra's father worked in a California shipyard, and the son got to see large new craft being launched. "It was a moment of tremendous anxiety," Serra wrote in 1988, "as the oiler rattled, swayed, tipped and bounced into the sea, half submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance. The ship went through a transformation from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyant structure, free, afloat and adrift. All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory, which has become a recurrent dream." His "awe and wonder" at this sight is recapitulated, more strongly than ever before in his work, in the Torqued Ellipses.

Making them required tanker technology. Each of the plates weighs between 15 and 20 tons, and few steel-mill machines existed that could bend them. Serra eventually found one in Maryland. All that tonnage (literally: the aggregate weight of the seven Torqued Ellipses comes to nearly 400 tons, giving this a claim to be the most ponderous one-man show in history) had to be shipped to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal and set up inside the Geffen Contemporary. The plates couldn't be craned in through its doors, and so, recalls the museum's director, Richard Koshalek, "we took the direct way. We just cut a big hole in the back wall and had the trucks drive straight in." Then, with the help of a compact but powerful lifting crane whose last major job had been to jack up the concrete slabs of Los Angeles' freeways after they pancaked in the 1994 earthquake, the curved metal slabs were fitted together: seven sculptures, each the size of a house, each open at the top but defining a strange and inordinately powerful space inside.

It's not the size of Serra's pieces that holds you, though that is in itself impressive; rather, it's their blunt originality, a drama of spatial conception that seems quite new but is presented matter-of-factly. In Serra's view the most important change in 20th-century sculpture occurred when it ceased to be statuary, when it came down off its pedestal, the plinth that isolated it from the rest of the world, and entered the space, public or private, in which its audience lived and moved. Walking through these works--from outside to inside and back again, and in the case of the double ellipses, which have one "room" inside another, moving along the narrow corridor between the skins and experiencing its ever changing tilt--is crucial to their effect.

They are not mazes; you cannot actually get lost in them. Yet they are not so easy to read. The change of curvature is continuous, and it destabilizes you. In some sculptures the difficulty of knowing what sort of space you are in almost amounts to queasiness; you misjudge your distance from the wall and bump into it; you have to look up through the open top to orient yourself again. The physical experience of the piece can't be predicted from its geometry. Those slabs of steel, leaning together and held in place solely by their own weight, play upon your body's sense of weight and induce an acute awareness of gravity. They testify to the world's density, and a degree of threat is included in that.

Serra is more interested in truth than beauty. Particularly the truth of materials. The Russian Constructivists had a term, faktura, meaning the straightforward, logical use of substances--wood, tin, steel, rope, wire--to produce expressive effects on their own material terms. Serra is and always has been fanatical about this. He doesn't paint, polish, grind or otherwise fiddle about with his metal. It rusts naturally and bears the marks of its making, the scrapes, even the claw marks of the grabs that hoisted the plates. And yet these traces, which one might think would be brutal, acquire--given the enormous scale of the pieces--a beauty that almost amounts to delicacy. The run and layering of red oxidation reminds you of Abstract Expressionist painting. More than that, it recalls nature itself: there are moments, particularly in the double-ellipse pieces, when walking between the rusty walls is almost like being in a red-rock gorge.

Grandeur is not a word you would think you would need in discussing the art of the late '90s in America, amid its tinkle of postmodernist styles and the chitchat of a depleted conceptualism. But in the presence of these new Serras, you have no choice but to use it--and to be glad that there's someone to whose work it can honestly apply.