Biography
His father was a pipefitter in a San Francisco shipyard; bending
steel under intense pressure was his metier. As a young man, Serra worked
in various Bay Area steel mills. His feeling for the tectonic began with Bay
Area bridges; his awe of weight and equilibrium, gravity and grace from watching
a ship launching. "The ship went through a transformation from obdurate
weight to a buoyant structure . . . my awe and wonder at that moment remained
. . . and has become a recurring dream."
"The biggest break in the history of 20th Century sculpture,"
Serra has remarked, "occurred when the pedestal was removed," meaning
that a shift took place away from sculpture as memorial or monument. The idealization
of pure form represented by the modernist aesthetic (think Meis) was supplanted
by Serra and his peers with post modernist values. For Serra, that meant that
what was paramount was the relationship of the body of the viewer and the
change of his body's spatial movement over time operating in tandem framing
and reframing the subject and the site.
In Serra's aesthetic, place is fundamental, but the body
remains primary. Thus his sculpture sets up a "relay" between the
viewer and the site that frames the one in terms of the other and transforms
both at once.
A basic assumption of the work is that the quotidian reality
of an American life in the 20th century is centered on the family. As such
it is also autobiography. Neel's portrait gallery is her world. Only a small
portion of her sitters belonged to the art elite, but it didn't matter.
Serra's basic syntax is one of point load, balance, counter-balance, and leverage.
His earlier series of works in the form of "arcs" were subsequently
doubled and tripled and then turned into wavy ribbons.
RIBBONS!!!
Two inch thick slabs of corten steel, 13 feet high resting
on their narrow edge. They spook the viewer leaning over his head, as they
do, and falling away from him at the same time in a reverse curve. The viewer,
now the artist's accomplice, shuffling warily between senses the menace that
these eerily raked "walls" threaten. As the viewer moves hesitantly
through this curvilinear corridor perception of space and angle continuously
- and beautifully - change in tandem.
Where as Carnegie 1984-85, the vertical sculpture at the door
of our Museum, achieves its effect by propping and overlapping, the "Rounds" from
the early 1990s rather than "manipulate space, obliterate it through
mass." The "Torqued Ellipses" of 1996-97 and their contemporary
variations suggest both passages and envelopes. Their effect is as Baroque
as the interior of Borromini's San Carlo church in Rome: a simultaneous sense
of deforming space and a spatial overwhelming of the viewer.
The "Torqued Ellipse" shapes are, in fact,
impossible in nature. They could only have been invented by a computer.
Software known as "Catia" was developed by the French aero-space
industry for its own design purposes. Serra puts it to another use. The "Torqued
Ellipses" put the viewer in play within the space in a way that seems
to derange its rational structure. The viewer seems to be inside and outside
at once. Rational and perverse, public and private are forced together.
Piranesi would have smiled.
When Serra says "Drawing is another kind of language," the
emphasis is on another. This explains why his sculptures are rarely preceded
by drawings. "Rather," he says, "they are the result of trying
to assess and define what surprises me in a sculpture."
In his drawings and prints, Serra focuses on the edge and shape
evoking, what he calls "peripatetic vision," the distortions produced
by walking around or through the sculptures. In this group of large scale,
beautifully etched images of "Rounds" and "Ellipses," the
circular and spiraling shapes off-set by splatters create their effect through
weight and energy.
One way to measure the value of a work of art, especially in
print making, is by the amount of personal involvement by the artist.
These works received an unusual amount of the artist's time
and personal involvement. To create the richly textured surface of these
new etchings, Serra worked the surface of the copper plate by building up
layer upon layer of Paintstick and/or lithographic crayon. As determined
at random by the artist, Serra would either pour the molten material or rub
the solid material onto a plate flat on the floor of the studio, thus permitting
him to press the material through an aluminum screen, often using his feet.
His completed drawings on the copper plate had a very sculptural physicality
with some high points as thick as ¾-inches. This translates to the
prints in their richly textural surface, and the size and scale of the images.
Once completed, the prints were sprayed with an acrylic clear-coating,
which allows them to be displayed in a frame without a glass or plexiglass
covering.
- Michael Berger
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