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FEATURE RICHARD SERRA
above: Sequence, 2006, weatherproof steel, 390 x 1240 x 1990 cm
overall, plate 5 cm thick. Collection the artist. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle.
© the artist
left: Sequence (detail), 2006, weatherproof steel, 390 x 1240 x 1990 cm
overall, plate 5 cm thick. Collection the artist. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle.
© the artist
The promise his work holds out to younger
artists is his consistent challenge to
the received ideas of artistic convention
this arrangement, Serra realised that, ‘in terms of structure and tectonics, trope, and Serra’s contribution to the history of modern art, indeed the
you don’t need anything else’. So ensued Strike: To Roberta and Rudy promise that his work has held out to younger generations of artists,
(1969–71), which is simply the corner-mould of Splash Piece writ large, would seem to be his consistent challenges to the received ideas of
and the first of many works that one could, to quote Serra’s consistent artistic convention, even while working within what appears as one of
refrain, walk ‘in, through and around’. the most conventional and traditional disciplines on offer – sculpture.
Johns’s studio and the arrival at Strike inaugurated Serra’s In the face of this paradox, we would do well to remember that
engagement with two conditions that have become synonymous ‘logic of materials’ that Serra identified so early, and which, in retrospect,
with his oeuvre: site-specificity, whereby the sculpture, either explicitly I believe should demonstrate how the whole issue of site- – not to
or implicitly, engages the contingencies of its physical locale, and mention medium- – specificity will be regarded as something of an
phenomenology, which understands the work as designed to isolate interpretive distraction. Serra’s ‘logic’ initiates an interrogation not of
and stir the viewer’s sensorimotor faculties in and over time. Though materials themselves but of conditions of materiality, by which I mean
the fiasco of Tilted Arc (1981; destroyed 1989) did not necessarily put those conditions that automatically implicate and incorporate (enfold
an end to the former, it would not be too long before Serra introduced and embody) the place of some subjects, namely ourselves, within
work, such as his Torqued Ellipses (1997) and subsequent suites of the ever-complex, objective furniture of the world. By this logic, Serra
large, complex topological forms, which turn the specificity of their writes in ‘Play It Again, Sam’(1970), one of his first and rare published
engagements decidedly inwards, and towards the latter. statements on the state of the arts, ‘I have chosen the structure of
As Serra explains it, ‘This work offers something that is not a relation’ – a structure that describes the limits, be they physical,
mediated, so the experience is direct. I’m not saying that qualitatively experiential or conventional, of that troublesome fact we call Art.
it’s different but it is experience that is different in kind.’ The problem
with such statements is that the myth of the unmediated experience, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years is on show at MoMA, New York,
especially when it is deemed aesthetic, is a familiar high modernist from 3 June to 10 September
ARTREVIEW nine.linsix.lin
p092-096 Richard Serra AR Jun07.96 96 10/5/07 15:30:04
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