Richard Serra: orienting space

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
Concerns quintessentially sculptural have engaged Richard Serra for more than thirty years, although as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s he was strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, above all Yvonne Rainer. Such work prompted him to consider “ways of relating movement to material and space,” he has explained, in that it allowed him “to think about sculpture in an open and extended field in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object. I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body’s movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.”

A visit to a number of Zen gardens in Kyoto while on a trip to Japan in 1970 reinforced Serra’s growing preoccupation with work that was defined through the processes of its reception. There he discovered that “your vision is peripatetic and not reduced to framing an image. It includes and is dependent upon memory and anticipation. The relationship of time, space, walking, and looking—particularly in arcs and circles—constitutes the only way you can see certain Japanese gardens.”

Redefining this requirement of extended temporality and nomadic vision, Serra’s recent series of Torqued Ellipses elaborates concerns with orientation and movement into tightly contained sculptures that radically challenge modernist notions of sculptural space. For in these works space shifts and moves in wholly unpredictable and unprecedented ways: so destabilizing yet so beguiling is this sensation of movement that the spectator quickly gets caught up in an exploration of extended duration.

Rolled-steel plates, each two inches thick and weighing twenty tons, stand abutted. This forthright, direct presentation, characteristic of Serra’s aesthetic, gives little hint of the fundamental newness and potency of the experience offered in these monumental works. They alter the proportions of the room in which they are located, testing perceptual and conceptual apprehension of the relation between the assumed horizontal plane and the ground, and tempering routine assumptions regarding the built environment and the spectator’s relationship to it.