When Richard Serra died on Tuesday, I went back almost 30 years, to a morning at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art , looking with him and his wife, German art historian Clara Weyergraf, at
Jackson Pollock
's 1950 Splash and Drip painting
, “ Autumn Rhythm."
We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the other end of the Met, would still be empty.
Looking at the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing from side to side, moving away to see the whole thing and then returning to inspect some details.
"We evaluate artists based on their ability to throw away convention and change history," he said.
That was Serra's ultimate goal: in his case, to push sculpture into new territory.
Why else be an artist?
That's how I thought. Old School. Old Testament.
Richard Serra's Leaning Arch" in lower Manhattan on March 6, 1985. Serra was known as the Man of Steel. But the sculptor was also a timeless poet, reconfiguring our perception of space, says Michael Kimmelman. (Richard Serra/ Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York; Neal Boenzi/The New York Times)
For him art was all or nothing.
Of course, he was not alone in his thinking among the American artists of his generation, descendants of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.
That being said, not many artists achieved what they set out to do and in the process saw the public perception of their work take a 180 degree turn.
All these decades later, a wide swath of the public remains bewildered and occasionally irritated by Pollock, just as they
were not
with Serra for years.
Tilted Arc, Serra's gigantic steel sculpture, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met.
Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouse in lower Manhattan in 1989.
His fellow artists opposed the removal, but office workers eating lunch in the square implored the City Council.
They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall dividing their precious open space.
Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.
"I think that if work is asked to be accommodating, servile, helpful, required, subservient, then the artist is in trouble," he said.
Two decades had passed and thousands of his admirers filled an auditorium in Brazil.
He and I had flown to Rio to give a public speech.
The audience had come to hear the lion's roar.
By then, he and his voice had softened.
But not his message.
He compared art to science.
Science is not advanced by public consensus, he said.
He then described the time he had thrown molten lead against the wall and adjacent sidewalk of a museum in Switzerland, an act that so horrified tense Swiss residents that the work was removed after only a few hours.
He explained that he was mocking the
stifling sanctity
of the museum, claiming the side of the building as part of his sculpture and, at the same time, exchanging industrial materials such as lead, steel and rubber for the traditional tools and conventions of his craft, such as marble, pedestals and clay.
Around the same time, he raised the edge of a sheet of discarded rubber collected from a warehouse in Manhattan, creating a sort of
balanced
tent :
a topography that implies action.
I wasn't trying to make something crowd-pleasing, familiar or beautiful, he recalled.
It wasn't beautiful. It was an experiment.
Was it art?
That was the question.
It was the same question Pollock posed when he painted “
Autumn Rhythm
.”
Pollock had also stalked the canvas as it lay on the floor of his studio in Long Island, New York.
He traced its edges with sticks, dripping and ladling paint.
The lines of the image recorded its choreography.
“Autumn Rhythm” was a pure abstraction, without depth, describing only itself, not an image of anything else:
a floating field of wild and exquisite tracery that viewers would have to navigate and decipher for themselves.
Not even Pollock was sure what it meant.
Pollock "had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements," Serra said.
"After all, he didn't know where he would end up when he started."
Career
Serra had begun his meteoric career as a volcanic presence in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, which today has the bittersweet smell of a faded Polaroid.
It was a cobblestones and cast iron version of 1910s Russia, driven by ego and revolution.
Serra occupied a loft with the sculptor Nancy Graves, without running water, which cost about $75 a month, and fell into a community of ingenues and disruptors, composers, dancers, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists, among them
Trisha Brown
, Joan Jonas
, Steve Reich, Philip Glass
, Spalding Grey, Michael Snow, Chuck Close, Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer.
The list goes on.
Cheap rent, available properties and concerns.
The cocktail of urban creativity and change.
“There was a clear understanding between us that we had to redefine whatever activity we were doing,” is how Serra described the scene to the crowd in Rio.
By then, a global audience had come to adore his
elliptical labyrinths
of twisted
Cor-Ten steel
, the culmination of his sculptural pursuits.
They were democratic adventures, depending on what you contributed to them.
A filmmaker once told me that walking through them reminded him of a film in progress, with twists and turns leading to a surprise ending.
A Holocaust writer once compared its high walls to pens.
I always found them very funny.
They focus the mind, provoking fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step.
Serra magically transforms bent and tilted walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax.
Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and imposing, suddenly open into clearings.
Milestone
When Serra received a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, one of the most spectacular shows of the current century, I found a trio of half-naked bathers reclining on the ground inside Torqued Ellipse IV, which occupied part of the museum's garden.
So what's changed over the years to appeal to audiences?
I'm not sure it was Serra, who stood his ground.
There is a work of his called 1-1-1-1, from 1969, which consists of three tilting steel plates held upright by a pole that rests on them, in turn stabilized by a fourth plate that swings at its end.
It seems scary and precarious, but the balancing act may also remind you of
Buster Keaton.
He used to describe himself as stubborn and threatening.
But I don't think Serra saw his work that way.
After the
MoMA
retrospective , I spent a late summer afternoon in Italy watching Serra patiently and silently escort my eldest son, who was still in elementary school, through the ancient temples of Paestum.
Serra spoke, like an adult, about the swelling of the eroded columns, the weight of the stones, the way the stones balanced on top of each other and supported each other.
For him, sculpture summarized in its essential qualities (mass, gravity, weight, volume) was our shared language and legacy, an eternal poem to which great artists add their contributions throughout the centuries.
“I don't know anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or language of painting as much as he has,” he told me in that gallery with “Autumn Rhythm.”
“And that was what, almost half a century ago?”
It is difficult to think of artists who have done more than Serra over the last half century to alter the form and language of sculpture.
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