SERRA

A Richard Serra sculpture is elemental and mythic. One feels the weight as ones mortality.

The curve is a mythic shape of the Illiad and a shadow of the Greek form of war. There is a blackness like Achilles "black look." The sculpture slices through space like the boat on the sea of Oddyseus. They are a metaphor for the weight of pure form heightened by the memory of-- echoing, to some origin.

The weight is like a history containing all shape and weight, a color of memory that doesn't get in the way of remembering.




It is like a Pollock whose form takes one to the stars. A Keifer that wonders of that same depth. A Newman that hails that same, vertical moment of eternity.

They are scary and one wants to get out of the way. They are a part of our best art and they leave so much behind.

The photos are from Ft Worth Museum of Modern Art, Texas and Pulitzer Foundation, St Louis.

Richard Serra at the Modern

I only just got to see the Serra Show on Sunday. I lined up at 9:30 Sunday morning and was one of the first in the gallery upstairs. Even then soon the galleries were filled with Disney like tourists with their necks craned out this and that way in obvious pleasure.

Not me. I could only remember my earlier pleasure with similar sculpture at other times in my life.

The big card like sculpture that lent on Franklin Street in the late seventies, with a neighborhood kid's sneakers thrown up on it. I was amazed when it was removed, it was so great, I thought it would always be there.

Then the Rotary near the Holland Tunnel in the early eighties. I was there late one night and hurled a spearlike 2x4 over the sculpture. I ripped my hand as a nail passing in the night drew blood. We were the Achaeans at the WALL.






We found drawings lying near the not yet covered concrete footings. Big rolls of Arches paper with 8 foot arcs of oil stick. I told John Chamberlain about them one night at a bar he said , "So what, kid?"

A little later Richard himself tried to hit me when I disturbed him late at night at the bar, One University, trying to tell him I had them.

I think later that night I tossed them out on the street.

Recently I was up at DIA Beacon early in the morning and spent some time with the sculpture there, and also at the Pulitzer in St Louis there is a sculpture really great, I saw last summer.

But I don't know? The new sculpture, they seem mannered? A little too curvy, too pretty now and easy-- a good test is, the tourist, they wouldn't like as much the plain elemental sculpture of 15 years ago. It was a big deal when one recognized they arced just a bit inward!

I just don't get what pleasure the curators and artists themselves are getting? Anybody want to go back for a second look wrangling with those crowds?