Richard Serra at Gagosian - New York - Brief Article

On a damp weekday in late fall, the enormous Gagosian gallery in Chelsea was hushed, almost ecclesiastic, and Richard Serra's newest steel-walled spirals and curving corridors presented themselves with imperious authority. The physical experience of Serra's work grows increasingly complex, and a handful of viewers took their time, testing the work's distinctive kinesthetics, and optics, and even, quietly, its resonant acoustics. On a bright Saturday a few weeks later, the place was crammed with visitors and crawling with baby strollers, and single-file crowds circulated endlessly, chattering, pointing, exclaiming. It was like market day at the village square.

An interesting cultural history of the last 25 years could be written in terms of the reception of Serra's work. The public lynching of Tilted Arc would have to be part of it, but his current apotheosis is more interesting. Apparently, the enjoyment of space as such is not as arcane a pleasure as it used to be--and, perhaps, Serra can take some credit for the change. It helps that the space-time continuum of cosmic physics has acquired such wide metaphoric use, and that the warped ranges of hyperspace introduced by digital technology (especially as visualized by Hollywood) are such popular destinations. Important, too, are computer-facilitated changes to the architectural design process, such that elaborately curved buildings--of the kind that Frank Gehry, a peer of Serra's, has become best known for--are fast becoming commonplace. All these factors help, at the least, to contextualize Serra's work; in the case of the designed environment, they may also reflect reciprocal influences.

Serra's own points of reference, though, tend toward the industrial age and earlier. In this show's catalogue, Baroque architecture and 20th-century shipbuilding are again invoked (with the artist's support) as influences. Of course, references--acknowledged and otherwise--constitute only a fractional account of Serra's resources, which involve above all a Pygmalion-like gift for animating the most unpromising raw material: empty space, solid steel.

In Betwixt the Torus and the Sphere, six doubly curved walls--they are, alternately, fragments of spherical and doughnut-shaped wholes--send viewers through passages that expand and contract with literally breathtaking rhythmic power. A pair of walls is joined end to end in Union of the Torus and the Sphere, forming a hollow but entryless pointed ellipse that is as sleek, massive and improbably buoyant as a breaching whale. The unnerving constriction and exhilarating release of the torqued spirals Bellamy and Sylvester (in memory of the dealer and the critic, respectively) recall the earlier Torqued Ellipses, though here the drama is stepped up a notch. No less theatrical, in its way, is Ali-Frazier, in which two heavyweight blocks of solid steel square off in separate rooms, the wall between them only enhancing the combativeness, and gravity, of their opposition. Solid steel blocks have appeared in Serra's sculpture before; indeed, the basic vocabulary of the artist's work has long been fairly stable. But its meaning is no more static than its paradoxically massive and mobile forms.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group