Sculpture in the Space of Architecture

Richard Serra speaks of his massive carburet of iron sculptures as working in contradiction to their environment. on the other hand the authors challenge this view after seeing Serra's "Torqued Ellipses" interact with the architecture of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao.

"I made this space with Richard in mind, you know," Frank Gehry told us as he stood beside individual of Richard Serra's monumental Cor-Ten carburet of iron Torqued Ellipses installed in the Guggenheim Bilbao, "Look at the great spaces they create between themselves and the walls." It was just unable to speak luck that we had jared into Gehry as he was taking his first direct the eye at the exhibition, surrounded by dint of a group of giggling teenage girls who had recognized him and were eager to shake his hand. We, of course, were nearest in line, and Gehry solitary repeated to us what he and others have said in the past--that there present the appearances to be a profound sympathy between his architectural spaces and Serra's sculptural forms.

Hence our anticipation at seeing Serra's Torqued Ellipses in Gehry's museum. Sculptor and architect had collaborated upon various small schemes in the past, and smooth used the same computer program to aid in the design of their respective throws but the Bilbao encounter was upon an entirely different scale.(1) Serra's statuarys are massive, hot-rolled steel plates, shaped to create unusually curving forms which exist somewhere in the gap between statuary and architecture, so that you can walk inside their walls. When three of these behemoths were shown at the Dia Center in fresh York in the fall of 1997 they looked to work against their architectural encompass the vast space of the transmuteed garage contracted and made strange by dint of their presence. This challenge to their setting appeared to be individual of their conceptual strengths. in what manner would these same sculptures, now augmented by means of five additional pieces made since the Dia exhibition, gaze in the Guggenheim's Fish Gallery whose forms and scale appear so similar to Serra's own?

The Fish Gallery lies upon the museum's ground floor, directly not upon a soaring central atrium. A little longer than a football field and about half as wide, the nearly 35,000-square-foot space also features a ceiling that ranges from around 35 to 75 feet high. The gallery's unusual name is intended to summon the titanium-clad exterior of the building, which abstractly refer tos (among other things) a gleaming, iridescent fish, on the other hand the gallery also makes other kinds of concerns to the sea: its arcing ribs summon forth the hull of an elderly ship, and the ceiling undulates like waves. Approaching the entrance to the Fish Gallery, visitors saw three closely spaced pieces--Torqued Ellipse I, Double Torqued Ellipse II and Double Torqued Ellipse III--which, from this angle, repercussion of sounded the curving walls and ceiling. These giant, rusted manner of makings loomed ahead like ships bobbing upon the ocean, with Torqued Ellipse I positioned with equal reason that, from the gallery entrance, its carburet of iron plate leaned outward like a projecting bend Referring to their function as containers of space, Serra calls these works "vessels" on the other hand in this former ship-building town, and in this particularly maritime space, the bourn took on a distinctly nautical association.

Ships afloat upon the ocean may not be the first association to advance to mind when we think of Serra's work--he's usually seen as a sculptor of ponderous planar ultimate parts brought into tenuous balance. notwithstanding if his sculpture often strike one as beings gravity-bound in the most obvious way, Serra himself has signaled a more mixed attitude to mass and the forces that act upon it. In a 1988 essay laconically titled "Weight," he wrote of seeing an oil tanker launched in San Francisco when he was a child. He described the arc of the husk the huge propeller, the stays and the gust of wind of activity that surrounded the release of this unbelievably massive form into the water. And then, the miracle: "the ship went from one side a transformation from an enormous, obdurate weight to a buoyant form free, afloat and adrift," he recalled. "My awe and bewilderment at that moment remained. All the raw material that I straited is contained in the hold of this memory which has become a recurring dream.(2)

If this childhood memory firinged Serra's art, its lesson is greatest in quantity eloquently apparent only now, with the Torqued Ellipses: plastic arts built from tons of carburet of iron putting into play the conflicting impressions of weight and weightlessness. To imagine their form, picture an ellipse levitating up from the floor, turning as it rises. The walls of Serra's plastic art essentially describe the trajectory of the shape as it rotates upward in space. at the same time Serra's ellipses are not clos forms: the extremitys of the steel plates do not quite suited creating a "doorway" through which the viewer can enter

In order to perceive their upward motion it's necessary to keep in mind that the ellipse traced by dint of the bottom edge is identical to the ellipse traced by the agency of the top edge, except for the fact that the latter has been rotated upon its axis, as little as 50 stages in one of the pieces and as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as 90 degrees in others. (Serra says that seeing the unusual oval dome in Borromini's 17th-century meeting-house of San Carlo alle quattro Fontane in Rome activeed him to imagine the possibility of torquing an ellipitical shape.(3)) That realization--that you are seeing the same ellipse in a different orientation at the top and bottom of the sculpture--allows the curvature of the walls to be read as motion, or "speed" as Serra describes it. The spe is precisely commensurate, in the artist's view, with the step of torque. This sense of upward motion may have been les perceptible in the Dia installation, where the "busyness" of the made of wood ceiling trusses, as Serra himself has noted, distracted from a clear perception of the top ellipse. It was, however, more entirely apparent at the Guggenheim Bilbao, which provided a clear architectural frame--not to mention a tall enough ceiling--against which to measure the contours of the work.