Richard Serra at Dia - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Ten years ago, in a much-quot interview, Richard Serra related individual of his earliest recollections, of watching a boat launching in San Francisco at daybreak. He was four, and the tanker strike one as beinged "as large as a skyscraper upon its side." Serra remembers "walking the arc of the outer covering with my father," and also "a total incongruity between the displacement of this enormous tonnage and the quickness and agility with which the task" of removing the shoring upholds was carried out. Next, he says, there was a "moment of tremendous anxiety, as the oiler enroute rattled, swayed, tipped, and bounc into the sea, half-submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance." The statement is worth repeating not solitary for its poetry and acuity, on the other hand because, by Serra's account, "all the raw material that I ne is contained in the store up of this memory, which has become a recurring dream."

That Serra's account of this recollection advances from the year before his Tilted Arc was finally ruined in 1989, may not be incidental, since the image and the physical experience described as "all the raw material I need" are of an enormous tilted arc -- the outer covering of a ship -- finding its balance and buoyancy in the water. Looming, massive, however seemingly weightless, the double-curved wall obviously has a central place in Serra's image bank. In Torqued Ellipses, his novel installation at Dia, it is bodied forth with extraordinary power and grace. Serra himself cites the oval dome of Borromini's Baroque house of worship of San Carlo in Rome and also Zen gardens, as antecedents for the soaring, twisting space his fresh work creates, and for its basis in walked-through experience. on the contrary in a fascinating interview printed in the catalogue accompanying the display he also says that "while working upon an experimental form, I don't care about the aesthetics of the work -- I just want to achieve the job done."

For the work at Dia, the piece of work was to create forms based upon two equivalent ellipses rotated with venerate to each other, so the footprint of each statuary bulges along a different axis than its top perimeter. The result: three chambers, each made from 2-inch-thick plates of carbonized iron over a dozen feet high and weighing 40 tons, are plant spinning inside a vast latitude barely big enough to contain them. A break in each wall allows access and from inside two of the chambers, a powerful faculty of perception of menacingly unstable weight is exquisitely balanced by an experience of release and change The third sculpture creates a far les emancipating space, since it is lined inside with a next to the first wall which creates a narrow curving corridor; the inner ellipse can be go intoed as well. Even here, although the disposition of overwhelming mass is managed with consummate poise, in like manner what could be claustrophobic is instead resonant and alive, a physical equivalent to the aural clamor of being inside a struck bell.

The awesome barrel-vaulted wooden ceiling of this field with its complicated network of beams, is in a certain quantity of ways unfortunate, because the upper limits of the rust-tinged carburet of iron are poorly defined against it. on the other hand it is fortuitous to the expansion that it deflects attention downward again. Gravity and rigidity, the forces of weight and stability, are Serra's basic vocabulary. Sometimes, as in his 1996 installation at Gagosian, which consisted of six differently positioned on the other hand otherwise identical solid blocks of carbonized iron each 58 by 64 through 70 inches, gravity triumphs. At Dia, upon the other hand, an flat more impressive feat of engineering (and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of is made, not for the first time, about the many carburet of iron mills canvassed before securing adequate facilities and skills) arises in work that is buoyant as a ship at sea.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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