Richard Serra: Forty Years

The Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting a retrospective of Richard Serra titled Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years. The work exhibited ranges from older work from the 1960’s after graduating from Yale University until recent work from 2006. Richard Serra was born in San Francisco California in 1939 and has been creating large sculptures for over forty years. His use of materials and styles has varied during this time, but began working almost strictly with steel in the 1970’s. Previous to using steel, Serra used lead because of its malleability and before that dabbled in vulcanized rubber.

His early work such as Belts (1966-67) is reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s “dude ranch dada” with his use of neon tube lighting and vulcanized rubber formed into hanging saddle-like structures. The neon imitates the forms of the saddle shapes, but is somehow opposite as if it was meant to reflect the outside contours of a horse rider. The rubber at first appears to be large strips of leather in various earth tones. Upon reading the plaque, one discovers that the material is in fact rubber. Other early works like Equal Parallel: Guernica - Bengasi (1986) resonate with the minimalist work of Donald Judd with his use of democratic, compositional hierarchy of forms. Serra’s title however, compares the grievances and suffering of Picasso’s Guernica and the old port city of Italian colonized Libia, Bengasi; which has seen its share of empirical suffering and violence. Serra’s new work from 2006 is located on the second floor: Sequence, Band, and Torqued Torus Inversion. They are all made from weatherproof steel, but have explicit, separate sensations to each of them. Band (2006) propels the viewer to walk closely to the steel while imitating the movement of a stream. Torqued Torus Inversion (2006) is actually two large sculptures next to each other. One gives a sensation of an open area inside and the other feels like the sculpture is closing in on the viewer. The most successful piece in the show is Sequence (2006) because of how Serra wants his work to be received; “I wanted to get away from the imagistic value of an object in an empty space and instead put the focus on the experience of the entirety of the context”. Sequence accomplishes what Serra expresses in this quote and can be the most enjoyable for most visitors. If Serra had pushed the limits of the angles on the material beyond what is physically possible, the sensation would have been the opposite, uncomfortable and claustrophobic. Sequence imitates the sensation of walking through a great canyon, like one of the small trails at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It was something that one would want to walk over and over again. On the other hand, it was a bit crowded and would have been more appreciable without the constant stream of people and the incessant docent tour going on in the background.

While Richard Serra is a very important artist in the 21^st century, he has not always been favored by female artists in the art community. He embodies phallic, oversized sculptures teetering on the obscene. This oversized work insinuates many negative stereotypes of male artists from his generation. He has been recognized as a great artist while female sculptors such as Petah Coyne have gone unnoticed until recently. One has to take this into consideration when attending a forty year retrospective at the MOMA, but Serra has some new work that produces the exact experience he is attempting to create between the work and the viewer. That is something very difficult for an artist to achieve, and in his own right he deserves the recognition that he gets.