Following censorship in the 1980s and vociferous scalding by critics, Richard Serra has transcended all odds with a mammoth installation entitled "The Matter of Time" at the Bilbao Guggenheim.
A Torque in Time
Jill Connor
Following censorship in the 1980s and vociferous scalding by critics, Richard Serra has transcended all odds with a mammoth installation entitled "The Matter of Time" at the Bilbao Guggenheim. As part of the museum?s permanent collection, this installation consists of five Torques, and three other pieces: Snake, Between the Torus and Sphere, and Blind Spot Reversed. This suite of eight sculptures features coiling undulating lines of convex and concave surfaces that somehow move the space within and around the gallery. "The Matter of Time," an appropriately weighty title for such a massive work, has the feel of a magnus opus: it marks the culmination of ideas that Serra has been working on for the past twelve years.
Entering the enormous gallery space, you are immediately faced with tall, curved, amber-colored walls. Appearing as soft as velvet, these lengths are in fact several coarse, nonmalleable surfaces that have been assembled into single, freestanding sculptures. The gradual tilt and sway of each component draws, or rather funnels, each viewer into an immense dialogue. The scale of the installation dwindles when seen from the balcony above and appears as a sea of red cauldrons. Serra plays with relational size?we are made miniature, lost and dwarfed within the labyrinthine walls; we are made gigantic, gazing from above at the winding walls below.
Serra was inspired to create the solitary Torqued Ellipse after visiting Borromini?s San Carlo in Rome. The interior of the church gives way to a tall vault that draws the eyes higher than the ceiling, to another point within the structure. As Serra walked down the side of the aisle, he misinterpreted the vault?s volume and thought it was an illusion. This form seemed impossible?it was not moving in kind with the floor plan. But when he walked down the center aisle of the church, he realized that Borromini had fooled his sense of sight and balance. Serra decided to recreate that feeling, that awkward sense of false-perception.
Serra?s new collection of sculpture also reflects his earlier interest in another architectural space that plays on the visitor?s sense of sight and self?the Buddhist temple complexes at Myoshin-Ji in Kyoto. Having lived near the site in 1970, Serra regularly walked the paths that wove around the temples and through the stone gardens. He hoped to achieve a unified perception of the place, but soon realized that there was no way to comprehend the whole landscape?what could be seen changed constantly. The application of subtle and constant change appears similarly pivotal in "The Matter of Time."
Serra?s spiraling ellipses are dizzying, disorienting and vertiginous. Waling through one of the alleyways, the tension builds and the space seems to pump rhythmically back and forth. You begin to doubt your sense of perception?is that curve illusory? Will I collide with a new surface? What will happen before I get to the opening at the center of the spiral?
While giving a tour of the installation, Serra explained: "When the focus is no longer on the object, it imposes upon your experience as subject." This is strikingly different from Modernism?s claim that the new aesthetic involved the location of a feeling generated by the object. In Serra?s view, "Modernism only told you that feeling the object itself was the aesthetic, if you could get it from the object, and whether you could get the grace of the sublime." After Donald Judd, a new generation of artists emerged determined to move beyond the studio, to create what the limits of the gallery?s white cube could not provide: the experience of time.
While�he has thoroughly explored the concepts of mass, height and depth,�Serra’s work has seemed to be very in-your-face, turning many scholars away since its hard surface and massive form provide nothing that references either history or politics. Although his work was considered anti-Modernist because of its performative nature, Serra has indeed used sculpture to draw space and create experience without imposing any specific meaning upon the observer. But Serra?s work here does have surprising resonance with the city of Bilbao: the region is rich in iron ore and the city, once full of shipyards, was once a center of metal construction.
In the late 1960s Serra composed a long list of infinitive verbs that�projected action and formed a framework for his creative agenda. The desire to capture motion within a static object was exceptionally challenging given that postwar America was no longer entertaining the figure as subject.�Forty years earlier, the Italian Futurists attempted to put movement into art. Umberto Boccioni?s bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) features a large figure lurching forward as small feathers of movement drip down from its limbs. The effort to convey motion was also satirically portrayed in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2.�(1912). Since both of these pieces used the human form as the primary subject, each representation was lost to metaphor as the vague resemblances evoked self-referentiality. In stark contrast, Serra’s work bypasses these loaded, compositional contradictions and strips sculpture down to its fundamental elements?balance, weight and volume?to focus on the subject?s movement through it. The subject here is not an abstract human form wandering through an imagined staircase labyrinth but the viewer stepping through Serra?s elemental structure, its weights and volumes altering and rebalancing as the viewer?s perspective changes.
