| For Richard Serra, sculpture is not merely an object. And it’s most certainly not an object only to be seen. It is a means of searching, of allowing the viewer to walk into its enclosures, to feel its oppressions and releases even as its steel walls enclose and release. The viewer, therefore, must invade his sculptural works because the sculpture embraces “movement through form,” and only if the viewer also moves does the work successfully achieve its artistic aims. |
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Richard Serra at the MoMA by Harriet Zinnes
For Richard Serra, sculpture is not merely an object. And it’s most certainly not an object only to be seen. It is a means of searching, of allowing the viewer to walk into its enclosures, to feel its oppressions and releases even as its steel walls enclose and release. The viewer, therefore, must invade his sculptural works because the sculpture embraces “movement through form,” and only if the viewer also moves does the work successfully achieve its artistic aims.
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at the Museum of Modern Art is an all-inclusive retrospective of some of Serr’a finest work. The show is even sponsored by Louis Vuitton, whose headquarters in Paris hold an installation of the artist’s Double Torus in a central courtyard open to the public. This retrospective of the artist, who was born in San Francisco in 1939, includes three recently created sculptures in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden as well as work from different stages of the artist’s career scattered throughout the museum.
Serra’s exhibition at the MoMA is the quintessential representation of an artist never standing still. Always the innovator, his early work consisted of experimentation with such materials as rubber, neon, and lead. But it is his recent work, his monumental, large-scale sculptures like the astounding Intersection II and Torqued Eclipse IV that enhance the MoMA’s signature Sculpture Garden. Sculpture that is still is unlike sculpture that demands the viewer to move with it and become part of a created experience. The viewer in a sense becomes both viewer and creator, or at least viewer and mover, within a created surging object. If the viewer does not stand still, in a sense, neither does the object that surrounds him. Movement is all, and the miracle lies in the fact that it is movement within stillness that is being nurtured.
An expansive catalogue accompanies the exhibition with such illuminating articles (including images) as Kynaston McShine’s “A Conversation about Work with Richard Serra,” John Rajchman’s “Serra’s Abstract Thinking” and “Richard Serra’s Early Work,” and Lynne Cooke’s “Thinking on Your Feet: Richard Serra’s Sculptures in Landscape.”
