After rantings, hearings, lawsuits and breakups, Richard Serra entered the last decade of the last century with his heart set on the classics.
He was happy to see the end of the 80s. The American sculptor, who died Tuesday at age 85, was embroiled in the culture wars of the Reagan era with his “Tilted Arc,” a 120-foot-long curved Cor-Ten steel plate spanning Manhattan's Federal Square. It sparked outrage almost as soon as it was installed in 1981. His fellow New Yorkers screamed at him in the streets. People called his loft on Duane Street and made death threats. (The paper wasn't always kind either.) The piece was finally removed in March 1989. According to Sarah's assessment, it was destroyed. I was able to see the charm of traveling to Italy.
In Rome he visited San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. This chapel is one of the Baroque structures designed by Francesco Borromini and has an oval dome on top. “The central space is simply a regular oval, and the walls surrounding it are vertical,” he later recalled. “I went in and thought, what if I turn this form on myself?”
Returning to New York, he consulted with engineers, experimented with new computer-aided design software, and created sculptural forms that had never existed before. That is, it was a free-standing weathering steel plate with the top and bottom edges forming two equal, offset ovals. Although the rolled steel weighed about 20 tons, it was so sophisticated that its mass belied its mass. They had the confidence of an artist who considered Borromini a colleague, but they were more captivating than Serra's previous steel works and beckoned us to explore their warmly rust-colored expanses.
The torqued ellipse literally shifted the axis of Serra's career from solid to space, from process to perception, from the artist's action to the viewer's bodily experience. Their accompanying book provides an unexpectedly likable third act for the once controversial and always blunt artist. The Oval at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York became a reliable spot for a second date and an ideal backdrop for a cultured flirtation. For me, on the other hand, the oval has remained for decades like an empty tomb, another place of deformed steel in my mind, coupled with the life of an artist who experienced September 11, 2001 with terrifying immediacy.
The first three torqued ellipses were seen at the Dia Gallery in Chelsea in 1997. Designing the bent plate to stand upright was an easy step. What was more difficult was operating it. The submarine manufacturer told Serra it was impossible. One shipyard in Maryland tried, failed, figured it out, and eventually closed. It took him several years to find a German steel mill specializing in turbine and boiler construction that could do the job. Getting it across the Atlantic to the gallery was itself an act of heavyweight engineering.
It should be clear that the phrase “torqued ellipse” is a misnomer. The oval that Steel depicts on the floor is a perfectly symmetrical oval, very identical in shape and size to the oval above your head as you walk inside the plate. that wall This is what the sculpture looks like after torque has been applied. It sounds simple, but when you look at the bird's eye view photo, the geometric conceit becomes clear. But to this day, when I walk around the curved walls of each ellipse in Beacon, I'm still not sure whether the steel walls will begin to move away from me or tilt toward my head. (1997 also saw the Guggenheim Bilbao, another engineering feat of bending metal, clad in titanium by Serra's colleague and rival Frank Gehry. A multi-torqued ellipse is permanently housed in a Spanish museum. Both the building and the sculpture can make you feel: a time capsule of that incredible decade, the Cold War behind it, and an unexpected new war.)
Can abstract sculpture be baroque? Can chapels be produced in shipyards? After all the fuss of the 80s, Serra now dazzled audiences in 1997 with the incredible geometry and dizzying curvature of the ellipse. They have been seduced by its vermilion-colored surface, which has oxidized to dark brown for decades. Like Serra's 1960s lead panels and rolls, they seemed indifferent to gravity, but the new works had a more lively, baroque indifference. They uncorked themselves like the pretzel-shaped saints in a Rubens altarpiece. Like the dancers Serra often saw at Judson Church. Or like a collapsed building; Probably two.
In September 2001, Sarah was finalizing preparations for her first New York exhibition since the inaugural exhibition of Torque Oval. There will be a delay. “I saw it right out the window,” he said that fall when he told Charlie Rose about the first airplane he saw in his Duane Street attic. He said, “I saw the plane take off and then head right toward the center of the building, toward the top center of the building. I saw the explosion. I saw a fireball. I saw the fire being sucked back in. I saw a black cave. I saw that the tail was still burning to ash. Then I went down the street and saw people running…
He would remember witnessing the collapse of Minoru Yamasaki's two towers that morning, their stainless steel cladding falling off the buildings and flying into the sky. One of Serra's assistants arrived at his attic, which was covered in white concrete. The truck crew that was scheduled to transport his sculpture to Gagosian went out to volunteer at Ground Zero. Serra also stayed downtown. He said this on Duane Street a week after the attack. “I live here. “To watch the fire brigade march and know that they are not going to march, you try to assume a normal life where you can go back to work. Otherwise, they will defeat you twice.”
His exhibition happened to be held. On October 18, 2001, six new sculptures were unveiled at Gagosian, including two of the torqued ovals. The tourism industry evaporated, but thousands of New Yorkers flocked to the Serra's hedges and spirals. Steel twisted into once unimaginable shapes can be disorienting and even frightening when first seen. Then I went inside, discovered the inside, and felt something close to awe. Heavy metal, which Serra's haters at Federal Plaza compared to prison walls, became a place of mourning and solace. Nevertheless, the abstract ellipse performed the functions of an inspired chapel: contemplation, consecration, glory, sorrow.
That fall, I was only 18 years old. I signed up for the draft at the post office on my birthday, and President George W. Bush's young administration was planning a “war on terror” that Sarah would later protest with a picture of a violent oil stick wearing a hood. Prisoner of Abu Ghraib. I returned to New York in October, examining the missing person posters in Union Square and looking down at the space where the tower used to be along Sixth Avenue. I was just starting to learn about carving, but when I saw Serra's torqued steel, I knew what everyone else knows. Artists can speak in a way that politicians never can, and aesthetic freedom is a freedom worth fighting for. Decades later, I still feel it when I'm in Beacon, haunted by the unintentional monument to his hometown's dead, as heavy as history and as inevitable as rust.