{"id":2182,"date":"2013-04-22T13:24:03","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T13:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2182"},"modified":"2013-04-22T13:32:30","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T13:32:30","slug":"dont-touch-the-art-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2182","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Touch the Art. Really!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Serra: Early Work, at David Zwirner<\/strong><\/p>\n

Resenha do Ken Johnson no site do New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"SERRA1-articleLarge\"<\/a>

Fred R. Conrad\/The New York Times
Richard Serra\u2019s \u201cprop\u201d sculptures, like \u201cV + 5: To Michael Heizer,\u201d are held together only by friction and their weight.<\/p><\/div>\n

Say what you will about the rise of the intercontinental mega-gallery, it\u2019s hard not to feel grateful for what it has given the art-loving public. Any art museum in the world would be proud to offer \u2014 and unashamed to charge visitors to see \u2014 \u201cRichard Serra: Early Work,\u201d a near-perfect, admission-free exhibition in the for-profit art dealer David Zwirner\u2019s gorgeous new building on West 20th Street in Chelsea.<\/p>\n

The exhibition consists entirely of sculptures borrowed from institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim and from private collections. In two spacious, sky-lit rooms it reveals with wonderful economy five formative years in the career of the man who has come to be the world\u2019s most admired living sculptor. The first room is filled with an array of single and grouped objects that might collectively be titled \u201cBack to Basics.\u201d Each piece is the result of some sort of physical procedure, often involving lead. \u201cFolded, Unfolded\u201d is a sheet of lead flat on the floor that was folded into quarters and then unfolded. \u201cTearing Lead\u201d is a sheet of lead accompanied by crumpled ribbons of metal evidently torn from its edges. \u201cThree Lead Coils\u201d consists of lengths of coiled lead tubing hanging from the wall and falling to the floor. Four works consist of sheets of lead rolled like carpets; one, called \u201cBullet,\u201d resembles a large-caliber cannon shell.<\/p>\n

Most complicated is \u201cCutting Device: Base Plate Measure,\u201d a floor display of steel plates, pieces of pipe and large blocks of wood. Mr. Serra created it by arranging those materials on a steel base plate, then running them through an industrial saw with two parallel blades, dividing the whole into three parts. It\u2019s like a salesman\u2019s demonstration of his product\u2019s capability.<\/p>\n

Hardly anything here would be recognizable as art were it encountered at a construction site or junkyard. A viewer could suppose that Mr. Serra was engaging in the philosophical game of importing nonart objects into the gallery and in that way turning them into artworks, as Duchamp did when he presented a urinal as a sculpture.<\/p>\n

But Mr. Serra\u2019s intentions were otherwise, as he made clear in \u201cVerb List,\u201d two pages of handwritten phrases, including \u201cto fold,\u201d \u201cto impress,\u201d \u201cto flood,\u201d \u201cto grasp,\u201d \u201cto bundle\u201d and many more. The list also includes nouns, as in \u201cof gravity,\u201d \u201cof entropy\u201d and \u201cof nature.\u201d What all these have in common is that they have to do with being and acting physically in the material world.<\/p>\n

Missing from the list are more cerebral activities, like representing, imagining and symbolizing, as well as concepts associated with artistic creativity, like aesthetics, metaphor and transcendence. \u201cVerb List\u201d is a manifesto declaring Mr. Serra\u2019s commitment to an anti-idealistic program grounded in the phenomenological experience of time and space.<\/p>\n

Some short films by Mr. Serra on view in a smaller room also insist on material conditions. \u201cHand Catching Lead\u201d shows his hand trying and mostly failing to catch falling pieces of metal. In \u201cColor Aid,\u201d the longest at 36 minutes, his dirty fingertips repeatedly drag colored sheets of paper out of the frame to uncover other sheets, differently colored.<\/p>\n

While various works in the first room call to mind other artists operating in what would come to be called the Post Minimalist genre \u2014 Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier and Bruce Nauman \u2014 the works in the second room, dating from 1969 to 1971, are unlike anyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The first four consist of lead plates, four feet square and an inch thick, standing on edge, all propped up without welds, screws or glue. In \u201cOne Ton Prop (House of Cards),\u201d four slabs lean against one another to form a square enclosure. In both \u201cV + 5: To Michael Heizer\u201d and \u201c5:30\u201d a single long lead pole is laid across groupings of the slabs, touching a corner of each to keep them in place. In \u201cEqual (Corner Prop Piece),\u201d one standing plate, bisecting but not touching a corner of the gallery, is held up by a horizontal four-foot pole touching one of the plate\u2019s corners and both of the gallery\u2019s adjacent walls.<\/p>\n

Because nothing but friction and gravity holds these arrangements in place, there is a sense of danger about them \u2014 that they could come crashing down. A sign in the gallery warns viewers to keep their distance.<\/p>\n

The exhibition\u2019s grand finale is \u201cStrike: To Roberta and Rudy\u201d (1969-1971), a single slab of hot-rolled steel, 8 foot 1 inches tall, 24 feet long and an inch and a half thick, wedged into a gallery corner at one end and jutting into the room at 45 degrees. To progress from the multiplicity and fragmentation of the works in the first room to the simpler and clearer prop works to this utterly unified condensation is to take an exhilarating intellectual journey.<\/p>\n

A historically minded viewer might wonder about a young artist doing such seemingly insular, self-reflexive things during the peak years of war in Southeast Asia and sociopolitical turmoil at home. In its own way, however, Mr. Serra\u2019s art was vehemently ideological. If you consider how much trouble can be caused by idealistic convictions \u2014 religious and nationalistic zealotry, for example \u2014 then you understand his insistence on the experience of material states.<\/p>\n

You still might be concerned about Mr. Serra\u2019s participation in today\u2019s high-end art system, epitomized by Zwirner\u2019s fabulous new pleasure palace. To achieve his ambitions, Mr. Serra has had to collaborate not only with the architecture of the white cube but also with museum and gallery administrators, wealthy patrons and, in the giant steel spiral enclosures of his recent decades, with big-scale fabricators.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perplexing. Isn\u2019t modern art supposed to challenge hegemonic power? Or is the idealistic dream of art\u2019s radical independence a distracting delusion? There\u2019s no pat answer. Reality, after all, is nothing if not paradoxical. That is one of the deeper lessons of Mr. Serra\u2019s titanic career.<\/p>\n

\u201cRichard Serra: Early Work\u201d runs through June 15 at David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, Chelsea; (212) 517-8677, www.davidzwirner.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n