Richard Serra at Dia

Ten years ago, in a much-quoted interview, Richard Serra related one of his earliest recollections, of watching a boat launching in San Francisco at daybreak. He was four, and the tanker seemed "as large as a skyscraper on its side." Serra remembers "walking the arc of the hull with my father," and also "a total incongruity between the displacement of this enormous tonnage and the quickness and agility with which the task" of removing the shoring props was carried out. Next, he says, there was a "moment of tremendous anxiety, as the oiler enroute rattled, swayed, tipped, and bounced into the sea, half-submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance." The statement is worth repeating not only for its poetry and acuity, but because, by Serra's account, "all the raw material that I need is contained in the reserve of this memory, which has become a recurring dream."

That Serra's account of this recollection comes from the year before his Tilted Arc was finally destroyed, in 1989, may not be incidental, since the image and the physical experience described as "all the raw material I need" are of an enormous tilted arc -- the hull of a ship -- finding its balance and buoyancy in the water. Looming, massive, yet seemingly weightless, the double-curved wall obviously has a central place in Serra's image bank. In Torqued Ellipses, his new installation at Dia, it is bodied forth with extraordinary power and grace. Serra himself cites the oval dome of Borromini's Baroque church of San Carlo in Rome, and also Zen gardens, as precedents for the soaring, twisting space his new work creates, and for its basis in walked-through experience. But in a fascinating interview printed in the catalogue accompanying the show, he also says that "while working on an experimental form, I don't care about the aesthetics of the work -- I just want to get the job done."

For the work at Dia, the job was to create forms based on two equivalent ellipses rotated with respect to each other, so the footprint of each sculpture bulges along a different axis than its top perimeter. The result: three chambers, each made from 2-inch-thick plates of steel over a dozen feet high and weighing 40 tons, are set spinning inside a vast room barely big enough to contain them. A break in each wall allows entry, and from inside two of the chambers, a powerful sense of menacingly unstable weight is perfectly balanced by an experience of release and movement. The third sculpture creates a far less emancipating space, since it is lined inside with a second wall which creates a narrow curving corridor; the inner ellipse can be entered as well. Even here, though, the disposition of overwhelming mass is managed with consummate poise, so what could be claustrophobic is instead resonant and alive, a physical equivalent to the aural clamor of being inside a struck bell.

The wonderful barrel-vaulted wooden ceiling of this room, with its complicated network of beams, is in some ways unfortunate, because the upper limits of the rust-tinged steel are poorly defined against it. But it is fortuitous to the extent that it deflects attention downward again. Gravity and rigidity, the forces of weight and stability, are Serra's basic vocabulary. Sometimes, as in his 1996 installation at Gagosian, which consisted of six differently positioned but otherwise identical solid blocks of steel, each 58 by 64 by 70 inches, gravity triumphs. At Dia, on the other hand, an even more impressive feat of engineering (and much is made, not for the first time, about the many steel mills canvassed before securing adequate facilities and skills) results in work that is buoyant as a ship at sea.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning