Writings/Interviews

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Jean-Pierre Criqui

The relationship of Serra's works to their physical context, and thus, in many cases, to architecture, is perhaps the principal theme underlying this collection of 30 texts (18 of them interviews), presented in chronological order from 1967-68 to 1992. No doubt the Tilted Arc controversy, discussed here several times in detail, tends to orient one's reading in the direction of this relationship. The wish to produce art that is fully in the world seems from the outset a determining one, but even with this postulate, Serra never fails to emphasize that his outdoor sculptures, as site-specific as they might be, in no way share the hypotheses of what in architecture has been called "contextualism." As Serra told Peter Eisenman, "For 'contextualists,' to build site-specific means to analyze the context and the content of the indigenous cultural situation, then to conclude that what's needed is to maintain the status quo. . . . In my work I analyze the site and determine to redefine it in terms of sculpture, not in terms of the existing physiognomy." In other words, the environment may influence the configuration and placement of the work, but not the sculptural language of which it is a manifestation - a language that postulates the abandonment of any figurative function and the use of a constant material, steel (with a few, rare examples in stone or concrete). One should not be surprised, then, if the sculpture, with its heavy-metal brutalism, does not marry with the esthetic of whatever architecture it accompanies. Thus the General Services Administration seemed pathetically naive when it first commissioned, then ordered the destruction of Tilted Arc.

All this holds true even though Serra's in-situ logic allows for some paradoxes. (Clara-Clara, for example, was conceived for an indoor exhibition and was only installed in the Tuileries because of technical problems at the Centre Pompidou. It is now to be found, though not necessarily permanently, in the Square de Choisy in Paris.) But Serra's thinking does often turn out to be less clear-cut than it seems at first glance. In a 1980 interview, Serra delivers an apparently final judgment on architecture: "I've always thought that art was nonfunctional and useless. Architecture serves needs which are specifically functional and useful. Therefore, architecture as a work of art is a contradiction in terms." This comes just after the statement, in reference to the Guggenheim Museum, "I would never criticize an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright because he was satisfying the needs of his own creativity with a candid, the-artist-be-damned attitude." As you see, nothing is simple.

As for museums, they are not the most fertile terrain for Serra, and he has no particular aspiration to intervene in such spaces. (I remember standing speechless before V 5 (For Michael Heizer), a sculpture of four steel plates and a lead bar, at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin last fall: the components were attached to the floor with cleats. One should worry as much about the people who run museums as about their architects.) For Serra as for many artists of his generation, the museum space is above all a locus of contradiction. And on occasion he recognizes this with a self-critical irony of which his detractors would hardly think him capable. Asked by Patricia Bickers in 1992, "What would you say to people who might use your own words about the Duveen Gallery about you and say, 'overblown, authoritarian, and a bit heavy-handed,'" Serra replied, "It's partially correct!"

By the use of what Lawrence Alloway called "inside information," this book allows us a look at Serra's work in all its aspects. Especially useful are a long and interesting 1979 interview with Annette Michelson and Clara Weyergraf about Serra's films, and the very dense "Notes on Drawing" of 1987. A short but beautiful text entitled "Weight" deals also with the weight of history. One regrets the lack of editorial care; an index would have been more worthwhile than a duplication of the same full-page reproduction (as a frontispiece and on page 96). The repetition of identical passages in different texts - in "Extended Notes from Sight Point Road" and in an interview with Peter Eisenman, for example - are ungratifying for the attentive reader. Finally, it is somewhat embarrassing to hear Serra declare of Barnett Newman, "I probably would not have been engaged with his work if he had not come to see Strike [a Serra work] several times in 1971." Newman died on July 4, 1970. Something to consider for the next edition.

Jean-Pierre Criqui is an art historian, critic, free-lance curator, and the editor of Cahiers du Musee national d'art moderne, Paris. He writes frequently for Artforum.