Word: metallism
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...Serra wondered, "What if I turn this form on itself?" But the closest architectural sibling of these new sculptures is the work of Serra's friend Frank Gehry, the designer of the spectacular Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, with its freely twisted and flowing curves sheathed in metal. To calculate the full-scale enlargements of the Torqued Ellipses from their sheet-lead models, Serra had recourse to CATIA, the same computer program Gehry used for Bilbao...
...pushing 60, Richard Serra is the John Henry, the steel-drivin' man, of American sculpture at the century's end. There are a few other sculptors of comparable distinction around--Martin Puryear comes to mind--but in the handling of heavy metal Serra has no peer; there, he is the most original figure since David Smith, who died more than three decades ago. It was Serra, with his ability to involve the human body as a participant in his work--demanding something more from a spectator than the sole act of looking, and yet harshly rewarding the eye as well...
...hole in the back wall and had the trucks drive straight in." Then, with the help of a compact but powerful lifting crane whose last major job had been to jack up the concrete slabs of Los Angeles' freeways after they pancaked in the 1994 earthquake, the curved metal slabs were fitted together: seven sculptures, each the size of a house, each open at the top but defining a strange and inordinately powerful space inside...
...Russian Constructivists had a term, faktura, meaning the straightforward, logical use of substances--wood, tin, steel, rope, wire--to produce expressive effects on their own material terms. Serra is and always has been fanatical about this. He doesn't paint, polish, grind or otherwise fiddle about with his metal. It rusts naturally and bears the marks of its making, the scrapes, even the claw marks of the grabs that hoisted the plates. And yet these traces, which one might think would be brutal, acquire--given the enormous scale of the pieces--a beauty that almost amounts to delicacy...
Whatever the source, I am not sure where I fit in. I still get peeved when a rustic bicycle with a metal basket on the handlebars--undoubtedly a refugee from the French countryside--knocks into me at the crosswalk. Whenever I see a new silver VW Beetle whiz through Mt. Auburn Street, a wave of nostalgia hits me as I long for the days of punchbuggy yellows...