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...critic Robert Hughes praises Richard Serra's monumental "sculptures" that required "tanker technology" and steel-milled plates [ART, Oct. 19]. If Hughes wants to see large pieces of steel, put him on the subway to the outer reaches of New York harbor, where he can watch ships pass through the Verrazano Narrows. Modern art is the biggest practical joke in history, and Hughes has fallen for it. The true artists are the ironworkers and shipwrights who build today's floating monsters. GARRY JAFFE Chicago...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Letters: Nov. 9, 1998 | 11/9/1998 | See Source »

...They are vessels that you walk into," says Serra. Well, yes, if vessel means ship rather than pot. They hark back to, and in a sense make concrete, a vivid childhood memory that is quoted in the show's catalog. Serra's father worked in a California shipyard, and the son got to see large new craft being launched. "It was a moment of tremendous anxiety," Serra wrote in 1988, "as the oiler rattled, swayed, tipped and bounced into the sea, half submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance. The ship went through a transformation from...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Steel-Drivin' Man | 10/19/1998 | See Source »

Making them required tanker technology. Each of the plates weighs between 15 and 20 tons, and few steel-mill machines existed that could bend them. Serra eventually found one in Maryland. All that tonnage (literally: the aggregate weight of the seven Torqued Ellipses comes to nearly 400 tons, giving this a claim to be the most ponderous one-man show in history) had to be shipped to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal and set up inside the Geffen Contemporary. The plates couldn't be craned in through its doors, and so, recalls the museum's director, Richard Koshalek...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Steel-Drivin' Man | 10/19/1998 | See Source »

...size of Serra's pieces that holds you, though that is in itself impressive; rather, it's their blunt originality, a drama of spatial conception that seems quite new but is presented matter-of-factly. In Serra's view the most important change in 20th-century sculpture occurred when it ceased to be statuary, when it came down off its pedestal, the plinth that isolated it from the rest of the world, and entered the space, public or private, in which its audience lived and moved. Walking through these works--from outside to inside and back again...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Steel-Drivin' Man | 10/19/1998 | See Source »

...Serra is more interested in truth than beauty. Particularly the truth of materials. The 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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Art: Steel-Drivin' Man | 10/19/1998 | See Source »

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