Word: steele
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...rising, will have generated a curving shape, an extremely twisted or "torqued" elliptical cylinder. Not a section of a cone (the cone diminishes towards its vertex) but something else, a curvature whose radius does not alter but whose walls constantly change their angle. Then make it out of steel plates, 2 in. thick. You will end up with a shape that has not been used in sculpture before, and that has no precedents in other arts like pottery (it can't be thrown on a wheel) or architecture (it is inherently weak in compression and can't bear large loads...
...space you are in almost amounts to queasiness; you misjudge your distance from the wall and bump into it; you have to look up through the open top to orient yourself again. The physical experience of the piece can't be predicted from its geometry. Those slabs of steel, leaning together and held in place solely by their own weight, play upon your body's sense of weight and induce an acute awareness of gravity. They testify to the world's density, and a degree of threat is included in that...
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...
Unlike combatants in, say, a steel strike, neither party to the basketball dispute has much to lose by not settling quickly. Though they'll eventually have to give up part of their new four-year TV contract, worth $2.6 billion, most team owners have already made fortunes in other industries. Similarly, marquee hoopsters like Gary Payton can probably count on millions from endorsements whether they play or not. A court-appointed arbitrator will soon rule on whether 230 players with guaranteed contracts must be paid in spite of the lockout, and that could put pressure on the side that loses...