Word: steeled
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...diesel fumes into the warm night air. The cause of the holdup: an army truck lying mangled in a roadside ditch, another victim, said one of the hundreds of onlookers, of the treacherous narrow and winding roads in this northeast corner of the country. Up ahead, soldiers were hammering steel pins into the hard earth to winch the wrecked vehicle up onto the road. The scene was chaotic. A few cars had managed to wend their way through the crush of traffic and were trying to slide under the low-slung metal cable tethered to the truck in the ditch...
Hanging a new museum show is never less than a complicated job. Getting all that art positioned just so--it's a test of nerves. But when the show is for Richard Serra, whose typical work is made from coiling steel plates that weigh 20 tons or so, complicated doesn't begin to describe it. Putting the things in place is like moving a dozen rockets to their launch pads. There's one sizable new Serra, called Sequence, that consists of 12 plates weighing a total of 243 tons. The average commercial airliner weighs...
Later Serra moved to working with massive plates of rolled steel. As it turned out, the most famous of those would be Tilted Arc, a 120-ft.-long curving steel wall that was commissioned by the U.S. government for the plaza outside a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, only to become the focus of a huge public battle in the late 1980s when some office workers complained that it had laid claim to so much of the plaza as to make the space unusable. (For the record, they had a point.) When the feds decided to remove the work, Serra...
Meanwhile, he moved on, and spectacularly. In the mid-'90s, with a series called Torqued Ellipses, Serra arrived at the intricate configurations of space that are the great discovery at the heart of all his recent work. The ellipses were steel plates, 13-ft. high, that had been formed into twisted ovals you could enter through a gap on one side. With these Serra wasn't merely addressing space; he was creating space of a new kind. Literally new. At one point Serra and his attorney thought of having the form trademarked. "We dropped the idea," he says...
...guts, yet now he speaks of being "spooked by the sea." His lawsuit claims he was so traumatized by the sinking that he could not return to fishing and was left unemployed. "They used to say the boats were made of stick and the men were made of steel," he says. "That's not how it is anymore. Men aren't as tough as they used to be. But there needs to be recourse. That's why we have laws and courts...