Abstract Art

Born in 1939 in the USA. Minimal art.
Richard Serra: Switch
Before anything else, one sees four long sheets of rusted steel. One faces them edge on, curving away without visible end. They lean toward and away from each other, as if considering which way to sway first. In fact, two swing off in near parallel just slightly to the left, two just off to the right. But at first one sees only thick, roughly cut edges. One has to discover the rest for oneself.

With Richard Serra's latest mammoth sculpture, the strangest discovery of all may be Minimalism forty years later. What happens, in fact, as the artist rediscovers it himself, in an era of ironic, backward glances? He has brought a much older sculpture's raw materials, physical weight, and personal associations to a world that Minimalism had discovered, a world at once ordinary, private, and high theater.


A call to arms
From the start, the steel sheets become an extension of oneself. As they curve away from one's body and line of sight, they could be one's own outstretched arms. They could be drawing some madcap version of reverse perspective lines in optics class. They could be echoing, or parodying, Rosalind E. Krauss on Minimalism as "sculpture in an expanded field."

They make quite literal Modernism's assault on tradition, from one-point perspective to the formalist's obsession with ideals. When Hal Foster wrote about Serra's early One Ton Prop, he argued that the burst cube could be mocking Plato himself. Now his mockery has made it at least from the Greeks to the Enlightenment.

Somehow the gigantic masses stand on end, thanks to gravity alone. From the first, Serra has done without external support. In his Prop Piece series, a heavy steel plate stood against the wall, held there by only a thick rod, catty-corner to plate and ground. One Ton Prop stood much like its subtitle, House of Cards.

Why should the sculpture not take care of itself? Minimalism had always, well, just been there, like Carl Andre's floor tiles. They make me giggle each time I see a heavy sculpture all bloated up or bolted to the ground. When the sculpture comes with Alexander Calder's pretensions to play, my giggle may even turn to a sneer. Let someone shoot art full of holes.

I cannot sneer at my own outstretched arms or the uncertain path ahead. I cannot feel too confident either where I might end up. Something really has changed in Minimalism. It has not become old-fashioned sculpture, but it has taken on a life of its own. It connects the insistently sculptural to painting and to theater.

One looks up to the rusted surfaces as to a star—tall, dark, and handsome. This is going to be fun.

The circus animal's desertion
One relates to these sheets as part of ordinary space, but unlike the real surroundings of any other Minimalist. Serra had long asked that one relinquish a bit of one's control over things. Tilted Arc, his most infamous commission, imposed itself even on blue-collar workers used to dealing with weights. They wanted their plaza back, near New York's City Hall.

Now, however, Serra finds other ways to demand surrender, without a loaded gun. I have walked on Andre's floor tiles. I have put them back with my own hands after someone else has mistakenly kicked them away. I could never touch Serra's eroded surfaces before. The museum could never let me. I would never, ever dare.

At last, Serra's sheets delight as well as threaten. The threat has become part of a roller-coaster ride. Their defiance of gravity seems more a dance of lightness than a precarious balance. Serra's stumbling elephant has gotten off the shelf above me. He has come fully to the ground. He has become almost human.

Perhaps the defeat of Tilted Arc did him some good, but the changed stance came last year, with the Torqued Ellipses. Now Serra has applied the new relation to a viewer to entirely open layers. The slow curve suffices. I felt like a child or architect folding paper models. I felt like a grown-up leaving my Valentine's card half open, so that it can sit close by on the bedroom dresser.

Already, from the gallery's entrance, the initial edge-on view undercuts this incredible mass. Parallel layers help, too, suggesting some kind of mutual support, making them seem less likely to fall.

By now, too, Serra's trick has simply grown familiar, a comforting part of the art world. Now, too, it is contained in an immense, pricey gallery, not reducing a public square. Besides, a New Yorker who feared losing open space to Tilted Arc should know better by now. After manipulating the issue of public funding for personal political gain, the mayor has bulldozed enough community gardens. His police barricades wall off that same space in front of City Hall, like a tacky imitation of Hitler's bunker. I, for once, am heading indoors to look at art.

Lightness and epic theater
As huge as they are, one wants to keep these sheets in sight, to walk along them. Before trying to cut in between those two pairs one first sees, one picks a direction, left or right, and walks beside a sheet. One needs to get a true sense of its scope and weight. Gagosian's outrageous warehouse space leaves enough room to each side for a good handball game, if only one could anticipate the rough bounces off these walls.

Still, this single, huge work fills the high-ceilinged gallery amply enough. One focuses on it happily. One just has to touch it, to pet the elephant.

Walking by the sheets means putting off a good thing—entering between them. One gets to that action before one grasps the whole shape, the entire form. The work really consists of six sheets. Its three pairs form roughly an equilateral triangle with the sides bowed gently in. Thirty years after the broken cube, Plato still takes his lumps.

Plato keeps on taking them once one has got inside, for the arcs tilt more strangely than ever. They make the central space less a comforting enclave than just another spot along a curved trajectory. One moves through that space like through the park on warmer weekends. There, too, plenty of others are busily moving alongside. The joint is packed.

First, though, one has to follow that narrow slot between any pair of sheets. Out the other side, one could be back where one started. Looking back, too, from another of the triangle's three corners, one starts to seek differences in the curvatures. The differences between parallel sheets, so accidental and arbitrary, tell only part of the story.

Structuralists talked about how meaning, even the mind, emerges from difference, from the inflections in speech to the nuances of a poet. From the same idea, deconstruction made a marvelous mess of meaning. Here the arbitrary differences add up to confusion and theater, but also an appreciation of something else. They connect private experience to a strangely real public world.

Minimalism of the museum
Serra calls the work Switch. The pairings and parallel tracks, with the sense of ceaseless motion, make me think of a railway switch. The combined sensuality and threat recall the teasing end of a whip. The discovery of its form comes with the electric jolt of a light switch.

Serra has not abandoned his own obsessions. He bases the curved sheets, like Torqued Ellipses, on conic sections. The reduplicated triangle likewise suggests a geometrician's rule. It returns one to Minimalism's origins. As with Sol LeWitt, any rule driven to extremes approaches chaos. Foster again captured things for the school's first generation:

In this transformation the viewer, refused the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is ...

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