An artist of inordinate gravity, Richard Serra loomed large. Stories and statistics of loads, static and dynamic (dead or alive), escort his oeuvre. Catalogue essays and wall labels emphasize heft, weight, logistics. T.W.U., a 1980 installation in Lower Manhattan, weighed seventy-two tons. Rotary Arc, erected a few blocks away and weighing in at a hundred tons, was transported to New York from Pennsylvania on five flatbed trucks. Equal (2015), forty tons times eight, Forged Rounds (2019), twenty-one rounds at fifty tons each, the weight limit to truck them over the George Washington Bridge.1 Each installation is an act of heroism. (In the early 1970s, a rigger died installing a piece at the Walker Art Center.) Serra often declared his appreciation for workers, and the literature leaves some traces of his work’s many manufacturers, from Milgo Bufkin in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Bethlehem Steel’s Baltimore shipyard to steelworks outside of Frankfurt and Cologne. Serra was the son of a Spanish immigrant who worked in Bay Area shipyards and often cited the influence of summer work in steelyards in college. (Serra’s mom has been described as “more than a Sunday painter” who took him to museums on weekends; he got a literature degree at UCSB and an MFA at Yale. We all choose how we lean on our antecedents.)2
I can imagine collecting, printing out, piling up all the books and journal articles produced on Richard Serra and how closely those stacks might equal the 320 tons (or 11 ½ feet) of Equal, eight boxes of equal volume but different dimensions stacked so that the immediate impression is one of simultaneous solidity and precarity. Over the past half century the art history industry has produced reams of interpretation, incorporating no shortage of words by Serra himself. The author of work so totally laconic has set the terms of its understanding as if the death of the author bypassed him entirely. I think of the spokesartist Robert Motherwell, who expended an awful lot of energy not so much on auto-interpretation as on ennobling a generation of abstract expressionist men, heroic and sublime (Vir Heroicus Sublimus, the painting by Serra influence Barnett Newman, on view two floors up from Equal at MoMA). After shoring up his and his friends’ reputations, Motherwell spent his later career relentlessly churning out canvases to finance his East Hampton house and lifestyle. Less defined by the company he kept than the space he occupied, Serra died at 85, in March 2024, in Orient. Serra had long kept a home and studio, designed by the same architect who transformed so many industrial structures for the display of his sculptures and who built a weekend house next door, on the tip of Long Island’s more rugged but still very expensive North Fork.
In search of a distinct and poetic angle of coverage following Serra’s death, a Bloomberg writer reported on the current location of Tilted Arc, or its component parts, which was not a mystery but a federal warehouse in Virginia. Tilted Arc, of course, was a public commission for a miserable Lower Manhattan plaza from which Serra’s cor-ten intervention, more boundary wall than sculptural embellishment, unleashed a major episode in the 1980s culture wars, as well as disciplinary debates about the nature of site specificity and the function of public art. Frustrated at the reception of sculptures that were not embedded in the fabric of New York City but very much aimed at taking up space there, Serra gave up on that hostile public realm for more receptive settings in European cities, private collections, and museum interiors and a very stable place in the pantheon of late 20th-century art. Passing from banishment from the city into spaces custom-built to accommodate it, Serra’s oeuvre spanned the art globe, and concerns with materials, form, processes, monuments, manliness, labor, spectacle, architecture, institutions, experience. Overdetermined, overwrought in its own way (pun intended, though the material in question was so often steel, forged or rolled), as the work and its artist formally pass into the space of history, what kind of space does Serra take up in it?
Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself. We might apply such a phenomenological approach, or better yet, a deambulatory one (as the very eminent art historian Yve-Alain Bois proposed when both of their careers were still in their youth, in 1983), to the work as a whole: a “picturesque stroll” through the landscapes, predominantly urban, that Serra punctuated, demarcated, and ultimately produced or dominated as his work found a privileged place in our late-modern world. Revisiting the public sculpture, as emplaced in the contexts or sites it has specifically confronted, we can see how it frames our cultural and social investments in urban space: what is hostile and what is safe, what is art and what is industry, what moves and what stays put.
Tilted Arc—installed, debated, destroyed over the span of eight short years—casts a shadow larger than much of what followed and preceded it. But Serra had long before left the confines of the studio for New York’s streetscape and beyond. The artist placed his first piece in the public realm in 1970, not too long after his friend Robert Smithson made a rock spiral in a Utah lake bed, not so distant in time or place from Claes Oldenburg’s proposals for monumental sculptures in the form of Good Humor bars and lipsticks on tank treads. To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, instead, was an inlaid steel ring made of semicircles of two widths and significant depth, framing the cracks and potholes of 183rd Street and framed by a scene of general dereliction. It’s not surprising that whoever within the administration of Mayor John Lindsay would have even had the authority to approve this granted Serra permission to install his work there, given its status as part of an urban renewal area, on or in front of a vast lot where a public housing megastructure would soon go up after years of delay.
Serra described the site as “sinister”: a hangout spot for “local criminals” and dumping ground for the cars they stole. In contrast to the land art produced in remote outposts of the American West and consumed back in the art world as saleable representation, Serra sought to drive viewers to confront his artwork on site. But the public either found the embodied experience on offer uninteresting or too daunting, and To Encircle exists primarily as a photograph of a giant stamped out manhole cover, the West Bronx’s extreme topography providing a perfect vantage point for the picture. The art critic and scholar Douglas Crimp wrote in 1986 that Serra failed in his attempt to create an environmental sculpture that would not exist primarily as a photographic image: “It was Serra’s misconception that anyone from the art world was interested enough in sculpture to venture into that ‘sinister’ outpost in the Bronx.” Ultimately, the work found its way to a site of display more amenable to an art public, though it is still likely to escape notice. In 1973, Serra’s SoHo gallerist Leo Castelli sold the circle to a couple of St. Louis collectors, who donated it to the Art Museum, where it’s now installed down the driveway from a very big Oldenburg three-hole plug. The sculpture is set discreetly into the smooth asphalt that runs between the grand staircase to the museum’s colonnaded entry and the rear end of an equestrian statue of St. Louis, who overlooks well-preserved grounds and symmetrical fountain dating to the 1904 World’s Fair. Art lovers can step on it as they get out of their cars, as originally intended.
Ten years after To Encircle, Serra was commissioned to install not one but two large public sculptures closer to his art-world neighbors in lower Manhattan. T.W.U. was set on a leftover triangle facing the stairway down to the Franklin Street 1/9 and named for the Transit Workers Union whose eleven-day strike in defiance of years of municipal austerity concluded, with mixed results, just before the sculpture’s inauguration. Offset from the entry to their workplace—an unceremonious hole in the ground—and extruded thirty-six feet in the air, the sculpture was one in a series of “prop pieces” of tall steel slabs. Three, four, or five slabs could lean against each other to form a funnel or chimney (which they did, in Bochum and Amsterdam, Paris and Münster). NYC received three slabs, which fit together like a factory reject I-beam, more on the lean than ready to support anything. In photos from 1981, the sculpture appears graffitied, wheatpasted, collecting cans and broken glass. The artist David Hammons had Dawoud Bey document him, in a visor, dashiki and Pumas, pissing into a corner of T.W.U., installing his own “prop piece” balancing the mundane contents of his shoulder bag and the shoulder bag in a miniature composition in the sculpture’s embrace, and having an encounter with an NYPD officer—real? staged?—who issued a summons for these unruly acts. On another occasion Hammons threw twenty-five pairs of laced-together shoes over the top of T.W.U., thus enlisting it in another register of urban threat and mystery. Hammons’s installation and performance doesn’t ask what this self-important steel stand was doing there, but suggests it didn’t matter much: Serra’s installation was nothing more, and nothing less, than a piece of poorly maintained street furniture in a hostile environment.
A second sculpture swept horizontally across the interior of the traffic circle that unfurls cars from the Holland Tunnel—which could hardly have bothered anyone at all, if they even noticed it as they made their way around the leftover infrastructural site. St. Johns Rotary Arc looked a lot like the Tilted one installed across town fourteen months later. That Arc, of course, did not so much unleash as endure a controversy fabricated by an aggrieved federal judge that played out in sham hearings, on TV news, and before the US Court of Appeals, the proceedings carefully archived and published by Serra and his wife. In short, a rotating posse that would include the conservative judge, a Reagan-appointed GSA administrator, and US District Attorney Rudolph Giuliani rejected the non-affirmative nature of the piece, the elitism of minimalist art, a piece that didn’t fit in with any idea of a public monument or marketplace amenities. Most interestingly, and less obliquely than Hammons had on Franklin Street, they strung it up on charges of urban danger: graffiti canvas, rat magnet, limited visibility a risk factor for drug deals or a terrorist attack.
Some Serra partisans pointed out in public testimony and subsequent post-mortems that Tilted Arc’s somewhat hostile act may not have improved conditions in the windswept plaza, but it certainly didn’t make them any worse, ascribing to the work a critical indictment of a less than public-facing, or -serving, federal landscape. But from today’s perspective, Serra’s casting of aspersion on a grim slice of public space has the critical weight of a guy “just asking questions”: partially informed, probably not that pleasant, profoundly self-indulgent. At the same time, it also would have been fine. People would have learned to ignore it, and after September 11 Tilted Arc would have been taken down or found practical use at last as a blast wall.
The last quarter century of antiterror designs define the entrance sequence to see the Serra on display at the Museum of Modern Art: bollards, bag inspection, and metal detector. The $30 admission fee offers a final layer of protection, although the only violence committed there came at the hands of a mentally ill patron of the cinematheque. There is only one work of Serra’s on display at the institution, where retrospectives burnished his standing while Tilted Arc was being dismantled and again twenty-one years later: the aforementioned weighty steel stacks of Equal. “It’s not stable!” my safety-conscious son exclaimed on first encounter. “Let’s go see something more beautiful,” his friend proposed. MoMA’s curators, similarly embarrassed, have placed Serra at the end—a dead end—of a promenade through the 1980s, 1990s, and so forth. For the past two years, works by Ja’Tovia Gary, Glenn Ligon, Chris Offili (of ’90s culture war infamy) have led the way to, or faced away from, this set of forged squares in Gallery 210. Serra’s work is so white, so male, it’s so much about math, it takes up so much space. In this art-historical sequence, it feels hopelessly out of touch, and it’s also the only place one can get away with the transgression of touch. Left alone in the gallery while our party seeked out something more beautiful at the Creativity Lab, I was struck by the solid, corporeal, material experience and the fact of having it in these anodyne confines.
For the past two decades, a New Yorker or a visitor to the city eager to encounter Serra at Tilted Arc scale has had to travel an hour and a half north to Dia Beacon. To roll the first pieces he called Torqued Ellipses, in which ellipses at the base and top are offset to extrude a form never before produced, Serra describes the impossible search for a fabricator, settling on a shipyard equipped with giant rollers that made World War II battleships: industrial heroism and advanced geometry combined, like a Boeing 747 or the George Washington Bridge. Dia labels its four as having been made of “weatherproof steel,” though the material is more commonly known as Cor-ten, cor-ten, or corten. COR-TEN, a registered trademark of US Steel, has self-rusting alloys that provide long-term, low-maintenance protection from the elements.
Cor-ten is good for bridges, the stuff of shipping containers. Its original applications were practical and industrial. More recently, and thanks in no small part to Serra, the material has developed an association with modern monumentality and new uses as architectural decoration. Cor-ten embellishes the exterior of Brooklyn condo balconies too narrow for any practical use, and figures in memorials for the victims of the Coventry Blitz and to Harriet Tubman, among others. Though the predominant mental image is of terracotta sandpaper, the weathered surface varies from tetanus vector to petrified elephant skin. The Torqued Ellipses feel like a visit to an old friend, and a visit to friendly Serra, the one whose confrontational works finally found their adorational art public. The author of the New York Times appreciation upon Serra’s death referred to the Dia Beacon as a second date spot, but I’ve always considered it a place to stroll with visiting family members, especially when it is cold outside, with Serra’s spirals as our ultimate destination.
The building where the Torqued Ellipses are parked was made for Serra, the sole occupant of the former train shed of the (Nabisco) box-printing factory that closed in 1990 and became Dia Beacon in 2003. After removing the tracks, one of Dia’s architects, Lyn Rice, described to me how they poured a new concrete floor raised to a level carefully calibrated with Serra to complement the ellipses’ combined masses, fitting the space to the work. In this way, the monuments would be grounded, rather than strangely dark and smooth icebergs floating in a side-lit sea. The sculptures arrived by flatbed truck and were loaded into the hall through an entirely removed corrugated metal wall on the shed’s south end and joined together using gantries that lift the individual steel sections up like they would a shipping container, roll them into the exhibition hall, and gently clap them together on the concrete.
There are four cor-ten forms in a row, four objects different than they appear. Not closer, not through a mirror. Stand to one side and see an inverted, truncated cone; shift your vantage point a few feet to the right, and it’s a parallelogram in front of you. But the point is to go inside—you don’t look at them in space but inhabit the space that they make, an early 21st-century embodied museum experience. During a recent visit a group of well-dressed Spanish women in their twenties took pictures inside, blocking movement into the center. Where so many museums drive in-person attendance through the opportunity to take selfies—pictures that would look identical if fabricated with Photoshop at home—stubbornly, presciently, form and material here resist photography. Weathered steel, they will see when they review their posts, doesn’t make such a great backdrop. Enter the sculpture and if you linger, you can see the seam in the steel, the production notes on the surface. Note the places where the base of the whole enormous volume lifts up off the floor, feel the play of stability and instability.
Number two, Double Torqued Ellipse (1997), is the scary one. You enter through a narrow slice in the dark steel like a Bruce Nauman corridor, scrolling through the dark before coming to an opening and the center. Four is the friendly one. Like a nautilus, 2000 spirals toward a central, skylit opening. If no one else is in there, the experience has a frisson of the unmonitored, distinctly antithetical to the museum experience. (If they would stoop so low, I’ve always thought Dia Beacon would lend itself to an easter egg hunt. Imagine a payoff at the center of the ellipse . . . a basket of foil eggs, a rabbit wearing a pastel ribbon.) Upstairs is a big spider, an indoors version of Louise Bourgeois’s overbearing Maman. You could duck under her eight bronze legs but certainly not embrace them, and it’s not clear if visitors are allowed on the other side of the prickly arachnid. Of course, Dad or Grandpa (though Serra was neither) is a good time, while Mom is slightly forbidding and uncomfortable. Here he is entirely at home, stretching out like he owns the place.
More spirals and ellipses torque in a long gallery at the center of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, encircling a hundred-foot-long cor-ten Snake commissioned for the museum’s inauguration; the eight-sculpture assemblage is collectively entitled A Matter of Time. If the space was not exactly designed to display these works (its architect, Frank Gehry, spoke with a touch of pique in an interview of a Serra takeover) the ur–turn of the millennium building is ultimately inseparable from the artist’s work within. In 2001, Andrea Fraser recorded an unofficial tour of the museum, Little Frank and His Carp. Filmed by five cameras as she heeds the audio guide prompts to admire the building’s “powerfully sensual” surfaces, the artist performs a frottage of the limestone walls with Serra’s Snake lurking in the background. The steel sculptures are closely cropped, soft and grainy. In the 2010 film essay The Forgotten Space, Allan Sekula (raised near the port of LA, the son of an aerospace engineer whose experience of unemployment featured in his early work) followed cor-ten containers and the laborers who move them from Rotterdam, to Los Angeles and Hong Kong, to the port of Bilbao. In the chapter labeled “Rust,” Sekula and his codirector Noël Burch alight upon Gehry’s titanium Guggenheim from a soon-to-be-relocated container terminal, panning upon the ultimate manifestation of the spatial fix, the union of capital relocation and cultural imperialism, “a fish that never rots, a ship that never rusts, a lighthouse that only shines when the sun is out.” Inside the museum atrium, The Forgotten Space attends to the installation of Serra’s Matter of Time, with its steel forms designed with computer technology from Gehry’s office. The camera not-too-generously peers down on the succession of bald heads and even Hawaiian shirts filing through the elliptical spirals in the ArcelorMittal gallery, as they follow the dictates of their handsets. This perfect picture of the deracinated, mediated late-capitalist economy is helpfully complicated by Sekula’s own voiceover description of how maritime activity continues to animate the port that has been expanded just a bit further outside Bilbao’s center: behind all our narratives of deindustrialization hides one of industrial relocation.
When Serra installed T.W.U. in Tribeca, a softer logistical district of egg and dairy distribution was still located a few blocks away. Not long ago I took a bus tour of the Industrial Business Zones of North Brooklyn and Central Queens, special regulatory carveouts to preserve manufacturing space in the city that lost most of it through the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and a lot of what remained in the first decades of this millennium, as rezonings made way for luxury housing left and right. After an introduction on the importance of creating and preserving industrial jobs, pathways to the middle class and all that, the organizers took us to see a Maspeth manufacturer specializing in ornamental steel (they did replacement window work for St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but what they were really excited to show us was their heavy metal squash court) and an industrial business development success d’estime—a rapidly expanding new facility where they make custom shipping crates for the city’s galleries and museums.
Serra’s industrial products never found a happy home until they got their purpose-built postindustrial containers. Before the cookie-box factory, the Torqued Ellipses were first exhibited at Dia’s space in Chelsea, a taxi repair shop turned kunsthalle. Variations of torqued spirals, toruses, and spheres debuted four years later around the corner at Gagosian Gallery, a former garage. The same architect, Richard Gluckman, renovated these workspaces to frame Serra’s outsize forms, the concrete floors engineered to hold up their monumental tonnage. Later, people may not have lined up along the sidewalk to see Serras, like he’s Yayoi Kusama or an inventive croissant, but the Gagosian exhibitions were blockbuster events with extended runs. When MoMA expanded in 2004, not for the last time, to better approximate an airport, it arrived with new twenty-foot tall galleries, and floors reinforced with steel, specifically in anticipation of a second Serra retrospective. Serra lives on rent-free in neighborhoods shored up to maintain the place of the art industry and in the semblance of safe, friendly, nominally noncommercial public space that pretty much only museums provide. Engineered to make room for Serra’s sculptures, climate-controlled to protect indefinitely against weathering. Intentional rust, perpetually old and present and future, rejects obsolescence.
Two days after Serra’s death, a container ship called Dali left Baltimore harbor and plowed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which rose to the northwest from Sparrows Point, the shipyard where the first Torqued Ellipses were rolled and Amazon and Home Depot distribution sites now sprawl. Six maintenance workers—immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala—died on the bridge, diverting traffic from the neither fast- nor slow-moving disaster. The crew of the Dali was held in their ship in the harbor for three months as an investigation unfolded and bridge pieces were dismantled. (By the time they were tugged to the port of Norfolk, their US visas had expired.) Containers, and laborers. Other cities worried if their bridges might be vulnerable to similar Panamax wrecks, though the Key Bridge was a rare case of transit infrastructure not yet past its prime. Still, it makes one reflect on what ages gracefully, who has the right of way. And, if, in the future, we want to make room for something else, where will all the Serras go?
And what traces remain of the ones that are already gone? After all the contestation and litigation, the GSA trucked Tilted Arc away in three pieces in 1988 and replaced it with landscape architect Martha Schwartz’s user-friendly composition of circular green benches. These were replaced in turn (because the garage underneath was leaking, and with 2009 stimulus money) by a landscape we’ll describe as “classy.” Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates pruned hedges into bulbous landforms and dotted the plaza with saucer magnolias that bloom ice pink in April and low marble cylinders approximating ottomans, all encircled by bollards whose design is sensitive to another historical era entirely. Javits Plaza is at the entrance of the federal building housing NYC’s immigration court and USCIS field office. In 1983, Tilted Arc served as backdrop to protests against the Reagan Administration, which refused to grant asylum to the Guatemalans and Salvadorans who fled US-fomented violence there by the hundreds of thousands. More recently, on weekday mornings, the updated barriers corralled the line of petitioners waiting to run their bags through x-rays and make their ICE check-in appointments and asylum hearings. At the height of the most recent “crisis” of people seeking a more secure living environment, hundreds of new arrivals waited outside through the night and queued up in the morning for appointments for work permits and mandatory registration. There is an ICE check-in line and a separate line for the court, a spatial confusion leading to bureaucratic fatality—one asylum seeker on the wrong line reportedly missed her hearing and was slated for deportation. The entirety of the plaza is closed off by both metal police barriers and airport-style crowd control ribbons, and occupied principally by a large security tent. These circumscribe free circulation far more than Tilted Arc’s slice through the original plaza ever could. If Serra couldn’t make a permanent point of the hostility of the plaza, time and ICE continue to do the work for him.
For this last statistic and more Serriana, I owe a debt to Julian Rose and particularly his 2019 essay “The Weight of History” in Richard Serra: Forged Rounds, Reverse Curve. ↩
The aesthetic judgement comes from Harriett F. Senie’s Tilted Arc Controversy, in which she also ascribes great significance to Serra’s semi-repressed Jewish heritage. ↩
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!