Major figure of contemporary art, the American Richard Serra, died Tuesday at the age of 85 according to the New York Timesplaced the viewer at the heart of his work with his monumental and minimalist steel sculptures, reflections on space and the environment.
For him, the form of the work is determined by the material and the place of its exhibition, of which it modifies the perception. In the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris, he installed in 2008 for the exhibition Monumenta gigantic angular plates with a worrying inclination. At the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, eight works of ocher curves and spirals envelop the visitor.
“When you see my pieces, you don’t remember an object. We remember an experience, a passage. To experience one of my pieces is to experience and respond to a sense of time and place. It is not remembering an object because there is no object to remember,” he explained in 2004.
Imposing build and steely eyes, Richard Serra traces his fascination with the notions of weight and balance to one of his first memories, which became a “recurring dream”.
He is four years old and witnesses the release of a battleship from the shipyards where his father works. Before the child’s eyes, the enormous mass washed up on the ground, like “an elongated skyscraper”, becomes a “free structure, floating in drift”.
“My intimidation and my astonishment linked to this moment have never disappeared,” said the sculptor, born November 2, 1939 in San Francisco, to a mother of Russian Jewish origin and a Spanish father.
After studying English literature at the University of California, Serra joined Yale for visual arts.
Holder of a scholarship, he left for Paris, where he visited Brancusi’s studio recreated at the National Museum of Modern Art almost daily. The aspiring painter decides to turn to sculpture.
In Spain, he stops in front of Las Meninas by Velasquez, where through a play of mirrors the viewer finds himself an integral part of the composition. “I looked at it for a while before realizing that I was an extension of the canvas. It was a revelation,” he said.
Zen gardens, which he discovered during a trip to Japan, also had a major influence on his work. “Walking and looking have become founding gestures for me,” he confided.
Dizziness and insecurity
At the end of the 1960s, he moved to New York, in full artistic ferment. To survive, he set up a furniture removal business, in which he notably employed the composer Philip Glass, who became his assistant.
In 1967-1968, he published his manifesto: a list of 84 verbs (“roll up”, “press”, “cut”, “fold”…) and 24 context elements (“gravity”, “entropy”, “nature” …) which lists all the processes at its disposal for the creation of a work.
For his first works, he used rubber, fiberglass, latex and neon, then projected molten lead between walls and floors (Splash1968-1970).
At the end of the 1960s, he produced a seminal work One ton prop (House of cards)four lead plates measuring 122×122 cm, held in balance by their own weight, like a house of cards.
From the following decade, Richard Serra favored open-air installations and Corten steel. There is nothing arbitrary about the choice of material. He knows its characteristics and potential perfectly, having worked in a steelworks every summer since he was 16.
The balancing acts, the weight of the steel and the height of the plates create, for the spectator invited to move between them, a feeling of insecurity, smallness or dizziness.
A destabilizing, even disturbing experience. In 1981, his work Tilted Arca gigantic metal plate 3.6 m high and 36.6 m long, installed across New York’s Federal Plaza, bothered local residents so much that it had to be dismantled after eight years, following of a long legal battle.
And one of his recent works, dark towers that seem to rise from the ground in the Qatar desert, is isolated, accessible only by 4×4 in temperatures that can reach up to 50 degrees Celsius.