For many people outside the art world in the 1980s, Richard Serra’s “Titled Arc” embodied much of what was wrong with contemporary art.
The curved 12-foot wall of unadorned steel, which stretched 120 feet and essentially cut New York City’s Federal Plaza in half, was castigated as cold, imposing, dehumanizing and just plain ugly.
After years of complaints, intense media coverage and, finally, a heated public hearing, a five-member jury assembled by the General Services Adminstration voted in March 1989 to have it removed and scrapped.
How much things have changed in the 18 years since!
“Richard Serra: Sculpture: Forty Years,” an ambitious retrospective of the 69-year-old sculptor’s career earlier this year at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was the kind of popular success more typically associated with Monet or Picasso.
The show drew an amazing 737,074 visitors during its June 3-Sept. 10 run, and these were not not just art-world cognoscenti. There were young couples and many families, the towering, labyrinthine installations being big hits with kids.
In short, Richard Serra, previously the arch-villain of art, has gone mainstream. He has been accepted by the general public as a kind of modern old master, and, such treatment is only fitting, because that is exactly what he is.
Emerging in the 1960s, he was part of a generation of artists who sought nothing less than the total redefinition of what sculpture could be. After experimenting with a variety of materials, he settled on thick sheets of steel as his preferred material.
Employing a spare, post-minimalist aesthetic, he explored the very materiality of steel — its weight and seeming rigidity. Suffusing his works with a feeling of precariousness — even danger, Serra balanced steel plates on the wall with a pole (“Prop,” 1968) or leaned plates together to create a loose, open cube (“One Ton Prop (House of Cards),” 1969).
“Basic Maintenance” (1987), an example on display on the fourth floor of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, deals with some of these same issues. The 12-foot-tall piece consists of two square steel plates on edge, one resting at an angle on another against a gallery wall.
Serra has also explored the sometimes confrontational interaction between his sculptures and the spaces where they are exhibited, either indoors or outdoors, as well as the dynamic relationship between his works and the viewer.
If his older works possessed a muscularity and solidity that could be off-putting to some viewers, his sculpture began to grow in complexity and become more supple, sensuous and graceful in the 1990s as his artistic vision evolved and fabricating techniques improved.
This new chapter in Serra’s work dramatically culminated at MOMA with the sculptor’s awe-inspiring “Sequence” (2006), a maze-like, 65-foot-long work consisting of two inset S-shaped walls nearly 13 feet in height.
Strolling through the serpentine corridors and spaces created by the curving walls offers an unprecedented and ever-changing visual, and, perhaps more important, visceral experiences, as the towering walls constantly bend inward and outward.
Because of the massive weight and scale of the largest pieces on view (MOMA’s new building was constructed with reinforced floors specifically designed to handle works by Serra), the exhibition did not tour, and it is unlikely that it will be repeated for a few decades at least.
But art lovers who were not able to make it to New York need not despair. In conjunction with the show, MOMA has published a handsome, impressively comprehensive book (420 pages, $75), with stunning black-and-white images of the works in the show and dozens of other examples.
It is the ideal Christmas gift for Serra devotees and fans of great sculpture in general.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
