Richard Serra at the Gagosian Gallery


Watching an oil tanker being launched made a profound and lasting impression on a four-year-old Richard Serra. Now 75, the artist is still feeding off that memory and it informs his latest works at the Gagosian Gallery in London’s King’s Cross.


Blueprint

Words Lily Le Brun

At sunrise on his fourth birthday, in 1943, the artist Richard Serra was driven over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to a shipyard by his father, who worked there as a pipe-fitter. They arrived to find a vast, steel-plated oil tanker balancing within its scaffold, waiting to be launched. Serra remembers looking up through the struts and dunnage to the enormous propeller, walking round the arc of the hull, and thinking it was like a skyscraper lying on its side.

Ramble, 2014 Weatherproof steel 24 plates 182.9 x 1,196.3 x 960.1 cm. Photo: Richard Serra / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Ramble, 2014 Weatherproof steel 24 plates 182.9 x 1,196.3 x 960.1 cm. Photo: Richard Serra / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

He can recall the sudden activity and noise when the tanker was released, tearing through its supports with a speed that seemed incongruous with its vast, hulking size. He remembers the anxiety of watching the ship rattle down the chute towards the sea, and the awe of seeing it enter the water, where it became partly submerged, before rising up, swaying, rolling and bouncing, to find its balance.

The Hours of the Day, 1991 Hot-rolled steel Twelve slabs in four sets of three: 180 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm, 165 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm, 150 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm, 135 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm. Photo: Dirk Reinartz
The Hours of the Day, 1991 Hot-rolled steel Twelve slabs in four sets of three: 180 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm, 165 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm, 150 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm, 135 cm x 5.1 m x 15.2 cm. Photo: Dirk Reinartz

The installation of Serra's most recent show of newly exhibited work, within the spotless, white walls of the Gagosian Gallery in King's Cross, is not as far removed from this early experience as one might imagine. Now a distinguished sculptor in his 70s, watching the ship finally collect itself on water and float free has remained a touchstone. 'All the raw material that I need is contained in the reserve of this memory,' Serra has said. The physical and practical materials are, too.

Union of the Torus and the Sphere, 2001 Weatherproof steel One torus section one spherical section 3.6 m high x 11.4 m along the chord x 8.1 m deep, plates: 5 cm thick. Photo: Dirk Reinartz
Union of the Torus and the Sphere, 2001 Weatherproof steel One torus section one spherical section 3.6 m high x 11.4 m along the chord x 8.1 m deep, plates: 5 cm thick. Photo: Dirk Reinartz

During summers as a student, he worked in steel plants that gave him a good understanding of steel's potential as a material, and it has remained consistent in his work since the early Seventies. The four eponymous steel sculptures that comprise the show -- Backdoor Pipeline, Ramble, Dead Load and London Cross -- were all forged or rolled in European factories that also build ships. The individual parts were driven into London in special, oversize lorries that required a police escort, and took two weeks to install. Serra's team flew over from New York, cranes towered over the gallery and roads were blocked off. Whole walls were moved and reconstructed, supports were fabricated and dismantled, as a total of 230 tonnes of steel sculpture were levered, lifted, winched and inched into their final positions.

Dead Load, 2014 Weatherproof steel 166.9 x 135.8 x 325.7 cm. Photo:Richard Serra / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Dead Load, 2014 Weatherproof steel 166.9 x 135.8 x 325.7 cm. Photo:Richard Serra / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

It was the 'transformation of enormous obdurate weight into a buoyant structure, free, afloat and adrift', as Serra has described the launch of the oil tanker, that was so transfixing to his four-year-old mind, and it is this quality that is found in his sculpture. One of Serra's earliest works was a long, handwritten list of verbs -- to roll, to crease, to fold, to bend, to shorten, to twist, and so on -- all of which he then physically enacted, demonstrating active participation within a material world.

Stacked Steel Slabs (Skullcracker Series), 1969 Hot-rolled steel 6.1 x 2.4 x 3.1 m
Stacked Steel Slabs (Skullcracker Series), 1969 Hot-rolled steel 6.1 x 2.4 x 3.1 m

Today, the processes of engineering, fabrication and installation remain implicit within the physical presence of the sculptures; it is the size, weight and material that are the essence of the art. Like the epic finale to a performance, the work is experienced within the present, but being aware of its past heightens the magnitude of its impact. London Cross (2014), for instance, balances one slender, 12m-long slab of rolled steel vertically on top of another, to form a huge grey cross that reaches up to the ceiling. Thick, reinforced walls were built to enclose but not support it, and nowhere is it fixed to its surroundings. With the top piece compressing the lower section into total stability, the work uses gravity in a terrifyingly simple way.

Bilbao, 1983 Steel 76.2 x 218.4 x 76.2 cm, 76.2 x 172.7 x 76.2 cm
Bilbao, 1983 Steel 76.2 x 218.4 x 76.2 cm, 76.2 x 172.7 x 76.2 cm

The experience of compression and release informs the areas around the sculptures too; Serra considers space, volume and gravity to be a medium, almost as much as steel. Each piece at Gagosian is contained within its own room, where it dominates and restructures its surroundings, subtly compelling particular movements. The 24 human-height, steel plates that form Ramble (2014) are arranged in two rows, forming narrow paths that encourage various ways of circulating through them. With time, their neat pattern becomes apparent. 'In order to get to an experience I would like others to have, there has to be a subtext and a logic,' Serra has explained. 'It is a syntax.'

Circuit, 1972 Hot-rolled steel Four plates: 2.4 m x 7.3 m x 2.5 cm. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard.
Circuit, 1972 Hot-rolled steel Four plates: 2.4 m x 7.3 m x 2.5 cm. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard

Backdoor Pipeline (2010), which took three years to make, coaxes you through its 4m-high, 15m-long, curving, dark tunnel. Gently concave on one side, convex on the other, and allowed to oxidise fully into a rich, rusty orange, it echoes the torqued works that helped make Serra's name in the Nineties. Nothing similar had been attempted before, and Serra worked with aeronautical engineers to devise a way to curve gargantuan steel plates. Standing free with grand elegance, these distinct, tilted spirals, ellipses and spheres are on permanent display in public spaces and museums across the world.

Delineator, 1974–75 Hot-rolled steel Two plates: 2.5 cm x 3.1 m x 7.9 m. Photo: Gordan Matta-Clark.
Delineator, 1974-75 Hot-rolled steel Two plates: 2.5 cm x 3.1 m x 7.9 m. Photo: Gordan Matta-Clark

In recent years, Serra's work has become -- in his own words -- less 'baroque'. Dead Load (2014) is formed of two, slightly mismatched forged steel, sarcophagus-sized rectangular lumps, which together weigh 50 tonnes. It relates directly to Grief and Reason (For Walter), named after Walter de Maria, a shy, minimalist sculptor who played drums for the Velvet Underground. Serra credits de Maria with helping him realise that, as a young man trying to negotiate the art world, 'I could keep quiet and do my work and be fine. It was such a relief.'

Blackmun and Brennan, 1989 Forged Steel 236.9 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm, 25.4 cm x 11.2 m x 25.4 cm. Photo: Bill Jacobson.
Blackmun and Brennan, 1989 Forged Steel 236.9 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm, 25.4 cm x 11.2 m x 25.4 cm. Photo: Bill Jacobson

These works are more contemplative and contained, with rough, uneven surfaces like ancient standing stones. They accept their austere appearance and unwieldy bulk, and stand as monuments to raw material, to hard graft and industry -- to their origins in the shipyards of San Francisco.

'We are all restrained and condemned by the weight of gravity,' Serra has written. 'However, Sisyphus pushing the weight of his boulder endlessly up the mountain does not catch me up as much as Vulcan's tireless labour at the bottom of the smoking crater, hammering out raw material. The constructive process, the daily concentration and effort appeal to me more than the light fantastic, more than the quest for the ethereal. Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.'

'Site specific works deal with the environmental components of given places. The scale, size and location of site specific works are determined by the topography of the site, whether it be urban or landscape or architectural enclosure. The works become part of the site and restructure both conceptually and perceptually the organisation of the site.

London Cross, 2014 Weatherproof steel 428 x 868 x 868 cm. Photo: Richard Serra / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
London Cross, 2014 Weatherproof steel 428 x 868 x 868 cm. Photo: Richard Serra / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

The specificity of site-oriented works means that they are conceived for, dependent on and inseparable from their location. Scale, size and placement of sculptural elements result from an analysis of the particular environmental components of a given context.

The preliminary analysis of a given site takes into consideration not only formal characteristics but also functional definitions of the site. Site-specific works invariably manifest a value judgment about the larger context of which they are a part. Based on the interdependence of work and site, site-specific works address the content and context of their site critically. Site specific solutions demonstrate the possibility of seeing the simultaneity of newly developed relationships between sculpture and context.

A new behavioural and perceptual orientation to a site demands a new critical adjustment to one's experience of the place. One factor for a changed experience of a site is a basic change in the experience of time. The inclusion of sculptural elements into a given context makes one more conscious of time, not by slowing it down to a state of meditation, but rather by particularising time through the experience of the work in context. This sense of time or sensation of time which is always a private and individual experience, can only be achieved through the language of art.

Richard Serra

Nature doesn't do it. Furniture doesn't do it. Design doesn't do it, architecture rarely does it. It seems to be one of the basic functions of art to enable us to acknowledge thought and perception in a way that other things do not. To engage thought does not mean that the thought is contained within the work itself, it means that the thought is contained in the dialogue the work engenders in relation to its place.

Site-specific works emphasise the comparison between two separate languages (their own language and the language of their surroundings).

Unlike modernist works that give the illusion of being autonomous from their surroundings, and which function critically only in relation to the language of their own tradition, site-specific works emphasize the comparison between two separate languages. To quote Bertrand Russell:

Every language has a structure about which one can say nothing in that language. There must be another language, dealing with the structure of the first and possessing a new structure about which one cannot say anything except in a third language -- and so forth.'

-- 'I consider space to be my medium. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct. This requires that I employ the practices and procedures of the industrial process. I admit the work is disruptive.

Serra inspects part of his new Gagosian work, Dead Load, still glowing red hot in the steelworks. Silke Von Berswordt–Wallrabe Portrait Matthew Sumner.
Serra inspects part of his new Gagosian work, Dead Load, still glowing red hot in the steelworks. Silke Von Berswordt-Wallrabe Portrait Matthew Sumner

However, I want to direct the consciousness of the viewer to the realities of the conditions: private, public, political, formal, ideological, economic, psychological, commercial, sociological, institutional, or any of these combined. One way of making space distinct is to ground the spectator in the reality of the context.

For me, the emphasis is on the work's ability to achieve this in sculptural terms. My response to a context is to use sculptural means that both reveal and are relevant to the connotative specifics of the context. Thought often arises from the physical conditions of a given context; in effect, places engender thoughts.

Thoughts and ideas that derive from the experience of a specific context are different from abstract concepts that don't derive from the experience of the particularities of a place; you have to make connections while evaluating your experience within the specifics of the context: thinking on your feet, so to speak.'








Progressive Media International Limited. Registered Office: 40-42 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8EB, UK.Copyright 2024, All rights reserved.