Thursday afternoon – December 4 – Gagosian – 522 West 21st Street – NYC. I’ve lost track of the number of times I have seen the work of Richard Serra. One memory leaps to mind: A sunny afternoon in May, 2007, I am walking east from Sixth Avenue along 54th Street when suddenly to my right there is a massive crane slowly hoisting a hundred-ton snaking slab of patinated Corten steel up to MoMA’s second floor Contemporary Arts gallery exposed to the open air. The thing was distanced, surreal, flaunting itself. Before the somehow-diminished Manhattan cityscape, that hovering section of Serra’s BEND obliterated my thoughts.
Last week, I entered the front-door of Gagosian Gallery, and a statement Serra had once made coalesced in my head, having to do with “movement through space” as fundamental to the perception of his sculpture, absented from a pedestal so that the viewer was compelled to factor in her/his relationship to the piece. Now, as opposed to eighteen years ago, RUNNING ARCS (For John Cage, 1992) and I inhabited the same white-walled chamber.
The exactitude of “three identical conical steel segments, inverted relative to each other, installed in a staggered formation, each panel approximately 53 feet long, thirteen feet high, and two inches thick” hardly does justice to the prepossessing weathered-ochre entity telling me where to go, be it “inside” or “out,” terms rendered placeless as I attempt to capture the free-standing selves in one photograph.
I am loving the resistance and acceptance I sense between the work and me, as it draws me closer. I am hesitant to extend one finger for a light touch, cautious, pulling back to avert some kind of violation; but reassured by these indestructible looming neighbors, present —for and with me — even when other flaneurs interfere with our sacred hush.
It seems absurd, and sad, to abandon the monumental impassive soul of RUNNING ARCS for a windswept, chilly grey street.