The Experience of Space in Site Specific works of Richard Serra
Richard Serra, a contemporary artist whose monumental minimalist sculptures became a reality in the early 80's, bring the viewers' attention to spatial relationships between the viewer, the sculpture, and the direct surroundings of the instillation. Serra's work cements itself into its environment, whether in a museum or out in public. His massive sculptures made from CorTen steel take their root from minimalist sculpture, where the use of the pedestal was rejected, everything reduced to geometric shapes and the idea of emotion is rejected in favor of a contemplative experience with the presence of the sculpture and the space that the sculpture inhabits. Richard Serra has been able to successfully create works of art both in museum and non-museum settings which dominate their surroundings, they are meant to re imagine the spatial quality of the area it was specifically designed for by, complementing the architectonics, lighting, and other elements of the sculptures surroundings. His sculptures capture movement by forcing one to interact with the piece in juxtaposing contracting and expanding spaces and giving the viewer a chance to experience space that is created organically by the works themselves.
Richard Serra was an artist and architect learning and going to school in the 1960's and 70's, he grew up with rise of abstract expressionism and minimalism and participated in those art communities of the time by creating works of art that were based off a list of verbs he wrote down. This became a way for him to systematically create something without any predetermined notion of its aesthetics and rid it of any emotional story or narrative, essentially combining an abstract expressionists process with the result of a minimalist aesthetic. Post World War 2, Clement Greenburg, wrote an essay called Modernist Painting, where he proclaimed the future of art should be formally pure, the artists hand present, and pure abstraction was key. Abstract expressionists, like most notably Jackson Pollock, used a process to create their art to embrace spontaneity and expressed emotion through color and gesture. Abstract Expressionists used gestures to paint in the air creating splatters unique to the hand that made it. In this way the autographic gesture became wildly important to artists of the time, it was a way to create a signature style, that was understood to be like a signature, unable to be replicated by anyone other than the artists. Abstract Expressionism advocated for a purity of mediums meaning that painters painted, used paint, paintbrushes and canvas and that is all, the use of low brow or non-academic art materials were unacceptable. Greenberg encouraged pure abstraction to reject their forefathers for making the canvas appear to be three dimensional making it a false reality. Abstraction drew attention to the flatness of the canvas's surface, and to the color, and other formal aspects of the painting, thus making the painting about painting and creating art that was autonomous, or art who's meaning lay within the art rather than a narrative. "Naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the old masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only by implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors and were acknowledged openly." (Greenburg, 2) During the Cold War, Abstract Expressionism was the epitome of American art and the US used it politically to show the world what was possible in a capitalist society, and how the US was culturally more advanced than that of communist societies.
Minimalism arose out of abstract expressionism as a rejection to it by removing any form of emotion from the art, making it devoid of political messages or any expression at all. Minimalist artists reduced all imagery to modular geometric forms creating sculptures that relied on multiplicity and on materiality, often working with volumetric measurements like bricks, tiles, concrete blocks, and Square meters, things that were deliberately uninteresting. "It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting". (Specific Objects Judd,4) Minimalism also rejected Greenburg's idea of media pure art, minimalist and other art groups of the 70's began using fabricated and non-traditional materials in their work. Minimalist artists had their sculptures fabricated in factories often in other countries rather than making it themselves. There was no need for the artist to have worked or have any kind of biographical mark for it be art since the meaning lay in its presentness and the interaction between the viewer and the object in the space that both viewer and object inhabit rather than in the unique hand or gesture of the artist. By their own choice artists put their sculptures on the floor to distinguish themselves from the historical academic arts. The pedestal in art is what subconsciously signifies the thing on top to be important, or art, by putting the sculptures on the floor, they no longer are a part of art, but rather a part of the same space as the viewer breaking any notion of traditional art and its separation daily life. Since minimalists were continuing to break traditions, the role of the museum became increasingly questioned and discussed, the model of a white square room with works placed meticulously was no longer what was needed by minimalist artists, they needed interactive space with windows, and interesting architectural details. "While Minimalism challenged the idealist hermeticism of the autonomous art object by deflecting its meaning to the space of its presentation, institutional critique further complicated this displacement by highlighting the idealist hermeticism of the space of presentation itself." (One Place, Kwon,88) The idea is that the art should rely on the interaction between the viewer and the sculpture within the space and to contemplate the spatial qualities of the direct surrounding environment, placed even more importance on museums and other art institutions to place the minimalist sculptures in the most ideal locations. Artists during this time even began to look outside the museum environments to place their works in public or in other spaces which might reflect the environmental experience of minimalism. Minimalism also allowed for an international community to understand the work, since the subject did not rely on a narrative, biography, or back story, everyone by simply looking around and feeling the room, noticing the other people interacting with the work, the time of day, and other environmental factors, one has understood the piece. Many minimalist works have reflective surfaces as a way to further highlight this idea, it emphasizes the people and lighting in the room forcing the viewer to look at and contemplate those elements. Minimalist sculptors encouraged the museums to place the sculptures in rooms with windows or with natural light, since the surfaces are reflective going at different times of day or even on days with different whether conditions would yield different aesthetic qualities in the works and would affect their experience with the sculpture.
By the early 80's Serra was working in his enormous and iconic style. All his works since Tilted Arch made for the Federal Plaza in Washington DC and made in 1981, have been made from CorTen steel, weigh tones and by bending and rolling the steel in different ways he has been able to create site-specific sculpture that become a permanent part of the space they inhabit. His works demand presence which epitomizes the minimalist ideal of creating an atmospheric cerebral experience for the viewer. Serra accomplishes this by creating space within his works that is meant to be walked through, around and in-between. Serra says in an interview "In one, you sense the volume moving out like a giant flowerpot or moving in like a giant lampshade. It's all about centralizing the space in different ways. How people move in relation to space, that's essentially what I'm up to." By creating works of art that within themselves create a spatial environment that is unique piece to piece and seclude the viewer, so they are surrounded by the work of art and the gravity it protrudes from the sculptures sheer weight, he is able to create his own spatial environment within the works which decontextualize the audience from the museum or public setting the sculpture takes place in, making the experience of his works minimalist. His monumental works were inspired by being a child in at a port watching the christening of a massive vessel. He says the change from heavy steal on land to floating and buoyant in the water left a huge impression. The looming feeling one has from standing in-between large ships is recreated by the up to 6-foot overhangs of some sculptures. He came up with a unique shape called a torqued ellipsis by figuring out what he wanted the space to look like inside of the work then reverse engineering a way to achieve the effect of simultaneously bending away and twisting toward the viewer. Serra made a mold which he worked with for years to get his desired effect.
In 2005 Serra installed a permanent instillation consisting of 8 sculptural pieces at the Guggenheim in Bilbao Spain, called The Matter of Time. Weighing in at a total 1034 tonnes and standing about 14-foot tall, these 8 works in such a confined space fit perfectly together and complement each other effortlessly. Each sculpture offers a unique spatial experience, some are easy to walk quickly through like Snake, others like Blind Spot Reversed turn sharp corners and make walking more rhythmic to get to the center of. In Torqued Spiral, one walks around, and around through large and small openings, some parts less than a meter wide, to arrive in a large open space that expands as it goes up. Claustrophobic and winding, the passages open in the middle into an awe-inspiring moment of being somewhere remote, the viewer is left with themselves and the open space they inhabit after being conditioned to a set of tightly winding path ways in between the sheets of steel.
"Shirting continuously from a sense of disorientation and dizziness to clarity and placedness, I found myself overwhelmed and thrilled by the range of extreme sensations. The curving walls of the Ellipses seemed alive, falling away or leaning toward me, pulling and pushing the curvilinear spatial volume in sync with each step I took. The faster my movement, the greater the velocity of spatial variations. The effects of those variations were multiplicitous: certain passages, especially within the corridor spaces created by doubled ellipses, felt compressed, threatening; others felt expansive, comforting, even spiritual. These qualitative differences were to be understood in terms of the relationship between my moving body and the physical forms and not as intrinsic properties of the forms themselves." (Approaching Arch, Kwon,46)
Though Serras' work is deeply rooted in minimalist tradition to activate the space around the sculpture and create contemplation of the viewer and sculptures spatial relation, Serra shifts the meaning of art from being about the contemplation of the spatial environment, to their own body, and the feeling of movement which takes us to a moment of innocence and rediscovery. Art historian Miwon Kwon in his essay Approaching Architecture: The Case for Richard Serra and Michael Asher, says "Even if the subject is destabilized and made acutely self-aware of this fact by the sculpture s eccentric moves, space itself is treated like, and understood as, pure and irreducible matter". Serra turned space, into a feeling through cause and effect, the conditioning of the journey and movement through his work that lead to the ultimate 'aha' moment of reaching the center. Serra also employs gravity in his works to create a sense of impossibility of the forms he creates, and to juxtapose several relative terms such as light and heavy, stopped and in motion, and organic and fabricated. His work Snake (2005) functions in the same way as the Torqued Ellipse and Blind Spot Reversed, but in a different way, since the work does not open within itself, the space created by the sculpture is less dizzying and follows a faster pace, The sheets of rolled CorTen steel create narrow walkways that oscillate, but propel the viewer forward, the 'aha' moment of spatial expansion reveals itself when the viewer exits the sculpture to find themselves in the gallery again. The Gallery that The Matter of Time is in, is spatially expansive, resulting in a similar, but not as impressive feeling as Blind Spot Reversed and Torqued Ellipse where "a simultaneous sense of a subjective deforming of space and a spatial overwhelming of the subject" (Jameson) occurs to create Richard Serra's dynamic sculptures.
Bibliography
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Kwon, Miwon. “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” October, vol. 80, 1997, pp. 85–110. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/778809.
Maria Anna Tappeiner, Maria Anna, director. Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet. Youtube, 28 May 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRMvqOwtFno.
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“The Matter of Time.” Guggenheim, Guggenheim Collections, 18 Apr. 2018, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/21794.