Industrial Strength.(sculptor Richard Serra)(Biography)

When I think of Richard Serra's work as art, or of art as what Richard Serra does, a bracing bleakness descends, like that of a stern northern region, where people live gladly, while under no illusion that it's the isle of Capri. Serra's mostly magnificent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art proves that he is not only our greatest sculptor but an artist whose subject is greatness befitting our time. He works at the physical scale of architecture and at the intellectual scale of art history as a whole. The degree of his undoubted success is immeasurable, because nothing really relates to it. The enveloping austerities of Carl Andre and Dan Flavin--Serra's minimalist forebears in the nineteen-sixties, when five years was a generation--come closest, but compared with his work theirs is parlor decor. His art affords no handle as easy, or as ingratiating, as "style." Consciousness of Serra's furious ambition--an arbitrary force, like weather--addles both analysis and aesthetic response. My comprehension of his tons of shaped steel always feels inadequate to their conceptual subtlety, engineering sophistication, and, oh my, size. Taking a childlike view may be the best way to relax with and, to the extent possible, enjoy Serra's art. Don't try to understand. Play.

I have in mind not the show's early work, on the sixth floor, which is more congenial to grownup appreciation, but its climactic sections: two colossal pieces in the garden, "Intersection II" (1992-93) and "Torqued Ellipse IV" (1998), and especially a stupendous array of three that were made last year--"Torqued Torus Inversion," "Band," and "Sequence"--in the cavernous second-floor space for contemporary art. All consist of curved walls, twelve or so feet high, of at least two-inch-thick weatherproof steel, which seals itself with soft-textured rust. "Intersection II" is an open, upright sandwich of four almost identical conical sections, tilting this way and that along three routes of passage. The "Torqued Ellipse"s were Serra's breakthrough to subsequent feats of geometric sorcery: oval enclosures, enterable through a slit, whose contour at the top is perpendicular to their contour on the ground. "Torqued Torus Inversion" is a pair of identical enclosures that describe the double curve on the inside edge of a doughnut; side by side, one flares upward and the other down. "Band" is a switchback ribbon that forms four chambers over a space seventy-two feet long. "Sequence," Serra's masterpiece so far, is a maze of two nested S shapes which, when you walk it, goes on just about forever. At each step around or within all the works, the walls curve or slant, or both, differently in relation to each other and to your body. The effect is like materialized music, actuated by your movement. Clap your hands for interesting echoes. You will like seeing and hearing other people share the experience. To explore these things alone, as I did, thrills but unnerves. I kept feeling like a trespasser at a top-secret industrial site.

Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939, the son of a shipyard pipe fitter and a remarkably supportive mother. In a chewy interview in the show's catalogue with MOMA's Kynaston McShine (who co-curated the show with Lynne Cooke, of the Dia Art Foundation), Serra tells of his mother's first visit, in the sixties, to his loft on Greenwich Street. "It was barren, there was nothing in it but a mattress on the floor, I was living on maybe $75 a month. . . . She looked out the window at the Hudson River and said, Richard, this is marvelous." He had majored in English literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara--he cites Emerson and Melville as persistent lodestars--and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in art at Yale, where his classmates included Brice Marden and Chuck Close and the abundant role models included Philip Guston and the composer Morton Feldman. (Serra was ousted from a class after surprising a visitor, Robert Rauschenberg, with a work involving a live chicken.) He spent two years, 1964-66, in Europe, where he met up with the composer Philip Glass. In Paris, they haunted La Coupole at the hour when Giacometti arrived for his after-work drink, and almost every day for a month Serra visited Brancusi's studio museum. In Florence, he immersed himself in Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Donatello, whom ...