A FROLIC OF OUR OWN: When I first heard that MOMA was staging a Richard Serra retrospective, I thought it would suffer the same fate as Christo, Calder, and architecture exhibitions -- too many drawings, photographs, models, and video, and too little of the real McCoy resulting in a trivialization of the work itself, the representations poorly conveying the scale, heft, and space of the work itself.
Then I heard on the radio today that they're actually bringing Serra's sculptures in. Wow, what a pain in the ass. And in the end, I'm still skeptical that this exhibition can work. I think Serra is the most site-dependent of the sculptors whose work I know (admittedly not a huge pool). Where Calder's works aim to dominate a site and Moore's site-specific works tend to frame or complement it, Serra's pieces are designed to control the site, altering the space itself and the way that users experience it. Tilted Arc bifurcated Federal Plaza, to the dismay of the workers there and to the delight of the litigators. I think I would have liked Tilted Arc, though, just like I loved my first experience with Serra, his Stacks in the old Yale Art Gallery. Stacks in one sense is just two large almost-square welded steel bookends a good 50 or so feet apart in an 80-foot sculpture gallery, but the real focus of the work is the space in between the bookends, which takes on a physical presence -- sort of like a high-pressure ridge -- that dominates the room. It's a piece that can only work in a room exactly that size, with exactly that same orientation, maybe even in exactly that same place.
That's why I'm skeptical of the MOMA exhibit. I don't know how Serra's works can have the same meaning and the same effect transported to a different, neutral gallery that they weren't built to control. If any of the New Yorkers here are going to see this, I'd love to hear how it works.
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