Evincing probably the most machismo of the macho male Minimalist sculptors, Richard Serra defines the very meaning of power and control -- tackling tonnages of sheets of steel into gentle submission. One does not merely contemplate his 1997-98 "Torqued Ellipses," one...
[more]Evincing probably the most machismo of the macho male Minimalist sculptors, Richard Serra defines the very meaning of power and control -- tackling tonnages of sheets of steel into gentle submission. One does not merely contemplate his 1997-98 "Torqued Ellipses," one is consumed by it, traversing and disappearing beneath its massive, twisted ninety-ton conical forms.
Serra's sculptures surprise you with their seeming instability, confront you with unexpected shifts in volume, depth and mass. As art critic Jan Garden Castro described, "Moving between double torqued ellipses -- and looking up and down -- is especially disorienting...recalling yet updating the bygone thrills of tilting floors and walls at a carnival funhouse."
A leading figure of 1960s Minimalist sculpture, Serra tracked down one of only two steel-rolling machines left in the world that was capable of rotating the massive steel sheets (these machines were originally used to manufacture World War II battleships). Serra, the Man of Steel, was not so much interested in aesthetics as in overcoming the seeming physical impossibility of what he could do, and, "the fact that a generic form, an ellipse, could be torqued on itself to produce a form not seen before. This form doesn't exist in architecture, nor in pottery."
Indeed, the torqued ellipse creates arcs that simultaneously tilt at opposite angles and fashion a space that seems to move in opposite directions at the same time.
Serra's monumental works are deliberately anti-optical in nature and emphasize his concerns with the elemental, and above all, physical concepts of sculpture: material and process, mass and weight, scale and plane, site and context. Noted art critic Rosalind Krauss characterized Serra as "stripping the work of art of all possible illusionism," thus creating "a field force that's being generated, so that the space is discerned physically rather than optically..."
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