RIP, Man of Steel
In late 2001, a friend suggested that we go to see a show at a gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. I was not (am not) any sort of connoisseur, but every once in a while some piece of art will grab my attention and not let it go. It may be a Velazquez portrait in New York or an odd Andy Warhol silkscreen in San Francisco, but those rare works impose a sort of gravitational force on me, making it hard to walk away, or even pulling me back for a second look after I’ve strolled on.
The work I saw in 2001 didn’t just pull me toward it, but it seemed to alter space itself. They were monumental sculptures by Richard Serra, who I had never heard of before, and they had a physical effect on me that even the grandest cathedrals never have. It’s not correct to say that I looked at any sculptures that day—it’s more accurate to say that I experienced the sculptures.
Some of the works at that show were his Torqued Spirals, huge coiled bands of steel which one can walk inside, through towering walls that alternately close in over your head or open out to reveal a broad patch of ceiling or sky. As I walked a curving path inward through the spirals, with walls twice my height seeming to move inward as I passed them, I felt a suffocating pressure in my chest, almost a sort of anxiety, only to be rewarded with a euphoric feeling of freedom as the walls began to widen again.
No art, sculpture or architecture before or since has had such an impact, simultaneously disorienting and disturbing me, but also exhilarating me and even altering my perception of what the world is and how human beings interact with it. The alteration of space, the sheer weight and size of the huge pieces of curved steel, the texture of the metal as you walk through it, and the shifting darkness and light and glimpses of the world outside the work combine in unpredictable ways.
The catastrophe at the World Trade Center just a few miles downtown from the Serra show had been just a couple of months before, so like many New Yorkers, I was in an unusually raw emotional state and perhaps more susceptible than usual to transcendent experiences, but even as the shock subsided, Serra’s sculptures have never lost their power over me.
He was already a famous—notorious, even—sculptor at the time, but that was my first encounter with his work. Since then, I’ve made a point to seek out his work elsewhere in the city, and in the Hudson River valley, and in his native San Francisco. He died on Tuesday at age 85.