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Art/Kay Larson

IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES

"...In Serra's retrospective, minimalist logic struggles toward transcendence; his force is both perceptual and emotional..."

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PURE INTENTION: Serra has re-created Casting at MOMA.

THE CATALOGUE FOR Richard Serra/Sculpture announces the Museum of Modern Art's willingness to leap into the ring for the rare artist it admires.  Emblazoned on the cover is Tilted Arc, the 120-foot outdoor sculpture that has proved to be such an irritant to the delicate sensibilities of certain public servants who spend their recreational time down in Federal Plaza, magnifying glass in hand, studying the Arc's rusted face to see whether the emperor has taken off his drawers. (There are few occasions for respectable people to be respectably titillated these days, so Serra's art has already served a redeeming social function.) 

The Modern seldom honors a single living artist. Serra's show is a testament to the confidence that the Department of Painting and Sculpture has in his twenty-year career. It's also an event with built-in urgency - more so now than if the Modern's construction delays has not bumped it off the schedule ten years ago. The issues that made Serra such an Irascible for the artists who followed him are still very much in contention. Minimalists have squared off against maximalists. At stake is the very set of terms by which we talk and think about art.

Polemics aside, Serra wears well. There is an awesome physical presence to the steel slabs he stacks on the floor and walls with such forceful ingenuity. If you can make your way past the unnerving Five Plates, Two Poles - in which pipes on the floor hold ceiling-high steel plates that fan out like the armor on a stegosaurus - you are literally stopped in your tracks by Two Corner Curve. From a deep corner, a slice of cold-rolled steel arcs across the floor, wedging up against a pillar on the opposite side of the room, blocking your progress.  

Great mass warps gravitational space; lesser mass warps lived-in space. Two Corner Curve, Serra's tour de force, sucks you into the eddies it creates around itself. You find yourself wanting to touch its surface, which is as ruggedly handsome as a scene from Antonioni's The Red Desert: the encrusted teals and deep blue-blacks of bare steel; the orange swellings of rust; the pitted pockmarks of sienna-purple corrosion; all the hues of a Tuscan sunset on black swamp water. When you fight your way out of the gravitational pull of the arc and amble around to the other side, you find that the steel slab has oddly flattened out. No longer a curve, it now seems to have snapped back into a nearly straight line. Human perception functions in its own force field, and Two Corner Curve fits (and fights) the curves of the mind.  

When Serra began to show folded and torn pieces of rubber and fiberglass and rolled-up sheets of lead in the late sixties, he moved to the head of what came to be called Porcess Art. The ideas flow straight from Abstract Expressionism: In critic Harold Rosenberg's formulation, "Action Painting" proposed that the locus of painting was in the bond between artist and canvas. Process artists simply got rid of the canvas. Serra came up with a now famous list of 44 verbs - to tear, to cut, to prop, to fold - which, for him, represented fundamental propositions about the operations that could be performed on physical substances. Then, methodically, he enacted them.  

In 1969, when Serra threw molten lead at the base of a wall in the Whitney Museum, he drew the battle lines for his generation. The gesture was electrifying - the art object disappeared in a rain of smoking metal. As the art object vaporized, the artist assumed the central position. Serra's verbs have an unspoken subject: the "I" who performs them, the thinking mind behind them. Rosalind Krauss writes in the catalogue, "Translucency to thought became the real 'subject' of Constructivism, marking a triumph over matter by the formal operations of logic or of science, the object baptized in ether of reason."  

If that image calls up Constructivism etherized upon a table - "ether" suggesting not the slush that fills space but the substance that kills pain - chances are you lived through the minimalist years and experienced the outcome of that triumph of ideas. The euphoria generated by Serra's liberating gesture, as Douglas Crimp's essay explains, helped propel art criticism into the province of philosophy, especially Continental philosophy, phenomenology, and, lately, the much-abused structuralism. The problem, as Krauss unwittingly implies, was that logic and science came to overrule the material foundation of art and life.  

There is a poignancy now to minimalist logic. It depends on an image of human beings as bundles of autonomous perceptions - the image put forth by such philosophers as Merleau-Ponty to

74  NEW YORK/MARCH 17, 1986