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describe the life of the senses with the deliberately limited terms then available to science. Minimalism assumed that those limits defined the known world. In order to make that assumption stick, it had to reduce the world to wholly knowable dimensions. (Merleau-Ponty might not have been so bold.)

You can see this logic struggling toward transcendence in Serra's retrospective. Two Corner Curve is a powerful presence, but its power over the senses requires the absence of distractions. In the pacified emptiness of the Modern's white-walled surroundings, the phenomenal weight of steel produces a Wagnerian chorus of experiences. On the other hand, Casting, the thrown-lead piece from 1969, is a case of  mind over matter. (Serra has re-created it at the Modern, tossing lead along the base of a wall, then peeling the lead as it cools and stacking it on the floor.) Because it's only pure intention, it seems quaint now--an important blip in the history of ideas, but not an object with any force of mind within it. Casting serves to enshrine not the art object but the conceptual "I" of the artist.

Minimalist language has not proved durable. The ideologues of the movement lodged themselves in the mainstream of art and were chagrined to find that the current swept around them with all the force of unruly life. I came to Serra's show expecting him to be one of the casualties. But Serra knew better than his defenders (and his followers) that matter exerts force. The force is both perceptual and (though he would deny it) emotional. In Delineator II, you walk under two four-ton steel plates embedded in the ceiling, aware of their mass in vivid proportion to your concern for your own skin. In the steel pieces propped against the wall, or the slabs of lead leaning on each other, there is a little thrill of "what if."

Indoors, Serra is a master. Outdoors, the delicacy of the mind's dialogue with nature is nearly drowned out by the background hum of distractions. Where perceptions can be channeled and ordered--in the 200-foot St. John's Rotary Arc, for instance, which you must view from a car leaving the Holland Tunnel or while walking across the tunnel overpass--the joined sweep of matter and mind is breathtaking. Where the world tugs at the work in distracted fits and starts--in Tilted Arc, for example--Serra's conviction is hard to see or feel. To understand it, you need to stand near Two Corner Curve and watch the way an immobile spring of three-inch plate can split the body's awareness of space like a chisel on a diamond's fracture lines.

Serra's show is a surprise and a pleasure--no less because pleasure is a surprising thing to get out of minimalism these days. MOMA's confidence is justified: He remains a leader and a survivor. (11 West 53rd Street: through May 13.)

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MARCH 17, 1986/NEW YORK  75