In the long and often embattled career of Richard Serra, no event has been more cathartic than his most recent New York exhibition, which opened last October at the Gagosian Gallery on West Twenty-fourth Street. The opening had been delayed by the terrible events of September 11th, and in the aftermath of the catastrophe there was no telling how many people would show up. More than three thousand did, as it turned out, and, according to Ealan Wingate, the gallery's director, "Everybody was bathed in antidote." Six monumental Serra sculptures filled the exhibition space. The scale and ambition of his new work was no surprise; Serra's sculptures have been overpowering viewers since the late nineteen-sixties, when he showed his early propped-lead pieces at the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums. What amazed me and many others was how far Serra, at the age of sixty-two, had moved beyond the breakout innovations of his most recent show, two years earlier. Once again, it seemed, he was carrying the art of sculpture into new areas, taking great risks and pulling them off, and there was something thrilling and deeply reassuring about that.
All six sculptures at Gagosian were enormous: leaning walls of two-inch-thick industrial steel plate; two forty-ton rectangular solids that devoured the space of two rooms; a strange, exquisitely calibrated monolith that looked like a great ship listing dangerously to one side. There were also two "torqued spirals," coiling thirteen-foot-high steel enclosures that you could walk into. Shown for the first time last summer at the Venice Biennale, the spirals offer viewers a spatial experience that is simultaneously disorienting and exhilarating. Because the encircling walls are never plumb (they either bend in or bend out from the vertical at all points), you have alternating sensations of confinement and expansion as you walk into them. The weight of Corten steel on either side makes the walk fairly frightening, but then, emerging at last into the open space at the center, you get a jolt of euphoria, space rushing away from you on all sides and the whole vast form becoming buoyant and seemingly weightless. Serra has said that the subject of his sculpture is the viewer's experience in walking through or around it—that what he is doing is not creating static objects but shaping space. Never before, however, has his sculpture played so directly and unequivocally with the spectator's emotions. People wandered through the spirals at Gagosian with rapt looks. They reached out to touch the walls, whose patina of rich brownish-red rust invited contact. Some sat down inside and stayed for a while; others came back again and again during the three months that the show was up. One young couple got permission to be married in "Bellamy," the spiral that Serra had named after the late Richard Bellamy, his close friend and early dealer. (The other one was called "Sylvester," after the British art historian David Sylvester, who died a few months before the show opened.) For the first time in my experience, I found myself responding to Serra's work with intense sensations of joy and delight.
Long inured to negative or even hostile reactions to his work, Serra seemed indifferent to the virtually unanimous praise this time. "Whatever the work is evoking in people, I don't dictate that," he told me, "so I don't know how to account for it." His attention, in any case, was focussed mainly on the unprecedented number of new sculptural commissions or proposals that he had in various stages of development. There was an eight-hundred-and-sixty-five-foot-long serpentine wall of steel plates being set into the landscape of a private client in New Zealand—the longest continuous sculpture he had yet conceived. There were major projects for the Toronto airport, for the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, for Caltech and U.C.L.A. and M.I.T., and for public or private sponsors in Germany, Italy, England, Belgium, and Qatar. Busy as he was, Serra nevertheless agreed to play a leading role in "Cremaster 3," the latest in a much acclaimed cycle of films by the young artist Matthew Barney, whose work he likes a lot. His role is that of the Great Architect, who (symbolism ahoy!) gets murdered by the Apprentice.
Early in December, Serra and Clara, his German-born wife, retreated to their house on Cape Breton Island, where they spend about five months a year. Serra does much of the planning for his sculptures up there, and he also makes a great many drawings, which have no connection to his sculpture but which are an important part of his oeuvre. When I went to see him at his Tribeca loft in February, the day after he got back from Cape Breton, he immediately took me downstairs to the ground-floor studio to see the new drawings: twenty-seven large-scale abstract variations, in thickly impastoed black oil stick, on the circular motif that has occupied him for several years. Serra was hyperkinetic, and dauntingly articulate. A stocky, powerful-looking man with a large head, a fringe of close-cropped gray hair, and black eyes whose intense stare reminds you of Picasso's, he wore his usual outfit of jeans, work boots, and a hooded sweatshirt. He moved quickly from one drawing to the next, explaining, in answer to my question, how he puts handmade paper face down on top of compacted oil stick and then draws through the back of it with a piece of metal, forcing the line into the thick black pigment. A real Serra process, I thought: physical, aggressive, laborious. And yet the drawings themselves were complex and sensuously, almost lusciously beautiful.
We went back upstairs to the sixth floor, which the Serras share with their three boisterous Chesapeake retrievers. The living room is about forty feet long by thirty feet wide: high ceilings, two large skylights, Mission chairs and tables, African wood sculptures, ancient Cambodian earthenware pots on a high shelf, a fireplace with stacked wood covering the wall on one side, and, on the other side, a single, very large Serra drawing in black oil stick. We talked about Serra's recent appearance on the Charlie Rose show, during which some viewers thought he spoke disparagingly about the architect Frank Gehry. Serra didn't agree that he had spoken disparagingly. Charlie Rose (like Matthew Barney) "was trying to make me an architect," he said, "and to make Frank Gehry an artist. The guy said to me, 'What do you think you have to do better than an architect, if you're a sculptor?' And I said that, for one thing, you've got to draw better. He asked me if I thought I drew better than Gehry, and I said, 'Sure I draw better. Absolutely.' What's wrong with saying that?"
Charlie Rose had hit one of Serra's hot buttons. Gehry is not among the architects with whom Serra has clashed publicly over the years—in fact, the two men are close friends who have been "talking to each other through our work," as Gehry puts it, for a long time. But Gehry's new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is the most acclaimed building of our era, it has been referred to again and again as a major work of art and Gehry himself as a major artist, and this does not sit well with Richard Serra. "If you analyze what I said," he insisted, "I didn't take a public slap at Frank. I said that art is purposely useless, that its significations are symbolic, internal, poetic—a host of other things—whereas architects have to answer to the program, the client, and everything that goes along with the utility function of the building. Let's not confuse the two things. Now we have architects running around saying, 'I'm an artist,' and I just don't buy it. I don't believe Frank is an artist. I don't believe Rem Koolhaas is an artist. Sure, there are comparable overlaps in the language between sculpture and architecture, between painting and architecture. There are overlaps between all kinds of human activities. But there are also differences that have gone on for centuries. Architects are higher in the pecking order than sculptors, we all know that, but they can't have it both ways."
I told him I'd recently talked with Gehry about this. Gehry's view was that an architect solves the client's problems, solves the building department's requirements and all the other issues, but that "there's something that takes it from just a building to architecture, maybe fifteen per cent of the effort, and that's where our decisions are similar." Gehry had added, "I'm dealing with context, form, surface—all the things Richard is dealing with."
"Did Frank give you the fifteen-per-cent line?" Serra said now, his voice rising. "O.K., I've got it. I'm building a functional building for a client, which happens to be a shoe store, but fifteen per cent of it is where the art is. He wants to claim art as part of his process? Come on. He doesn't need that, and we don't need it!" What sounded like animosity was something different—passionate intensity. "I think you have to take Richard as Richard," Gehry had told me. "He's sometimes angry, he's jealous, he's critical, impatient, a perfectionist, demanding, difficult. But the people who love him say, 'Oh, well, that's Richard.' I remember an incident soon after I first met him, in 1978, when he was staying at Stanley Grinstein's house in Los Angeles. He'd left one of his drawing books open on the kitchen counter, and Berta, my wife, innocently looked into it, and Richard came in and told her she shouldn't do that, said it so stingingly he made her cry. That was the first time I understood you've got to be careful, this one bites. When he gets like that, there's no arguing with him."
Even so, Serra and Gehry have spent a lot of time together during the past thirty years, and learned a lot from each other. Gehry "is one of the few architects of this century who has brought the procedures and thought processes of contemporary art into the world of architecture," Serra said recently. Gehry has consistently praised Serra's work and has tried to arrange commissions for Serra sculptures to be sited in or adjacent to his buildings. Their only real falling-out occurred in the late nineteen-seventies, and it was over a Serra sculpture that Gehry had persuaded Marcia Weisman, a Los Angeles collector, to commission for the garden of her house in Beverly Hills. As the steel sculpture was being lowered on its crane, Weisman got into a violent argument with Serra about its orientation, and then, half an hour later, she told him she wanted to have an opening party at which a bottle of champagne would be broken against its side. Serra said it wasn't a ship, and he wouldn't put up with that. Angry words ensued, Weisman threatened to have the sculpture removed, and Serra stormed out. Gehry, who was also present, called Serra that evening and advised him to send her a dozen roses and say he'd like to come over and talk about it. "Two hours later," according to Gehry, "a box of two dozen roses comes to me, with a note from Richard saying, 'Shove 'em up your ass.' And then he didn't speak to me for two years."
"What roses?" Serra barked, when I relayed Gehry's story to him. "Did I do that? I may have done that, and I can tell you why. Because where does Frank Gehry get off calling me up and telling me to placate Marcia, after she's just offed one of my pieces? Get serious." Marcia Weisman did have the sculpture removed. It has been sold twice since then, most recently to a gallery for $1.2 million.
Getting along with Serra has never been easy. His father used to try to discipline him by having him move large sand piles from one part of the back yard to another. "After I'd spent all day shovelling, he'd come home and say, 'O.K., tomorrow I want it over there,' " Serra remembers. His father was Spanish, from Majorca. He had immigrated to America and married a Russian Jewish girl, and they had settled in San Francisco, where Richard Serra was born, in 1939. His father worked during the Second World War as a pipe fitter in a shipyard, and after the war as the foreman at a candy factory. Serra and his two brothers (one older, one younger) grew up in a house on the sand dunes between the zoo and the Cliff House. The family next door was named di Suvero; their oldest son, Mark, would also become a world-famous sculptor. The two of them didn't spend much time together, because Mark was the same age as Serra's older brother, Tony, whose long shadow Richard struggled to get out from under. A brilliant student and a gifted athlete, Tony Serra became the most celebrated defense lawyer in San Francisco. (James Woods played him in the film "True Believer," which was about one of his cases.) Serra thinks he got interested in drawing as a kid because it was one thing his older brother couldn't do. Both parents encouraged his drawing, and he drew every night, on sheets of butcher paper—airplanes, cars, baseball players, boats, himself in the mirror. "I always felt I could do that and would do it," he told me, "but when I went to college I decided to major in English."
In 1957, he entered the University of California at Berkeley, but transferred in his sophomore year to U.C. Santa Barbara, because "I'd broken my back playing football at Berkeley, and I wanted to go to a place where I could major in English and surf. I was a relatively good surfer." Every summer, he worked in a steel mill. "I started doing that when I was fifteen, rolling ball bearings in a little plant where I lied about my age. It was very useful. It's probably why I do what I do. I respect the working class. If you're making art, you don't know what class you're in, but if you work in a steel mill you're part of the working class." At Santa Barbara, he took a lot of art courses, but he still planned to go on to Stanford for graduate work in English. His faculty adviser suggested, however, that he think about applying to Yale's School of Art, which was recruiting gifted art students from all over the country. Serra sent Yale twelve of his drawings, Yale wrote back offering a scholarship, and the chance to get that far away from Tony's shadow proved irresistible.
Serra's three years at Yale, from 1961 to 1964, could not have been better timed. Josef Albers, the former Bauhaus teacher and artist, had retired three years earlier as head of the art school, but his program continued to attract the most talented and ambitious art students, many of whom would go on to become well-known artists. "The great thing about Yale was the student body," Chuck Close, who was in Serra's class, said. (Other classmates included Brice Marden, Nancy Graves, Rackstraw Downes, and Stephen Posen; Robert Mangold was one year ahead of them; Jonathan Borofsky and Jennifer Bartlett were a year behind.) "There were thirty-five or forty kids," Close said, "each with a different attitude and different gods. We asked more of each other than the faculty asked of us, but we knew we were students. There was no confusion about that, no thinking you could take your graduate work to New York and hope to get a show." The Yale faculty was augmented by visiting artists from New York: Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkov (who would become the dean there in 1963), Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and other stars, whose visits often generated loud arguments among the students. Abstract Expressionism still reigned supreme at the school. Serra, who thought of himself as a painter then, was churning out what he calls "bad de Koonings," but he was also absorbing art history at a frenzied pace. "You could always tell who Richard had been studying when you'd go to the library and find a book all stuck together with paint," Close said. "He distinguished himself by his intensity. He took things more personally than anybody else. Huge fights, smashing of chairs, throwing of loaded brushes. When he thought you were wrong, you were an idiot—but he'd always come around the next day to see how you were doing. There was something supportive about his negativism." For Close, who became an important painter, staying friends with Serra was worth the effort, but not always possible.
In 1964, armed with an M.F.A. degree and a Yale travel grant, Serra headed for Paris. He shared an apartment off the Boulevard Raspail with Nancy Graves, his Yale girlfriend, who was there on a Fulbright; their Swiss landlady threatened to throw them out when she discovered they weren't married, so they got married. Graves had met the future composer Philip Glass on the boat coming over, and Glass and Serra became good friends. "Phil took me to see Buster Keaton films, which I'd never seen before, and I took him to Brancusi's studio," Serra remembers. Serra spent a lot of time sketching in Brancusi's studio, which had been re-created in the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. "It was the first time I looked at sculpture seriously," he said. "I really responded to the strength and simplicity and abstraction of the work. I just found myself being drawn back to that studio every day." In the evenings, he and Glass would go to La Coupole and stare at Giacometti. "I'd written a thesis on existentialism at Santa Barbara," Serra said, "and I was just starstruck. One night, he must have noticed us staring, because he said something. I asked if we could come by his studio the next day, and he said yes, come at such-and-such a time. We did, and nobody was there."
After a year in Paris, Serra got a Fulbright of his own, and he and Nancy Graves spent the next year in Florence. They also travelled—Greece, Turkey, Spain. Serra's first exposure to Velázquez, at the Prado, was a life-changer. "I'd come out of Yale as a painter," he said, "but I didn't quite know how to move painting on. When I saw 'Las Meninas,' I thought there was no possibility of me getting close to that—the viewer in relation to space, the painter included in the painting, the masterliness with which he could go from an abstract passage to a figure or a dog. It pretty much stopped me. Cézanne hadn't stopped me, de Kooning and Pollock hadn't stopped me, but Velázquez seemed like a bigger thing to deal with. That sort of nailed the coffin on painting for me. When I got back to Florence, I took everything I had and dumped it in the Arno. I thought I'd better start from scratch, so I started screwing around with sticks and stones and wire and cages and live and stuffed animals." An Italian dealer saw some of his stacked cages with objects inside, and gave Serra a show of them at his gallery in Rome. It was like a premonition of Arte Povera, a European movement keyed to the use of non-art materials, which would surface a year or so later. "That was in the air," said Serra, "but I didn't know it was in the air."
New York, when Serra and Graves moved back, in 1966, made Paris and Florence seem like artistic backwaters. Pop art had broken the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism; its bumptious, mass-cult images were attracting a whole new audience to an art that seemed immediately comprehensible and highly entertaining. Minimalism, the austere and impersonal aesthetic laid down by Frank Stella's stripe paintings, Donald Judd's machined metal boxes, Carl Andre's rows of bricks or steel plates, and other strategies that dispensed with composition, metaphor, and any hint of self-expression, was looking stronger and stronger, its lack of popular appeal offset by its ability to generate dense thickets of critical analysis. Within a few weeks of his arrival, Serra had plunged into the downtown art scene and caught minimalism's second wave, becoming one of a group of young artists (the others included Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Michael Heizer, and Eva Hesse) who were roughening up the movement's smooth surface with weird materials and a distinctly personal touch. They met almost every night in the back room at Max's Kansas City, the downtown restaurant and bar that Mickey Ruskin, its owner, had turned into an artists' hangout. (Andy Warhol and his entourage held down the big table in the corner, under a neon-light sculpture by Dan Flavin.) It was like Yale again—impassioned arguments and violent disagreements, plus a lot more drinking. "I remember him filling the room with energy, and being impulsive and competitive," recalls Nancy Holt, an artist who was married to Bob Smithson. "He was always trying to provoke you and get responses. Bob was somebody he had to take on, challenge." Serra and Smithson were two heavyweight intellects, testing themselves against each other; their abrasive friendship was important to them both. Serra smoked a lot of marijuana in those days. He could be a bully, and a real pain in the ass sometimes, but the others respected his ambition and commitment. "Richard comes across as this macho bulldog, and he is that, but he isn't just that, and the other part is just as strong," Elizabeth Murray, another artist of that generation, told me. "I don't know anybody who goes into things as deeply as Richard does."
Serra had started working with scrap rubber, which he picked up from a nearby warehouse that was throwing it out; he folded it, hung it, and combined it with neon-light tubes in random assemblages. Richard Bellamy, a young dealer with a great eye but not much business acumen, liked the work and put it in a group show at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery. (Bellamy had shown Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and other emerging stars of the previous generation at his Green Gallery in the early sixties; when the Green went broke, many of his artists gravitated to Leo Castelli.) Nobody in Serra's group wanted to do anything that had been done before. Most of them were involved with the idea of process; like a lot of others on the downtown art scene then—dancers, filmmakers, performance artists, musicians—they believed that the process of making something was more interesting and more important than the result. There was a lot of cross-influence between disciplines. Serra and his friends went to the performances at the Judson Dance Theater, whose young innovators (Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton) were experimenting with ordinary, non-dance movement and chance procedures in much the same way that the artists were using latex rubber, rocks and dirt, and random placement. (Although Serra had no interest in performing, he was and is an excellent dancer; on the day Elvis Presley died, he and Helen Tworkov, Jack Tworkov's daughter, danced for three hours to Presley songs.) Serra's faltering marriage to Nancy Graves came apart when he fell in love with a performance and video artist named Joan Jonas. Graves had hit her own artistic stride by then, with a highly acclaimed show at the Graham Gallery of realistic life-size sculptures of camels.
Process art had political overtones. By getting rid of the pedestal ("the biggest move of the century," according to Serra) and using cheap, easily available materials like scrap metal and fabric, sculptors were rejecting hierarchy and authority and received wisdom of all kinds. Serra, the former English major, wrote down a list of verbs: "to roll, to crease, to fold, to bend, to twist"—dozens of active verbs. "I was very involved with the physical activity of making," he said. "It struck me that instead of thinking about what a sculpture is going to be and how you're going to do it compositionally, what if you just enacted those verbs in relation to a material, and didn't worry about the result? So I started tearing and cutting and folding lead." He had been introduced to lead by Philip Glass, who was working part time as a plumber. (Serra supported himself then with local moving jobs; he had a truck, and several friends willing to man it two days a week, which earned them enough money to spend the rest of the week doing their own work.) Lead was almost as malleable as rubber, but it had weight and solidity. He tried propping heavy lead plates against the wall in various ways, often with sheets of rolled lead. Serra and Glass, who was helping him, did more than thirty propped-lead pieces. "Some of them didn't amount to anything," Serra said, "but others did." He also tried splashing molten lead against the wall, which was dangerous but exciting; the splashed lead, when it dried, came away in beautiful, lacy, V-shaped strips. Serra had a splashed-lead piece, a lead-prop, and a rubber scatter piece in a group show at Leo Castelli's uptown warehouse gallery in December of 1968. The show included work by most of the process-oriented artists, and announced a major shift in the development of minimalism. "The New Avant-Garde," an influential 1972 book by Grégoire Müller, with photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni, had a dramatic shot on the cover of Serra in a welder's mask, flinging molten lead from a ladle—he looked like a working-class Poseidon.
The Castelli warehouse show got a lot of attention, and it led directly to exhibitions of Serra's work in a number of important group shows here and in Europe. Soon enough, he had a team of people helping him. Philip Glass had quit his plumbing job to become Serra's paid studio assistant. The painter Chuck Close, Serra's Yale classmate, the musician Steve Reich, the writer Rudy Wurlitzer, the actor Spalding Gray, and two or three others could be counted on to help assemble and install the heavier pieces, such as "One-Ton Prop (House of Cards)"—a freestanding sculpture made of four-foot-square lead plates, upright and balanced at the top corners. "He was smart enough never to have a sculptor as an assistant," Close commented. "One Friday night, we put up a bunch of the lead-prop pieces for the show at the Castelli warehouse. At that point, he hadn't started mixing antimony into the lead to make it stiffer. The warehouse was closed for the weekend, and the pieces all came down." Luckily, no one was around to get hurt. "I don't think Richard meant danger to be an element, although they were very dangerous," Glass told me. Serra insists that the possibility of collapse was never part of his aesthetic. "I wasn't interested in that at all," he told me. "I wanted them to reveal the principle that they were interdependent and self-supporting, and not bolted or welded." He started adding antimony to the lead after a three-piece lead-prop collapsed in St. Louis, taking out the back wall of Joe Helman's house. Helman, a collector who became a dealer, kept right on buying and selling Serra's work for years afterward.
Serra resisted the idea of working with steel. "Steel was such a traditional material I wasn't going near it," he said. "Picasso, González, Calder had all done great things with steel. But then I thought, Well, I can use steel in the way industry uses it—for weight, load bearing, stasis, friction, counterbalance. I knew something about steel, so why not?" In 1970, he wedged a big slab of hot-rolled steel into the corner of a room, so that it was held up by the corner itself. The idea had come to him the year before, when he was making a splashed-lead piece that Jasper Johns had commissioned. Johns, whose influence on Serra's generation was as immense as Pollock's, had wanted to buy the splashed-lead Serra he had seen in a 1969 group show at the Whitney Museum; because that one was not available, Serra agreed to make another in Johns's studio on Houston Street. He put a small, freestanding lead plate in the corner there, to splash against, and this made him realize that a corner could be a structural support. "Strike," the steel corner piece he finished in 1971, was twenty-four feet long by eight feet high, and Serra had to hire industrial riggers to set it up. "That's when I left the whole studio idea behind," he said. "It was a real sea change for me. I began to think about declaring or dividing the space of a room, and about the spectator walking through and around a piece in time, rather than just looking at an object. The spectator became part of the piece at that point—not before. After 'Strike,' my studio really became the steel mills."
A lot happened in the next two years. He and Joan Jonas went to Japan, where they spent five weeks visiting Buddhist temples and gardens and going to performances of Noh and Kabuki plays at night. The gardens gave him "a new sense of how to control space in relation to time," as he put it. Back home, he went to see Michael Heizer's "Double Negative," a pioneer work of land art made by bulldozing two deep cuts in a Nevada mesa. Serra had helped Bob Smithson, his closest friend and archrival, to stake out "Spiral Jetty," a winding archipelago of rocks, dirt, and crystals at the northern end of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. Although Serra would not become an earth artist like Smithson and Heizer, shaping the landscape in remote areas, he was impressed by the scale and the evocative power of both these projects, and they were certainly in his mind when he accepted his first major commission, from the publisher and art collector Joseph Pulitzer, for a piece on the grounds of Joe and Emily Pulitzer's country house outside St. Louis. "I was very anxious about the Pulitzer piece," Serra said. "The house there had one of Monet's 'Water Lilies' paintings, and a beautiful Ellsworth Kelly sculpture, a Matisse sculpture, a Brancusi, and paintings by Rothko and Cézanne, all at a very high level, and you don't want to go there and make a fool of yourself." It took him more than a year to finish it. Serra's anxieties nearly undid him a couple of times. At a dinner party at Joe Helman's house in St. Louis, he flew into a drunken rage and attacked everyone at the table, including Joe Pulitzer, a man whose personality, life style, and politics he greatly admired. (Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch was one of the first newspapers to come out against the Vietnam War.) Helman and others remember the evening as a total disaster, but everyone got over it, as people did with Serra, and the piece got finished—three sixty-foot-long Corten-steel plates set into a field at precisely calibrated angles, which made the landscape into a work of sculpture embracing space, time, and the walking viewer.
Fierce struggles against obstacles that were partly self-imposed: this seemed to be the pattern of Serra's career. Commissioned to do an outdoor sculpture for a new building at Wesleyan University, he designed a forty-foot tower of overlapping steel plates—it came right out of "House of Cards"—which was rejected, because the university's architect said it was too tall. (Four years later, the piece was installed on the grounds of the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam.) A Serra proposal for the exterior of the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, also got turned down, because Renzo Piano, one of the building's architects, considered it intrusive. Serra talked himself out of what would have been the biggest sculptural commission of the decade, for the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Corporation, in Washington, D.C. He clashed repeatedly with Robert Venturi, the architect in charge. When Serra was shown a watercolor rendering of two pylons designed by Venturi with stars and stripes on them, he said there might just as well be a swastika and an eagle on top; he was fired soon afterward.
In 1971, a two-part prop sculpture by Serra fell while it was being taken down at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, pinning a workman underneath. The workman died on the way to the hospital. At the trial that followed, responsibility for the accident was assigned to the fabricator, for not following the design specifications, and to the rigging crew, which had ignored the engineer's written instructions, because the foreman couldn't read. Industrial accidents happen all the time, of course. Nobody had blamed Alexander Calder when a piece fell off a sculpture of his that was being installed at Princeton in 1970, killing two workmen, but Serra's reputation for arrogant and aggressive behavior led a number of people to condemn him over the incident. "I was harassed, ridiculed, disgraced, and was told by friends, other artists, museum directors, critics, and dealers to stop working," he said. Serra was devastated by the tragedy and its aftermath. "It sent me into analysis for eight years," he said, "and it put me on the road. I went to Europe and started building there."
For a man who was often his own worst enemy, he could inspire and reciprocate deep loyalty. When Bob Smithson died in a small-plane crash, in 1973, at the age of thirty-four, Serra went out to Texas and helped Nancy Holt finish "Amarillo Ramp," the piece Smithson had been working on at the time. He did a lot to further the careers of Philip Glass and the filmmaker Michael Snow, arranging concerts and screenings for them in Europe; it was Glass, in turn, who introduced Serra to Cape Breton Island, where they both have been going since the early seventies. ("What I really like about Nova Scotia is the light," Serra says. "Northern light is like light after it rains. I don't like fat, lazy, Mediterranean light.") Serra was deeply grateful to Leo Castelli, who became his dealer in 1969, stood by him after the Minneapolis accident, and kept giving him annual shows even though he had trouble selling his work, but the person he says he owes the most to is Alexander von Berswordt-Wallrabe, his German dealer, with whom he has worked since 1975. Von Berswordt's connections gave Serra high-level access to German steel mills (his father-in-law was a director of Krupp), and his tireless advocacy led to many commissions. It was at von Berswordt's gallery in Bochum, moreover, that Serra met Clara Weyergraf, a German art historian and Mondrian scholar, with whom he began living in 1977 and whom he married in 1981. Serra's mother had committed suicide a month before he met Clara, and Serra thinks this had a lot to do with his finally managing to form a stable relationship. "When your mother commits suicide, it pretty much changes your relation to women," he said. "Before, I don't think I could have been as open or as vulnerable." Serra also told me that his mother's suicide, which nobody in the family could explain, had "pretty much conflicted the relationships" between him and his two brothers. He occasionally sees his younger brother, Rudy, an artist who teaches sculpture at Rutgers, but for the past twenty-five years he has had virtually no contact with Tony, in San Francisco.
Although he would continue to set sculptures into natural landscapes, as he had done with the Pulitzer piece, Serra preferred to work in urban settings. His ideal site was a place with a "density of traffic flow," like the traffic island facing the train station in Bochum, where, in 1977, he and von Berswordt managed to install a vertical steel-plate piece called "Terminal." In the early eighties, he was offered three such sites in downtown Manhattan. It was a terrific opportunity to triumph on his own turf, and to demonstrate the contempt he felt for artists like Noguchi and Calder, whose public sculptures failed, in his view, because they had nothing to do with the contexts in which they were placed. ("At best," Serra said, "they are studio-made and site-adjusted. They are displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, 'We represent modern art.' ") The Castelli Gallery sponsored and paid for "St. John's Rotary Arc," a two-hundred-foot-long, gently curving twelve-foot-high steel wall in an unused open space at the exit from the Holland Tunnel. Visible mainly from above and by people in cars, it caused no controversy and was generally considered a great success. "TWU," the second piece (the initials refer to the Transport Workers Union), was financed by von Berswordt's Galerie M; it took the form of three tall steel plates (thirty-six feet high) set vertically on a narrow triangle at the intersection of West Broadway, Leonard Street, and Franklin Street, an area where many artists lived and worked, and, judging from the tone of the graffiti that regularly defaced it ("Kill Serra," for example), local admiration was decidedly mixed. The third of these New York commissions was "Tilted Arc," which became the most controversial art work of the nineteen-eighties—a sculpture whose fame stemmed from the battle over its removal.
"Tilted Arc" was commissioned by the General Services Administration of the federal government, under a program that allotted one-half of one per cent of a government building's construction budget to a work or works of art. The G.S.A. reviewed and approved Serra's proposal at every stage of the design process—drawings, models, on-site mockup—and knew exactly what it was getting: a curving, slightly inward-leaning wall of Corten steel, twelve feet high and a hundred and twenty feet long, which bisected the open plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, in lower Manhattan. From the moment it was erected, in 1981, however, the piece generated unusually hostile reactions. This didn't surprise Serra. "The work I make does not allow for experience outside the conventions of sculpture as sculpture," he had said in a 1980 interview. "My audience is necessarily very limited." Serra thought that in time people would come around to "Tilted Arc." People, after all, were an essential part of it—his intention was to bring them into the sculptural experience. "It will . . . encompass the people who walk on the plaza in its volume," he said. "The placement of the sculpture will change the space of the plaza. After the piece is created, the space will be understood primarily as a function of the sculpture."
There is no doubt that, for many office workers in the Javits Building (itself an unusually depressing example of government architecture), "Tilted Arc" was an eyesore, a menacing, intimidating barrier whose tilt made some pedestrians feel it was about to fall on them. They hadn't asked to have a sculptural experience in their lunch hour, and they didn't want this one. But the arc might still be there if Edward D. Re, a federal judge whose office was in the building, had not mounted a one-man lobbying campaign against it. Judge Re wrote letters to the G.S.A., and he railed ceaselessly against the "rusted steel wall" that "desecrated" the plaza, and in his view harbored rats, posed unspecified security risks, and prevented the plaza from being used for concerts and other frolicsome events. His efforts apparently hit a nerve. In 1985, the G.S.A. scheduled three days of public hearings, at which fifty-eight people spoke out against "Tilted Arc" and a hundred and twelve defended it. The defenders included well-known figures like Joan Mondale and Mrs. Marion Javits, representing former Senator Javits, after whom the building was named, as well as a significant cross-section of the New York art world. Some of them did not particularly like the sculpture, but they felt that to allow the public art process to be overturned in this way would set a terrible precedent. The pro-Serra forces also complained that the G.S.A.'s regional administrator for New York, William J. Diamond, had compromised the issue by speaking out prior to the hearings in favor of "relocating" the sculpture—an option that Serra, with his usual intransigence, had vehemently ruled out. The work was "site-specific," he said. "To remove the work is to destroy the work." When the G.S.A. decided, soon after the hearings, that the sculpture would nevertheless be removed, Serra brought a thirty-million-dollar lawsuit against the agency for breach of contract. The case dragged on for several years, but in 1989 the court decided against him, and "Tilted Arc" was carted away to a government parking lot in Brooklyn.
Serra is still angry and bitter over what he considers this betrayal by his own government. The episode hurt his career, he feels, and kept him from getting new commissions in the United States for a long time. It should be noted, however, that the Museum of Modern Art put on a major Serra retrospective in 1986, that Alexander von Berswordt continued to get important commissions for him in Europe, and that Serra's work kept right on growing in authority, inventiveness, and sculptural power. He is one of those rare artists whose careers seem to have had no weak or fallow periods. Material success, moreover, has hardly been withheld from him: just about every major museum in the world now owns at least one Serra, and since he branched out from the Castelli Gallery, in 1992—showing with Blum Helman, with Pace, with Matthew Marks, and now mostly with Larry Gagosian—the pecuniary rewards have kept up with an almost unprecedented outpouring of critical acclaim. (One of the torqued spirals at the recent Gagosian show sold for more than three million dollars.) "Richard has managed to stay within a very strong vocabulary that's clearly his, but never to rest on his laurels," according to Kirk Varnedoe, who acquired several major works by Serra for the Museum of Modern Art when he was the director of the painting and sculpture department there. "His pieces have moved away from the brutality and raw aggressive menace of some of the early things, into something you could properly call sublime," Varnedoe told me. "I can't think of anything that's rivalled this. And the idea of reaching for the monumental scale without any sense of the undercutting subversion of irony—that's hard to find in contemporary art." When MOMA reopens, in 2005, after its massive rebuilding, one of the first big shows there will be another Serra retrospective, done in collaboration with the Dia Art Foundation.
Since "Tilted Arc," Serra's contracts for commissions have been handled exclusively by John Silberman, a lawyer who specializes in working with artists. Under the system devised by Silberman, when a client (private or corporate) wishes to commission a Serra, the artist visits the site and decides whether or not he wants to make a proposal. If he does, the client must agree to pay his proposal fee, which might be in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars. Serra then has a year to prepare a design, which the client can accept or reject. (To date, there have been no rejections.) Once a design is accepted, the client pays Serra a much larger fee (in the seven figures); this covers the purchase price and the fabrication costs, but not the transportation or installation expenses, which are paid for directly by the client. There have been rumors that Serra makes his clients sign legally binding pledges never to move a sculpture that he has sited and installed, but Silberman assured me that this is "absolutely not true." Serra's refusal to compromise in his work does not prevent him from being highly professional and realistic in negotiations over contracts. "When he calls someone a motherfucker, that doesn't help, of course," von Berswordt says, "but he rarely does that without a reason."
On a cool, overcast day in February, my wife and I drove upstate to Beacon, New York, a Hudson River town where the Dia Foundation is converting a former Nabisco plant into a museum for its collection of post-1960 art. Dia collects the work of fewer than twenty artists, but it does so in great depth: among the anointed are Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra. Although the museum will not open till next spring, three very large Serra sculptures were already in place, and we had come to watch the installation of a fourth, a torqued spiral, which had been shipped over from the factory in Germany a few days earlier. We were issued hard hats and escorted to a covered shed adjoining the plant, where the Nabisco freight cars used to load and unload. Three torqued ellipses—the forerunners of the torqued spirals—filled the huge space so snugly that there was barely room to squeeze by them on one side. Serra was at the other end of the floor, conferring with Ernst Fuchs, his German rigger, who oversees the installation of his most difficult pieces. In his hooded sweatshirt and wool watch cap, Serra looked indistinguishable from Fuchs and the eight or ten other riggers on the job, except that he carried his omnipresent black sketchbook and drawing pencil, which he used now and then to demonstrate some verbal idea or instruction. He wasn't wearing a hard hat, and neither was Clara, his wife, a slim, handsome woman whose quiet competence is indispensable to Serra's work, but who makes it clear that she takes no part in his aesthetic decisions.
Four of the spiral's five elements were already in place at this end of the building, suspended an inch or so from the floor by overhead cables, and the fifth was being lifted by crane from a flatbed truck on the road below. It came down very slowly, guided by three workmen on the floor, until its bottom edge rested on three smallish, wheeled dollies called skates. A rigger then mounted a ladder and unhooked the clamps that connected it to the crane. It hadn't dawned on me until that moment that this enormous slab of steel—fourteen feet high and weighing twenty-two tons—could stand by itself, without support. "The tendency to overturn is always inside the line of balance," Serra explained. "A lot of them curve both back and forward, but when you put them down they're stable." Serra was keyed up, buoyant. ("He jumps age groups when an installation is going well," Ealan Wingate, Gagosian's director, had told me. "He's like a seven-year-old with a new truck.") A moment later, he ran off to speak to the crane operator. "I wanted to thank him," he explained when he came back. "They're bringing in a new operator. This one said, 'Don't thank me, go tell my boss and save my butt,' so I did that, too." If Serra treated everyone the way he treats riggers, his life would run more smoothly. Some people say he has mellowed, but others (including a former Serra dealer) say he can be as irascible and ruthless as ever. His old friend Chuck Close, whom he recently threatened to sue over a dispute involving an interview with Serra in a book by Close, describes going up to Serra at a party and trying to tell him (in spite of Serra's having stopped speaking to him) how much he had admired his recent show at the Guggenheim Bilbao, and Serra saying, "You think I give a shit what you think?" ("I didn't say that," Serra told me. "I didn't say anything. I turned my back and walked away.") "I still consider Richard a friend, someone extraordinarily important in my life," Close said. "I think he's the best sculptor working today, and maybe the best artist. I don't think he's a bad person. But it's a goddam good thing he is a great artist, because a lot of this stuff wouldn't be forgiven."
Serra led us back to the other end of the building and into the first ellipse, which was also the first in the series. The idea for it had come to him, he said, during a visit to Borromini's church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in Rome, where an oval space on the floor is echoed by the same oval (it is called a Borromini ellipse) on the ceiling. Serra had decided that he wanted to make a sculpture by placing two Borromini ellipses at right angles to one another, and enclosing them in a continuous skin of steel. After two years of work and a lot of help from Frank Gehry's computer expert, they figured out how to do it. The first three torqued ellipses were made at the Beth Shipyard, in Sparrows Point, Maryland, which had a press that could bend two-inch-thick steel plates. The shipyard went out of business at that point, and since then Serra's torqued ellipses and torqued spirals have been made in Germany. The sixteen-foot-wide plates are rolled at one steel mill and shaped at another, a relatively small mill near Frankfurt that happens to have the biggest press in Europe, and whose business, thanks to Serra, is now devoted exclusively to working with him and other artists. The ellipses were first shown in New York, in 1997, at the Dia Foundation's exhibition space on West Twenty-second Street, and the Times critic Michael Kimmelman has described them as "that rarest thing in art, something new." Nobody had ever seen or walked into a space like this. "As the piece rises in elevation," Serra now pointed out to us, "it not only leans in but torques and turns outward, corkscrews up. The radius never changes. That's never been done in the history of form-making."
Serra walked us through the other three ellipses, which differed from each other in shape, proportion, and over-all effect. All three had done a lot of travelling lately—from Dia, in New York, to Los Angeles, for an important Serra show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and from there to Spain for his 1999 show at the Guggenheim Bilbao, and now back here. Pointing to some blue-green streaks near the top of the third in line, Serra said that they were caused by saltwater spray during the Atlantic crossing. "Eventually, they'll oxidize out and it'll have the dark-brown Corten patina, but when something looks as good as that there's no point in sandblasting," he said. "I'm very, very happy about having this group of pieces together here. I owe a lot to Dia. They've been very generous and supportive. I think they're really interested in art, and not in other things." One of the reasons Serra likes Dia's conversion of the Nabisco plant into a museum is that "the building doesn't have any big architectural signature on it."
A little later, during a coffee break at a nearby bakery, I brought up the paradoxical alliance between nineteenth-century-scale industry and twenty-first-century art—factories morphing into museums, the German steel mill that works exclusively with artists, not to mention Serra's career of shaping industrial-weight steel into huge and poetic works of sculpture. "Spinoza predicted that art would dematerialize," he said, "and to a large degree it has. In a sense, my work is antithetical to that. But then, simultaneously, other things go on. As art dematerializes, the scale has grown larger. I'm using tons of steel to make the situation look lighter."
He thought for a minute, and said, "Listen, I just saw the Warhol show in London, and I loved it. But that's a very, very different experience from walking through a torqued ellipse. It's different in kind. When you go see Campbell's soup cans, you're playing a strategic game of the relevance of painting to figuration, to media, to commercialization. Abstraction gives you something different. It puts the spectator in a different relationship to his emotions. I think abstraction has been able to deliver an aspect of human experience that figuration has not—and it's still in its infancy. Abstract art has been going on for a century, which is nothing." Serra cut the conversation short because he was in a hurry to get back to Dia. The riggers wanted to work late, so they could finish installing and not have to pay for another day's crane rental, and he wanted to oblige them. "I've worked with riggers all my life," he said happily. "I have a very good relationship with them. I admire people who do a hard day's work, whatever it is."