Richard Serra

Richard Serra is a famous sculptor based in New York. He was born in San Francisco in 1939, the second of three sons to a Spanish mother and a Russian-Jewish father.
To support himself through his university studies, Serra worked in steel mills in the Bay Area and this experience influenced the development of his work. Serra's early work in the 1960s focused on the industrial material he had worked with; steel and lead.
One of his earliest childhood memories was viewing the launch of a massive tanker at a shipyard near the Golden Gate Bridge when he was four years old. As a child he was amazed at such a dead weight becoming a floating graceful mass of steel; Serra says of the moment: “All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory which has become a reoccurring dream.” (BOMB 113/Fall 2010)

Serra began his studies with English literature at university in the late 1950s and wrote his major thesis on Camus. Serra then went on to study Fine Art at Yale University in 1961, graduating with a BFA and a MFA. Here he got to hang out with people who would go on to become influential artists like Frank Stella, Chuck Close and Nancy Graves, who became his first wife. He was influenced by the teachers there such as Philip Guston and the experimental composer Morton Feldman, describing them as 'guiding lights' who, he says, 'didn't try and lay their shtick on you' (O'Hagan,The Observer, 5th Oct 2008).

Though a successful graduate, his time was tumultous at Yale, having been thrown out for playing a practical joke, involving a chicken, on visiting critic Robert Rauschanberg.
' I actually tied it to a dowel, which was anchored into a block and the chicken was in a box. And when Rauschenberg opened the box, the chicken flew up in the air about fifteen feet, and then stopped, because it was tethered. It began to flap its wings, it crowed and shit. They kicked me out for two weeks. They told me I wasn’t “polite to guests.” How can they kick you out of art school?' (BOMB 113/Fall 2010)

Nevertheless he received a Yale Travelling Fellowship and with that spent a year in Paris, trying to get a glimpse of his hero Alberto Giacometti. The great sculptor 'would turn up for a drink late at night with plaster in his hair'.(O'Hagan,The Observer, 5th Oct 2008).
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It was a defining moment for Serra in his early years when he first saw Velazquez's painting, Las Menias. He was struggling to be a painter and this work threw him into confusion. He realised that he himself was an extension of the painting. This revelation led him to try reinvent himself. He developed a fascination for the history of zoos and ended up doing strange installations with stuffed animals and even a live chicken. He quit painting (he did return to it later) when he realised he wasn't using paint for what it was; I was using paint with a certain disdain, with the attitude that any material was as good as any other material'. (BOMB 113/Fall 2010)
Through his developmental process he was struggling with the idea of 'the viewer being the subject of the piece'. Today that concept is evident in his work.

'In my later work, the person who is navigating the space, his or her experience becomes the content. So, the whole subject-object relationship is reversed. The content is you! If you don't walk into the work and engage with it, there isn't any content. That's really what I've been dealing with ever since I saw the Velazquez painting.' (The Observer, 5th Oct, 2008)

After playing with steel and lead, throwing molten lead at walls of his studio to create splashes of form, Serra went on to create massive rolled - steel sculptures, his steel working background becoming formative in its development. Since the 1970s, he has relied on a family of New York riggers to erect his installations and works with a German steel mill to construct and engineeer his designs. These groundbreaking works are located all over the world.
Most of the work is site-specific and is designed to tower over the observer, and the steel walls oxidise over ten years then settles down to a stable earthy colour.
Walking admidst these massive curving towering walls of steel are definately about the experience of the viewer as it dislocates and disorientates. It overwhelms and engulfs the viewer; the viewer does become content. It can be a scary but equally fantastic experience.

His work hasn't always been well received. In 1981, Serra installed Tilted Arc, a gently curved, 3.5 meter high arc of rusting mild steel in the Federal Plaza in New York City. There was immediate controversy over the installlation, mainly from workers in the buildings surrounding the plaza who complained that the steel wall obstructed access through the area. A public hearing in 1985 voted that the work should be moved. After much protest from Serra and the arts community, federal employees came and dismantled it for scrap. Serra then attempted to sue the American Government.

Amidst other controversy, cancelled commissions; 'mislaid' sculpture; firing up the American right by creating two posters protesting against the Bush administration and the abuses at Abu Ghraib (which sold in their thousands online), Serra has emerged as an admired artist sculptor with a now accepting public.

Serra's siginifcant work,The Matter of Time, is the centrepiece of the Guggenheim collection in Bilbao and could be regarded as his masterpiece. The imposing massive curving maze like forms transform the huge exhibition space, encouraging the viewer inside, only to become overwhelmed by the looming curving walls, closing in.

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/richard-serra/

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