"Our Greatest Sculptor": Richard Serra at MoMA (review)

There was something deeply unsatisfying about Richard Serra at MoMA, and I have been thinking about whether it was Serra or MoMA.

The 2007 exhibition, "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years," (1) showed off his least interesting (the early) works, (2) omitted his best work, the wedges (so-called "elevations") of the 1970s, and (3) placed the large torques, the major pieces of the '80s, in spaces that drew attention to their limitations. Part of the Serra problem at MoMA was hype, backed by the stories that the vast spaces in the new MoMA were specifically constructed to hold the Serra torques. Just about every critic reporting on the first forty years of Serra's work followed suit: the greatest twentieth-century sculptor. The greatest living sculptor. The greatest sculptor.

This was largely an exhibition of the torques—huge sheets of steel bent into shapes that resemble outside, from ground level, the structures you see at building sites. Inside: My personal experience involved slight surprises as, in the first, I kept moving down a canted curving passage, expecting an exit and not finding one; in the other, finding myself in a cul de sac, a circular chamber, and having to return, only to find myself in another. Just about every spectator I talked to (and quite a few of the critics also) searching for analogies, compared the experience inside the torque, walking through narrow canted passageways without a clear sense of destination, to that of a fun house in an amusement park. Even the MoMA catalogue (John Rajchman's essay) refers to Serra's (i.e., Alice's) "Wonderland conception of space" in his torqued pieces: "One gets lost, one loses oneself, in a space that defeats the common sense of height and scale." Only John Updike in the NYRB was bold enough to address the issue of the emperor's new clothes, though his criticism was genteel, distanced with irony.

We pass the structure, enter it, walk through its skewed passages. The experience on the ground, labyrinthine or womblike or snailshell-like, is defined both from outside and inside, but lacking the bird's-eye view, the experience is incomplete, or at least deceptive. In MoMA's exhibition space only from the upper stories are we afforded glimpses of the garden—of Intersection II, but not so far as I could see of Torqued Ellipse IV (from the Modern, the MoMA restaurant, it is a blank wall); the works on the second floor can only be seen at eye level. The overview is theoretical and hypothetical. The photographs in the catalogue offer this view, impossible for a human spectator; they draw attention to the question of whether sculpture or architecture is the parent art, further complicated by memories or photographs of the Serras in the Bilbao Guggenheim, within a Frank Gehry structure—contained by, set off by architecture that is itself ostentatiously sculptural.

The critics have noted that the experience is not of the eye but of the tactile sense. But the eye will have its way: the metal betrays itself. As I walked through, I was more aware on either side of me of the splotches and stains on the walls—as if I were walking through the ruins of Pompeii—than of the path itself. What holds the attention (as Updike notes) is the mottled texture of the metal, the patterns that recall, on the one hand, works by the Abstract Expressionists and, on the other, the stains in which Leonardo detected human faces. The second-floor pieces are a flat red paint. If they were outdoors, they might also experience the contingency of the shadows cast by adjacent trees, but trees are something Serra in his early landscape layouts avoids, preferring relatively flat fields. His works are best visualized as on a bare plain or promontory—a Beckett landscape to accommodate a Giacometti human figure.

Serra's so-called "elevations" of the 1970s, his most viable works, have to be seen in situ, as on the Pulitzer estate, where he uses low slanted metal walls or...