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| Richard Serra Taraval Beach, 1977 Paintstick on Belgian linen Shown installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Biennial Collection of the artist Artwork by Richard Serra (c) 2012 Richard Serra Photo: BeVan Davies |
Relative
to other modes of visual expression drawing is perhaps the most elemental,
immediate, and direct.
Historically, it has been one obliged to service as a largely preparatory
underpinning of art-making, and in the Western tradition has earned a space for
independent consideration only comparatively recently. By no means the exclusive province of
drawing however, the physicality of mark-making also exists as an obvious and
essential ingredient of written communication. Writing by hand, the figures of letters and words must—irrespective
of their individual or collective meanings—be drawn as both a preparatory and
integral measure of their production, a process whereby writing ensnares
thought, and drawing, signification.
However unintended or imperceptible, the consequence of such a circuit
is that literal physicality gives rise to generative conception by way of paths
both formative and receptive.
Considered in this way, making and cognition achieve an elusive procedural
feedback which stands apart from—and even resists our common expectations for—where
along this chain intention, as a decisive inertial moment truly lies.
Exploring
this Möbius-like circularity is an exhibition organized by the Menil Collection, “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective.” The third and final destination for the exhibition which
opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and remains on view at the Menil in Houston through
the 10th of June—the retrospective examines not the sculptural forms for which
Serra is most broadly known, but instead takes a view of his drawing
discipline.
This
relationship of mark-making and meaning has greatly occupied art-theoretical
mechanisms since its early confrontation at the hands of the Impressionists,
and since Modernism has coalesced as an inescapable point of consideration with
arguments whose forms have grown more refined as their employment has grown
more radical. Engaging methods for
conceptually and procedurally distilling, if not resolving, these concerns is a
point of preoccupying interest for Richard Serra. It is profound understatement to say that Serra’s work is
neither light nor easy; to engage it meaningfully requires an investment of
consideration. But among the
retrospective’s accomplishments, one of significance is its ability to suggest
Serra’s formal investigations in viscerally intuitive, rather than purely
external, academic terms. To some
extent it is the curation and compressive context which foster this access—forcing
apart and rendering observable the fundamental particles of his work as one
might the composition of atomic nuclei, by slamming them against one another.
One
such beneficiary of this contextual framing is his piece “Drawings after
Circuit.” Here 24 drawings are
arranged into three rows of eight, with each framed sheet comprised of three or
four individual, uninterrupted vertical paintstick marks. More than many of the exhibited works,
this piece bears a direct correlation with Serra’s sculpture. Known for his somewhat idiosyncratic
habit of making sketches which do not precede—but rather follow and respond—to
his own installed sculptural works, Serra composed this series of drawings
based on his own physical engagement with and reaction to his sculpture “Circuit,”
an installation comprised of four steel plates, each reaching on the diagonal,
out from the corners of the room.
The marks echo his motion through the space, varying in their length and
placement. But rather than serving
to relate his drawing to his sculpture in reactive or derivational terms, the
work and its simple, repetitive, meditative marks suggests among the most
persuasive and articulate arguments for Serra’s sculpture as being highly
informed by his drawing concern, embodying the experiential scaling of and
impulse toward a drawing made physical—a drawing in space.
Hardly
blooms unfolding to the mere touch of observation, then, Serra’s drawings are
much more theoretical devices, mechanisms which when carefully probed often
reveal a lever, a means by which the work may be opened in remarkable, if
somewhat paradoxical ways. The
lesser works, however, do not do this.
And it is the ironic flipside of the retrospective that, while it provides
the collisions which pry apart some of these recalcitrant works, that same
context reveals others as essentially inert. Such examples include the several “Untitled” works from the
early ‘70s, images of rhomboid shapes or of circular forms which prefigure the
Rounds and Solids to emerge later, or which invoke the more structural or
architectural concerns of his sculpture.
While certainly handsome, they nevertheless resolve as far less
compelling than their peers.
There
are other casualties as well, but of a different sort. Serra’s Installation Drawings, without
question the main feature of the exhibition, are also works of extraordinary
contextual fragility, with properties of light, room volume, and wall dimension
substantively influencing their resonant properties. Among these, “Triangle” and “Diamond,” pieces of heavily
worked paintstick on Belgian linen trimmed in accord with the shapes their
names suggest, feel uncharacteristically more localized in time than space, while
other celebrated pieces are simply ill at ease. “Pacific Judson Murphy,” a paintstick on linen which
provocatively turns a corner, and “Blank,” two black paintstick fields which
antagonize each other from across the room, each suggest having perfected their
fight within the pre-war architectural context prevailing among New York
institutions, but here seem decidedly unhappy with the excess of space, while “Abstract
Slavery” appears equally discontent in the natural lighting and with the
ceiling well beyond the reach of its threatening gestures.
Conversely,
the vast black monolithic expanse of “Taraval Beach,” isolated in its own
chamber and reaching floor to ceiling—the tooth of the Belgian linen resolving
beneath the heavily matted paintstick to intone sculptural rather than graphic
processes—cannot have been happier in life, with the draft and beam of the
Menil apparently tailored for fit.
It is a work simultaneously of brutal confrontation and monastic
concentration, and vividly illustrates Serra’s refutation of drawing’s conventional
delineations of either gesture or form.
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| Richard Serra out-of-round X, 1999 Paintstick on handmade Hiromi paper 79 ½ x 79 inches Collection of the artist Artwork by Richard Serra (c) 2012 Richard Serra Photo: Rob McKeever |
Among
such conceptually preoccupied company one might expect Serra’s Rounds to offer
a standout dose of narcotic immediacy, but they are unexpectedly swamped by the trio
“No Mandatory Patriotism,” “Pittsburgh,” and “The United States Courts are
Partial to Government.” Excepting “Pittsburgh,”
these are works whose titles invoke the vitriol of Serra’s contentious legal
battle to preserve his sculpture “Tilted Arc,” and its eventual destruction. In this case, the works are framed
diptychs whose pigmented surfaces achieve a rich granularity by Serra’s
application of meat grinder-prepared paintstick. Unlike the Installation Drawings, here the use of frames
proves essential for the dictatorial spatial control Serra employs, forging
tension between the forms as they crowd against each other and their
context. These pieces are imbued
with a distinct, raw visual intensity—a blind exquisitely rendered ferocity;
and which, it might be added, succeed further by inducing the keen lamentations
of a life spent in all the ways that will never bring one home.
More
than any one piece however, to truly submit oneself to this work is to be taken
into the close and volatile confidence of a professional tuff, one whose
assertions range between the opaque and the sublime—but are delivered with
unswerving bare-knuckled, ecclesiastical certitude in every case. In a very real sense, Serra’s drawings
are the argumentative explorations for which they are their own artifactual
proofs. Despite the occasional
sparsely-sutured point of self-referential closure, the severity and continuity
of this argumentation can nevertheless astonish. Serra’s concern is so adamantly theoretical that even
additional powers of magnification seem to yield a startling coherence.
In
many cases the interstitial dimensions of Serra’s drawings are so close, the
conceptual tolerances so tight, and the considerations of good and bad, like
and dislike, so carefully circumvented, they seem almost quaintly irrelevant. Instead, agree or disagree seem to be
the valuational terms on offer. But
one is warned to mind the apparently egalitarian tone: Serra means to do irreparable
violence to drawing’s formal considerations. And if amongst its arsenal, a singular defense remains, it
can only be the extent to which Serra’s work interdependently requires and relies
upon those very semantical terms in order to entrench, define, and substantiate
his opposition to them.
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