Tuesday 30 October 2007

Richard Serra at MoMA

The following images and text from http://scoboco.blogspot.com/2007/06/richard-serra-at-moma.html led me to think about a series of short walls of gauze between trees creating passages that undulate: disrupting the rows in a pine tree forest or in a vineyard. I will look for a site at Mount Tomah for this idea. One of these images is without people, the other with people in the space. I am interested in how the inclusion of people in the space changes your viewing of the work.

' Richard Serra at the MoMA
Try NOT swaying slightly from side to side in tune with the undulating passages as you walk through Sequence, his massive, interconnected spirals on the second floor... or leaning backward as you approach the inverted walls of one of the immense cocoons within Band. You can taste the metal in the air; you can smell it and feel its deep chill and unimaginable weight in your chest. You can get seriously disorientated here, even lost (well... we did, anyway), and yet it seems more comforting than dangerous, thanks in part to the stunning suppleness of these giga-ton works.'

' The exhibit is divided into three parts. On the second floor are the real show-stoppers: three new, enormous, enveloping steel sculptures, Sequence, Band and Torqued Torus Inversion, that you walk through and around and within, and that you'll have to run your hands over even though all the signs tell you not to. Made from weatherproof steel, there's none of the rusting and oxidation that you might normally associate with Serra's work—here instead are long, seamless, almost placid surfaces. These three pieces are literally breathtaking.'

No comments: