Space

Richard Serra is best known for his large sculptures made of Cor-ten steel plates. Serra is not sculpting an object alone but places a great deal of focus on spaces or voids that emerge from these planes and objects. He is very interested in the experience, how these spaces relate to the body and how these stationary, immovable sculptures facilitate movement around and through them. His earlier works are process-based investigations that involved hurling molten lead into the gaps between walls and cracks in floors. He would keep a list of “verbs” like hurl or roll that would describe the processes he would use to form the material. Even at this early stage he was fixated on the space that existed between objects and movement or action. By the late 1970s his work was transitioning into manipulating monumental steel plates. 

I am a big fan of Richard Serra’s work, so it pains me to say that I found the work shown here, Five Plates, Two Poles (1984) very disappointing. The largest plate in this sculpture stands no more than seven feet tall and appeared to me like a small-scaled model of the sculpture I wish I were standing in front of. The spaces between the plates were not large enough to walk through. The experience was limited to walking around its edges. I am trained as an architect and am accustomed to projecting myself into small-scale models that represent the spaces one might occupy, but the way this work withheld the actual experience was deeply unsatisfying and seemed cruel. Perhaps someone cut Serra’s commission, so he delivered a half-size version. I don’t want to be too critical—perhaps I am missing something—but I left the work quickly with a deep sense of spatial frustration.