SLAM.ORGTo anyone with some knowledge about Richard Serra, one thing is usually clear: Serra equals metal. Unpolished, thick, heavy slabs of steel, lead, and iron, climbing up walls, standing at angles, coiling into spirals, scattered on the floor, or curving across a plaza. His work represents a career-long fascination with how the material can be bent to his will.
His work is always presented honestly, without any attempt to hide the fact that metal is metal. All the while Serra intentionally heightens metal’s natural properties-its texture, presence, and gravity. He doesn’t play the artist deception game-materials and their properties define each sculpture’s meaning and determine their eventual outcome. At the same time, Serra constantly tries to push the physical limits of his sculptures, sometimes stacking slab upon slab to reach the top of a 30-foot wall, other times twisting steel into “torqued ellipses”. For all the macho bravura that is obvious in constructing these monstrous behemoths, Serra demonstrates an artist’s sensibilities in the way he unifies environment, viewer and sculpture. The spaces he creates can be contemplative, personal, or threatening (in one case a worker was crushed by a piece he was installing). Serra’s pieces always reveal clever dialogues between work, its surroundings, and the physical presence of the viewer. One doesn’t just look at a Serra piece, one physically reacts to it, sometimes by dropping his jaw in awe, other times simply by rolling his eyes at its absurdity.
During the late 60s Serra briefly experimented with vulcanized rubber as an alternative to metal. “Untitled, 1968,” the only major installation he did in rubber, is now showing at the Saint Louis Art Museum as part of the “American Summer” series. For this rarely seen floor installation, Serra made a mixture of rubber and orange liquitex paint which he poured on a corrugated metal door. The piece is made up of three of these large orange rubber molds lying on the floor, partly overlapping each other. This is the only major work in rubber by Serra, and not only does it stand out in its medium but it is also an understatement compared to his other structures. With works like these, extracting meaning, if at all possible, usually comes after some time, and with the avoidance of thoughts like “I just walked for half an hour to look at some old pieces of rubber lying on the floor”. Meaning aside, there is something beautiful to be found in the texture of the old rubber, where it cracks to form veins, how light and shadow play on the orange, where the rubber oozed past the metal door when the mold was made, and where, over time, the color has faded in parts. The whole thing looks like dead skin, neatly shed and discarded by some enormous orange reptile.
Though looking at this work doesn’t necessarily invoke the word “action,” “Untitled” alludes to the action and reaction of media and Serra’s theme of an artist as a kind of catalyst and not necessarily a creator. The process of mixing, pouring, drying, and peeling is, for Serra, the rubber doing its own thing with him as that initial spark that gets everything going. “Untitled” is simply the result of a simple experiment-art made from chance. Nothing premeditated. While rubber may function in an entirely different manner than metal, this “medium over matter” attitude is typical of Serra and his work.
Years of closet incubation has added another dimension to the piece: the effect of time. The rubber would have looked brand-new when initially displayed but age gives “Untitled” added complexity and challenges the viewer to redefine preconceived ideas about sculpture as something hard, stable, and constant. The fact that “Untitled” simply lies flat on the ground is another indication of Serra’s frank honesty. These are copies of doors, and they are supposed to be sculptures, but no effort has been made to defy gravity. Serra simply acknowledges this without doing anything about it. These facts would have been especially relevant in the decade when it was created, when artists had experimented with sculpture using soft materials and unconventional methods of display. For that reason, “Untitled” deserves credit for pushing the boundaries, as does the most interesting art.
The space in which “Untitled” sits presents something of a problem. While important to the piece’s preservation, it is a mistake to have placed the sculpture on a low platform. The piece is meant to engage directly with the floor, as do all of Serra’s sculptures. His works never belong on pedestals or platforms. They try to engage with the space and the viewer, and “elevating” them creates an awkward interruption in that dialogue. The wood pattern on the floor of the gallery is also very distracting and doesn’t go at all with the orange of the rubber molds.
For hardcore Serra lovers, this showing of “Untitled” is a must-see. It represents a momentary distraction in the artist’s career that led to some unique results. It also was an opportunity for Serra to discover “a new kind of language” in a new medium, which undoubtedly affected the outcome of later work. Serra, however, was wise to stick with metal, which most effectively communicates ideas about material, environment, and physical presence, which are important to him. It is intriguing and worthwhile to see “Untitled.” The piece is a challenge in that little information is provided about its intentions, allowing viewers to come up with their own conclusions as to what on earth might have gone through the artist’s head before pouring a bunch of orange rubber on some metal doors. If you choose to go to the Saint Louis Art Museum, it is worth your time to look at “Untitled” and come up your own interpretation of Serra’s ubiquitous sculpture.