November 2, 1938 – March 26, 2024
Richard Serra created monumental metal sculptures that asked viewers to become participants, to explore the relationship between art, architecture, and the environment. One could not just walk by a Serra. It demanded your engagement. Or as Serra said in an interview in Bomb Magazine https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1993/01/01/richard-serra/ in 1993: You’re not asked to look at them like you look at an object on a table. You are inside of them….[T]hey are about walking, and looking, and anticipation, and memory, and location. But because they are about weight and mass, they are different in that they make the volume of a space manifest in a way that allows you to experience it as a whole.”
Although I had been aware of Serra from the early 70s, I only met him once, and then briefly. I remember him as intense but cordial, extremely articulate and with eyes that seemed to be taking in everything at once. He was part of the downtown New York art scene that burgeoned in the 70s and 80s when relatively inexpensive lofts could still be rented or bought in Soho or the East Village or Lower East Side. Unlike many in that group who were perpetually creating advertisements for themselves, Serra was quietly disrupting preconceived notions of sculpture, allowing his pieces, such as his controversial 1981 “Tilted Arc,” to speak. And it did speak volumes in an authentic language that could be understood by anyone with the courage and determination to parse his artistic phrases.
The sculpture displayed in Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan from 1981 to 1989, consisted of a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high solid, unfinished plate of rust-covered COR-TEN steel. Its intent was to interrupt the pathway of pedestrians in an otherwise barren and inconsequential open space. It succeeded so well that the sculpture was removed in 1989 as the result of a federal lawsuit. While Serra did ardently defend his work in court, he also knew he had accomplished his mission, even with his outraged detractors. Or as he stated it: “Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer’s movement. Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.”
It wasn’t “Tilted Arc” that convinced me of Serra’s importance, though I did find that piece of great interest. Instead, it was his “One Ton Prop” (“House of Cards”) at MOMA in 1984, that allowed me an opportunity to immerse myself in what he was doing as an artist and provocateur. I went to the exhibit with a few of my students in architecture at MIT. We spent a few hours in the space. When I returned to Cambridge, I wrote this poem to capture what I had felt and experienced. I published it years ago in a book of poems in a slightly different form. I reproduce the original here as an epitaph for an American genius:
— Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
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