Saturday, March 3, 2012

Big Black Serra

by Robert Boyd

Richard Serra is a rock star. I wasn't quite prepared for that, but when I went to the opening of Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, there wasn't enough space in the Menil for all his fans. I had to sit on the lawn and watch a simulcast of his interview with co-curator Michelle White projected on the wall. (I wonder why they didn't try to get a bigger venue over at St. Thomas?)


Richard Serra and Michelle White

The Menil is pretty strict about not letting you take photos. On opening night, there was enough of a crowd that I could sneak a few shots in. But otherwise, I've come up with a different, older solution. I drew pictures of his drawings.

Now it's weird that he calls some of these things drawings. Most of them are made with paint-stick on canvas. Paint-sticks are themselves kind of a liminal art medium. They take oil paint and turn it into a crayon-like drawing implement. But the medium is still paint. But in Serra's case, he explained that he considered them drawings because they had no color. Their monochromatic blackness was what made them drawings, regardless of what the physical medium is.

Early on he was still using charcoal and graphite and other traditional drawing tools. But he quickly added paintstick to his repertoire.


drawing of Heir, paintstick and graphite on paper, 1973


drawing of Abstract Slavery, 1974, paintstick on Belgian linen

(It's funny that the nationality of the linen was included, but not the nationality of the paintstick. For the record, my drawings were on American legal paper, drawn with a Japanese marker and a ballpoint pen of unknown origin.)

This was an early paintstick drawing. It is much blacker than my drawing indicates. The title comes from the fact that he used unmodified paintsticks (about which more later) and that filling this enormous trapezoid was sheer torture. The trapezoid shape is important. Serra is using it to engage the architecture. It's not precisely site-specific, but it does depend on being on a wall of a certain size. The left and right edges have to be parallel to the corners, and the bottom left point has to meet the floor. So this implies that you can see the corner line and the floor line. Even if you had a room in your house big enough to hang Abstract Slavery, you'd have to leave the room largely empty to the piece's relationship with the edges of the box it was in would be unobstructed to a viewer.

 
Richard Serra, Emerson, paintstick on handmade paper, 2010

In one of the galleries, there are a group of circular drawings. The circle is solid black, and in fact has a really pronounced texture. The impression I get is that the paintstick was melted or partially melted when he made these. The ridges of oil paint extend greatly from the surface of the paper, maybe an inch. The texture looks like it was the result of violent action. Serra has used liquid material for sculptural purposes in the past. He made pieces by flinging molten lead into the corner of his studio in 1969--another violent process.


drawing of Emerson, paintstick on handmade paper, 2010

The lines radiating out from the center look splashed. This again reflects the molten lead works, which were very much about the process of making them. The question is, were the radiating marks drawn or splashed? I am guessing the latter, but I'm not sure how. They seem too perfect, originating from the exact center of the circle.


Richard Serra, Out-of-Round IX, paintstick on handmade hiromi paper, 1999


drawing of Out-of-Round IX, paintstick on handmade hiromi paper, 1999

What these circular pieces show is that Serra was willing to fuck around with the medium. He's using paintsticks but not using them "out of the box." After Abstract Slavery, he explained that he needed to find a more efficient way to use paintstick. So he would buy them, melt them down, than make bricks from them that could be gripped with both hands. These would cover the canvas easier, and he could put his whole body into it, grinding the brick of paintstick into the canvas. This creates interesting surface effects.

Emerson, Out-of-Round, and Heir exist as traditional drawings in a way. They have a relationship with the square edge of the paper itself--Emerson centered, Heir tilted, and Out-of-Round IX tangent to two edges. But the most dramatic and interesting pieces in the show are the room-size solid black pieces on linen.


drawing of Pacific Judson Murphy, paintstick on Belgian linen, 1978

I like these the most because they use the room to complete the drawing. They are in a box (that we the viewers are also in), and that box is like the edge of the page in a traditional drawing. But they can do something that a piece of paper can't do. The edge can be in the middle of the drawing, as in Pacific Judson Murphy, which wraps itself around a corner of the room.

The relationship to three-dimensional space becomes really important to these drawings. In this respect, they are no less architectural than Serra's sculptures. Two Corner Cut: High Low is especially seen in a piece he created especially for the Menil.


drawing of Two Corner Cut: High Low, painstick on Belgian linen, 2012

This is a spectacular piece that you walk into. Standing at the entrance gives you a kind of brutally simple trompe-l'oeil that disappears as you walk through it. Again, he puts trapezoids in an empty room, where they can engage with eight edges of the box the piece is in.

One final note. Serra was insistent on thinking of these things as objects within an architectural space. Now when you get solid black drawings or paintings, words like "void" and "sublime" inevitably pop up. This was brought up in the question and answer period of Serra's discussion with Michelle White. Serra was fairly generous with the questioner. He said that if you wanted to see the works that way, that was OK--but that's not what he was thinking when he made them. That's the way I think about art in general--that the artist had an intention, but once the art leaks out into the world, their intention is overwhelmed by the way viewers see the work. This was the key problem of The Art Guys Marry a Tree, for example. But since Barthes declared the death of the author, it's been something that artists have to live with, hopefully with the same sanguine attitude that Serra displayed.


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4 comments:

  1. You're gracious to the "master" as my inclination is away from encomiums and more toward depressing art econometrics. A Serra retrospective shows an unwinding vitality ending with gratuitous spectacle of tori, an unravelling of artist with medium transformed to crowd-wowing investment bank cum PT Barnum showmanship and Tiberius too long on Capri finalé. Perhaps i underestimate the hand of the artist in the giant rolled plates --short of the cad files--and the relentless gravitational pull of stardom. I guess that's personal.

    When looking at his inky crayolas, I think if not for Serra's zeitgeist hero status, fawning masses might walk past the display thinking "under construction," and tote their baseline narratives to some other Lichtenstein-like blockbuster. Which I guess winds me in Barthes camp.

    Call me bitter--or better yet, envious--but after colonizing the courtyard, I'm piqued by Serra.com.org's need to add "the wall" to his fistful of medals. I know I'm supposed to like it, but how many times do I have to see it? It's a bit like Keaton in Annie Hall: "The Sorrow and the Pity" again?

    Which brings me to art econometrics: what I call the grand masters who wouldn't leave syndrome.

    Last year in France, Sarkozy proposed raising the retirement age. The public went wild, but not the sector you would think. it was the 20-and 30-somethings who realize if workers at the top don't leave no positions on the bottom will open up.

    D. Hickey recently ran on about the oversupply of capable artists. I agree, but his solution--fewer new artists--totally misses the mark. There is an oversupply, but at the top, on million dollar retros and auction pump and dump producers, not the bottom.

    Imagine how many unknown artists a single Serra show could feed?


    Signed,
    Wishing it weren't a Country for Old Men

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  2. Hey man, not only that, but did you realize that museums are full of art by people who are DEAD? Some of them are so freaking dead that their languages are even extinct!

    (But seriously, you have a flair for polemic. Why waste it in the comments? If you're interested in writing with a byline--even a pseudonym--contact me. robertwboyd2020@yahoo.com)

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    Replies
    1. could i submit something to your blog and write under a byline?... assuming its of some quality of course :D p.s, no need to look at my current blog, thats more something we do for college, and i intend to write properly when, well, i start writing properly!

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    2. Nope. This is Houston-centered blog. As in Houston, Texas. I'm willing to run regional pieces and the occasional travel piece, but Ireland is a bit far for us. Better that you start your own blog about art you see in Ireland. You'd be doing a real favor for your fellow Irish artists.

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