[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

Why Serra Matters

by Mark Daniel Cohen

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 3 – September 10, 2007

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007. Copyright © 2007 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

Some works of art matter too little because they matter merely as works of art. Some works of art matter only within the corridors and interior landscapes of the story of art, of the ongoing history of art’s development, only along the walkways of puttering rumination and the storied vistas of art on its way to becoming art, of past art making its traipse to future art. Some art matters only because it leads to the vision of what art will become.

Anyone who has spent sufficient time in the art world, time sufficient to follow these tendencies toward self-defining excitations, knows the mode of enthusiasm. It is a corporate fascination that roams in crowds the streets of New York, Berlin, London, and elsewhere, and studies the makeshift hallways and byways of international art festivals, sniffing for the early scents of what will be next, and it displaces any concentration on external standards of significance, any focus on questions of why what will be next will matter: what will be next will matter merely because it will be next.

There is to the thinking mind, of course, a roster of logical difficulties here. They begin with the logical absurdity of, the internal contradiction in, the idea of contemporary history—a contradiction in terms. To see history, or to see eventuality as history, is to see a story—it is to see what has occurred as a story, or the told tale of what has occurred, accurate to a degree beyond determination for its having been fashioned into a story. To do that is to require a finite selection, and the present tending to the future is by definition indefinite—it is open-ended. To look to see how the story ends, or even how “this” chapter of the story will turn out, is to angle the experiment—it is to “beg the question.” To know what to look for is already to have shaped the story, and so to have defined at least the sort of thing one is prepared to recognize as fitting the category of expectation. Somewhere, deep within, one already knows the result, and all other outcomes already have been overruled. It is to observe “history” as a participant who forces the conclusion. And Schopenhauer has made the argument, in his remarkable essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual”—that the future will inevitably, always contribute to a story, in that every detail will lead to a coherent conclusion, but that “storied” nature of eventuality can be observed only in retrospect; one cannot see the future coming by projecting the form of the story, by continuing its recognizable pattern. In short, history remains history—it is of the past.

And to seek ongoing history is to enter voluntarily into the herded mob, to bow to the power that markets to the crowd, or uses the crowd to market its wares to those who use the crowd to drive up the prices of what they have bought—it is to willingly participate according to the “herd instinct.” The mob, driven by expectation of the news about to come, and not knowing to recognize that news but by the assent of the crowd—for popularity has no sign other than popularity, everyone looking to everyone else—is a supersaturated solution of fanatical interest. All that is required is the seed crystal, the convincing suggestion to be enthusiastic about something, dropped into the waters of the undirected popular will, the bath that cleanses nothing, and the herd runs toward wherever it has been pointed. And then, fingers “fumble in a greasy till,” for the mob is made to be herded and popularity is the tool of those who know to profit from it.

But the greatest difficulty is in the displacement of critical judgment for fanatical interest. Art that is of interest for the sake of art and for the sake of nothing else is a closed circuit, and of beckoning only to those whose interest has no need of justification, no need of reason beyond itself—and that is a fair definition of fanaticism. Works of art that are taken to be of interest because they take up and brandish new forms of execution, new materials of employment and modes of engagement for the viewer, or the reader, or the listener, and that want no reasons why the new forms and materials and subjects are more compelling than those that preceded them, works of art that are compelling purely for the novelty of their means, are matters of fascination, of mesmerization, of hypnotic appeal. They have no reasons for no reasons are requested; they are sufficient unto themselves for there is nothing they are required to lead to. They are adequate as means—for no end is wanted. And they are of interest only to those who need art to have no interest, no end, no purpose, beyond the fact that it is art, or is taken to be. And we cannot then know what is art by what it does, for it does nothing, or by what it is, for the new, the previously unrecognized, is what is desired. Art, then, is a machine plugged into itself, like a tape machine recording only its own output, with no output but what it obtained from itself. And the interest it curries is fanatical, for it needs no reasons—it is sufficient because it is. It is because it is. And that leaves art as an entertainment—fascinating for the fact that it is fascinating; popular because others find it popular, a stick for whipping public taste, taste that is nothing more than the irresistible penchant for the following of followers. And then art is no longer an enterprise of inquiry, a search for whatever the artist deems worthy of seeking: it is an industry of commerce, a herding of sheep.

To distinguish out interest of reason and reasonableness (not the same thing) from unreasoning and unreasonable interest (not the same thing), one may refer to what can be called the machine principle, which is to say that art is, in the making and in the requirements for its results, no different from anything else—it is like all else we do but worthy of greater concern, it is different from all else in degree rather than in kind. It is like all else we do, only in some way, more so. The machine principle is such: for a machine to be functional, it must have output—it must make something—and its output must be of a kind other than itself. The failure to be so is the failure to be functional. A factory that produces nothing more than more factories whose functions are to produce more such factories clearly constitutes a system that is going nowhere. Sooner or later, something must be produced that justifies the entire enterprise, some purpose to it all must appear, otherwise, the entire enterprise produces nothing. Sooner or later, something must escape the defining confines of the system, or the system is purposeless. Sooner or later, there must be a vertical move out of the lateral distribution of the system’s parts, or we have nothing. So, too, with art—sooner or later, the sequence of works of art leading to other works of art must produce something that is not art—an insight, a realization, knowledge, or anything else that we might determine justifies all that antecedent effort—or the effort has been for naught. The purpose of art is not art.

Much of Richard Serra’s reputation has been such—as an innovator with relatively little argument for or recognition of the purpose or purposes his innovations serve. He has been known for creating new means, for employing new materials or employing materials in new ways, for expanding the formalisms of sculpture, without much to be said about what he has accomplished or made possible beyond the means, beyond the making possible of some future sculptor’s work. He has been known for most of his time for doing what no one else at the time was doing, which is what most other artists deemed of note at the time were doing. The thinking in this is more than (or less than) circular.

Which is to say that a great deal of the recent exhibition of Serra’s work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York was of interest in that it showed us where he was, which is to show us where we were, because in part where we were was busy ogling what he was producing. The exhibition contained more than two dozen works covering the entirety of Serra’s career as a public and highly influential artist up to this point, beginning with his most overtly and reputedly experimental works of the mid1960s and ending with his most truly experimental and, far more important, aesthetically remunerative works of the present day. This is to say that a great deal of the exhibition was nostalgic. Much of it was comparable to an exhibition of paraphernaila from the Sixties, which in fact was the subject of an almost simultaneous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Extending over three spaces, two within the museum and then out to the sculpture garden, the works were not displayed entirely in chronological order. However, the start of the exhibition on the sixth floor—one moved on to the second, and then outdoors—offered the works from Serra’s first decade, as well as the trip down memory’s lane. One room, in particular, found many of the Serra sculptures whose images tend to make it into the art history books. Seeing sculptures such as Belts, 1966-67, To Lift, 1967, Prop, 1968, 1-1-1-1, 1969, and One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969, those of us who are old enough could not help but recall the heady days of ferment. And one could not help but recall the theorizations written about these sculptures, then and often now, explanations so opaque for their blandness that they served and serve only to extend the mysterious opacity of the works by extending the befuddlement, as if the explanations of the unilluminating titles were themselves further unilluminating titles.

Belts is a series of rubber pieces, apparently rubber belts, tacked to the wall, in 11 groupings, one after the next, with one having twisted neon bulbs wound into it, like masses of large insect feelers caught writhing around themselves, intricating themselves into coagulated intestinal conglomerations, like butterflies pinned to a board. It has been said to be a form of drawing, emphasizing “non-compositional alloverallness” (Serra’s words), whatever that is supposed to mean. To Lift is a large swath of vulcanized rubber placed on the floor, one edge lifted somewhat like a teepee, or half a teepee, and standing of its own accord, without an armature to hold it up—soft sculpture that remains erect despite the pliable material out of which it is composed, evidently defying gravity. Prop is a plate of lead antinomy placed at eye level on a wall, apparently held in position by noting but a lead rod that leans against it—evidently defying gravity. 1-1-1-1 is an assembly of four large plates of lead antinomy each standing on edge, unconnected to each other, with only a lead rod touching them all by lying across the tops of them—the plates evidently defying gravity. One Ton Prop (House of Cards)—probably the best-known work of this group—is another assembly of four lead plates standing on edge and leaning apparently precariously against each other, held up only, it appears, because they are leaning against each other. Together, we are told, they weigh one ton, and they are standing something like a rather simple house of cards. The point, we are also told, is the contradiction between the weight of the material and light, casual way the work slants into its standing position—evidently defying gravity.

These works speak of their time, a time in which, as we thought, the language of art was being expanded, new forms and formalisms, new formulae for making new artistic statements, were being developed everywhere it seemed, with little thought for or expectation of their being used to say anything new. To “speak” in a new way was to be “saying” something new—at least, it was all that was being said. Much of the purpose was also an expansion of art, both in its means and in its exposure—art forms were devised so that more people could make what would be accepted as art, and art was to be a common currency of social exchange. After Abstract Expressionism, which was taken not unreasonably to be an elite exercise, capable of “speaking” only to the initiated, to those who knew how to look at it, and with the inauguration of the Sixties, elitism was the antithesis of hip, or in, or something or other. The common was the good, and art was to be common. It was as if we had given everyone a library card and then put nothing but blank pages inside the books.

But following this time, Serra turned to something else, something his own, and something entirely elite, capable of speaking only to those who have prepared themselves to receive the more refined forms of imagination, of thought and wonder—and that is the remainder of the exhibition. Serra turned to geometry.

In works such as Band, 2006, Sequence, 2006, Torqued Ellipse IV, 1998, and Torqued Torus Inversion, 2006, one can see not only forms that are far more complex and more engaging than those of the earlier work, one can see the working of an idea—of something being said, of something being realized and revealed through the sculpture. Serra is after something here, something more than internal tales of the hermetics of sculptural making, something that reaches beyond the precincts and perimeters of the practicing of the art form, something in the way of output that is not art: a recognition, an understanding of the nature of space, and of ourselves in space, and of ourselves and the space we occupy as a conception, and an experiential reality. There is observation here; there is an insight.

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