Why Serra Matters

Page II

In each of these works—and of the later works in the exhibition, I have omitted only Intersection II, 1992-93, which seems a bit simple relative to these other works—the form, the footprint on the ground, and in the air, is easy to comprehend. Each work is composed of a long, curving steel sheet, or several curving steel sheets, bent such that one can not only walk around the work but into its inner space or spaces. Each work stands between 12 and 13 feet high, so that when walking inside, one is completely encompassed by it, enclosed in the interior space. Band is composed of apparently a single sheet (actually a number of sheets welded together) that curves back and forth into four close to circular loops. Sequence is composed of two such apparent sheets curving around each other, in near parallel, to form two circular inner spaces and the curving “hallways” between the sheets. Torqued Torus Inversion is made of two identical forms, sheets in almost circular pattern that curve—that is, elongate—in two directions: along the ground and as they rise. One of the two toruses is an inversion of the other—turned upside down—and both are slit vertically so one can walk into them. Torqued Ellipse IV (the first versions of the Torqued Ellipse series were a sensation when they opened in New York almost 10 years ago) is a sheet curved into an ellipse, an oval, only the sheet is torqued, is twisted as it rises, so that, at the top, the wider axis lies at 90 degrees to the longer axis at the bottom, at the floor. Torqued Ellipse IV is also slit, permitting one to walk inside. (Please refer to the images to get a sense of the simplicity of the forms.)

For all the ground-plan simplicity of the forms of these sculptures, the experience of walking inside their interior spaces is nothing simple, and that experience is the opening of the import of these works, it is the experience they are built for, or rather, the experience of them is why they needed to be built and not just planned out, as on paper. They are made to be entered, and upon entering them, one is disoriented to a remarkable degree. Even with works as relatively simple as the two (or three) torqued sculptures, nothing about the interior walls makes normal sense, and you discover within them how dependent we are on walls, or any vertical rises, being exactly perpendicular to the ground. Once the walls go in some other way than straight up, you lose your sense of balance, your physiological orientation. The feeling of gravitational pull, the inner sense of where “down” is, does not help—one is off kilter. We are evidently helpless without the normal visual cues. We are conditioned, apparently to a thorough extent, by the structural definitions of the spaces we construct for ourselves.

What becomes evident in walking into and through these works is that, for all the simplicity of their forms, these structures are, experientially, mazes. In each case, even once one has grasped intellectually the geometric pattern, the work remains labyrinthine to walk through. Nothing in it is simple to take in—everything is disorienting and new every time you encounter it again. None of the pathways has perfectly vertical walls; you feel like Alice undergoing geometric realignment. Corridors that you know proceed in nearly straight lines disappear around remarkably subtle curves as you walk along them. None of the interior spaces, the nearly “circular” spaces, retains its precise shape as you look up—your sense of the distance between you and any portion of the surrounding wall changes as your gaze moves, and eventually gets lost entirely. Perspective changes everything you know about the overall form; the sheer scale of it, its relative enormity—relative to you—alters its nature. Everywhere inside and outside these works, you know where you are, and you never know where you are.

There is a severe discrepancy between the conceptual simplicity of the ideas of these sculptures and the experiential complexity of their reality—there is a rupture, or rather, there is a failure to bridge, an impossiblity to bridge. What Serra reveals with them is that there is a transformation that occurs when simple principles are distilled from complex experiences. We seed the mind with the images of what we encounter in life. We detach the world from the world, dislocate its elements, condense them down, and inventory the awareness with miniatures of the objects and situations we live among in full scale. We map the world and chapter it for comprehension. But the simulacra, the models, the images, are not equivalences. Something of the basic nature of the object changes when we enter it into awareness, when we make it a denizen of the precincts of thought.

The reduction in scale, from the surrounding world to the encompassing mind, is also a reduction in complexity. The simple principles, the underlying tenets and foundational conceptions, are an explanation of what is, or a plan for what we will make, and they are also a distortion, for they are a reducing down to a clarity of logic that is the result of the process of reduction, that is of the nature of the mind that conceives and not the thing being conceived. Or put differently, the logical clarity of simple principles is an alteration, an over-simplification, of a reality that is unremittingly irrational, uncanny—a phantasmagoria. A simple geometry can constitute, when brought to a physical reality, a vertiginous labyrinth. And in the reverse direction, a scientific theory is not of the complexity of the world to which it applies, nor is it meant to be. Scientific theories are derived from experimental situations, and experimental situations are deliberate simplifications of the districts of reality from which they are taken, to which they refer. They are reality corralled, distilled, taken under control, and they are what the theory derived from them explains. Once we put the theory into orbit, so to speak, there is no telling what might just happen. The vertiginous may inject itself.

With Serra’s later, geometric works, the knowledge of the form is simple and the experience of the form is not. The knowledge of the form must be simple because the experience of the form is not—it is dense, complex, and constantly changing. That discrepancy is precisely to the point of these sculptures. What we know and what we live through constitute two different worlds, and each world is dependent on the other. What we know comes from what we experience, and what we experience is dependent on what we know. Yet, these two forms of awareness are, in and of themselves, nothing alike.

The difference between these two forms of awareness is something along the lines of the difference between the objective and the subjective. More, it is the difference between the conception and the perception, and in that formulation, it is comparable to the difference between the way things are unto themselves, if we assume that what we conceive, were it complex enough, would be capable of being the way things are in themselves, that thought is a vision of things with us detached, as themselves, without the range of consuming perception, as if beneath some mind’s eye, and the way things hit us, confronted by and in the embodied eye—the difference between truth and life, between things as they are, or envisioned as they are, pure of us, and what we encounter, the way things come to us.

The world of living experience and the world of things in themselves—at least as we can conceive it in ideas, ideas operating by their own laws in our own interior spaces—do not touch at any point. There is no intersection between them. And the discrepancy is not due to any distortion in perception. Nothing has been distorted in our experience of Serra’s forms. They are there before our eyes. One can stand inside, say, the torqued ellipse and, through observation, mentally map and recognize the shape. One can visually measure the 90-degree turn by observing, from the inside of the work, the top edge of the sculpture and comparing it to the edge touching the floor. The math of it is right there. The discrepancy is not due to any evident distortion but to what has been called the subjective component of experience, an overlay of something impossible to describe, of something dream-like—a blanket of experientiality, like a tangible substance, a draping sheet, a veil of mortality, a gauze before the eye—that transmogrifies everything without altering a single fact of it all.

Serra has said, with regard to the Torqued Ellipse series, that he is interested in what he calls “the substance of space” and that the works in the series are predicated not on the eye but rather on the movement of the body. This thinking is comparable to the intent of Minimalism, at least among some of its practitioners, to discover a means of, as Donald Judd put it, “finding out what the world’s like.” But it is also comparable, with its orientation on the movement of the body, to the interest of Abstract Expressionism, the opposite in many ways of Minimalism and the artistic paradigm against which the Minimalists reacted, in the nature of the subjective, of the quality of experientiality purified, of the subjective component of experience experienced on its own terms. This thinking is comparable to the theoretical concern with the intrinsic nature of space, as Serra says, as it was before we arose as a species, as it is all around us, as it will be after we have managed to make ourselves as a species extinct (through over-running our environment, our space, as natural an eventuality as what happens to any species that over-runs its environment, and, sooner or later, all species become extinct—a natural eventuality). But it is also comparable to the interest of Helmholtz, Mach, and Poincaré in constructed space, in physiological space, in what Poincaré called “motor space,” an experiential reality resulting from the sensations of bodily movements, the experience of a space that, according to Poincaré, “has as many dimensions as we have muscles.”

But these pure alternatives are not where Serra resides. His later work strides the chasm between the two artistic vocations of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, between the theories of the geometric nature of space and the idea that the experience of space is a physiological result, a body reaction to what is beyond conception, to something whose nature we do not even suspect. Ultimately, the space that Serra’s works are most deeply concerned with is the space between knowledge and experience, between what the truth might be and what life in fact is.

A simple geometry can constitute, when brought to a physical reality, a vertiginous labyrinth. What we experience might be utterly accurate, and at the same time, will be nothing like what it is we are accurately experiencing, for the veil of the subjective has fallen over the reality, the gauze is ever over the eye, and our face always looks back at us in the mirror, obscuring the view of what lies behind us, forever hidden.

The geometry of it all is both lucid and strange, familiar and completely alien. This is Serra’s realization, and as new as it is in his hands, it is also an old one. The Pythagoreans, roughly 3,000 years ago, knew that arithmetic was the heart of a vast mystical philosophy, it was the essence of the mystery of the universe. And musicians know to this day that the emotive power of their creations are dependent upon a cold logic of simple and rigorous numbers. In these times of the superfluity of the intellect, times in which all art is subjected to the bleaching glare of theoretical formulation, in which we continue too often to spend more time making clear how art can be made in new forms than we do using art to make anything else clear, it is a profound lesson that Serra does well to teach us once again—logic can explain everything, and it can explain nothing. The mystery constantly returns. And in everything we know, and everything we can live through, we are in the gap.

© Mark Daniel Cohen—Nietzsche Circle, 2007

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007)

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