Richard Serra: The Matter of Time

Ideas become sensory experiences through the arts, practical or aesthetical. The linguistic immateriality takes shapes in matter whether in the etheric consistency of a sound wave or the persistent reality of a stone. As physics proposes, it is matter what determines space-time, thus, our ideas give shape to space-time through the artistic action: we think and space-time becomes this or that, only perceptible and ready for experience in the particular object.

Contemporary sculpture has transformed the tradition of experimentation with form in a direct experimentation of space, i.e. of the curving of light. The experience of space as the curving of light has produced a kind of living experience of space as a basic intuition for the awareness of our own life: movement through space becomes intuitive thinking, a rather deeply grounded intuition in our animal nature. We move and the universe begins, like in the Walkabout of the ancient Australian Aborigines. Then we add words that fix objects, and mountains become ancestor-mountains.

Richard Serra has proposed a walkabout through his sculpture no very different to a walkabout on a Japanese Garden populated by the Kami of steel. What comes to life in this walkabout is our own experience of space-time, general and fuzzy movements of our basic intuition which find a shape in steel: gigantic ellipsoidal metallic flowers dance in impossible torsions closing the light around us in a vast melting idea. Museums are not the best scenarios for aesthetical or mystical experience, for they are charged with the vast mythologies of what art should be, overweighting any possible fresh approach to our own experience and forcing our aesthetical considerations to a rather dull experience determined by general social factors, but Serra’s colossal structures minimize somehow all that noise amid the geometrical simplicity of the proposal which immediately produces a sort of inner state of meditation.

A recurrent theme in most of the sculptures is the morphism between the points of an ellipse at the ground level and another formed by the superior part of the enormous steel plates. Those two ellipses have the same radii though their axes are not parallel. The torsions are the result of the projections of the points of one ellipse onto the other. At a walking level, such torsions produce some stress when the plate bends towards the head of the walker and a relieve when they turn in the opposite direction, a combination which finds its climax once we make it to the center of the sculpture where we feel at the heart of a labyrinth woven by our space-time perceptions. Some of the sculptures have an added sonic dimension in their paths produced by the bending and closing of the space above the walker’s head. Such reverberation adds cave overtones to the work which extend the space of our imagination to a wider psychological realm.

The main interest of the work is its musicality, for it leads sculpture in the direction of music by returning our experience of space to its more basic experience of inner time, space as a projection of the temporality of the moving organism.

(This essay is part of the book by Oscar E. Muñoz : "Aesthetic Notes". Mandala Ediciones. Madrid 2016.)