The Poetics of Power

The brutal drama and lyricism of the late Richard Serra prompted thoughts on art and power.

Sculptor Richard Serra has died at the age of 85. This American sculptor, who deployed raw sheet steel in giant publicly sited installations, was notoriously tough about his uncompromising art. Serra understood power as a sculptural element in a way no other recent artist has. He was the heir not only to steel-welding sculptors David Smith and Anthony Caro but also, rightfully, Titian, Velazquez, Rubens and Goya.

Minimalism as an aesthetic movement is seen mainly as the domain of cultivated good taste. It is a way of displaying one’s adherence to simple living that requires an expensively engineered space that elegantly hides one’s possessions in an ostentatious show of simplicity and humility. However, it is much more, especially as the art movement that emerged around 1960 as a riposte to the intensely subjective, personal, gestural, expressive character of New York School of abstract painting. How could an artist outdo the lyricism of Pollock, the intensity of Rothko, the drama of Kline? By cutting through it by going in the other extreme, by negating these very qualities by going to the opposites. Carl Andre used roughly sawn wood blocks or tiles of metal; Robert Morris made geometric forms in metal or plywood; Donald Judd set up stacks of shapes in pressed steel and Perspex. Expression was out, presence was in. Minimalism was not anodyne; Minimalism – and its architectural stablemate Brutalism – could intimidate as effectively (albeit indirectly) as the Heroic Realism of Socialist Realist USSR.  

Serra occupied spaces with rolled steel, as used in structural construction and shipbuilding. His towering forms were unpainted and untreated; they accrued a skin of rust according to natural processes. Slabs of metal weighing many tons formed freestanding stacks – rolled metal or slabs leaned against walls – all without any mechanical connections, held in place by gravity, mass and inertia. They could only be moved with powered machinery. The most ardent detractor could hurl himself at the slabs and not come close to destabilising a Serra prop piece.

[Richard Serra, Snake (1994-7), steel, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. © Estate of Richard Serra]

The glowering presence of Serra’s slabs had overtones of toughness that reflected Serra’s dockside sartorial taste. Serra worked in a steel mill when young and his appreciation for the materials, methods and attitudes of industrial manufacturing carried over into his tough character and dress, which only slightly moderated as he aged. The physical threat from his metal slabs was intimidating. They could – and, in the case of worker crushed during the installation process of one Serra piece in 1971, did – present a threat to anyone in the vicinity. The menace was real and contributed to a frisson of fear in the audience. I remember viewing pieces in the 1990s and there was a tangible electrical charge to standing close to Serra’s props.

As Serra’s aesthetic and financial standing increased, his work’s thuggish quality became more indirect rather than outright diminishing. In the 1970s Serra received commissions to set up permanent sculptures in specific places. Standing stacks of rusted iron loomed in a plaza in London; curving strips of steel several metres high and ten, twenty or longer metres long appeared in the forecourts of buildings in American cities. They antagonised office workers by not only being ugly in a conventional sense but because they blocked out familiar views and forced them to take detours. Routes that people would have taken most directly to get to and from their office or parked car were no longer accessible. By forcing individuals to take a detour, Serra’s tilted walls provoked and tired people. Serra’s installed sculptures comprised (quite unironically) art that could not be overlooked or disregarded. They imposed the artist’s will in a way that was both aesthetically bold and socially aggressive.

[Richard Serra, Tilted Arc (1981), steel. © Estate of Richard Serra]

When Tilted Arc (1981), sited in a plaza in Washington D.C. proved unpopular with office workers, was scheduled for removal, the artist sued to preserve it. Serra argued that removal of a site-specific piece was destruction of an artist’s intellectual property, effectively putting forward his legal right to defend the art work even if he did not own it physically. The courts ultimately ruled that the land owner controlled the art and it was that body’s property. In 1989, the piece was cut up and transported out of the plaza, but Serra’s argument set a precedent and is a landmark in art law.  

Serra used power and threat directly and indirectly as a material in the same way as had court painters and papal artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. While those prince portraitists or makers of martial murals depicted the wielders of worldly might, Serra’s art demonstrated the might of industrial commodity production on a breathtaking scale by putting it unadorned in public forums in a way that could not be ignored or removed. Serra’s art could only have been made through large sums of money, institutional backing, local government approval and the agreement of senior figures. That observation does not make Serra’s art immoral, makes no aesthetic claims and does not preclude beauty. Indeed, the beauty and drama of the curved walls of metal was something that captivated individuals who found them objectionable.

Serra’s curling ribbons of metal were as undemocratic as a papal injunction or dynastic coup; they were unarguable and uncongenial. They did not work well in group exhibitions, at least the ones I saw. Serra’s pieces had too much power and were too absolute, making all around them look compromised, fussy, effete. They brooked no compromise with the taste of the masses or the utilitarian expectations of urban planners. Serra’s ability to set up potentially dangerous and actually antagonistic interventions which inconvenienced others was a demonstration of the power of art.