by Alex Wells
Like the death of real celebrities, the death of celebrated art-world figures always precipitates a deluge of appreciation. The Footnote would like to be among the first to say that in the case of the recently-deceased Richard Serra, it isn’t deserved.
There’s an old joke from SNL “One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke.” This is what it’s like to head to a museum and then find out it’s a Richard Serra retrospective.
He wasn’t a good artist. He made dull art with nothing in it. He wasn’t even the first artist to make a work of art with almost nothing in it. That had been done decades before. He didn’t invent rectangles, spirals or tilted arcs, he was not the first to use them in art or to inconvenience pedestrians with big simple shapes (architects and truck drivers had been doing it for years). The only possible audience for a Richard Serra sculpture is someone who’d been in prison so long they’d never seen a half-finished building site or so lacking in imagination they couldn’t picture pieces of it in a different environment.
The most exciting thing about Richard Serra’s work for contemporary artists now was that he could afford it. It’s no surprise when a contracting company with a fleet of bulldozers can muscle a metal wall into place, when a single pretentious man in SoHo can do it, its a tribute to the human spirit. He sure did know how to hire people. And those people sure did know how to slightly alter common building materials. America!
Image: © 2012 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York