Art | Big steel: The evocative sculpture of Richard Serra

NEW YORK - Forget Superman, Richard Serra is the real Man of Steel. Many other sculptors have worked with the metal, but I can't think of another who uses it so audaciously, or who is so pitch-perfect regarding its physical properties and evocative potential.

Serra hasn't always used steel. In his early career, in the 1960s and '70s, he made sculptures of industrial rubber, fiberglass and lead that departed radically from tradition. But when he switched to huge plates of raw steel about 1970, his vision became monumental. At the same time, it also became elemental, sublime and, oddly, refined.

The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years" makes these points clear enough, despite its relatively small size - just 27 sculptures - and the fact that it addresses a major aspect of his career, his landscape pieces, only through the catalog.

(His most controversial outdoor work, the 120-foot-long Tilted Arc, bisected a federal office plaza in downtown Manhattan from 1981 to 1989, when the federal government, which commissioned it, yielded to public protests and removed it.)

In the flesh, "Forty Years" is a curiously attenuated exhibition: a section on the sixth floor devoted to his pre-steel experiments; two large outdoor pieces from the 1990s in the museum's sculpture garden, where they look severely hemmed in; and three gigantic new works, all made last year, in the second-floor contemporary gallery.

If you aren't familiar with Serra, understand that the garden sculptures link the lead-rubber-fiberglass pieces on the sixth floor with the three rusted steel behemoths on the second. This isn't sufficient connective tissue to make logical sense of four decades. Unfortunately, the scale of Serra's mature work imposes severe limitations on what any museum can do with him in an exhibition format.

His large sculptures are profoundly space-altering; in fact, at extreme scale, such as the new pieces called Band, Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence, they generate their own space. With the largest nearly 72 feet long by more than 36 wide, they fill up a gallery as cavernous as an airplane hangar. They're industrially fabricated in close-fitting sections, yet they're seductively curvaceous, their vertical axes constantly tilting in and out, as feminine as they are masculine.

These three imposing sculptures, which combine imaginative conceptual thinking with precise methods of shaping two-inch-thick steel into gentle compound curves, constitute the heart of the show. They're Serra's ultimate legacy, and one could spend a long time walking around and through them, admiring their velvety orange patinas and trying to force the mind to grasp the totality of their complex forms.

Born in 1939, Serra, 67, belongs to a fertile generation of sculptors that included Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Richard Tuttle, Bruce Nauman, Barry Le Va, Lynda Benglis, and minimalists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre who, in the mid-1960s, began to develop startlingly unconventional language for sculpture.

In his early work, Serra became infatuated with process. Probably his most famous pieces from this time are those he "cast" by flinging molten lead into the intersection of floor and wall. These long strips, L-shaped in cross-section, expressed both how they were made and the time it took to do so.

Serra also played around with slabs of black industrial rubber salvaged from a warehouse. Sometimes he combined the rubber with fiberglass. Whatever interest these pieces have today, and it's slight, derives from their material character.

When Serra switched to sheet lead, his sculptures gained a conceptual subtlety that still resonates. They hold themselves together through gravity, equilibrium, friction and bravado. In the simplest, four slabs of lead are arranged in a square, each leaning against one corner of its neighbor. Remove one, and all fall.

Other sculptures in this "house of cards" series employ different permutations of this strategy. Slabs are wedged into corners, or held against a wall and off the floor by a heavy cylindrical prop, or held vertical by a single point of contact with another mass. While gravity is a key factor, the pieces are so perfectly balanced that they feel oddly weightless.

At the same time, they're also tenuous, and this provides the frisson of anxiety that transforms them into something more than science-class demonstrations. They embody basic forces of nature, but they're also potentially unstable. You wouldn't dare touch them even if allowed to, lest they disarticulate and fall on your foot.

This sense of impending disaster continues in Serra's larger steel sculptures, only magnified. Walk through the passageways formed by the multiple walls of Intersection II, in the outdoor garden, and you'll get the point. Serra's steel sculptures not only twist and turn, they flare in and out. When massive walls over 12 feet high lean toward you, you might feel claustrophobic, and start to walk just a bit faster.

Serra makes one viscerally conscious of natural phenomena such as mass, gravity and equipoise - properties that hold the physical world together. You become comfortable with the sculptures only after you understand that he has all these factors under control.

Which brings us back to the three behemoths on the second floor. Part of their majesty is the fact that they're so big and convoluted that they exceed one's visual and mental reach. For instance, Band, if seen from above, would look like a giant piece of ribbon candy. In a sense, the sculpture is the whale that swallowed Jonah - you and me.

While circumnavigating these monsters, I naturally wondered how the museum got all this mass into the building (in pieces, hoisted through a temporary opening in an exterior wall), and how much these pieces weigh (MoMA says between 100 and 200 tons each). I also speculated on what they might look like outdoors in the sunlight. Would my perceptions change dramatically? I suspect they would, but not necessarily for the better.

Large as they are, these battleships seem quite at home under cover because the room becomes intrinsic to their spatial aura. Form and open space merge into a synergistic feedback loop, isolating viewers from the world at large inside an encapsulating and intensely introspective environment.

"Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years" continues at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York, through Sept. 10. The museum is open from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Mondays, and to 8 p.m. Fridays. Admission is $20 general, $16 for visitors 65 and older, and $12 for students with current ID. Free to visitors 16 and younger. Free Fridays after 4 p.m. Information: 212-708-9400 or www.moma.org.

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