Richard Serra

Andrew Brant and I sat together. When I say sat together I do not mean side by side, but simply that we inhabited the same room, sharing oxygen and ideas, for the evening. He and I talked a lot about literature and philosophy as well as some art history. When the subject of “What is art?” arose, as it often does among those of us in our late teens to early nineties, I told him that I believed all of experience is art for art is the education and educating of ones self and/or others. He said he didn’t agree, I said I just wasn’t expressing my ideas clearly enough.
Then language and understanding entered the arena of our conversation.

When looking at Richard Serra’s Circuit II there is a point at which you can face a corner of the room and have a lead plank slice straight through the center of your line of vision, hiding in a blind spot. Your eye is forced to see two identical halves of a corner, but one is in shadow the other in light. I discovered this while slowly moving in and around the Serra sculptures at MoMA taking in the feelings and ideas that each presented to me, while occasionally looking up at my grandmother, pitying her slightly.

On the car ride to the museum my grandma and I had a conversation about Serra. “There used to be a garden, where your grandfather used to eat lunch and it was a beautiful space,” she had begun to say with a sharp crackling voice, “I loved the space. Then one day suddenly there was this giant squiggle in the middle of the courtyard. There was such a hooplah about it and people protested it, so it was taken down. Now you know about Frank Gehry’s Bilbao in Spain right? Well in that space it is impossible to put art in, but Gehry said ‘People will build pieces to fit my space’ or something like that. Then when I go into the Bilbao I see the Richard Serra sculpture from those gardens.”

A security guard asked me to not touch the sculptures, because from his vantage point it looked as if I was running my hand across the sides of the giant Band, but the truth was my hand was 4 inches from the sculpture simply running parallel to Serra’s mass. His misunderstanding of the situation amused me.

Andrew pulled out a pair of pliers he had been using to solder the wires of his bass guitar. “Let’s look at this pair of pliers and try to describe them. They are made of two parts that meet together at a screw. The top half opens and closes in correlation with the bottom half. They are made from a grey metal with a red rubber coating the bottom legs. There is a molecular structure of the metal that these pliers are made of. We could point out the fact that these pliers were given to me by my father when I was fifteen; that I have used them for almost every project I have needed pliers for since; that these pliers survived a tornado that destroyed my home the same day my grandfather died. We could go on and on about these pliers, but we have whittled it down to a single word, pliers. I can simply say, ‘hand me the pliers’ and you know what I want you to do.”

“Richard Serra, I’m not really a fan,” my Grandma said, I told her I was.

“Now an artist,” Andrew continued, “is able to take things as simple as words and images and convey entire experiences. I can see how education is learning the word pliers.”