Mariana Mogilevich at n+1:
I can imagine collecting, printing out, piling up all the books and journal articles produced on Richard Serra and how closely those stacks might equal the 320 tons (or 11 ½ feet) of Equal, eight boxes of equal volume but different dimensions stacked so that the immediate impression is one of simultaneous solidity and precarity. Over the past half century the art history industry has produced reams of interpretation, incorporating no shortage of words by Serra himself. The author of work so totally laconic has set the terms of its understanding as if the death of the author bypassed him entirely. I think of the spokesartist Robert Motherwell, who expended an awful lot of energy not so much on auto-interpretation as on ennobling a generation of abstract expressionist men, heroic and sublime (Vir Heroicus Sublimus, the painting by Serra influence Barnett Newman, on view two floors up from Equal at MoMA). After shoring up his and his friends’ reputations, Motherwell spent his later career relentlessly churning out canvases to finance his East Hampton house and lifestyle. Less defined by the company he kept than the space he occupied, Serra died at 85, in March 2024, in Orient. Serra had long kept a home and studio, designed by the same architect who transformed so many industrial structures for the display of his sculptures and who built a weekend house next door, on the tip of Long Island’s more rugged but still very expensive North Fork.
more here.
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