Richard Serra, minimalist sculptor whose steel creations awed viewers, has died | Hacker News Reader

Richard Serra, minimalist sculptor whose steel creations awed viewers, has died

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136 pointspseudolus75 comments

My favorite Serra story is when he was hired to build a sculpture by Caltech. In typical fashion he decided he wanted to build a giant wall across one of the few remaining wide open green spaces on campus, the lawn adjacent to Beckman. In a nod to Caltech he called it “Vectors”.

The students were not happy. This was great lawn to just lay out, play frisbee, etc. A few days after this blew up in the student news, a large wall showed up right in front of the main coffee shop, the Red Door. That was a nice space with beautiful trees and tables (ah, the Southern California weather). The wall was right in the middle of this and blocked off the thoroughfare. The wall was called “Eigenvectors” and that word was painted on it, along with a ton of other linear algebra formulas. I remember walking by and going “holy shit is that the Moore-Penrose inverse?!” In the end the students won, the sculpture was never built.

I was a undergrad senior at Caltech during that time, and as luck would have it, I was taking an art history course. Caltech humanities courses tended to have visiting professors that would come for a single night a week. I mentioned to my professor that I did not think Serra's piece should be considered art and it turned into a debate that spanned several weeks. At first, I was worried I was taking a harsh stance but the professor was so excited that Caltech students took an interest in art and we happily debated for a while. I told her I hated Serra's Tilted Arc but conceded I did like his Sea Level and The Matter of Time.

While I was not one of the students that put up Eigenvectors, I would have gladly helped if I realized they were doing it. I argued to my professor that Eigenvectors was art because it stood for something and my professor could not have been happier about the situation.

Another protest piece that occurred was dumping a bunch of indoor and outdoor furniture on the very lawn that was going to host Vectors and then placing a sign on it that read something along the lines of "Invoice: Qty 1 art installation. Price: $1,000,000" in protest of the amount Caltech was going to pay Serra.

If I recall, while the students won, Caltech never admitted it was due to the outcry. The official statement argued that a geological report of the area deemed it unsuitable for such a heavy art piece.

I just looked online and it looks like they ripped up the entire lawn in a last few years to create another building and parking lot.

among other things what's inspiring is the fact that if they had let the iron wall be built, maybe the lawn would be still there today

thank you for this inspiring story

yes! we should tear up more open spaces and build more buildings?

Thanks for the story,.

I love Serra's work, but I'm glad this piece was never built. For artists of his generation, the thoughts/feelings of the Hoi polloi were of little regard. A space was their stage, dam the little people.

Seems he got to build one eigenvector at least - the last photo in the article, the Tilted Arc. Across a public square, everyone needs to walk around the eigenvector. I had a reaction similar to that of the students

But beautiful small figures :-)

> the thoughts/feelings of the Hoi polloi were of little regard

pedantic language note: "hoi" means "the" in greek. So, the thoughts/feelings of hoi polloi can be ignored just like that.

No one here has talked about the number of lives that Serra's work has claimed/ruined. So far: one death and two serious injuries. Details here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2018/aug/...

From this link:

> Richard Serra’s steel sculptures feel the most dangerous of all. They tower over you, surround you, menace you. The danger is not illusory. Serra’s rolled steel is dangerous, especially for workers who have to install it. In 1971, a contractor called Raymond Johnson was killed during the installation of a Serra sculpture. In 1988, two workers were seriously injured while deinstalling one of his pieces.

We were taught to hate his work at school. Big, heavy, industrial... 'big willy' art I remember one lecturer calling it. However, I always liked his work, largely as a result of seeing it in person at the Tate Modern. I could feel the literal eight of his work as I walked through it: heavy sheets of metal balanced against each other. Peril was part of the price of admission.

The death/injuries victims were all art technicians: people tasked with installing the work. I used to work with such people, and their job is a fascinating one. I remember helping to scan a building with ground scanning radar in order to determine if it was strong enough to hold Anselm Kiefer's library of huge lead books: https://www.wikiart.org/en/anselm-kiefer/the-high-priestess-...

It took a team of four men and a forklift truck just to turn the pages of these books.

I’m guessing nobody else brought it up because the original article already mentioned this fact.

Woops. My bad. However, I believe the details I raise remain generally valid.

I’m not sure it’s fair to describe something as “dangerous” and as having “killed” people when you’re talking about technicians hired to safely move or install something.

By that definition pretty much any object is “dangerous.”

Right, in order to fairly describe this man's artworks as any more dangerous than average based on their entire functional lifecycle we'd need to evaluate, for example, how many people were killed while producing the marble blocks used by sculptors such as Michaelangelo, or how many people died as a side effect of exposure to toxic compounds (e.g. cinnabar (red), cobalt (blue), lead (white)) while producing pigments for painters such as Rembrandt.

There is a clear difference between the dangers incurred by an artist (e.g. an artist using toxic pigments) and an artist endangering their employees (models, assistants, etc).

Similarly, there is a difference between the dangers incurred by an artist and the dangers incurred by anyone deeper into the supply-line (e.g. in the mining of toxic compounds to be used in paint/pigment).

The artist who taught me sculpture died as a direct result of employing asbestos in his work. He was an art student when he did so, and the information that could have saved his life was not then public knowledge.

One of the hallmarks of Serra's work is precisely danger. Stand in person inside of his work and tell me otherwise. This was a knowing gamble on his behalf.

> By that definition pretty much any object is “dangerous.”

Fair point.

However, like any employer an artist has a responsibly towards their employees. I hate to say this, but there is an inevitable credibility attached to art artist's work that results in an employee's death.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506

The painting Ophelia by Millais required a model sit in a bath of water for extended periods of time. From the article:

> The model, Elizabeth Siddal, a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites who later married Rossetti, was required to pose over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. The lamps went out on one occasion, causing her to catch a severe cold. Her father threatened the artist with legal action until he agreed to pay the doctor's bills.

At art school, this was presented to us as a romantic feature of the work, rather that the outrageous abandonment of an artist's responsibly towards their workforce.

> However, like any employer an artist has a responsibly towards their employees.

Were they his employees?

Hard to say, but the likelihood is that they were. Most 'blue chip' artists employ technicians that travel around the world to install and repair their work. This may be mediated through their dealer.

I mention repair as a lot of contemporary art requires ongoing maintain, Julian Schnabel's employs full-time a team who trot around the globe repairing his famous plate portraits.

Regardless, I would feel ethically responsible for anyone who installs my work. FYI: most exhibitions require that an artist define 'installation instructions'.

I'm more speaking concretely than theoretically: do we know he employed them? Even if an artist defines instructions, that doesn't mean that they'll be followed.

How many people die installing roofs above art galleries or felling trees for the paper upon which art is made?

It’s also weird that you were taught to hate something. Seems like a waste of time.

Exactly. It’s always so crazy to me how there’s such a double standard when it comes to art. Millions of people spend their entire lives in factories doing the same stitch over and over again, but if Kubrick makes Shelley Duvall do the same scene 100 times it’s abuse. How many people die in the shipping industry for example and no one calls them out

I'm not a huge fan of this kind of safetyism argument. Human beings have been injured or killed by most fields of human endeavor, it's certainly unfortunate but unless Richard Serra specifically was engaged in some kind of negligence I don't see how that's really a critique. In the last couple hundred years some person somewhere has variously been killed by swimming pools, kitchens, sidewalks, windows, bicycles, etc. How many people have fallen off say a roof in the last century? Imagine if you said 'no one is talking about the number of lives cut short by roofs'. A 0% injury/death rate is not really possible

The man just died and we're remembering what his art meant to us. Why would you expect a lengthy discussion on a handful of accidents his artworks caused? Read the room please.

The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has an entire wing dedicated to a giant Richard Serra installation that's one with the architectural space it's in. For anyone visiting the Basque country, I cannot recommend visiting the exhibit strongly enough.

And if Spain is too far for some American southerners, there are a couple of Serra pieces in the Chattanooga, TN sculpture park. I was surprised to run into them while I lived there.

Saw it once, it was incredible. I didn’t really know what it was when I first walked into the room and kind of got sucked into it.

This is a simple yet effective description of the unmediated art experience. At the end of the day, art is about standing-in-front-of, and experiencing, THINGS.

My favourite of his pieces is Open Field Vertical Elevations, which incidentally was erected in the fields outside the residence of a collector who also recently passed, near where I live in the middle of nowhere, Tuscany.

In person, viewed while immersed in its necessary context of landscape, it is visually powerful and moving. It is also a link to the greater world outside our narrow vales and to a cultural history of patronage of the arts.

I understand that the attitudes here are mostly skeptical of contemporary art, but it really goes too far in most cases. Serra wasn't Hirst.

Those are some interesting pieces. It'd be fun to create a game where players need to guess between "Art Installation or Random Pile of Trash"

One cannot guess with post-modernism. Classicism has fixed standards of beauty, you can measure them looking at a piece of an art and grade them. The follow ups like Renaissance art tried different standards of beauty, but the idea was the same: you measure level of art looking at the art. But post-modernism had shown then you can make a pile of trash and it might work like an art installation. The really interesting question is if any pile of trash can serve as an art installation? Or maybe you need a pile with some special characteristics? If so then what are those characteristics?

> what are those characteristics?

That's easy: does the particular pile of trash generate any interesting discussion?

(for the category-heads: what functors are there into or out of the pile of trash?)

EDIT: we have AI generated art; do we have AI art critics yet?

> does the particular pile of trash generate any interesting discussion?

Then, trash created by a celebrity, is art?

Because knowing that that person did that ugly thing, generates discussions (like "wow what did s/he think!? Is that the best they can do?")

Any straight answer I give to that would probably be long and boring and drag in things like "Marianne"'s 2024 reproduction(fr)[0] of Bourdieu[1].

Here's a shorter (albeit catechistic) version: would you count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873907 as an interesting comment?

How does Queen Bey's cover in that comment compare to David's Napoleon[2]?

How does Queen Liz' picture from that comment compare to her younger self[3]? to the Beyoncé cover? to Gainsborough's Mr. & Mrs. Andrews[4]?

From the standpoint of the graphic arts[5], do either of these queens count as artists? or as celebrities?

In which quadrant of [0] do celebrity news tabs belong? "Marianne"? (with what accuracy can we guess a website's target quadrant by its immediate visual impression?)

What other questions might we ask?

[0] https://panorama-pv5.immanens.com/api/document/3229/1399/xml... [6]

(in french; for related english content: https://dynomight.net/img/class/social%20positions.jpg

explained in: https://dynomight.net/class/ )

[1] https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Crossing_the_Alps

[3] https://photos.airmail.news/uwcwylyjv86yd02gja659nfc69sj-c12...

[4] https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/images/ch5_21.jpg

[5] the Muses all seem to be patrons of the literary/musical arts; are there equivalents for the visual arts? WTF is Urania ("astronomy & astrology") doing in that group?

suggests that X né Twitter has poor demographics in the hexagon. Are they better among anglophones than francophones?

(Louis Vuitton, Zara, pop music, and Marvel all fall exactly on the cultural centreline; do we suppose they were lucky, or that they poll —and position— often?)

I wondered when Jon Berger would show up. His analysis of the Gainsborough picture was very eye opening to those viewers raised on more traditional analysis such as that of Kenneth Clark.

Along the same vein, Francis Frascina's commentary on Guernica (see youtube) is also enlightening. Both Berger and Frascina are very much of their time (vaguely marxist veneer of the 1970s?) but the beauty of these works is that they inspire conversation in succeeding generations.

I see a conversation from Berger (1972) with preceding generations:

(Ep 1 18:40) > ...as soon as the meaning of the painting becomes transmittable, this meaning is liable to be manipulated and transformed.

Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is from 1943, and I believe the "game" played in Castalia was meant to be exactly this sort of manipulation and transformation; creating new work by combining and transforming old, kind of like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millefiori , but for all sorts of work, not just glass.

EDIT: heh, at 19:44 Berger gets around to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect (without, however, mentioning Кулешов) ... and at the close of the programme he even cites a reference*! (on broadcast TV? what kind of marvel is this?)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

My first thought was artworks like those of Tim Noble and Sue Webster: Literal piles of garbage in several cases, but also much more than that.

https://www.artworksforchange.org/portfolio/tim-noble-and-su...

Serra's work is just one of those things that completely changed my world. I don't know how old I was, but walking through his pieces made me realize that art could be larger than life. Truly a giant of the 20th century.

In 2002, Caltech students rejected one of his pieces, which would have been installed on the Beckman Lawn:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-may-22-me-calte...

https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/1826/1/2002_05_20_103...

The installation he had at SFMoMa, in the side entrance, was really great. The space now just feels naked without it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra

These are so large. How do you even go about bending such large sheets of steel in unconventional ways.

Big machines:

    "… we use very large machines first used to build battleships 
    in the Second World War. People really hadn't explored the 
    potential for what steel could be in terms of its variabilities 
    and elasticity. It's only recently been explored by a few people."

From: https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/236/3052

Stumbled upon 'Fulcrum' yesterday near Liverpool Station in London without knowing anything about it.

Incredibly impressive piece of art that made me stop and admire it for a few minutes. Watching the relatively minuscule people shuffle by at the base of the _enormous_ sheets of twisted steel was fascinating.

Yesterday I knew nothing about the artist but the moment I saw this article title I thought, "wait that piece had to have been this guy." I'm going to have to seek out more of his work.

It's reasonably hidden, lots of redevelopment work going on around that sculpture at the moment. Hopefully the setting improved a bit.

SF native. Brother of defense attorney Tony Serra who defended Shrimp Boy and the Ghost Ship guy.

Agree with comment below that his works are best appreciated by walking in their shadow.

The old James Woods film True believer is based on Tony Serra.

These sculptures are awesome. Literally. Walking next to one is a literally awe inspiring experience. They just seem so big and imposing standing next to one.

It makes sense he grew up in a shipyard town, big ships are imposing like his art. I’m not sure it was nearly formative, but I feel like he must have been going for something similar to walking through a shipyard, with all of the large ships but also the buildings and equipment and cargo are huge!

Love the article. I knew nothing about this artist, but after reading this, I am curious to see his works. Gives lots of details including pictures.

The article does talk about the hazards of installing these giant steel sculptures and that workers have died and been injured.

I've always admired his large outdoor work "Wake" at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. I have very fond memories of my kids peeking around the massive, wave-like walls of steel.

My visit to his stuff in Bilbao was amazing.

I for one have never heard of this artist. Sometimes I feel like there's a world of contemporary art that exists entirely apart from the layers of society I am exposed to.

Everyone’s taste is their own thing, but if you haven’t exposed yourself to the world of contemporary art, I’d highly recommend giving it a try if only to see how it bounces off you.

In my experience, great modern art creates an indelible impression that puts to shame all but the most thoughtful artifacts of our (largely “disposable by design”) popular culture.

I distinctly recall wandering through one of Serra’s oxidized marvels at the Bilbao Guggenheim, just before becoming mesmerized by Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors”—now 9 years ago.

It’s the penetration into memory and the deeper layers of the subconscious that really distinguishes the best contemporary artists and works.

I had to dig a bit, but MIT's "Transparent Horizons" (local description: "is neither") turns out to be Louise Nevelson's work, and "The Great Sail" is a Calder; turns out MIT didn't end up with any of Serra's work in the Big Hunk Of Metal genre. (On the other hand, unlike Serra, as far as I know none of Nevelson or Calder's installations actually killed anyone...)

This was a fairly prominent moment in his raise to the “mainstream”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilted_Arc

I went to a public university and walked pass/thru/around one of his works nearly every day on my way to classes for four years. It’s actually not a world as far removed as you might think.

It's unfortunate that you're downvoted, because I can relate. I knew nothing of the contemporary art world until I found myself working at an art marketplace and media startup. For a few years, I was immersed in it. When I left, I wrote in my farewell note that I felt like I gained a whole new layer of perception of my surroundings. I connected with art installations. I sought out galleries and museums when traveling.

This is how I became acquainted with Richard Serra's work. His pieces are so monumental and immersive that when you encounter his work elsewhere, you immediately know it, whether or not you remember his name.

So I don't blame you for not feeling a connection. But you might find it worthwhile to invest in learning about the art world. If you're interested, IMO, the single best thing you can do is go on the little scheduled guided tours at museums. The docents (volunteer guides) are great at making the art relatable.

Sad to see the other comments are so contemptuous. When you see one of his pieces in person, you will gain an immediate appreciation for what he was trying to do. Essentially Richard Serra’s iron sculptures were playing with the architecture of the spaces they were placed in. Turning an open plaza into a twisty maze and so forth. As far as art is concerned, one of my favorite people, and I’m glad he did what he did.

Yes, Clara-Clara (formerly installed at Jardin des Tuileries in Paris) was the first time I really "got" Serra -- at least, beyond the scale and imposition of the things. That sculpture was almost natural for the space, and people interacted with it by touching it, leaving white handprints from the soil across the surface, and creating a sort of ghostly effect of all the people who had been there. [1]

Too many Serra sculptures are just sort of treated as plop art, but if you see his stuff at Storm King or Dia Beacon or the site-specific installations, it makes a lot more sense.

[1] https://alltheartiveeverseen.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/serra-...

> When you see one of his pieces in person, you will gain an immediate appreciation for what he was trying to do.

No, sorry. It just doesn't work for me. Tastes differ, I guess.

I found most of his works to be typical of "put something big in a gallery and it looks amazing". Also, I feel annoyed by people who claim so much space. Not to say that his work is bad or useless -- I just don't like it.

Perhaps if I read more about his intentions I might change my mind. But the appreciation sure isn't immediate for me.

I hope you dont feel forced to like it in order to this of yourself as an art lover. That would be wrong. No one likes everything in a gallery after all.

Re Serra, one of the problems I have with it is that displaying a gigantic work in the confines of a gallery just feels, well, confining. You already know the boundaries of the space because you can see the walls, the ceiling, the giftshop, etc.

If the aim is to induce a sense of awe, or perhaps unease, at the mass of the work, or its size, rather like you might feel at an old site like Stonehenge, that effect is lost in the gallery.

In fact there is a general problem with how we display art that is not easily soluble. Much of what is in museums and galleries today was created and sold for a single buyer/viewer. Such works reward close inspection over many years by the owner. Maybe one year you see something you never saw before. That effect is totally lost in a gallery.

There isn’t a single contemptuous comment. Did you write this in anticipation of them?

Don’t be so cynical. I was like the third person to comment on this post and both existing comments were negative. One asking about a game telling the difference between art or trash, etc.

An early work of Serra’s involved him literally tossing molten lead at a wall where it would harden into a pile of waste on the floor. Art or trash indeed. https://www.artforum.com/features/due-process-richard-serras...

Well maybe give it a few minutes before judging the temperature of the conversation? At this point, it seems like there's a lot of appreciation.

I don’t think that comment was negative, it starts by saying they are interesting. I’ve seen a lot of art that purposefully juxtaposes itself with trash.

>Sad to see the other comments are so contemptuous.

There are literally no comments in this thread which are negative.

I have no idea why those who control the art world feel the need to present themselves as marginalized.

Not contemptuous , but this guy’s “art” is the type of thing that has helped alienate the common man and drove him into whichever political hands rejected these neoliberal-inspired creations.

Also, props to Serra for doing some “art” stuff for Qatar in the 2010s, the money was probably very good (which brings me to my above point).

Pretty sure the existence of art made from large pieces of steel isn't the thing that "helped alienate the common man".

Alienating art has been a staple of many past social revolutions, the “made up of steel” thing (like in this case) is just a secondary issue.

But I get this guy’s appeal and I also get why his audience wouldn’t want to see it that way, it is what is, nothing that the two of us can do about it other than trying to talk over an over-increasing socio-economic wall.

Can you name some of these social revolutions? I'm genuinely not sure what you are referring to.

Yes. I pull the strings on the art world and have complete control over everything but this comment thread.

I agree that too much art commentary is made without actually seeing the goddam artwork. As an art student I was guilty of this. I remember being very contemptuous of Edward Kienholz's work. These installation pieces looked very cheesy in photos, but when I saw one in real life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beanery) I was blown away.

I had the same reaction to Rothko. Doesn’t make sense until you experience it in person; the color and scale creates a totally different experience than what I was able to imagine looking at photos.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> For a week, I considered chartreuse seriously.

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