“Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years”

Sequence, 2006

Photograph courtesy the artist © 2007 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Lorenz Kienzle

No one could accuse Richard Serra of being a lightweight—and not just because the three most recent works in his survey at the Museum of Modern Art weigh in at a collective 550 tons. From his early, process-oriented experiments in lead, neon and rubber to his recent, protean manipulations of Cor-Ten steel, Serra’s 40-year engagement with abstraction has produced some of New York’s most formally rigorous, ruthlessly aggressive and transcendently beautiful works of art.

The key players in Serra’s 27-piece show—torsion, weight, concavity—may not sound like a match for Caribbean pirates, but MoMA is clearly making its own bid for a summer blockbuster; on YouTube you can catch a making-of preview, as riggers wrangle the gargantuan forms into place. Yet for all the behind-the-scenes muscle flexing, Serra’s sculpture is not about spoon-fed spectacle. To “see” you have to participate: to enter a space between curving vertical planes and spend time.

Like most big-budget productions, the MoMA show has its weak points. It includes no drawings from a master of the medium. A number of early works—including the seminal One Ton Prop (House of Cards) from 1969, in which four 500-pound sheets of lead lean together to form an unanchored cube—are corralled behind glass on the sixth floor. They look quarantined, even defanged. In a catalog interview with MoMA chief curator-at-large Kynaston McShine, Serra takes a swipe at Minimalism, saying that its works “read primarily as an isolated object in a rarefied box.” Unfortunately, that’s the precise fate that meets many of the artist’s own Postminimalist works in the show.

Despite such shortcomings, McShine and his co-curator Lynne Cook are bound to have a hit on their hands. The 67-year-old Serra is the heir apparent to the modernist sculptural lineage that is MoMA’s stock-in-trade, a patrimonial bloodline that extends from Rodin to Brancusi to David Smith. Just past the ticket-takers on the museum’s ground floor you’ll see Rodin’s radically tilting statue of Balzac (a scandal in its day). Think of it as a human-scale harbinger of Serra’s notorious Tilted Arc, the public sculpture that was removed (against the artist’s wishes) from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1989.

In the decades since that debacle, Serra has more than bounced back. His 1997 exhibition of “Torqued Ellipses” at Dia (where Cooke is chief curator) put massive plates of Cor-Ten steel through dazzling contortionist paces that engineers insisted were physically impossible; he proved them wrong and won rave reviews. In 2005, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain permanently installed a selection from the series that it grandiosely billed as “the largest site-specific sculptural commission in modern history.” (Serra’s work lends itself to a strain of megalo-maniacal machismo.) Another sign of the artist’s cultural currency was the sight of Serra playing himself in a Matthew Barney film, throwing handfuls of Vaseline—a play on the 1969 piece that is widely considered his breakthrough, in which he splashed molten lead against an uptown warehouse wall.

“New York is either a traffic accident or a fortress,” Serra told McShine in the interview. His show is a little of both. The layout is more of a minor moving violation than a Warhol-style crash, as the loosely chronological survey makes its erratic way from the sixth floor (with 22 works made between 1966 and 1986), to the sculpture garden (and two steel behemoths from the ’90s). It ends back upstairs, this time in the second floor galleries where three massive new pieces, all from 2006, make their debut. Here, the fortress phenomenon is in full swing: Sloping steel planes shift their effect between protection and assault. In the doubled curlicue of the 65-foot-long Sequence, serpentine folds play games with perception; interior and exterior merge, and it’s hard to keep entrances and exits straight. In Serra’s mystic geometry, even gravity assumes paradoxical proportions as hundreds of tons of steel are set whirling like a tornado with you at the eye of the storm.