‘The processes of construction, concentration and daily labour attract me far more than the lightness of fantasy and imagination, and the quest for the sublime’
— Richard Serra


Two important works by American sculptor Richard Serra, Promenade and Clara Clara are situated in the centre of Paris from 7 May until 15 June. Promenade was commissioned by the newly-founded organisation Monumenta, which was launched in 2007 with the objective of organising an annual collaboration with an artist and the placement of a site-specific art work in the 13,500 m² space of the Grand Palais.

The work Clara Clara was created in 1983 on the occasion of Serra’s solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and it was installed throughout the duration of the exhibition in the Tuileries Gardens. Twenty-five years later — during which it was stored — it has returned temporarily to its original location. According to Alfred Pacquement, curator of Monumenta 2008 and director of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou, the re-installation of the work seeks to commence a dialogue and to create a conceptual passageway between the two artworks. The aspiration of the curator synthesises the artist’s intentions. Richard Serra has stated many times in the past that movement is the main axis of his art while, according to Hal Foster, his work consists of a dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape. The artist often approaches his work in phenomenological terms; he refers to the bodily experience inside the space and the pure form as a vehicle of meaning: ‘In all my work the construction process is revealed. Material, formal, contextual decisions are self-evident’. Elsewhere he mentions that what interests him most is to reveal the structure, the content and the character of a space and a site, defining a natural structure through the materials that he uses.

Richard Serra began his sculpture in the middle of the ’60s. At the beginning, he explored the morphological qualities of rubber, steel and neon creating mainly indoor sculptures. At the end of the ’60s he started to create film and video, while at the same time he recognised the morphological power of steel and turned to a systematic exploration of this material. At the beginning of the ’60s, while he was studying painting at Yale, he had worked as a labourer in the steel industry and he claims that this experience deeply influenced him. Throughout his career Serra has almost exclusively been interested in primary materials — with the exception of some works made with neon and some made of stone. He is interested in the structural components of modern architecture and mechanics, among them concrete. When he uses these materials he always preserves their rough character; he has never attempted to clothe them with decorative elements; he adopts a modernist aesthetic that reminds one of Mies van der Rohe.

The aesthetics of Promenade stands in stylistic opposition to the building of the Grand Palais. The building is an architectural achievement of the industrial development in France and was built together with the Eiffel Tower on the occasion of the International Fair in 1900. At the same time that the first skyscrapers were built in Chicago with steel frame and glass, in Europe, Art Nouveau –which broke with the historical styles at the same time that it morphologically echoed the pre-modern era with the extensive use of decorative elements– was still flourishing. The Grand Palais constitutes a monumental example of this period and radiates a final baroque colonial grandeur. The façade reflects eclectic prototypes –with a classicist highlight. A glass roof rises 30 metres from the floor, over the building that is 200 metres in length, creating a dome in the centre, while ornate Art Nouveau columns ascend to the roof. In this romantically anachronistic context Richard Serra’s work stands emblematic; in a first reading it appears minimalist, in a second it is deeply sensual and seductive.

Promenade is a site-specific sculptural installation consisting of five steel slabs that are each 17 metres high, four metres wide and about 15 centimetres thick. The verticality of the work rises forcefully into space. At first, the artist thought of creating a horizontal work, hesitating to counter the grand vertical structure of the building. Nevertheless, he ended up creating an installation of vertical dynamics that, at the end, was fully justified. The form of the work does not leave the horizontal space unused. The five slabs are situated at slightly counterbalanced angles, thus creating a sense of movement when one walks between them. The reception of the work as lived experience constitutes a fundamental objective of the phenomenological approach. Moving through the space of the Grand Palais one discovers the diverse aspects of the work and this process is sustained throughout the length of the work. The tall steel plates seem different when viewed from above, standing on the highest steps of the building and different when one is opposite and close to them, and again altered when they are observed from a distance. When the visitor walks at a distance from them, the relationships between them are transformed and the work is renewed, appearing to vibrate.

Setting aside the relationships between its different parts, the work seems to expand to the exterior space of the building. The glass roof allows the installation a flexible restraint and the sculpture is found to be in a state of transition between the interior and exterior spaces. Serra’s work, as a whole, has an architectural character and it creates dynamic relationships with the environment in which it is situated. The significant element of this installation is that the artwork is able to engage in a dialogue with an uninterrupted inner space of great dimensions, which is not a typical white cube but a site of explicit sophistication that is infused with history. The sculpture is 17 metres high, which is half of the building’s total height. Inside this space the impression is created of an intangible extension of the five plates on the way to infinitude. The monumental form of this sculpture appears to be pervaded by a metaphysical spirit; the massive steel slabs stand spread apart, like objects of worship in a temple. The light that enters from the roof generates an environment of spatial unity, which is momentarily disrupted by the visitor. The passage through the sculpture itself, as suggested so much by the artwork’s title as by Rosalind Krauss’ renowned book Passages in Modern Sculpture — which refers to minimalist art — constitutes the main axis of the work; the sculpture cannot exist inside a strictly determined spatial frame, it is allocated in the experience of the fleeting constituent of time (Hal Foster, 1996).

Altogether, Richard Serra’s exhibition at the Grand Palais is an integrated example of an oversized site-specific sculptural installation that has concurrently been contextualised by events of unprecedented quality (a concert by Phillip Glass, talks by Jacques Rancière and Robert Storr). It is much more consummate than similar productions by other institutions such as the ones for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. In the case of Promenade and Monumenta we come across a French approach to the monumental-entertaining sculptural blockbuster, which remains true to the rules of the star system and the ‘macho’ art world spectacle. At the same time, it does not cease to offer high quality, self-respect, and a casual institutionalisation, which focuses on the pleasure of art and life in a way that only the French visual art tradition is able to maintain so effortlessly and so well.


Promenade
Grand Palais
07 May – 15 June 2008