When a several-ton slab of cor-ten steel crushed an installation worker at the Walker Art Center in the early 70s, Serra's work acquired a mortal dimension that most people don't associate with art.

Pop art had wooed the middlebrows through the power of mass publications like Life and Look magazine. There was a denaturing involved in the widespread acceptance of Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana and other chic fabulists of the American commercial image.

Serra more than any of the others invested in gravity in a manner so extravagantly literal that it pushed the existential envelope of art to overlap with war itself. It wasn't a cartoon from any angle. It dug beneath the merzbild of the dadaists, and the mobius strip tease of the cubists, and tried to reconnect with art as life and death. But for the midtown party and chelsea gallery orchid eaters, art has no real business intersecting with war. It should at best play with cap guns, with the faux abbatoir pretense of Damien Hirst, but not with real honest-to-god dead people.

The deadly gravity of Serra's work still look at us, a question that can only be answered with a eulogy delivered in a language like molten lead.

Excellent use of the word "gravity" to mean both gravitas and a literal force of nature.

Since you focus on Serra in the 1970s, are you saying that his current work is not as effective as his earlier work?

I saw (experienced?) the Serra show of twisty torquey things in New York, not long after 9-11, and it was kind of unsettling, but impressive. Besides the impact of the big shapes, I couldn't help but wonder how they were installed. Such a nice. even patina of rust without a mark on them (did they apply some sort of oxidizing agent after installation, I wondered?).

Construction workers here in NY will swear to you that nearly every bridge ever built has a body encased in at least one of its cement pilings. Of course art installers aren't paid as well, and probably haven't thought as clearly about the possibility of dying for art as the I-beam artists have about dying for commerce. Have to agree with you about the Chelsea crowd. Once you've had a look at Bodies: The Exhibition (especially that last bunch of, well, installations) the last thing on earth you will want to see is a bunch of art majors and gallery owners in a room full of corpses.

I was inspired by Slate's essay and this board's posts to do some further reading about Serra on Google. Now that Serra is a big star, there is more media coverage of his installations. There are several places online, even YouTube, where you can watch a time-lapsed video of workers installing his pieces at the MoMA exhibit. I also discovered that he's been using the same installers for the last 20 years or so. I guess he and they feel confident about what they're doing.

I like to think that Serra's work can be read outside of the context of that installation accident. Can you view Andre's work without thinking about the death of his late wife? Lots of people can't. These people take the moral responsibility of art and artists pretty literally and seriously. Overall, that doesn't bug me as much as the snide position taken elsewhere on this board that artists are all posers and elitists and drunks, and eve BAD TIPPERS, perish forfend. And this as well is understood as a critique of the work. I somehow knew tht the chatter wuld all go back to the instllation death and Tilted Arc. For the punters, those two events will always bracket Serra's career, no matter how long and distinguished it may be. The approach that serra's *gravitas* somehow saves him from "the chelsea gallery orchid eaters" is way way too silly to pass without comment. Do you mean that art, like war is all about sex? Does it all come down to fag-bashing, for you? two points: Tilted Arc was actually good, well-sited urban sculpture. It wasn't as imposing as the publicity photos at Castelli made it seem, or as horrible an impediment to daily life as the faux-populist campaign against it made it seem. It was just art, and pretty good art. It should have been given time, not made the target of mass hysteria. And it should have been supported by some kind of contextual curation by the arts bureaucrats who just dropped it in place and ran, leaving the public first mystified and then angry. The elitism in this case WAS NOT SERRA'S ELITISM. So why blame him for it? Mostly because artists are easier targets than rich people. Second point: the Torqued Ellipses are great, breathtaking sculpture. A lot of Serra's early work (not all of it, but a lot) was muscularly overscale, but this work shows him to be as sensitive to issues of scale as you could hope an artist would be. Looking back, I remember getting caught up in the class politics of the Tilted Arc controversy and losing touch with the fact that the piece itself (TomWolfian bullshit aside) was miraculously sensitive to the space for which it was intended. The politics were way too complex and the politicans were way too sleazy, and the work should some time be rescued from the chaff cloud they produced.

hi melvyl (new spelling?),

I don't understand your anger here. I think zeitguy was defending Serra against Chelsea lotus eaters (instead of orchid eaters) who are apathetic and prefer "easy" artists to raw ones like Serra.

As for "Tilted Arc," perhaps it was ahead of its time. Perhaps it was not as appealing as some of Serra's more recent work. (Several of the reviews I read last night said that.) Perhaps people are more attuned to Serra's work today. (Consider initial reactions to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring.") I don't think mentioning "Arc" or the death of an installer is necessarily putting down Serra's entire career.

Also, what about MessyONE's comment that maybe it should be optional as to whether or not one has to go through one of hs pieces to get to work or to get to the entrance of a museum? (Was it optional with "Tilted Arc"? Is is optional at Bilboa? Will it be optional at the museum (LA? SF) in California?

Mary Ann

As far as I can tell we don't have an argument here. I don't think anything is all about sex. Even sex. Least of all art and war. I don't know you but for you to extract "fag-bashing" from my post seems way over the top, unless any gnomic comment on art fits that category for you. Outside of some of that straw-man hoo-ha, I like your elaboration of Serra's specific works.

Thanks for an interesting reply. I don't mean that in a patronizing way.

A variant on my main point is that anyone trying to restore the life and death dimension of art to popular consciousness might be misreading Poussin, even the Sistine Chapel, but the effort deserves a deeper look.

Hi Mary Ann, long time no see.

I wish I could see the current installation. My personal impressions of Serra are limited to older works, so my comment was not meant to compare phases of his career as much as to note the intersection of metaphor and reality which his (and as others point out, other minimalists, Andre perhaps especially) career enfolds in such an extreme manner.

I have been away from the Fray for a long time. This is a refreshing homecoming. While it seems to encapsulate the whole gamut and gantlet of response types my posts used to evoke, I hope I can fit into this new crowd!

Hi zeitguy,

(head down, face red) Ummm... ummmm, I must admit, zeitguy, that your nic does not ring a bell. Was your previous presence here under a different nic?

As for fitting in with the new crowd, I'd say you're doing fine, what with an editor's pick checkmark (substituting for stars) your first time out.

Mary Ann
(she of the failing memory)

I do hope to be interesting. My hackles go up when people start talking about some art as serious and Real as opposed to other art, made by suspiciously fey and flowery types. I do have to agree with you about Damien Hirst. I imagine him as a character in a remake of Pygmalion, in which some big time art critics make a bet that they can make a talentless drunk into an international art star within a year. Julina Schnabel could film it as a musical; call it My Fair Laddie. Whatever.

"Some of what she said was technical, and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile." --Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an institution

Sorry, I meant the above as a kind of sotto voce aside, but I didn't know how to make it a general post. It was not intended to be snide or in response to any post above. I have a love/hate response to Serra. I think Tilted Arc was an arrogant and macho gesture for a public space, but I now think he has evolved into a genuine and significant master with a unique vision. I think Minimalism is a dead end and I'm not sympathetic to his aesthetic--yet I can't ignore his contributions to sculptural history. He is also a courageous process pit bull of an artist and deserving of any acknowledgment he gets. I also found him to be pretty humble (for a guy with his size ego) in the Charlie Rose interviews.