Summer of 2008 was the occasion of my first true maraudes around Paris and among many other places to be, it was impossible to resist Richard Serra’s Promenade at the great and truly Grand Palais in the Champs Elysses, a temple created for the 1900 World’s Fair, the kind of harmonious structure that would never get built today for reasons all too obvious. (I’m not talking about the fruity Belle Epoque statues that adorn the façade, but the immense, inviting interiors.) You could say the same about Serra, an artist who doesn’t believe it’s his job to deconstruct society but to hone a distinctive, individual vision of what art can be and put it in your face without any of the frills that make explaining art such a tempting vocation. Art bureaucrats tend to have a strong reaction to attitudes like that, and like the Grand Palais itself, one wonders if we’ll see his likes again. Or where the Serras of today are! (Not his imitators.)
Being an ex-New Yorker, I can remember the intense brouhaha over Tilted Arc in front of one of the court buildings on Foley Square downtown. Serra’s Arc sliced that bland bureacratic foyer like a shiv.
Ugly, the critics fulminated. Has nothing to do with the site, the government that paid for it groused. The site itself was a boring plaza in front of a cluster of office boxes built to house the ever-growing legion of paper-shufflers (sometimes called paperasses in French.)
People didn’t take the hint : it quickly became a place to meet, to have a sandwhich or quick smoke where the boss on the fourth floor couldn’t see you, even a momentary shelter during those slanting downpours that come off the Atlantic in the spring. That’s just the popular vote and doesn’t really mean much in terms of aesthetic valuation but it gives another instance of people’s response to Serra’s work. However formidable it may be on the first take, it provokes a reaction, a curiosity, a desire to move around in its space. Not unlike, let’s say, Stonehenge.
Back to the Grand Palais.
Promenade was positioned in such a way as to make it look like the individual pieces might fall over like dominos. A veiled threat. They wouldn’t, would they ? Maybe that’s what the lady in the foreground is wondering about.
I learned a few lessons as I scampered around the Palais, one being that it’s hard to take a bad photograph in a space with so much light and so many vantage points. The other being that French security is pretty lousy, and once I was in the building, I could go pretty much wherever I wanted, climbing stairs marked forbidden, and hanging off balconies. Another reason to love France.
Serra’s work is brutal (no frills) and humanist at the same time. It carves space and magnetizes it, creating an order that you participate in, like the woman in the photo above who looks a touch lost but then about to break into a dance.
The era of heroic minimalism may be over but Richard Serra is still with us. Let the artist have the last word.
Obsession is what it comes down to. It is difficult to think without obsession, and it is impossible to create something without a foundation that is rigorous, incontrovertible, and, in fact, to some degree repetitive. Repetition is the ritual of obsession. Repetition is a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work. In order to work you must already be working.
-15h54, mardi 26 mars ‘24
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Combing through my files at the beginning of the month, searching for something else, I found low res copies of my visit to Promenade. Worth posting I thought. I only learned of Serra’s passing late last night when I got back from Mont Saint Michel, another monumental piece of site-specific sculpture. An unnerving coincidence or the Universal Mind at work, perhaps not so shocking since he was 85 years old. Maybe I’ll add a little to the essay but I think it’s at least as good as the obits in the mainstream press, minus the jargon, with better photos.
Dead or alive, the artist hangs on.
28 mars ‘24