Serra at Broad's BCAM

One of my all time favorite artisits, Richard Serra, has top billing at BCAM, the new wing (or really it's own museum) at LACMA. Before I sing the praises of BCAM, I have to admit my unbounded, uneducated, unearned snottyness when it comes to modern museums. In defense of my complaints, so many of these museums are poorly arranged, more closely resembling a look-what-I've-got, crap-ass-china-cabinet-of-porcelain-angels than a cohesive journey and experience. They entirely miss the concept of presentation in their focus on "Showing".

But anyhow, now that my little diatribe is done, onto the BCAM and Serra...

The BCAM itself is perfect, The ground floor is dedicated to Serra, and Kruger gets the shaft. HA! She really does though, and it was my only complaint, she has a great piece lining the entire humongous elevator shaft but the back and sides of the elevator are not the glass they should be to showcase it. Insead, they block out the piece as you ride in the elevator. Oh well.

Onto the Serra- This is the kind of experience that got me into Contemporary Art in the first place. Walking in and around these pieces, and seeing and feeling the bend around them, was altering to say the least. My friend Rachael Smith, the Vanna White of Serra's piece in the photos, was thankfully with me to walk into these silent little rooms, born of the bands, as if side altars of a great cathedral. The leanings of the walls, and the depth, and mass of the steel, is something not only seen, but felt, in a truly visceral sense. It's almost as if the power of the piece were enough to transform the air around the piece, bending space itself...

I'm going to stop now, because this is getting out of hand, and I feel like it's my post about the Tea Ceremony (although, now that I mention it, there are some very real similarities) but anyhow, seeing as I might be getting a little over the top here, I'll just wrap it up by saying it was an extremely memorable and moving experience.

Below are the remarks of the curator

Band may qualify as Richard Serra's magnum opus, representing the fullest expression of the formal vocabulary proffered by his monumental steel arcs and torqued ellipses of the 1980s and '90s. Band is among the most formally elegant and technically complex works of Serra's oeuvre, a sculpture that took him two-and-a-half years to develop and which he described as "a completely new form for me." Whereas the arcs and ellipses had a stolid austerity and an uncompromising formal logic, Band introduces a new quotient of fluidity and sense of freedom, undulating with the apparent ease of a ribbon, flowing back and forth with almost balletic grace. Yet, it is plainly – obdurately – a manifestation of its own titanic size and weight, indomitable in its mass, volume, and ownership of space.

Serra's art has always forcefully asserted its materiality and evinced the process of its fabrication. Band is no exception. It is a daunting display of its own immensity, evoking the incomprehensible mechanics of handling some two-hundred tons of hot steel and the precision engineering that goes into shaping it, as well as the placing of its component parts, which requires tolerances down to a single millimeter. At twelve feet high and more than seventy feet long, the work is vast even by Serra's monumental standard. Careening aesthetically between bravado and elegance, Band bespeaks the ambitiousness of Serra's artistic vision and his commitment to its physical realization.

Howard Fox, Curator of Contemporary Art, 2008