When Richard Serra was about seven years old he would walk along the water's edge at the beach near his home in California, then turn around and retrace his route back to where he had begun. Same sand, same surf, same small steps – yet somehow the reversed orientation gave rise to an experience that was palpably different and thus perplexed the small boy. But when he returned home and tried to explain this conundrum to his mother, she advised him, quite simply, to ‘never mind’.

Serra recounts this memory, included in an interview with Met exhibition curator Gary Garrels, in the catalogue for Richard Serra Drawing, as formative for him as an artist – not, one assumes, as formative as his oft-told childhood sighting of a tanker at a shipyard slipping slowly into the water, but formative nonetheless, perhaps in part because Serra clearly did not follow his mother's advice. To the contrary, Serra has dedicated the bulk of his artistic career to paying 'mind' to the perceptual experience of the human body in movement through space, time and its immediate physical environment – most successfully, but not exclusively, in his sculpture. And moreover he has done so while maintaining an insistent and even belligerent attitude of rejection towards artistic convention that, by the mere fact of existing as convention, in effect 'advised' him otherwise.


Richard Serra, Pacific Judson Murphy, 1978, paintstick on Belgian linen, two parts: 285 x 442 cm and 285 x 272 cm, private collection. Photo: Rob McKeever. © the artist

Richard Serra Drawing captures both aspects of the artist. The work on view is referred to collectively as 'drawing', although by rights much of it could (or should) be categorised otherwise. More germane than a quibble over terms, however, is that the works collectively transmit Serra's fierce drive to break with tradition and generate, via two-dimensional work, a physical experience different from what most two-dimensional art is held to be capable of, more akin to an ‘expanded field’ of drawing that might parallel the ‘expanded field’ of sculpture which he helped to initiate.


Richard Serra, No Mandatory Patriotism, 1989, paintstick on two sheets of paper, 237 x 534 cm, collection Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Rob McKeever. © the artist

This, in other words, is an experimental body of work, and among the more successful of these experiments is a series of drawings consisting of vast stretches of Belgian linen that have been thickly coated with black paintstick, then cut and hung with precision so as to meld seamlessly with their architectural container. InPacific Judson Murphy (1978), two blackened sheets of linen meet in the darkest of corners, obliterating all sense of juncture between the walls on which they stand; the grainy black of Taraval Beach (1977) fills the height of a nearly 20-foot-high wall and looms, even at a distance, over an entire room; the two identical components of Blank (1978) occupy opposing walls, activating a force-field-like space between them.


Richard Serra, The United States Government Destroys Art, 1989, paintstick on two sheets of paper, 287 x 547 cm, collection Eli and Edythe L. Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Dorthy Zeidman. © the artist

These works, in striving for an autonomous presence, share the qualities of much of Serra's sculpture; but they do so, fascinatingly, in an abstracted or distilled version, not reliant on the three-dimensional works' characteristic combination of real weight, perceived threat and fluid occupation of space. A series of diptychs from 1989 – The United States Government Destroys Art, The United States Courts Are Partial to Government and No Mandatory Patriotism – functioned in a similar fashion. The drawings consist of paired sheets of paper, each covered with black paintstick; like sheets of Serra's favoured Corten steel, the blackened sheets of paper seem to lean against each other, providing one another with the support necessary to remain upright and creating a small but powerfully charged space between them.

Not all of these experiments can be said to have resolved themselves with an equal degree of success – such is the nature of genuine experimentation – and the show's installation suffered from lapses of pacing and balance. But as in Serra's 1968 film, Hand Catching Lead (on view here along with Serra’s three other early ‘hand’ films), in which his disembodied hand attempts with intermittent success to catch falling pieces of lead, over the course of his career Serra has openly placed himself in situations where his reach exceeds his grasp; and in so doing, he has proven what an artistic heaven is for.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through 28 August

Source artreview.com