An era of Serra

How do you move the 550 tons of steel that's part of the Richard Serra retrospective at the MoMA up and into the second story of a mid-town building? Randy Kennedy of The New York Times details the choreography to do just that in this article.

"Plate by curved plate, workers from Mr. [Joe] Vilardi’s Long Island company, Budco Enterprises, hoisted each piece from an empty lot on the museum’s west side to a makeshift two-story-high platform, slowly lowering it onto three humble hunks of metal with rollers, called skates. A forklift then nudged the plate, roller-skating it into the building to its next appointment, with the gantry. Dangling from the gantry’s cross beam were cables with two crablike steel claws that grabbed the plate and hoisted it into the air. The gantry then glided down the room with the plate, which appeared strangely weightless, like a velvety orange sail being wafted by a breeze."

As Michael Kimmelman exlains in his review, "That second floor at the Modern, by the way, is the show’s tour de force. A high, huge and like so much of this museum, totally unlovable space, it was conceived for housing Mr. Serra’s sculptures." Certainly Serra's pieces just can't be parked anywhere. Frank Gehry specifically designed a space large enough to hold Serra's sculptures in the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It took an old Nabisco factory -- now the Dia Beacon -- hold more of Serra's torqued ellipses. And the Gagosian Gallery, which played host to more spiral, toruses and spheres in 2001, has to be one of the largest gallery spaces in Manhattan.

A slightly less complicated installation in the garden of the MoMA is below.


The retrospective is, of course, incredible (despite what this guy at the Washington Post says.) The newest pieces continue to engage the visitors. Some people walk the perimeter as if they were in a labyrinth while others go straight to the center of the ellipses. Two works in particular, Band and Sequence, add serpentine elements and surprise to the bending of balance and perspective that Serra does so well.