Richard Serra's sculptural practice reflects the fundamental new issues explored by the medium in the second half of the 20th century. The initially disturbing, troubling aspects of his work are in essence the product of our changing view of the nature of works of art.
The 19th century witnessed a sea change in the world of sculpture, sounding the death-knell of one era, and the dawn of the next. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) marked the culmination of an epoch, while at the same time overturning its conventions and norms. Rodin's consummate art of the representation of the human body, his ability to capture and convey the thousand fleeting expressions of the human face, or the pensive pose of a body folded in upon itself, brought him worldwide fame. And yet Rodin was hailed by his contemporaries as the finest and most lifelike sculptor in history of the medium, precisely because he worked in new and different ways. Assemblage, simplified and fragmented forms enabled him to reach new heights of perfection in expressive realism. Rodin's work sought not to conceal matter in form, but to sublimate it.
For centuries, sculpture had been essentially representational. Figures of men and animals, plant motifs, imaginary beasts, angels – all were 'freed' by the sculptor from the matter in which he worked. Abstract motifs were reserved for decorative sculpture, and never constituted an end in themselves, although the question of what could in fact be represented was a subject of debate for generations. Invariably, sculpture aimed to make visible that which could be seen elsewhere: to 're-present' an original model. Like painting, sculpture was seen as an art devoted to the copying of life. The sculptor reproduced what he had seen in his own imagination, or with his own eyes, and the resulting form was invariably recognisable to the viewer.
The two characteristics expressed to the highest degree in Rodin's work – the visible record of the artist's hands-on contact with his chosen material, and the figurative dimension of the resulting work – were both undermined in the 20th century. One example illustrates this shift perfectly: when Brancusi (1876-1957) created his Bird in Space series, from 1923 to 1940, one of the pieces was said to have been registered as a propeller paddle when it was shipped to the United States. The title was not enough to convince the US customs and excise authorities of its identity as a work of art. Today, we are of course more at home with the concept of abstract sculpture. It was this abstraction that fascinated Richard Serra when he discovered Brancusi's studio in Paris in 1961. Serra's choice of sculpture as his preferred medium is indeed wholly due to the personality and influence of this Romanian-born artist. Abstraction, which revolutionised the history of modern sculpture, is rooted in a concept of minimalism, which Richard Serra takes as the basis for his own artistic vocabulary.
Among others, the work of Donald Judd (1928-1994) marks a definitive break with the celebration of the virtuosity of the individual artist's touch, by producing works which consistently undermine any sense of the illusory, or of figurative representation. The work stands solely as the manifestation of the conditions of its own making: time, space and more generally the reality of the setting in which it finds itself. The example of Judd's work is particularly telling: sculpture becomes a self-reflexive artwork, the ultimate expression of the contiguity of matter, technical means and finished form, turning resolutely towards new horizons, new concepts of artistic production.
For many years now, numerous sculptors have explored the fundamental concepts of sculpture itself in their work, often adopting widely differing approaches. Richard Serra is one of the movement's most brilliant exponents. Not only do his works avoid representation of any kind, not only are they produced in industrial workshops, but above all they do not strive to be seen as beautiful monumental objects in their own right. They are conceived above all as a means of transforming space. For Richard Serra, the artwork is not confined to the sculptural object, but encompasses the space it configures, too. In the sixteenth century, Michelangelo said: 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.' The angel has long since taken flight…
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