Steely

Richard Serra, The matter of time, an installation of 8 sculptures, completed 2005, weatherproof steel, at the Arcelor Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.


Think of steel as a medium for making art, and perhaps more than any other artist, sculptor Richard Serra immediately comes to mind: over the last three decades his work has explored the physical properties of the metal, in epic-scaled sculptures which dramatically alter your perceptions of the internal and external spaces they're installed in. (Serra had steel in the blood: his father worked in a shipyard, and the artist supported himself by working in a steel mill while he studied at Yale.) His massive sculptures seem both beautiful and physically intimidating, as if by comparison to the sheer heft and torque of the steel walls that soar above the spectator you're unavoidably confronted by your own relative puniness and fragility. (It's much like the experience, actually, of standing on a dock next to a gigantic ship.)

As New Zealand art historian Anthony Byrt writes in the latest ArtForum, reviewing a show of Serra's at Gagosian Gallery in New York City:

"The thrill induced by Richard Serra’s sculptures doesn’t come from the sense that they might crash down at any moment. As this exhibition proves, it occurs due to the delicate manner in which they stay up, and the subtle way Serra manages to bend our experience around them."

One of the best art films I've ever seen, Alberta Chu’s 2003 documentary Seeing the Landscape documents the five-year long installation process of Serra's monumental Te Tuhirangi Contour, commissioned for New Zealand businessman Alan Gibbs's farm out of Helensville, and one of Serra's largest works. There are many seemingly dangerous moments in the film, provided not only by the enormous sheets of steel used to make the work (875 feet by 20 feet of 650-ton steel) but by the evolving relationship between the equally strong-minded collector and artist.

In a recent interview with the Art Newspaper's Louisa Buck, Serra -- who expresses surprise that an audience has developed for his work -- discusses his feeling for his chosen medium in a statement which is bound to be much-quoted:

"When I first started working in New York I was working with molten lead and I was working with rubber and I didn’t want to go to steel, not because I didn’t know enough about it, but because it really had been the traditional material of the 20th century in terms of sculpture. But for the most part no-one was using steel in the way that I understood it. It had not been used for its weight, its counterbalance, not for its cantilever nor its stasis or gravitational load. It had not been used in the way that it had been used in the industrial revolution in terms of building processes and procedures.

"Instead what they had done was to cut and fold it and use it as kind of three dimensional surrogate for painting. It was hung out in space and painted to have a 3-D planar look so its basic fundamental balance was untrue. It was either bolted into the ground or welded up in the air, then held with a staff and painted green, blue, pink or purple or whatever, so that its inherent properties of gravity were being denied in favour of its visual image readout. But although that was very, very successful for years it was also a limitation and it always remained the handmaiden of painting. I think [Ad] Reinhardt said that sculpture was something that you bumped into when you were backing up from looking at a painting."

Not much chance of that with a work by Serra.

But is it better-looking than nothing at all?

(Via C-Monster)

Andy Rooney shares his thoughts on art in public places.

"Is it really better-looking than nothing would be?"

Not a bad question to think about when planning public art, actually.

I was with Andy on the decorated cows and the dog in a gilded cage. He lost me, though, at the Tilted Arc business. There's a world of difference between enormous urban knick-knacks and difficult public art.

In New Zealand I think we tend to go for a mid-ground in our public art commissions: works by competent artists which aren't too intellectually or physically challenging. At the moment, we seem particularly keen on public works that evoke the history of place. Might be time for some tougher stuff. Some art which makes a public place its own.

We do do a nice line in urban knick-knacks, though.

Photo of The Pig in Wellington's Civic Square. The smoking cigarette someone had tastefully added in magic marker seems to have been removed since I last saw it.

Photo of the appalling Christchurch Corgis by Michelle from christchurchdailyphoto.com . The rear dog is sniffing a half-melted bronze ice-cream cone. Ankle-tapping death-traps at night-time...


And Auckland's goat stack.

A theme is developing ...

Viking hell

Jason Greig, Viking U-Boat, etching, 1993: the only New Zealand work of art on a Viking theme ever to be shown in a public art gallery.*

The main streets of provincial New Zealand are studded with good intentions. Some of them are forty foot high, made of concrete, and shaped like a carrot. It is no coincidence that as various governments of the day pulled the infrastructure out of the regions, shutting down Post Offices, hospitals, and schools, the citizens of small town New Zealand, concerned both to attract tourists to their locales and to persuade the remaining inhabitants that life was good, fund-raised to erect ridiculous attention-seeking monuments -- making an emphatic statement of the local among what architect Robert Venturi has termed the "persuasive heraldry" of the road side.

Now tempers are flaring over the design for the latest 'big icon', the Dannevirke Viking, set to join the Ohakune Carrot, the Paeroa L&P bottle, the Taihape Gumboot, the Tirau Sheepdog, the Rakaia Salmon, the Big Slice of Kiwifruit at Te Puke, etc. etc. in the pantheon of gigantic provincial New Zealand public sculptures. The resource consent has now come through for the 10-metre figure, but there has been a great deal of argument and some painful compromises along the way: the sword of the original design has now been swapped for a "less bloodthirsty" axe.

But the main problem for the good people of Dannevirke (a truckstop in the Manawatu settled by a handful of Danes and Norwegians in the 1870s) is the horns on the helmet: apparently serious Viking scholars have long since put to bed this tiresome myth, which interestingly, was first promulgated by a visual artist. Viking helmets were definitely worn sans horns, and it would be "painful" to see them pictured otherwise, said Norwegian immigrant Johan Bonnevie when interviewed by Mervyn Dykes of the Manawatu Standard.

At primary school in England during the mid-1970s, we "did" the Vikings. The mental picture I have carried with me is of snarling ginger-headed hordes roaring down the country from Scotland, swinging double-headed axes in pursuit of rape, pillage, and general menace of the poor old lily-livered Anglos, before they rowed off back to Scandinavia in their funny long boats, stolen gold coins spilling over the gunwales. And yes, they wore the double-horned helmet. I rather think it is this idea of the Vikings that the more sensitive elements among the citizenry of Dannevirke are keen to avoid.

Wellington-based sculptor Dennis Hall, who sounds rather grumpy at all the criticisms levelled at the sculpture, says that his gigantic Viking is not intended to be a historical study.

"Ask most people to draw a Viking and they will come up with someone in a horned helmet. What I am giving them is a movie version of a Viking."

Obviously not too precious about his work, which he's constructing in collaboration with Wellington's Weta Workshop, Hall says it's meant to be a "common stereotype", which he clarifies as "a cross between a piece of art and a piece of advertising". (He is also responsible for the much-photographed gargantuan Te Kuiti shearer.) The inside of the work will be left hollow, so that maintenance can be carried out from within. "It will last for thousands of years," threatens Hall.

I started writing this piece thinking that I might draw some kind of parallel between the Dannevirke Viking and the Tilted Arc controversy, but although it's possible, I actually don't think I can bring myself to. I think the art story is instead in the statement by the chairperson of the Dannevirke Promotion and Development Society Inc, Malcolm Peffers, that "the Viking Icon is NOT a statue; An icon is an image - a branding - a trademark - which is NOT necessarily historically correct."

Although, if I understand Peffers correctly, it's intended to be seen less as a work of art and more of an advertisement for the town, I'd suggest the reason that Dannevirke's Viking has caused so much local controversy is that it encroaches on the conceptual -- perhaps the emotional -- territory of public sculpture. Rather than advertising what the place is all about today -- Te Puke earning its revenue from offshore sales of kiwifruit, for example, or Ohakune growing whopper carrots or Tirau hawking sheepskin slippers -- the big cartoony Viking on the roundabout interprets Dannevirke's past, drawing on the cultural memory of the place rather than representing its current economic identity. As such, its inhabitants, including the descendants of the original Scandinavian settlers and local Maori, will necessarily have a point of view about the way their history is memorialized.

Peffer notes that still unbuilt, the Viking non-statue has already "given Dannevirke the best publicity that it has ever had". But the promotions group have agreed that the slogan which was originally to accompany the figure, "Take a liking to a Viking," must go.

Pity.

----
*Go on, prove me wrong...