Richard Serra at The Met

                        
                  So I went to visit the recently opened Richard Serra exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day. By my estimation he is one of the most famous and influential and prolific American artists still living and working today. Now he made his name(and rightfully so) with large scale steel sculptures experienced sometimes in public, site-specific places but this particular retropspective features everything except what he is primarily known for. No sculptures here--yet as you walk through each room and spend some time with each piece, the Richard Serra signature becomes apparent.
Here we get drawings, notebook doodles, three videos from the 1960's  but mostly(and this was my favorite part anyway) we get large wall size or half-wall size pieces painted black using a custom built 'paintstick' as he calls it on either Belgian Linen or Hiromi Paper. In his world we do well to think about weight, gravity, process, material, and our own bodies experience with those things.
These works are not about image. When you confront or are confronted by one of these massive black Belgian Linen pieces tight against the wall so that the whole what was once a spacious white room is fundamentally altered and your feeling about where you are is altered too. In the last room these giant black rectangles(in other rooms they are triangles in the corners) reached the ceiling some 50 ft high and as you approached they became a towering barrier but only a barrier if you were trying to look into them, through them. These were not walls of airy darkness. Despite their scale and solid black color, these were not something you looked into as though it was a window on another dimension or whatever. In these pieces there is nothing 'out there' or 'in there' because these are not portals or like looking up at a night-time sky. This is physicality. This is material. This is not to help illusion. This is about physical interaction in the present. If you're a big fan of all things colorful, you prolly aint gonna dig this jam. There are no other colors except black in any of the work. Using his custom paintstick which was a combination of crayon, oil, wax, and pigment, he plays on similar themes by varying how thick or thin he paints it on. The exhibit itself is called 'Drawings' but I can't see how these particular pieces(and there are quite a few) are to be considered drawings; not that its a big deal. It isn't. (I'm not covering every piece in the in exhibit in this post.)
In terms of the notebooks under glass cases with certain pages open to the viewer, we see basically a hyper creative individual doodling. If these weren't the notebooks of Richard Serra one gets the impression they wouldn't garner such spotlight. In one room of pieces from the 1970's, the glare from the plexi-glass or whatever it was makes it impossible not to see a reflection. It totally distracts the viewer from the work. This I have noticed is becoming more and more a problem in museums. I realize the need to a have a protective see-thru shield of some kind but find something that doesn't function as mirror and totally change the experience of what we are supposed to be looking at.
All in all, Richard Serra restores my belief in the relevance of a brand of Art for Arts sake that I don't mind subscribing to. I'm gonna go back to the Met next week and take a look again and see what happens.