Sometime during our honeymoon trip to Bilbao, Charles told me about the friction between architect Frank Gehry (total genius) and sculptor Richard Serra (also genius, in that prickly artist kind of way), where Serra had said that Gehry was not an artist, only did drawings, and something about how it was up to engineers, and physics gods, and other people to create his work. This burned me for months. I read the actual article, found the "apology" both off-putting and insufficient, and swore off Serra forever, though his amazing works in the Gehry-designed Bilbao Guggenheim seemed designed exclusively for the space and begged entrance.
10 months later, the sprout goes on Big Art Adventure to the new Dia:Beacon, wth Papa, Grandparents Paoletti and visiting friend Amy (whose biscotti have no peer). And, Grandmother Sprout turns into happy skipping freak over the physics involved with the Serra sculptures, aka "torqued ellipses". Mama finds out that Serra doesn't build these, he does the math, and draws them, but some ship-builder actually creates them, because, of course, "Look how big they are."
So, now, who's the artist? Maybe Sprout will tell us all.
Posted by Rebecca at July 02, 2003 12:44 PM in sproutnotesWhy I really find the sculpture so exciting - in Serra's own words, "I had a need to walk into and through and around it, then you get involved with what effect the work has physically on your body as you walk. So, time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with, not only sight and boundary, but how one walks through a piece and what one feels and registers in terms of (one's) own body in relation to another body. So, in that sense, as the pieces became bigger and you walked into and through and around them, they took on other concerns which were more psychological, even though implied and not specific than in the early work." And the surfaces are quite beautiful as well....
Posted by: Grandma-to-be on July 2, 2003 09:07 PMokay I spent the day watching Lifetime Movie Channel and reading books about the Manson house (near my apt in Cole Valley) and finished off a jar of queso.
after reading this entry, it's painfully obvious that I need to expand my knowledge of the cultured world around me.
Have any book suggestions on these sculptures so I can read and join the conversation without sounding like a slack-jawed yokel?
- bb
Posted by: bonnie on July 8, 2003 12:10 PMFor more info on Serra and the Torqued Ellipses, see
http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs/serra/ellipses/
GTB
Posted by: Grandma-to-be on July 8, 2003 09:47 PM