ART REVIEW : SERRA’S BIG-SHOULDERED SCULPTURE AT MOMA

Richard Serra’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 13) leaves little doubt that he is among the most powerful and pure of living sculptors. Contemplating his monosyllabic arrangements of huge slabs of pocked and rusted steel brings literally visceral sensations. Well, it brings at least one literally visceral sensation. It’s that feeling that we all love, that a ton of metal is about to fall on us.

Serra, 48, was born in San Francisco and worked in a steel mill as a youth while earning a degree in English literature. That combination of ruggedness and intellect has always been part of his art. It is a blend that makes the work come across with the ideological rigor of the old Russian avant-garde. But where a pioneer like Malevich made his statement in metaphors of theory, Serra states his in terms of intimidating physical reality. The work dares us to accept it on the artist’s terms or not at all.

At MOMA a piece called “Delineator” consists of just two oblong steel slabs about 10 by 25 feet. One lies on the floor, the other is attached to the ceiling. People are inclined not to walk on the floor piece because doing so enhances a feeling that either the ceiling plate will fall on you or the floor will rise up and you’ll be crushed like a B-movie hero trapped atop a hydraulic lift. Artniks appreciate a clear demonstration of the idea that the two like plates create the sensation through purely visual implication. Most folks just shuffle their feet nervously and walk sheepishly away.

This ability to dramatize the Gregorian simplicities of sculptural grammar is Serra’s greatest virtue. But encountering it is like being in a stuck elevator, wondering if the cables will hold. A Serra confronts us like a big bozo in a dark alley mumbling, “I big but I real nervous and if you don’t do me just right I squash you like a juicy bug.”

This kind of physiological bullying has caused him repeated trouble. Way back in 1970 he sawed up some huge redwood logs at the old Pasadena Museum of Modern Art. They dwarfed and crowded the viewer, creating a giant attack of claustrophobia. In reality the logs were an interesting sculptural demonstration of relative scale, but they set off a fuss over everything from ecology to fears they would break through the museum floor.

Later, an outdoor piece at a German “Documenta” exhibition outraged burghers, who used the big leaning enclosure as an outhouse. And of course there was the flap last year when the federal government decided to consider removing Serra’s commission, “Tilted Arc,” from the courtyard of a building in lower Manhattan.

When viewing the 10 large works in the Whitney retrospective, you wonder what all the fuss was about. Then you realize that Serra’s outdoor works--for all their vaunted importance in his career--don’t come off as well as these. Serra needs the physical compression and implied intellectual ambiance provided by the cloistered confines of a museum. Outdoors, his work loses scale and is too easily confused with any nearby construction site. This is rugged, macho -man stuff that thrives best when lecturing on sculptural syntax in a white lab.

There the natural chemical patina of steel surfaces looks tough and elegant, like graffiti from Lascaux. There it can bump its massive head on the ceiling, boom on about the Shakespearean intensity of “Circuit II,” the operatic breathing of “Two Corner Curve,” the precarious brilliance of “Five Plates, Two Poles” and . . . what else?

Not much.

There are 10 works here. There may not be that many ideas. Serra’s art seems to be subsisting on power and shifting geographic location rather than growth. It begins to remind one of those one-image artists from Jackson Pollock to Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. There is no question that each of them produced one great theme-and-variation, but each represented a heroic breakthrough that is now an established part of the lexicon and does not need repeating. Today--for better or worse--the emphasis falls somewhere between a need for mindless novelty and a desire for growth, such as we see in Serra’s contemporary, Frank Stella.

The way things stand, if Serra goes on as he is, he’ll become evermore identified as an artist of an epoch gone kaput.