A Steel and Space Odyssey

Michelangelo carved marble. The Yoruba in the Sudan carve wood. The 9th century artisans who built the temple at Borobudor in central Java carved volcanic rock.

Richard Serra, the New York-based artist whose stunning exhibition of recent work opens Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, is a sculptor too, but a sculptor with a difference. Richard Serra carves space. His sculptural objects are fabricated from steel, but the material he manipulates most profoundly slips right through your fingers; you cannot touch it with your hands, but you can feel it in your gut.

The exhibition, organized by Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Julia Brown, a former MOCA curator now at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, is a flat-out tour de force. In fact, it’s hard to come away from this exhilarating show without thinking that, at 58, Serra ranks as America’s greatest living sculptor.

The curvilinear spatial complexity of these works is deeply compelling. You’re pulled through the galleries like a charged electron--exploring, examining, scratching your head, feeling the inexplicable power in the pit of your stomach. Although dispersed throughout a 50,000-square-foot building, the sculptures even create energized spaces between and among one another.

Seven of the show’s nine sculptures take the form of torqued ellipses. Imagine something like the interior shape of the Coliseum or the Rose Bowl, then give it a twist, and you’ll have some idea of the mind-bending form the artist has given to these huge steel walls, which stand as high as 13 feet and can extend nearly 30 feet deep.

Two sculptures are double torqued ellipses--one “twisted Rose Bowl” standing inside another. A long gallery beneath the Geffen’s mezzanine holds a table-top display of about 50 small models for other torqued ellipse sculptures.

The eighth work unwraps the enclosed form of an ellipse and turns it into a long passageway. An 86-foot double-corridor is made from three tilting, serpentine walls, which snake in and out of supporting columns in the Geffen’s south building.

These looming works are disarmingly approachable--especially those with a softly streaked, velvety-brown skin of rust. Yet, enter one and your body literally begins to reel, pushed this way and that by the sheer force of dynamic space, which has been dramatically carved out by vertiginously tilting walls. They generate something of the psycho-physical discombobulation associated with Bruce Nauman’s seminal corridor installations of the 1970s, but in a less emotionally nauseating, more distinctly thrilling way.

Finally, on the mezzanine Serra has installed a massive work composed from six big blocks of forged steel. The blocks seem to be an anomaly when first compared to the eight other monumental sculptures in the show. Rather than towering, enclosed walls of elegantly curved and curling steel, this brute sculpture is stolid, squat, rectangular and impassive.

Each block of the densely packed iron alloy obviously weighs in at some ungraspable number of tons. (The actual number is about 38--apiece!) For all their unfathomable mass, each individual block possesses an oddly human scale. Measuring 58 by 64 by 70 inches each, they are of a size that approximates a standing person with arms outstretched.

These “almost cubes” are arrayed along a central axis, three blocks per side (think of ribs along a spine). Visually, the dense gray surface of the forged steel radiates an elusive sheen of silvery blue, like oil on a puddle or graphite in a pencil, while the sculptures and the chunks of space between them establish a regular rhythm, like an alternating current of positive and negative charges. The logically ordered composition draws you around the piece erratically, setting your body into ruminative motion.

In short order a simple but unexpected perception dawns: A block has six sides. This sculpture is composed as if a single block had been flopped back and forth across the central axis six times, each time coming to rest on a different one of those six sides. In your mind you begin to effortlessly toss around these multi-ton cubes of steel, as if they were so many Lego blocks laying around a kid’s playroom.

“58 x 64 x 70” is an uncanny sculptural performance that shows the power of mind over matter--or, better yet, mind in matter, as exemplified by the material construction of space. Simultaneously it invokes a youthful image of play.

Those dual sensations turn out to be not at all anomalous for the rest of this remarkable show. They are, instead, a key. Executed in 1996, the same year as the first of the dramatic and imposing “Torqued Ellipse” sculptures, “58 x 64 x 70” is a quiet but surprising touchstone for what follows.

The steel walls in the other sculptures are as thick as your thumb is long, but they’re seamlessly curved as if mere sheets of paper had been twisted into place. Serra’s new sculpture is post-industrial origami, transforming the heavy, laborious associations of its daunting material into inescapable connotations of whimsical play.

Serra is one of those I’ve always associated with a certain sartorial look--denim and work boots--which became standard artists’ drag (especially in New York) somewhere around 1970. An etymologist could profitably examine when--and why--the term “work” came into common usage in the lexicon of postwar art as a noun synonymous with a painting or a sculpture.

In part, work emerged as a primary artistic value as residue of an American Puritan tradition, to reconcile the frivolousness of art with the morality of a work ethic. Partly it was a result of environment, as artists began to move en masse into abandoned factory lofts. And partly it was practical, as sculpture became less about pedestal-bound carving, casting or assembling and more about large-scale constructing.

Heavy labor is of course still there in Serra’s new sculptures, where industrial materials and extraordinary methods of fabrication reek of the factory and the foundry, the shipyard and the steelworks. And play, for its part, has been a critical aspect of Serra’s art at least since 1969 and “One-Ton Prop”--a pivotal sculpture in his career, composed from four chest-high plates of steel that hold themselves upright by standing on edge and leaning carefully against one another. The sculpture’s formally descriptive subtitle--”House of Cards”--makes the sense of rigorous gamesmanship plain.

The aura of physical labor, though, has now moved into the background, where it assumes a supporting role. Only intermittently do these new sculptures conjure work. They luxuriate instead in play. Serra’s graceful “Torqued Ellipses” don’t assert themselves as domineering icons of possibility in an age of industry, but as endlessly surprising, body-conscious spaces for flexing ephemeral imagination.

A dramatic narrative unfolds in these sculptures, but it’s not the story of seduction and transcendent uplift told by the European Baroque architecture that served as Serra’s inspiration for them. Instead, their narrative is nonlinear, abstract, resolutely earthbound and without fixed destination. Despite their crushing weight and blunt imperviousness, they speak to the most transient, elusive and lively of impulses.

Three of these works were shown to much curiosity and enthusiasm last year in a somewhat cramped display at New York’s Dia Center for the Arts; the ensemble looks even more remarkable here, in the airy, light-filled spaces of MOCA’s big, renovated warehouse. Serra makes magic with sculpture’s fundamental elements of mass and space, and the warehouse makes a perfect stage for this breathtaking performance.

* MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 3. Closed Mondays.