The closer you get to the spiral the smaller you feel. Then you walk into it, navigating the narrow curve between shifting shapes of tilted steel. It’s a bit scary when the plates pinch in over you, shutting out the light, but anticipation wins out. Each step around the curves is like turning a corner to something new. Suddenly you reach the bright, open center. Your body adjusts, and you are somewhere else entirely. Somewhere beautiful, and calm.
THAT’S EXACTLY the kind of experience acclaimed sculptor Richard Serra says New Yorkers are thirsting for right now, and that’s what his work provides. The attack on the World Trade Center delayed the opening of “Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres” at the Gagosian Gallery. Now, Saturday crowds can make it difficult to navigate the narrow passages of the giant sculptures, and even weekday afternoons are busy.
“This entire subculture here, Chelsea, was pretty much closed down,” says the artist, “and the night we opened in two hours we had 3,000 people. I think it was a need for people to get back out and see each other again, and I was very happy about that, more happy than I am about the work.”
Of the eight pieces on display, the two torqued spirals receive the most attention. Each 125-ton work is made up of five sections of 2-inch thick steel plates standing over 13 feet high on edge. These are not simple cinnamon roll spirals. The shapes are so unusual that Serra tried to patent them—and needed design software derived from the aerospace industry to build them at full size.
“The top of the spiral is moving at a different radius than the bottom of the spiral,” he says. “Most spirals, the top and the bottom are symmetrical in elevation. Here, what you have is a shift; that’s why the pieces are torqued, so that as you’re following the space the top plane doesn’t align itself with the floor plane.”
For Serra, who tries to bend human perceptions of space and time, these pieces aren’t complete until people are inside them. It works on Hudson Ansley, a computer programmer from New Jersey: “I love the movement of the pieces, when you move they expand and contract, it’s an amazing feeling to walk through them.”
That’s the sort of response Serra is looking for, and one that he says can help in the aftermath of the mass murder in New York.
AN OPEN WOUND
Serra has worked with steel his whole life—the son of a factory worker, he helped rivet a skyscraper in San Francisco in his youth—and there’s pain in his eyes when he describes a piece he saw recently: “I go for a walk in the morning along the West Side Highway. There was a big truck two days ago with a big beam on it. And in the middle of the I-beam, 3 feet high, 40 feet long, gnarled, there was graffiti written that said ‘body.’ B-O-D-Y written with an arrow. That means either the body was on the bottom of the beam or it was on the bottom of the pile that the beam was pulled out of. If you are living there you never get away from the consequence of that horror. It’s with you all the time.”
Art can’t cure that pain, and Serra knows it—but his work is providing an alternative, immediate experience for the folks in the gallery. None of the people we talked to were thinking about the attack as they navigated the curves. Instead, they were transported. “It’s impressive by definition,” says Elizabeth, a distinguished and eloquent New Yorker in her sixties, “as was Sept. 11, of course, but different, but very different.” Dana Croteau, a sculpture student from Brooklyn, is ecstatic about the pieces, at a loss for words until asked what these pieces say about art’s ability to heal. “Art has a huge place in the world right now. I think people need something to look at and feel good about. It’s comforting. And this is amazing because you get to experience it, to walk around it.”
ART IN THE AFTERMATH
It’s clear that these art works, which were made before the attacks, are fulfilling a need. But will terrorism change art? Serra witnessed the attacks, and knows they will change his work, but he doesn’t know how—except that he will not depict anything. For Serra, much of the power of art is defined by what art isn’t, and he emphatically sets his own work apart from the representations of the mass media: “When I was under attack here, my TV was gone, water was gone, electricity was gone for a week, when I actually saw the first clips on TV a week later, they were totally different than my experience. ... The experience of art I’m interested in has to do with immediate experience, and I think that immediate experience can’t be topped in terms of either the language of art or anything else.”
Guillermo Resto, a dancer, also saw the attacks, and sees Serra’s art as a counterpoint to the torrent of news pictures. “The second plane hitting woke me up. I walked to the corner of Delancey and watched people jumping off the buildings, and watched the buildings fall. My wife told me not to watch too much TV, I was watching CNN and my god, that little teletype thing at the bottom will drive you crazy. It’ll drive you nuts. ... Art is such a luxury, but it’s all that matters — music, art, dance, that’s all that matters, completely, and this is brilliant!”
Exhibits like these and the pleasure they provide are just one part of the city’s recovery, along with stockbrokers making trades, ad agencies hustling for accounts and new firemen graduating from the academy. Confidence helps, and Richard Serra is one confident New Yorker. He says the city will thrive, even though everybody knows it’s a target: “People come here because if you have an idea it’s symptomatic that somebody else down the block may have the same idea, or at least share the idea or respond to the idea. That’s why we’re not in Nebraska.”
Stokes Young and Jon Sweeney are multimedia producers at MSNBC.com. Richard Serra’s “Torqued Spirals, Toruses, and Spheres” is at the Gagosian Gallery, 555 W 24th St, until Dec. 15.