Richard Serra makes minimal maximal.
Throughout his career, the sculptor has sought the greatest impact with the most compact gestures. His most efficient effort, "Tilted Arc," commissioned by the federal government in 1981 for a building plaza in New York City, so altered that space that outraged Manhattanites hounded it away. Of course, a 12-foot-high, 120-foot-long, slightly curving wall of Cor-Ten steel has a way of vexing, even if it neatly counterpoints the plaza's paving patterns. This testifies to the sculptor's noted querulousness. When the German government insisted he and architect Peter Eisenman alter their design for the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Serra pulled out instead.
Serra worked his way through college in a steel mill, which might speak to his temper. Since leaving Yale with his master's degree in 1966, he has built a celebrated career that has, at times, ventured into the more abrasive precincts of minimalism. "Tilted Arc" and Helmut Kohl notwithstanding, he's managed to impress if not please most observers. Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times listed the installation of eight large Serra sculptures in the Guggenheim Bilbao among the top art events of 2005, saying the show "pushed abstract art to a new level and set a benchmark for the new century." Of course, local gallery-goers could only lament the vanished opportunity to see those Serras in the Guggenheim Las Vegas, a vast space seemingly created for precisely such a show.
We'll have to content ourselves with Richard Serra: Trajectories & Transversals, up through March 15 at Godt Cleary Projects. Like last summer's Turrell + McCracken show, this one eerily shapes the experience of space. These works are not sculptures, but one-color etchings (black, of course) of almost monstrous scale. The "Transversal" prints reach 90 inches in height and carry as much as a pound of ink. If you know anything about printmaking, you'll understand this tests the outer range of possibility.
No doubt some viewers will approach this show with skepticism. Here we have rooms full of large black swaths, each bent ever so slightly, each nearly overwhelming the paper: Yeah, and ...? The concept of minimalism probably is lost on I-know-what-I-like types, but some aspects of it really are too esoteric to offer much reward. In its reductive essence, it's a step from conceptual art, in which the artwork is the agent of an idea, rather than the idea itself. Coincidentally, the Las Vegas Art Museum opens Southern California Minimalism this weekend, so it's an excellent time to examine the school.
It would be wrong to dismiss Serra's prints as airy exercises for eggheads, though, for they are every bit as daunting as a wall across a plaza. Get up close to one. It's tempting to run your fingers over the surface of pocked and pitted black ink. You can't, of course, and this frustration amplifies Serra's imposing visual conceit, in which he expresses torque applied to inelegant mass. And you have to imagine the mass beyond the paper's edge—stupendous arcs into space or curls across the planet. Here the black form crowds the edge, there it sweeps inward, drawing the eye to shifts in width that might describe in two dimensions the trimming effect of perspective.
Serra has made prints throughout his career, echoing his sculpture, finding ways of twisting its dynamics into two dimensions. But the Trajectories & Transversals prints are anything but afterthoughts. You can imagine this suite in a splendid space somewhere—a ballroom or a tony condo lobby—staking out the edges but ruling it like a curtain of steel.