Meyerovich Gallery

Richard Serra

March 25, 2005
Sculptor Richard Serra weights in on his huge Mission Bay installation

BY KENNETH BAKER, CHRONICLE ART CRITIC
So far everything has broken Richard Serra's way in the approval, fabrication and installation on Tuesday of his giant new work, "Ballast," on the Mission Bay campus of UCSF.

" Ballast" consists of two 80-ton rectangular plates of weathering steel, each 5 inches thick, set facing and upright on what will be an open plaza. The plaza will remain a construction site until a public opening in January.

Serra and the riggers allowed two days to install the sculpture. Despite incessant rain and a mud-ridden site, they finished the job in less than a day.

" Once the first plate went up, I thought, 'Well, we have a real shot at this thing holding together,' " Serra said Wednesday. He meant not only the job but also the felt connection between the sculpture's two elements and their consequent effect of energizing the space between them.

" I was pretty convinced that at 133 feet" -- the distance between the plates -- "we were going to make it," Serra said. "If they were too far apart, you'd just have one here and one there, not both of them defining the space as one work."

Serra made a 1-inch-to-1-foot scale model of the work in a sandbox, he said, "but there's a big difference between formally working something out and having an existential relationship to a piece as you walk."
Even though the plates measure nearly 50 feet high, "what you don't want to do with a site like this is overmonumentalize," Serra said. "These are 80- ton plates. That's a lot of weight, but they don't look monolithic; they look like blades stuck in the ground."

Each plate tilts edgewise slightly off the vertical, one northward, one southward. From afar, their opposing slants register clearly, but stand between them and face one, then the other, and each appears to tilt the same way. Their dissonance from the architectural verticals all around creates the spatial "agitation" that interests Serra.

He relates the seeming perceptual paradoxes in "Ballast" to his boyhood memory of growing up in San Francisco's Outer Sunset District. "I'd walk to Seal Rock and back," Serra said. "And I always thought, 'Isn't it fascinating -- when I went out, the ocean was on my left, when I turned around and walked back, following my own footprints, the ocean was on my right and it was a completely different experience."
Serra's large-scale work always risks being misread as a complex of objects, especially in outdoor settings.

" If people are looking at sculpture as an object, that's just not the dialogue you enter into with this piece," Serra said. "There are a lot of people around still making objects, but I'm interested in a situation where what we call the sculpture is a catalyst for walking and looking and thinking about what you're looking at. If this work can do that, if it can just inform and change how you see, even minutely, that's a reason to do it. I mean, nobody thinks sculpture's going to change the world."

Serra enjoys a critical reputation as high as that of any sculptor at work today. But the accessibility of his work, of how it functions, matters to him no less. He was pleased to find that workers on the site "who have no involvement with art at all, became involved. If you're working in public space, you'd like to have the possibility of reaching those people who don't go to museums," he said. "That's the whole reason to do it."