It is Saturday morning in New York and lorries are lined up along Sixth Avenue, all loaded with huge arcs of Cor-Ten steel. They resemble construction materials, but a little way down a side street, dangling from a crane is one of those arcs, looking somehow sugar-frosted in the sunlight, and only then one wonders if this might just be art.
This is a 25-tonne fragment of Richard Serra’s Intersection II, from 1992-93, being lifted into the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in readiness for a retrospective of his work.
Serra himself is darting about eagerly among the workmen. He’s 67, yet people say that he drops a generation when he’s installing work, such is his excitement. Perhaps that’s because it brings him back to essentials: he lied about his age to get work in a steel mill as a youth, and he still looks comfortable talking to the hard hats doing the lifting. Indeed, a little of Serra’s glory seems to be reflected on those workers, because this is a man whose career has been like a hymn to sublime construction, the heroism that built America.
A few days later I am back in that garden with Serra, where he continues to exude enthusiasm. It is as if, after only glimpsing the idea for the artwork, Serra is seeing it realised. As he puts it: “I’m basically a model builder. I make models in lead and then we graph them out on a computer and send them to the factory in Germany.”
This wasn’t always the case.
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Shortly after Serra graduated from college, he went to Paris with the would-be composer Philip Glass, and every night they would go to La Coupole in the hopes of glimpsing the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who would come in plaster-smeared after a day in the studio. Serra and Giacometti never met, but the image of the sculptor grappling daily with his materials was what redirected Serra away from his early course as a painter.
When he returned to New York, he set to work, and rather than use the sculptor’s traditional materials – bronze, marble – some memory of his time in the steel mill encouraged him to find uses for industry’s cast-offs. MoMA’s retrospective honours it all: he hung strips of vulcanised rubber from the wall to create Belts in 1966-67, illuminating their tangled complexity with twisted neon tubing. And he splashed molten lead into the corners of rooms to produce long troughs of metal that recalled the site of their production.
He then started to work with sheets of lead, making theatrical play with their threatening weight by leaning them together in simple constructions, as in One Ton Prop (House of Cards), from 1969 (a later example of that tactic, Fulcrum, is installed near Liverpool Street station in London). And then, when many artists might have been hitting a mid-career low, Serra created the Torqued Ellipses: spirals of steel that flex in and out as they carve a path for the viewer.
Serra was born in San Francisco, his mother was a Russian Jew, his father a Spanish immigrant, a pipe-fitter and later a factory worker. Far from emerging as the talent of his family, in his youth he was challenged by his elder brother, Tony Serra, who became a celebrated defence attorney.
Serra is not a great one for explaining his work. He knows that responses to his sculpture come from the gut: one simply feels their presence with the body, is impressed by how they realign the contours of a room or respond to human scale.
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He says he likes to use lead because it has “a very high order of entropy. If you put a cube of lead on the ground, in a year or two it’s going to bulge out like a sugar cube at the bottom. Lead is always deforming.”
His work also reflects a long love of dance. “I came up with a bunch of dancers in New York like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown,” he says. “They would throw parties and everyone would dance, I really loved them. They forced me to think about movement in space and the relation to materials.”
For Serra, it is almost as if talking about metaphors is idle speculation. It’s not that he lacks the means to talk, it’s simply that his roots are in Modernism. Materials matter to him. “In the 1960s, materials kind of got dismissed,” he says, “It didn’t matter what the material was so long as you could describe it, but I thought, if you do something in glass, it’s different than if you do something in paper, or wood, or steel. I happened to be at Yale, and one of the things they insisted on was that matter imposes its own form on form. So when I was trying to build these ellipses, all the architects told me to build them in concrete, but that wasn’t the point.”
But when discussing his art, Serra won’t have anything too clever getting in the way of pleasure. When I try just one last time to get him to talk about those sculptures in the garden he cuts me right down with a lovely, conclusive truth.
“Kids come to see them,” he says, “and they’re not involved with ‘threat’ or ‘transcendence’. They discover these pieces and they play peekaboo or whatever and their mother tells them it’s sculpture; and in their mind’s eye it is.”
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Richard Serra: Forty Years, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (www.moma.org 00-212 708 9400), until Sept 10