FROM the balcony of the newly christened 130m (430ft) Arcelor Gallery at Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, you can see an extraordinarily ambitious sculptural installation called The Matter of Time.
It’s a single flowing movement of eight discrete monumental pieces in steel — spirals, ellipses and toruses — created by the American sculptor Richard Serra. The gallery itself is the longest in the museum, and its ever-changing shape — a ceiling that starts tall and then lowers as the gallery ducks beneath the bridge that spans the river; undulating walls — makes it a challenge from which smaller works would shrink. Serra’s installation seems to pack it to the beams.
Downstairs, you can walk in and through the pieces. It’s not so much a succession of abstract sculptures as an entire sculptural field, weighing a total of 1,200 tonnes. The first piece is a double spiral with soaring walls that loom over us, leaning first one way and then the other. They’re the colour of sun-baked earth. As one wall leans out, the other leans in. The walking space narrows and then widens again.
The experience is unpredictable, vertigo-inducing. Our feelings shift: from some sense of space, light, airiness to an almost dank gloom. Our walking speed seems to be dictated by the shapes between which we are moving. At the centre of the installation is Snake, a long, flowing serpentine form of three close-packed, undulating steel planes. At this point the walls of the gallery seem to fall back as if something threatening may be in the vicinity.
Serra has used steel as his primary material for the greater part of his working life, and as his work has developed, so have his ambitions for the material. “What I like about steel is the way the body haptically responds to it,” he says. “It’s a question of how your body experiences it against its weight . . . The advance in the technology of forming steel has enabled me to spin out different volumes, different voids, different passages. No one had figured out how to take an ellipse on the ground, raise it in elevation and keep its radius the same,” he claims. “The [South] Koreans finally figured it out, but they could only make pieces of steel 9ft high.”
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Serra didn’t want them that small. Eventually he cracked it. All this work had finally enabled him “to make unforeseen forms, which had been hitherto unknown in the history of nature, architecture and pottery”. Big claims for big works.
There is another issue here: the competing claims of architecture and sculpture. Serra is on record as being no friend to architects — they use the most progressive art for their own ends; they can’t draw as well as artists; they are not interested in the finer detail. And this installation undoubtedly feels as if it is in competition with the space it inhabits.
But isn’t Gehry an artist too? Serra clearly finds this notion preposterous. Halfway through the installation we are standing inside a spiral, looking up at the ceiling of the gallery with its sequence of overarching beams. “We are standing inside a gravitational vector looking back at the elevation of the front half of the building,” Serra comments. “As to whether that’s tectonically real or not, you decide. This is not a container for the superfluousness of the architecture. It ain’t a trash can.”
It was Serra’s own work which was trashed in 1989, when Tilted Arc, a giant curving wall of raw steel sited on Federal Plaza in New York, was dismantled and removed after protests by office workers who overlooked the site that the installation was obstructive. The row it provoked was enormous. The boost to Serra’s career was enormous too.
“The claim that the people wanted it down was hogwash,” Serra says. “It was pure manipulation by the Government.”
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According to the Culture Shock website, Serra said at the time: “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.”
When I quote the remark back at him, he blows a gasket. “I did not say that it is not the function of art to be pleasing.”
And what about the rest?
“In my heart of hearts I don’t believe that art is democratic. Would you call scientific investigation democratic? Art is an investigation into a realm of thought. You have to find a way of expressing that thought.”
So if it not for people, who is it for? “Look, that is a question to set me up, and you know it. You are accusing me of being an elitist pig. You are deliberately setting me up to seem anti-democratic. Are people entitled to an informed opinion? Of course they are. Would an Eskimo appreciate Leonardo? No. And you can write what the f*** you like.”