More and more the critics are starting to get it. It's time for change. Jerry Saltz's review of Richard Serra's show is full of praise and delight, but he also drops a lot of sneaky wonderful ideas about art and artlife all through the piece. Jerry is becoming a beacon for change, and in the process, he is eclipsing his fellow art writers and becoming extremely relevant to this time. It's great to watch and to read.

First, the Serra stuff - "...MoMA wanted a mighty Serra show, and not, say, a mighty Eva Hesse or Hélio Oiticica show—to name two artists of Serra’s generation—or even, for that matter, a complete Serra survey. So despite the seeming preordination of it all, and the fact that the work sometimes feels decorative, inert, or like a fun house, and the prop pieces—protected, as they have to be, within a Plexiglas pen—look like they’re in a petting zoo, it’s only fair to say that a mighty Serra show is what MoMA got...Museums revere him. Not only is “Forty Years” the roomiest exhibition the Modern has ever devoted to a living artist, it’s the second retrospective the museum has devoted to Serra (the first was in 1986), which makes him MoMA’s current Picasso. Architects venerate and emulate him. The Guggenheim Bilbao (which has eight Serras permanently installed in its ridiculously oversize main gallery) owes so much of its design to Serra that he could conceivably sue Frank Gehry for intellectual-property theft." - I absolutely agree! Serra is an architects' sculptor and the crowning achievement of the end of American Materialism. See our speculations here.

What we really honed in on were the little bombs in the article.

Number 1 - "After the Serra show is over and the sculptural circus has been dismantled, we’ll all have to face up to the sad fact that, in its earnest effort to accommodate sculpture like Serra’s, MoMA blundered. The museum’s new spaces aren’t friendly to most other art." - This is in the Backstory. Jerry has been most adamant about the failure of MoMA's renovation. In fact they are about to start an expansion of the recent renovation that was just completed. It makes your head spin. The galleries are useless and quite frankly the hanging of the collection is really unfriendly. The old MoMA allowed you to flow and hang about if you liked. I used to love the Matisse room with it's silly window and bank of seats - but what a startling experience sitting in front of the Dance surrounded by the Piano Lesson, the Red Studio and Goldfish. Stunning. You were allowed to indulge in the work. Today you're sent on a trip through the galleries to get to the shops. It is a Mall - Mall of Modern Art.

Number 2 - "Like so many of his mid-sixties generation, Serra wanted to make sculpture entail time, movement, and process, and exist in was then called “the extended field." - As painting brokedown and became about it's physical limitations sculpture took over. It is real time, three dimensional and about material. It was the final hurrah for Modernism, and it began the installation projects and objects that run rampant in POMO aesthetics. Art becomes about the space it's in. Serra's sculpture work best in enclosed spaces, and tend to ease up in the outdoors. He needs the hanger spaces in order for the ideas behind the work to click in - he needs the architecture. This is true for most installation art - the idea of a parasitic art, one tied to architecture - runs rampant through POMO theory. There are dozens of artists that dig into walls, push things across a floor, open ceilings, move things from the canvas surface and into the room - this is the "extended field" that Jerry is talking about. Serra does it best.

Number 3 - "These sculptures are so huge that they blind you. This work takes you on a sensuous trip beyond language and optics to a place where physical sensations replace sight. You don’t see a Serra with your eyes; you see it with your whole body. Sheer excess disarms sight. You walk around and through a Serra, brushing very close to it—closer than to any art I can think of—taking in its weight, texture, temperature, mass, and volume with parts of you you didn’t know you had. Flow, fullness, and rhythm become ways of knowing. It’s like being very close to another person; vision is useless as it’s subsumed into other parts of your body; you experience a loss of control. Surprise, entrancement, and enchantment mingle, and you become a walking nerve ending." - This is the real conundrum of our time and it is what lens are doing to how we experience vision. We do not see things in the same way as the Modernists or even the Postmodernists have described in their work. Maybe this is why Serra is still relavent. He pushes our visual space into nothing. We must feel with our eyes. We've discussed this issue in depth here, here and here - in fact all through many of our blogs. Our time has a different way of seeing and Jerry is hinting at it as he encounters Serra's work. The exciting thing is that he might make the intellectual jump to the lens based world and its effect on art and painting. Wow! A critique of current art done from a prespective informed by undertanding the new vision forced on us by Lens based programming. A lot of painting, sculpture and illustration would suddenly be seen as the transitional art that it is. I'll say it again - that is exciting!

There is a marked difference in Jerry's writing since his move to NY Mag and I really enjoy watching someone pull it together - whether it's art or writing or whatever. I'm not sure where he's off to yet, but the hints of his thinking are there in the work. Drop him a line, let him know you appreciate his risk taking!