ARTS
Exhibitions
Heavy metal
Giles Auty
Richard Serra Drawings (Serpentine Gallery, till 15 November) Richard Serra: Weight and Measure (Tate Gallery, till 15 January) Eduardo Chillida: Sculpture and Works on Paper (Annely Juda, till 14 November)
Two men of iron are celebrated in Lon- don at present: the American Richard Serra and the Spaniard Eduardo Chillida. Both are represented by sculpture in heavy metal and by what are nominally drawings. Serra has achieved success and notoriety through his controversial use of massive steel plates to form so-called sculpture, often in public places. The sheer scale and rawness of these often give them a bullying presence. One is looking up constantly at great bulwarks of steel which appear pre- cariously balanced and likely to squash one flatter than a cartoon cat. I am reminded of a time when, as a young boy, I rowed round an aircraft carrier in a small dinghy. I could not get out of the great shadow it cast.
Steel on a human scale: 1,otura XVI', 1991, by Eduardo Chillida There seem elements both of minimal- ism and romanticism in Serra's sculptural work but the former emphasis predomi- nates in his present, specially commis- sioned installation at the Serpentine Gallery. What the visitor there will find are various sections of the all-white rooms cov- ered in rectangles of canvas which bear sticky-looking paint of a blackish, all-over hue. These are Serra's so-called drawings. Their relentless puritanism will endear them most to those who often share a pro- found hatred of more traditional artistic practices, i.e. the odd beings who adminis- ter Britain's modern museums. Contempla- tion of black oblongs on white walls is reputed to bring these strange folk as close to orgasm as they may ever approach. Other onlookers may think such extremes of enthusiasm unjustified. At the Serpen- tine, two of Serra's blackened shapes occu- py the precise spaces one might associate more generally with sooty fireplaces. The two large side rooms of the Serpentine are empty of all decoration apart from this. Serra arranges his shapes with an artist's skill but what he achieves in essence lies well within the capacity of anyone who has laid out the pages of a newspaper. There is nothing more here than elementary graphic design. What should really concern us is why so large a publicly subsidised space as the Serpentine is turned over so regularly to exhibitions of such remorselessly mini- mal charms. Londoners may reflect occa- sionally that such a desirably sited building could not but serve the public better as either sandwich shop or soup kitchen.
While the management of the Serpentine rush to prostrate themselves before the international celebrity of Serra, their prone postures may seem positively erect by com- parison with their colleagues at the Tate, who have emptied the vast spaces of the Duveen galleries so that the transatlantic Messiah can erect two high altars there to himself. These take the form of huge rect- angular blocks of forged steel 60" and 68" high, weighing 35 and 39 tons respectively. The structure of the Duveen galleries has had to be underpinned at considerable expense on account of these loadings. Of course, if the blocks had been cast hollow none of this might have been necessary, though their appearance would have been the same. The entire exercise may be thought to illustrate a kind of modernist puritanism gone mad and I cannot help wondering whether Mr Serra's installation might not be motivated by an obscure, semi-sexual desire to dominate. If this hypothesis sounds fanciful, what more piquant humiliation could one inflict on a nation than to insist that a great deal of money be spent by one of its premier art galleries merely to house two unprepos- sessing lumps of German steel? If the artist and others did not take themselves so seri- ously it would be easy to suspect a sense- less prank.
If Serra's twin installations in London at present seem to amount to little more than monumental boredom those of Eduardo Chillida at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 Der- ing Street, WI) show what can be done constructively using virtually the same materials. As a Basque, Chillida belongs to a race with both poetry and iron in its soul. Iron has been worked in his area of north- ern Spain since pre-Roman times. Regret- tably for Chillida, Spain has long been one of the less fashionable members of the international artistic merry-go-round. His work is more open, individualistic and humane than that of Serra, who is his junior by 15 years. Yet the politics of inter- national modern museum art decree emi- nence for the art of the USA, Germany and Britain. Serra's remorseless aesthetic of minimalism, allied to extravagance of scale, also lies closer to the heart of the warped puritanism of the modernist creed. On the other hand there is a lyricism and more compatible human scale in Chillida's small works in alabaster, steel and fireclay which are on show now in one of the more attractive spaces in London. Seeing these, one remembers that the Basques are an old and proud people. Serra, by contrast, sym- bolises the typical insecurity of a nation with only a short history to its name in the sheer bombast of his works.
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