I'm Sorry Richard Serra
LACMA'S "Band" & Chelsea's El abrazo
At 15 I worked on my third student film, and we made it inside Richard Serra’s 2006 Band.
The film we made was the second my group of friends completed for a high school film course, this one was a lesson film on how to use sound. My friend was anxious to test out Adobe Aftereffects, so we crafted a simple alien abduction film. Scary sounds coupled with the interior of the Broad Museum for its sparse concrete architecture, chrome glass elevator, and oval observation windows, as well as what LACMA describes as Serra’s opus: a 70-foot-long 12-foot high nutty steel band that twists and arcs in a continuous flow.
Looking back, there is a discrepancy between what defines these spaces as necessarily alien. The Broad’s architecture is intrinsically alienating, with its shields from the street, its internal shielding of visitors from its archive, and its endless institutional curving blank concrete. Band is alien in that it is inexplicably natural. Its surface is too smooth, its proportions gargantuan, its geometry perfect and foreign. Fresh off of seeing the natural technology in Arrival we were enamored with Band as an embodiment of a terrifying organic logic, an endless and impossibly slick maze.
Michael Govan similarly writes of Band saying “unlike architecture it doesn't traditionally delineate an inside from an outside. It rhythmically holds and opens space… those walls alternately leaning over and then away from your body as they draw you alternately inside and outside the sculpture.” We could only film at the Broad because we chose a hidden concrete stairway for our short scene. We were only able to shoot inside Band because of its ability to delineate hidden inside spaces within the surveilled bunker-like space it sat. Still, we filmed the whole scene in adrenal terror, a skeleton crew, each of us with a hasty alibi if a security guard approached us. None did. We escaped back to Earth, not unlike our film’s fearless hero.
Over the years I returned to LACMA, saw new Serra sculptures, and broke bigger laws to make movies with friends, returning periodically to Band. The more I went back the more the affect of the space diffused. Its power was no longer bound by the “alien”, it was a space that could produce an awe in human ingenuity, in an unintelligible spirituality of geometry, structure, and materiality. Govan summarizes it well: “I can feel multiplicity and unity at once. Intense materiality can also be mysterious.” Among the beauty and transformation I had learned to encounter in Band I could not help that feeling that I had betrayed this specialness, that I had to defile Band to understand it.
It didn’t take long to learn I hadn’t even broken the largest or most interesting of rules. As I grew older I discovered in the folds and patina of Band, a structure visitors aren’t supposed to touch, is riddled with jaggedly carved graffiti. There are a few names and lone scratches, but the interior walls are populated mainly by lovers’ names inscribed with pluses and hearts. Organic steel corners became hideaways, releases of museum stuffiness, and spaces for sealing love into nature. I started seeing the children who saw Band as a playground and the families who took pictures in its tightly framed corridors as if it were a winding tree trunk.
What I learned over the years and what I mourn in Serra’s passing was the ability of so much of his work, namely Band, to make the natural seem sublimely foreign, and the hypnotically austere somehow seem comforting.
I thought of Serra last week, the way most gargantuan room-encompassing sculptures evoke Serra. At Dia:Chelsea gallery’s showing of two huge works by Delcy Morelos constructed of dark mud and soil, something new clicked.
Delcy Morelos is a Colombian artist who has been employing mud and earth to craft large site-specific installations for over a decade. At Dia:Chelsea Morelos is showing Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven, 2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace, 2023). When one enters the space, they first encounter Cielo terrenal, an expansive dark room coated in low black mud, upon which low structures sit. Walking through it is like meeting an overly ordered riverbed or cavernous battlefield. It is a space that suggests escape, and one inevitably does into El abrazo.
They are met with a wall of earth, or more specifically, a packed mass of soil and straw that pushes into the ceiling and threatens to meet the walls. The sheer amount of soil, as well as added cinnamon, clove, and copaiba give the room a powerful musk. The effect was initially a means of transporting a post-industrial urban space and viewer back to the Earth. The exhibition information explains “Morelos invites visitors to gently caress the surfaces of El abrazo, and to note that “to touch the earth is to be touched by her.” The viewer is brought back to the distant earth through smell and touch, wrapped into a true embrace.
The beauty of the work when first approaching made turning the corner of the mass that much more shocking. The viewer is met with a jagged slice cut into the earth. It’s hard to properly articulate the dread this slice creates - it is deep enough that the end of the strange tunnel darkens with earthen shadow, organic and “real” enough to create a perversity in seeing the guts of the soil. The tunnel is an unmistakable human perversion of the organic.
Then, as if watching the first victim in a horror flick, I saw a phone-toting tourist casually walk inside the belly of the sculpture, the center of the earth. Like the second victim I said “What the hell” and followed him. As I progressed the darkness grew, sounds began to dull, and the end of the slice grew closer. At the end, I looked up and saw six feet of earth above and around me. It felt like being buried alive - a true embrace.
I have had few experiences with art that so effectively and affectively bound me to the power of the organic, and made me conscious of my own act in displacing and redefining the organic. As Morelos puts it, “There is a difference between seeing and entering. When you enter, you experience. Like in a symbiotic relationship, you allow yourself to be permeated by that which you are permeating.” Embraced by the natural in the artificiality of New York, and confronted with the gash of human influence, I was overwhelmed.
The affect and structure of El abrazo is not unlike the opening up of one of Serra’s steel bands. Serra’s juxtapositions were often the inverse of Morelos’, placing industrial steel in the forests while Morelos placed earth beneath the steel. When these opposites are reversed tension emerges. Paris has recently considered unearthing a Serra work entitled Clara-Clara which was often graffitied, much like Band. Morelos’ work is harder to read in natural spaces because it so closely mimics them - her medium becomes “work“ when placed in these contexts.
Illustrating human rebellion against the seemingly unmovable natural world is what makes Morelos’ work powerful - rebellion is built into the design of the work to be actively contemplated. For Serra, this occurs mainly in urban spaces, with viewers creating from Serra’s mysterious structures a comfortable way to be. This is how Band becomes a lover’s refuge, a playground, and an alien starship.
When you leave the gaping hole in the Earth of El abrazo it is like saving yourself from burial. Rounding the corner back to the door you know that the gash exists, but you walk engrossed in earthen scent and savior. You embrace a nature of awe, a humanity of ingenuity, you escape death. Perhaps this is why this experience of such profound alienation and terror made me feel so at home, so cleansed.
What a privilege it is to experience work that lets you rebel against it, that lets you refashion it for yourself. What a joy to know that Serra lives on in the hearts of millions as a first date, a playground, a family photo, a work of art, or a film set. What luxury to be allowed to enter the earth and then escape, to meet the dirt more intimately in New York City of all places.
But most of all, and perhaps most simply, what a gift is the creation of impossible spaces.