Jeff Ward is pondering a sort of phase-change of the self in poetry, with Browning as a pivotal moment. In an entirely different key, Calvin Tomkins offers a profile of Richard Serra in this week's New Yorker. Where Ward's penetration makes Browning seem new, Tomkins offers us little news about the art, but lots of familiar ideas about the artist:
A stocky, powerful-looking man with a large head, a fringe of close-cropped gray hair, and black eyes whose intense stare reminds you of Picasso's...
Serra, we quickly learn, could care less about what people think of his work. He's busy contemplating bold initiatives. Queue the anecdotes of Serra being loud and passionate about art in Max's Kansas City. The bust of Pollack hangs heavy over the profile being carved:
He took things more personally than anybody else. Huge fights, smashing of chairs, throwing of loaded brushes.
Serra's ditching of wife #1 receives a Hollywood "save":
Serra's faltering marriage to Nancy Graves came apart when he fell in love with a performance and video artist named Joan Jonas. Graves had hit her own artistic stride by then, with a highly acclaimed show at the Graham Gallery of realistic life-size sculptures of camels.
What we have heah is an uneasy amalgam of hagiographic cliche, tritely surreal plotting, and strangely addled references. At one point, a photo of Serra, wearing a welder's mask and flinging molten lead from a ladle, is likened to Poseidon, when the context clearly calls for Hephaistos.
Why bring this up? Only because: Searching writing about aesthetic matters (like Ward's) is happening every day on the Web. Meanwhile, the formerly-somewhat-in-touch New Yorker is serving mildewed cliches. (The magazine did not post the piece on its niggardly site). No disrespect to Serra, but the magazine's slant - featuring the sculptor crowned at the finale by words from some Times critic, speaking somewhat oracularly about the value of abstraction (in contrast to Warhol, no less), seems to vacate the working values of the artist it celebrates, as if wholly deaf to what that work has to say.
At one point, Serra is quoted as saying that getting rid of the pedestal was "the biggest move of the century" - interesting in light of his industrial-strength monumentality. Is the print world looking stodgier by the day, or is Modernism staging a comeback, now that its proponents are ripe for their own pedestals? - Comments -
