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Two S-shaped plates, one nestled inside another, make for a fairly straightforward pattern. But with each plate twelve feet high, and the larger one extended for over sixty-five feet, a maze is created along with a pair of culs-de-sac. Walking into and around such a sculpture (call it that for the moment) thus becomes an uninterrupted process of opening out and closing in. And with the plates made out of two-inch weatherproof steel, "Sequence," or so Richard Serra has entitled it, takes on more of the attributes of a site than those of an object. Container and thing contained redefine each other; new senses of walking and standing are indicated, offering both destined shape and free space: the standard dichotomies shed their stability and induce not only a sense of awe and displacement but a desire to come to terms with scale, texture and vol urne. In short, the site is still dedicated to confronting the traditional means of the sculptor's art in rendering objects. Easily unforgettable, "Sequence" dominates the show of Sena's three new massive steel sculptures at the renovated Museum of Modern Art, whose second floor was designed in part to accommodate their massive weight. But the sixth floor held earlier, smaller works, while the outdoor sculpture garden featured two previously seen pieces, rounding out, so to speak, the exhibition entitled "Richard Serra, Sculpture: Forty Years."
The news is hardly fresh but nevertheless powerful: the scale of Richard Serra 's sculptures unquestionably demonstrates, indeed enforces, the central claim of his esthetic. Some art demands bodily presence, and by that demand implicitly restructures our esthetics, moving away from idealization and ideology into the realms of phenomenology, particularizing the haptic and kinetic flashes that constantly and surreptitiously make us aware of being both here and human. Though his forty year retrospective at New York's MoMa drew thousands, there are millions of others who can't have the luxury of walking through or looking at (what a choice!) several of Serra 's monumental sculptures in the space of a single visit. These millions of "excluded" must continue to take it on faith: not only do you "have to be there" but you can't know Serra through the usual esthetic categories. Yes, the work is "about" scale, and...