Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Richard Serra
American; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
75%
To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted. 1970. Hot-rolled steel
When I'm feeling frisky I'm inclined to say that this is the best Serra in St. Louis, after Twain and Joe. Frisky because it seems like a joke as well as an abnegation of all of his famous monumentality and bravura. (Or maybe "abnegation" is the wrong word, since when it was installed in New York in 1970 this was Serra's first ever outdoor piece.) The artwork, two semicircles of steel embedded into the street outside of the art museum, continues beneath the pavement, and I've never been able to make sense of what exactly goes on under the surface. But that matters less than the simple fact that there is something going on under the surface, which becomes a metaphor for how the thing works, aesthetically. It's mostly invisible to the hoards of park-going people who drive on and walk past it, yet it's always there in the corner of someone's eye, indelibly a part of the landscape. When one considers its apparent form — which even in purely sculptural terms is handsome, a differentiated circle enframing concrete like a tondo — one is forced to consider how, in vanishing, it's almost meant not to be considered... till a car drives over and articulates it as a real thing in the world. (2025)