Richard Serra. Sequence, 2006; weatherproof steel; 153 x 488 x 782 3/17 in. overall and 2 in. thick; installation views at New York MoMA (top left) Photo: Lorenz Kienzle. Collection of the Artist, © 2007 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, LACMA (top right) Courtesy of the Artist, the Cantor Arts Center (bottom left) Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2014–15, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and SFMOMA’s 85-foot wide by 55-foot long Howard Street gallery (bottom right) Photo: Henrik Kem © 2015.

It was foolish to have imagined that Richard Serra’s Sequence (2006) would easily relinquish its claim on the courtyard of Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. Even after power-washing, the concrete pad preserved the contours of the sculpture’s twelve twenty-ton weathering steel plates. During its four-year residency, a bond had grown between Sequence and its foundation, just as one had blossomed between the work and its community of followers. Visiting during the de-installation, these pilgrims sought one last visual memento, however inadequate, of the shifting experience of space and time conjured by Sequence’s winding pathways.

Sequence demands, and then commandeers, spaces like the Cantor’s courtyard, or the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gallery into which the sculpture moved in February 2015 in anticipation of the museum’s spring 2016 reopening. But just as the Lilliputians shackled Gulliver to a twenty-two-wheeled cart hauled by fifteen hundred tiny horses, transplanting Sequence is no simple undertaking. Riggers chained each of its thirteen-foot-high plates to its own eighteen-wheeler to conduct it from Palo Alto to San Francisco.¹

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Left: Barbara Takenaga, "Blue Wheel," 2007. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 20 in. Right: Daniel Zeller, "Filtered Compression," 2008. Ink in colors on paper, 10 1/4 x 8 in. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is always subversive, always in conflict with mainstream European cultural and historical imperatives to populate the canvas with recognizable objects, traditionally the symbols and tropes that a particular era and place associates with authority and power, history, capital, or god. This dominant way of making and perceiving persists even though U.S. culture has been from the start, and is continually, inflected with culturally multitudinous ways of expressing and seeing. Even when it deploys forms, colors, and compositions that are culturally resonant, abstract art incites the visitor to relinquish this representational predictability and safety.

In the face of unpredictability, however, I, the viewer, am pushed toward agency. I must see in personal terms rather than in the prefabricated terms of literal depiction. Abstraction is cruel in that way. Either I trust the legitimacy of the intuitions this personal journey may inspire or I doubt the work—or, worse, myself.

The museum can be a testing ground for the subversive tactics of personal agency that abstract art both requires and invites. Untethered to the anchors of representation, I can, and maybe should, release myself from the desire to correspond my experience of the artwork both to the concrete world and to the artist’s intention for the work. In this other(worldly) dimension, I interpret the abstract in the stream-of-consciousness associative way of dreams, attributing representational appearances to my psychological projections. The “real” might materialize, but it is protected from becoming too sensical, too literal, too dominating. It is, instead, bounded by the rules of dreams, which allow the fantastic to manifest without threatening the order of things. In this dreamworld, I can, and maybe must, suspend the laws of physics that define time and space, harnessing new tools and methods—for example, the superhuman powers of flight, of shapeshifting.

The way to see abstract art is to stretch the experience beyond seeing, to perceive the artwork not as the flat modernist ideal of itself, but as a four-dimensional world unchained from the “real” four-dimensional world. To see abstract art is, then, to construct an experience more akin to that of sculptural world of artists such as Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor, or Maya Lin than to the flattened world of painting. Further, the way to hear the language of abstract art is to honor its inclinations to unsay as it simultaneously says, rather than to disrespect these inclinations by interrupting, by requiring the artwork to choose one thing that might be said and to say it finally.

Daniel Zeller, "Undefined Edge," 2003. Graphite on paper, 19 x 25 inches. Collection of Richard Green.

Flowering Associations

Does Daniel Zeller’s Undefined Edge (2003), for example, depict a tattered garment, a landscape of lakes, a lacerated body, or an exploration of form and texture? I see (and hear) all of these, then I see one more than another, then another more than the last. I find myself made small, walking the gray landscape of the graphite drawing, approaching the lines that seem to represent thread—stitches to repair holes in the garment or to suture the lesions on the skin—as I might approach a bridge over a lake. I find myself first tiny, as if borne above this strange countryside by hot-air balloon, and then life-sized, as if entering the frame, wielding the needle to attend the damage. And all of this wandering, the collision of one allusion with another, resolves for a moment in the experience of exquisite attention. I focus on this environment—garment, body, lake—upon which I have come not as if I were seeing it at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, but despite the fact it hangs in the museum’s exhibition of abstract art, Approaching Infinity.

There may be a neurological basis for my behavior, the brain’s capacity to discern a recognizable object even, at times, from the evidence of only a few lines. Since the visual system is designed to perceive objects, particularly faces, relying on only the incomplete information the eye gathers, it would seem pointless to avoid such associations.[1] But it is equally foolish to force any single association to dominate when that association might yield to another and then another, or to actively seek allusions to the “real” when the mind has the capacity to experience form as feeling alone. The beauty of abstraction, then, is not that it invites personal associations free of the strictures within which representational art operates, but that it encourages a flowering of associations to co-exist even as they contradict, conflate, compete, diverge, even as they cancel each other out, leaving only the exuberance of bodily feeling.

Stephen Antonakos, "J #12 Berlin," 1980. Carbon pencil and colored pencil on vellum, 17 x 14 in. Collection of Richard Green.

Stephen Antonakos’s J #12 Berlin (1980) and Mark Sheinkman’s 2.29.2005 (2005), like Zeller’s Undefined Edge, are both tributes to the depth and variety of mark and effect that can be coaxed from the deceptively one-dimensional graphite. J #12 Berlin, a labor of mark making, covered with a thousand short strokes that combine and diverge, seems to record the path of a school of minnows as they flit through the water, first as one, then divided, then recombined. Or is it a memory of fur on the body of a cat that has accepted the indignity of being rubbed in many directions? Or of rocks in a river? (And even if the six red-pencil disks Antonakos deploys to dot the water–fur–river do not recede, they do not interfere with my shifting associations.) Likewise as I inhabit Sheinkman’s 2.29.2005, an effusion of white lines on gray paper, I am borne on contrails, fleeting around a space with no time to wonder where I am—a galaxy or an atom—or where I am going.

Mark Sheinkman, "2.29.2005," 2005. Graphite on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 inches. Collection of Richard Green.

In these abstract works, what might seem to be repeating patterns—one artist in the show, Alexander Gorlizki, defines himself as a “farmer of patterns”—become environments. Even Yayoi Kasuma’s Wave of Sea (2003) reveals itself as more than a pattern of black, blue, and white, more than the recurring flower petals or waves each figure resembles, once the painting invites me in. Floating above such landscapes, I enter and proceed through masses of shape, skip from one place to another, ascend, descend, immerse. My eyes do not stand aside to survey and document these contours (perhaps taking advantage of the magnifying glasses hanging in the gallery to inspect the detail). Instead, my body follows them, infiltrating the landscapes they describe and discovering their patterns repeated within myself.

Left: Yayoi Kusama, "Wave of the Sea," 2003. Acrylic on linen, 21 x 18 in. Right: Alexander Gorlizki, "Manuscript," 2007. Pigment and gold leaf on antique paper, 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

These experiences of embodiment are more customary to the experience of abstract sculpture, which is less likely to provoke the uneasy search for representational meaning that flat abstract works do. Sculptures such as Serra’s Sequence (2006) and Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2006) might arouse representational urges—a Utah slot canyon for the former; a kidney bean for the latter—but each, enveloping from inside or outside, demands physical exploration more than mental riddle-solving.

Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

I am not saying that is it impossible to enter, embodied, the frame of a representational piece. I am saying that abstract art—by the nature of its artifice—encourages entry, while representational art—by the nature of its artifice—discourages it. Unlike abstracts, representational works specify the content and scale of recognizable worlds, creating a discontinuity between the gallery and the scene—either a garment, a body, or a lake-strewn countryside, but never all three—and almost never close enough to life-size to be mistaken for the world of the gallery itself.[2]

Nor am I saying embodiment is necessary to the abstract art experience. Abstract art bestows gifts in its flattened form, the flatness of the canvas being the enduring legacy of modernism; and many of the works in Approaching Infinity, for example, Susanne Schossig’s Light Blue Field (2007), invite the eye to skitter along their surfaces, to relish pattern, color, texture, composition, and form. What I am saying is this: by recognizing the willingness of abstract art to bear the weight of my experiential inquiry—my embodied experience of it—I can open up my own internal space to the artwork’s internal space. In this process, I subvert not just the boundary between me and the artwork, but also the boundaries between abstraction and representation, between even two-dimensional artwork and three- and four-dimensional sculpture.

Left: Susanne Schossig, "Light Blue Field," 2007. Gouache on mylar, 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches. Right: Dennis McLeod, "Blue Black Swirl," 2010. Ink in colors on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

A Confusion of Dimensions

It is not always easy to enter an image, to reconceive its flatness as topography, to resist the detail, the craft that might shimmer, even as it is distanced through a magnifying glass. But the dividing line between the visual experience of flat works and the embodied experience of sculptural ones is not a natural one. Neither flat works nor sculpture demands the boundary, even if we interpret the behaviors their media—flat paper or canvas or pixels; bent steel or resin; even water—promote as directives to limit our experience of the works. If flat, non-representational artworks do not invite me into themselves using sculptural means (or, for that matter, the methods of virtual reality), it is not out of reticence. In fact, since there is no obvious portal, no pathway in steel or gateway of stone, there is no wrong way in, no wrong way out.

“No wrong way in, no wrong way out” could be, then, a call to subversive action. But where in this call is either the frank political or social message—another form of representation—of polemical art or the more embodied interventions of social practice? What is the political action that “no wrong way” incites? I struggle to avoid an either/or binary here. There is a place for works of art that state their messages, political or otherwise, unabashedly and frankly, or which seek to move us toward specific political revelations or even actions. But to dismiss abstract art as self-indulgent or insular is to miss a different set of richly political possibilities.

“No wrong way in, no wrong way out” is a call to escape the cultural biases and psychological pressures of a representation-hungry world. It is a call to defy the regime of representation that requires art, both abstract and representational, to represent something, to have a particular message rather than an ever-changing set of associations, feelings, meanings. If, as I suggest, abstract art can foster subversive acts—embodiment, contemplation, and personal interpretation—it would seem to qualify as training in the agency and imagination necessary for modern citizenship.

All the works in this essay are on display at the Crocker Art Museum’s “Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction,” through May 5, 2013.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of the Arts. Marks recently won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research for his essay, “The Site of Imaginative Contention.”

Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s “Sequence,” on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”

Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra’s “Sequence” (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?

Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and the artist approved of the site.

Half of Richard Serra’s “Sequence” (on loan by the Fisher Art Foundation) nestled in the cul-de-sac formed by the museum’s old and new wings. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

At 1:00 p.m., the pad is empty. Seen from the second-floor McMurtry Family Terrace of the new wing, the 200-ton crane that would lift each plate sat idly on the dirt to the left of the slab, the site of a past and future lawn. In the distance, each of the steel plates sat on its own flatbed trailer. The silence was barely disturbed by the arrival of Budco Master Rigger Joe Vilardi and his crew. Brandishing a floor plan, a T-square, two tape measures, a spool of hot pink twine, a roll of lime green masking tape, a hammer and stakes, the team carefully mapped out the reference points for each steel plate to guide the assembly of the sculpture.

Joe Berlese (left) and Domingo Tejada work with John Barbieri and Joe Vilardi (behind the plate in the left hand photo) to guide it into position. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. “Sequence” is on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation.

Over the course of the next three days, the assembly unfolded, at times like a dance, but one that never masked the painstaking process of hauling the trailers, attaching the plates to the crane, hoisting, swinging, lowering, and positioning the plates, and winching, clamping, hammering, grinding, and welding.

Riggers from Budco Enterprises undertake a variety of tasks to install Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The assembly mimicked the disorientation and confusion I felt when I first walked Sequence’s pathway—formed of two nesting S-curves—in 2007. The first plate, closest to where I stood, curved from the terrace, blocking the space beyond from my gaze. Each succeeding plate seemed not only to bare itself and define the growing form, but also to hide more of the concrete and abscond with the expanse—compressing the volume as if into the magician’s hat. I had not expected that this process, as beautiful as the evolving form was, would also entail a feeling of loss, a spurned desire to see.

Time-lapse video portrays the four-day installation of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra describes the primary experience of Sequence as confusion: “After a point . . . you become confused about whether you’ve been in the same place before or whether you are turning back on yourself. And then you arrive at an exit and you think, ‘This isn’t where I thought I was going to be.’” Sequence is not only about this confusion of orientation, but also about the veiling of space, about the theft of the certainty of my bodily relationship to the space I inhabit. Experiencing a new perspective, I lose the old one. Retracing my steps, I fail to recover the space that was.

On the fourth day, I walk through the completed sculpture. My experience of Sequence matches both Serra’s description of confusion and my New York memories, at least until I look up. Hovering above the sculpture is a bit of parapet, the curved wall of the terrace, a tree top, the octagon’s wall, the building’s pediment—all landmarks that might orient the Sequence participant and fix reference points that establish what Serra calls “your body’s own axis.” Do these markers undermine Sequence’s ability to steal, along with everything else, a consistent sense of verticality by registering not only top and bottom, but also north, south, east, west?

Landmarks of the Cantor Arts Center do little to orient the participant walking through Richard Serra’s “Sequence,” on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University

To remove the work is to destroy the work? It is a mistake to assume that Serra hews to site specificity out of abstract and unyielding principle rather than out of practical necessity: to collaborate with a site is the unavoidable means he applies towards his goal of engaging space. A sculpture’s intended site is integral to this process of creation. That particular site, however, may not always be integral to the resulting sculpture’s capacity to achieve Serra’s goals for his participants. Tilted Arc could achieve Serra’s goals for it only in Federal Plaza. As Serra wrote in 1985, “Tilted Arc was constructed so as to engage the public in a dialogue that would enhance, both perceptually and conceptually, its relation to the entire plaza.” And, as art historian Douglas Crimp notes, “[Tilted Arc] imposed a construction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architecture. It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experience that was counterposed against the bland efficiency established by the plaza’s architects.”

Can Sequence, born in the cramped MoMA gallery, achieve Serra’s goals for it in the expansive space of the Cantor courtyard? It remains, I suspect, that Sequence works best in the place where it originated. Sequence’s seeming expansion of the New York MoMA gallery space seemed magical in a way that Sequence, situated in the Cantor courtyard, cannot match. But Sequence’s capacity to reconceive space is far more potent than the mundane verticals of the courtyard’s architecture. And the sculpture’s capacity to confuse is far more significant than the landmarks that might otherwise orient me within the Google-mapped world of my mind.

Serra’s goal for Sequence was not to perform a political or social critique of the New York MoMA gallery’s space, as his goal for Tilted Arc had been to engage Federal Plaza. Instead, he sought to finesse the limitations of the gallery’s architecture toward the goal of engaging the participant in this disoriented experience of space and time.

Video of a walk through the interior passage of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Ultimately, Serra seeks this work to “be a catalyst for thought, [to] change how people think . . . and how they see.” In this sense, his work remains profoundly political. It is political, too, in its capacity to force the subject back and forth between the positions of outside observer and embodied participant, and to construct an environment in which the participant freely relinquishes, or at least shares, agency with the sculpture. Sequence, then—at Stanford as in New York—is not just movement and meter. It is an emergence from the safe cocoon of autonomous selfhood into the danger of an unpredictable dance, a negotiation with the sculpture, the space it reveals, and other visitors, as each participant navigates a self-contained—yet profoundly communal—encounter.

Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, is on view now at the Cantor Arts Center. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.