Seattle Right Angles Propped

Richard Serra (1938–2024)

Created 1991

Installed 2019

Forged steel in two parts
43 1/2 × 96 × 12 1/8 in. (110.5 × 243.8 × 30.8 cm)

Located in the the Smart Museum of Art’s Vera and A. D. Elden Sculpture Garden

Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Doris F. Sternberg family, 2018.75

The sculptures of Richard Serra lay bare the artistic and industrial activities behind their making. The American artist’s work—marked by untreated metal sculptures installed in a variety of rural landscapes and urban public spaces—is about process. With its raw steel surfaces, Seattle Right Angles Propped speaks directly to Serra’s interests in process-based art. Located at the center of the courtyard connecting the Smart Museum of Art and the University’s Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Seattle Right Angles Propped is an abrasive metal form, consisting of two L-shaped components that brace against one another and form a low bridge whose height reaches a viewer’s upper torso. Like the shape it forms, the courtyard sculpture also links two disparate periods of Serra’s practice: the artist’s early prop works with his later, large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Embracing these periods in tandem, Seattle Right Angles Propped embodies Serra’s radical conception of sculpture. The steel artwork is not an inert object but a structure that changes and must be encountered in motion, or in time.

Now nestled between the courtyard’s low porticos, Seattle Right Angles Propped once framed a very different location: overlooking Lake Michigan outside the home of art collector Dorie Sternberg and her late husband, Paul Sternberg in Glencoe, Illinois. Dorie Sternberg recalls Serra visiting the site with a to-scale cardboard maquette of the sculpture. Moving it around the yard to model potential installation sites, Serra settled on positioning the steel structure on the Sternbergs’ back lawn upon a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan and visible from the windows of their living room. Seattle Right Angles Propped was relocated in the spring of 2019, when the Sternbergs donated the sculpture to the University’s Smart Museum of Art—a fitting return, as Dorie Sternberg was born and raised on the South Side where she attended the University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools.

Seattle Right Angles Propped is deeply informed by Serra’s process-based conception of sculpture. Like many of the artist’s works, Seattle Right Angles Propped is crafted from raw, rather than treated or stainless steel, evident in the variation in color and texture on the sculpture’s surface. Serra often cites his early work in the steel industry as a pivotal influence on his sculptural practice and affinity for unworked metals. Born to a working-class family in San Francisco, Serra worked in steel mills as a young teen, “catching red-hot rivets and sticking them between flanges.” The untreated steel of Seattle Right Angles reveals a similar industrial labor behind the work’s making. In fact, Seattle Right Angles Propped takes its name from the Seattle steel mill where the sculpture was forged, the sculpture’s title and material gesturing to its industrial origins.

Beyond speaking to Serra’s engagement with time and process, Seattle Right Angles Propped also joins disparate eras of Serra’s artistic production: the artist’s early prop works with his later, large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Seattle Right Angles Propped, as its name attests, belongs to a class of Serra’s early sculptures, his “prop works.” The prop works, such as One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) and Prop (1968), generally consist of two or more metal sculptural components that lean and brace against one another. In the absence of welded joints or other supports, the prop works are held together by virtue of counterbalanced weight, tension, and gravity alone. The two right angle L-beams of Seattle Right Angles Propped manifest this tension by pressing against one another in mutual support. Seattle Right Angles Propped is always exerting—and is constituted by—its own internal forces, the L-beams pushing upon each other continuously. Serra’s seemingly static sculpture is never completely at rest.

The courtyard sculpture not only shares clear similarities with the artist’s prop series, but also with Serra’s later, site-specific works dating from the late 70s and 80s. Viewers may notice that the form of Seattle Right Angles Propped appears to shift and change as they walk around the sculpture. This visual effect is characteristic of Serra’s large-scale, site-specific works made of COR-Ten steel. As he gained increasing international renown, Serra’s work grew larger and graced increasingly diverse public spaces. These later sculptures eschewed a model of public art that sought to compliment its site, beautifying or ornamenting urban plazas and green spaces. Instead, works such as Tilted Arc, installed in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza in 1981 only to be dismantled following intense public controversy, transgressed their surroundings. Bisecting the plaza, the tall walls of Tilted Arc impeded commuter foot traffic. Indeed, Serra often stated that sculpture’s function was to work en contra to the spaces and sites in which it is installed. He once noted, “I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own space, and to work in contradiction to the places and spaces where it is created.”

As they disrupt physical space, Serra’s later works also disrupt a viewer’s unified perspective. For instance, given its size, an observer cannot view Tilted Arc from above or in its totality. Similarly, the form of Seattle Right Angles Propped is not immediately intelligible to a passerby. Upon entering the courtyard, the work appears as an open bridge shape. Yet when viewed from the side, Seattle Right Angles Propped forms a dense rectangular block. The sculpture offers a different perspective at every angle, appearing as both a closed and open structure. Here again, we find that Seattle Right Angles Propped is a changeable, dynamic form. Tilted Arc and Seattle Right Angles Propped are static sculptures yet their forms oscillate when viewed from different perspectives. Like both Serra’s later works and his early prop series, Seattle Right Angles Propped—with its lack of a singular vantage point—is a sculpture that must be encountered through experience, in motion, in time. Coupling the artist’s early prop works with his later, large-scale sculptures, Seattle Right Angles Propped demonstrates that the sculpture of Serra’s evolving practice is never at rest; rather, it perpetually occurs. The courtyard sculpture exists not just as a physical object, but as a set of ever-shifting relations between form, viewer, and site.

Written by Lizzie Smith, AB 2019

Artist profile

Richard Serra

(American, b. 1938)

Biography

American artist Richard Serra was born in San Francisco, California on November 2, 1938. Serra worked in steel mills as a young teen before studying English literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He later enrolled at Yale University to study painting, where he earned both his BFA and MFA. At Yale, Serra was exposed to the work of visiting Conceptualist and Abstract Expressionist artists including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. A 1964 Fulbright grant allowed Serra to travel to Paris in the year following his graduation, where he paid daily visits to the reconstruction of modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio.

Upon returning to the States, Serra began to show with New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery, where he held his first solo exhibition in 1968. His sculptures, drawings, and video works now grace a wide set of international sites and museum collections. He has held major solo exhibitions at venues including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Serra currently lives and works on the North Folk of Long Island in New York.

Often considered alongside the Post-Minimalist and Process Art movements, Serra is well known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures made of untreated steel. The artist’s works have been installed in a wide variety of rural landscapes and urban public spaces. Serra considers his artworks’ sites to be integral to the works themselves, once famously proclaiming, “to remove the work is to destroy the work.” Serra has also created numerous performance, video, drawing, and print works that address themes such as subjectivity, process, and temporality. His 1991 sculpture, Seattle Right Angles Propped, is located in the Cochrane-Woods Art Center Courtyard.

Written by Lizzie Smith, AB 2019

Sources

Bois, Yve-Alain, and John Shepley. “A Picturesque Stroll around ‘Clara-Clara.’” October 29 (1984): 33-62.

Crimp, Douglas. “Redefining Site Specificity.” In Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster, Gordon Hughes, and B. H. D. Buchloh. October Files. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000.

Krauss, Rosalind E. “Richard Serra: Sculpture.” In Richard Serra: Sculpture, edited by Rosalind E. Krauss, Richard Serra, Laura Rosenstock, and Douglas Crimp. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986.

Serra, Richard. Writings, Interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Serra, Richard, and Hal Foster. Conversations About Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Gallery

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