Serra firma: Dogged artist stood his ground

Seventeen years ago, when construction crews cut Richard Serra's curving steel wall ("Tilted Arc") into three pieces and trucked it from its site on New York City's Federal Plaza to a scrap-metal yard, many people thought the artist got what he deserved.

Even some supporters didn't dispute that he was an aggressive man making aggressive art. Artforum magazine sided with the disgruntled public, not the sculptor.

Few artists are so publicly thumped.

What did Serra do?

"I kept working," he said Monday, looking at his sculpture "Wake," installed during the weekend as the first piece to be placed in the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. The park is scheduled to open on the Elliott Bay waterfront Oct. 28.

"I knew if I kept working, the wheel would turn. That's the advice I give to young artists, to keep working and to work out of your own work. Don't worry that the scene changes. It always does. Stick to what you're doing, and if you have a few witnesses, consider yourself lucky."

Serra's wheel not only turned, it made a complete revolution.

Today, Serra generally is considered to be the most important living sculptor, and his work, viewed in the early '80s as bully-boy abstraction designed to intimidate the audience, is now celebrated for the profound engagement it offers those who move within its orbit, the space charged by its presence.

Serra, 66, still looks like a muscle man on a mission. He moves with authority, speaks with eloquence and listens intently when others speak, unless his attention is snagged by his work.

While Lisa Corrin, SAM's former curator of modern and contemporary art, praised him Monday as possibly the most important artist alive, he veered off to have a word with the crew installing "Wake."

Stepping up to the microphone, he briefly thanked the necessary people (including Bagley and Virginia Wright, who've been supporters for 40 years) and urged the audience to follow him for a quick tour.

"The crew's working in the heat," he said. "We don't want to hold them up."

In its own valley within the park, "Wake" consists of five gently undulating steel slabs in a staggered cluster. Seen from the elevated platform to the south or atop the wall to the west, the piece suggests water reeds or small waves rolling toward shore.

Standing in front of it, its massive weight -- 300 tons -- is apparent: The five pieces are 14 feet high and cover an area 125 feet long and 46 feet wide. If one of them fell on you, there would be nothing left to bury.

Walking between these sculptural slabs, each one softly swelling as if it had an organic root, the audience's consciousness of weight recedes, and the entire work appears to float.

Every angle of approach offers a radically different experience. Move left, and the elements spread out like a hand of cards. Move right, and they're coming at you, like ships.

Concave and convex, the sculpture is fluid in its meanings, conveying the artist's radical intent: to inhabit space with rigor and purity, and to charge the very air around it with the sensations it inspires.

Not being a representational artist, metaphors don't interest Serra, although he said he's "not bothered" by nautical ones.

"I've lived near the sea my whole life," he said. "I'm sure there's a relation."

"Wake" was first exhibited in New York, where Corrin saw it and determined to raise the money from SAM supporters to buy it.

Serra sees the sculpture as "completely different" in the park than it was in New York.

"The elements are the same, but everything else isn't," he said. He wanted to place it within the valley on the park's edge, made suggestions about the design of the space and asked that his sculpture be the only work inside it.

It took about a year, he said, but thanks to park architects Weiss/Manfredi, SAM came around to his way of thinking.

"Architects can be a pain in the ass," he said. "(Weiss/Manfredi) understood what I wanted, and why it was best for my sculpture and the park. The challenge for the museum will be not to load the park with too much art. The problem with most sculpture parks is that there's too much art and not enough space."

He's grateful to those few who have supported him throughout his career.

"There are 1,000 painters for every 10 sculptors," he said. "Most people don't see the point of contemporary sculpture. This park, which will be free and open to everybody, will give kids the opportunity to understand sculpture with its own internal necessities, and to grasp the different between (an Alexander) Calder and a (Tony) Smith."

He wants to come back to see "Wake" when the park opens and when the sculpture is finished with its color changes. "Cor-Ten steel turns dark amber and then holds its color. This piece is halfway there."

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