Power v. Tyrrany: Serra Interlude



Because Barney is all about sculptural power, it is impossible to talk about Barney without talking about Serra. And modernism.

Richard Serra: Power.



Serra is the king of sculpture power not because he uses massive amounts of weight, and not because he is stern looking and has meaty forearms. It's what he does with all this weight and meat. He uses weight to describe, activate and electrify specific negative spaces. Nobody else really does this in the same, elemental way. My favorite things about Richard Serra dovetail nicely. He is extremely intellectual and knows that what he is doing is more than formal, and he can write about this in a very clear way. But he doesn't really need to. His work manages to be quite generous. I have never taught an art appreciation class in which Serra wasn't immediately understood by non-art majors. He does one thing that everybody else does, too: displaces space. And he does it again and again, honing as he goes, making baby steps. He comes across all kinds of other things to do with space in his journey: he carves up space, describes elevations, which are vertical space...

And this is a concept the average ninteen-year old accounting major can easily grasp. It's elemental--we all displace space with our own flesh all day long.

Serra's generosity as a thinker lies right here, in this act of taking on weight itself. And of course to anyone who went to college in the eighties and beyond, this reads as just beyond arrogant because nothing is elemental. Artists in the postmodern academy are taught to stay the fuck away from the very idea that we share experiences because it's almost never true. One person's truth is another's tyrrany, know what I mean?

This is as it should be--I'm no Hilton Kramer. The very fact that my skinny little female self can do whatever I want with big tools is a testament to the fact that Serrra's worldview changed. I am a product of pluralism, and so is Barney.

But what about power?



In some ways, Barney's contemporary take on power is right on the money. Working with impossible materials, using restraint, a disaster-management aesthetic--these tactics resonate, and manage to project as much humility as power. The physical world is not at our beck-and-call the way Serra thinks it is--it's much more fluid than ten tons of cor-ten would have you believe. Barney has this fact in his grip and is not letting go, and that is good.

But there's the logoisimus, Barney-as-brand, obsession with getting viewers to decode personal mythology and personal narratives--all the ways Barney manages to use his zeitgeist to create a whole new tyrrany of the self.

Punchline: Serra manages to be much more generous than Barney is about power, because he is working toward what we share.

Serra's work does not collapse into tyrrany because of this basic generosity. He makes more assumptions about his power over the world as a human. But he also makes critical, correct assumptions about the way in which this experience of displacement is shared. Barney, because he's smart about power, sees that we share very little. But this means that Barney's freaky truth gets to become my tyrrany. I never think about myself in terms of freemasonry, the Chrysler building, hacking my legs off and turning into a whale, or being able to cajole Richard Serra into flinging vaseline. All this obtuse mythologizing is digging a moat around Barney, and because this is art power and not political power, that's a bad strategizing. This kind of power is boooring.

Matthew Barney, are you going to use your power-gift for good or evil? I prefer the Barney that keeps his eye trained on what we share. So few people are doing that.