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Reviews

Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet

A smart, attentive documentary

By MICHAEL BRODEUR | November 4, 2008

3.0 Stars

From above, the colossal coils of steel that make up The Matter of Time, Richard Serra’s installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao, look like ribbons of paper. Given that the work is welded together from several panels of steel at 40 tons apiece, this delicacy is quite an achievement — one of the many that Serra has pulled off over the years. In Maria Anna Tappeiner’s attentive documentary on the construction of this project, little gets in the way of Serra and his process — after all, his works are about process. As we trail him through the skewed corridor of one of the coils, we learn that his creations are “generated by the void.” As a crew of workers use howling machines to impart barely perceptible curvatures to white-hot steel plates, we hear that his concerns are primarily “tectonic.” And as Tappeiner allows him to lead the way through his singular sculptures, it becomes easy to see why his work has withstood storms of controversy. Tappeiner smartly demonstrates how Serra turns the experience of the viewers into his subject matter. For all his works’ silence and difficulty, they’re not so challenging — unless you’re the one who has to install them. English + German | 93 minutes | MFA: November 6, 7, 8, 20, 22

Related: Afterglow, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Wandering star, More

Afterglow
The installation is a bit of a shift for Whiteread, who’s best known for making plaster, rubber, resin, or concrete casts of old used mattresses, a staircase, the entire interior of rooms.
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
There’s no explaining Arthur Russell. It’s best just to listen to his music. I hope Wolf’s documentary will encourage people to do precisely that.
Wandering star
Cleaning the kitchen of her Brooklyn apartment a few weeks ago — shortly before hitting the road in support of her fourth full-length, The Living and the Dead (Anti-) — singer-songwriter Jolie Holland was struck by an idea for her fifth album.
Louise Bourgeois: the Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine
What we learn, in intimate conversations at her Brooklyn studio, is that she remains furious, 80 years later, that her father in France took a mistress in front of her mother.
Photos: Exposures
A slideshow of photos from Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC
Exposures
In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness.
Slideshow: Beth Orton at the MFA
Beth Orton at the Museum of Fine Arts, July 2, 2008
Cambodian dance party!
Dengue Fever’s charms are so extreme that at first they might strike you as incongruous — like a chocolate-covered lobster.
Flora, fauna, and the female figure
The Art Nouveau movement of the late-19th/early-20th century distanced itself from the mass production of the Industrial Revolution with elaborate, one-of-a-kind works made from unusual materials.
Out of Africa
Writing about Extra Golden, you’re tempted to focus on the novelty: two indie-rock dudes taking off to Nairobi to jam with a pair of benga masters sounds like the premise for some awful Jack Black movie. (Please don’t please don’t.)
Slideshow: Grizzly Bear at the MFA
August 14, 2008 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
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Topics: Reviews , Museum of Fine Arts, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Richard Serra, More

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