Visceral experience

One’s physical apprehension of objects happens constantly, and informs our interactions with the world. To truly apprehend an object is to utilize the imagination; in order to illuminate it, to understand it, to obtain a palpable notion of its fundamental characteristics; to enter into it and feel its nature as though becoming aware of our own body, in mass, volume, center, periphery, and balance. This imaginative event is similar to our experience of empathy for another person; one is said to “step into another’s shoes” and gain insight through that process. With objects, one can “touch with their eyes,” or “see with their fingertips,” but this may be misleading as it assumes a focus on one or another mode of sensation. More accurately, one’s full comprehension of an object, as well as the spaces that objects create, involves a necessary culmination or collaboration of all the senses. This is a continuous, though most often inactive process, one that does not necessarily produce an intellectual understanding of the things one encounters but a visceral one.

Gravity is a recurrent focal point in much of Serra’s work. Pieces such as “Carnegie,” 1984-85, and “Fulcrum,” 1996-97, which reach 40 and 55 feet high respectively, each involve large-scale slabs of steel about two inches thick which lean against each other in seemingly precarious configurations. The slabs of steel are not fastened but held together by their own weight. Here, an entirely observable application of weight and balance becomes tangibly risky. The heavy metal forms, along with the ostensible fragility of how they lean together, impose a sense of inherent danger to a viewer, as though they could shift and collapse unexpectedly like a card house pushed by a gentle breeze. A palpable sense of gravity is not only observed in the object, as with “One,” as an essential ponderable aspect of the work, but also as a tool that must be trusted like a harness.