I love painting. In particular, abstract painting. Everything from Piet Mondrian through Franz Kline through Joan Mitchell through Jacqueline Humphries. Be that as it may, more often than not when I've seen a show that has really knocked me out, it has been a sculpture show.
In 1996, during my weekly rounds to the NYC art galleries I walked into the Gagosian Gallery in SoHO. There were a series of steel cubes approximately five feet tall arranged in the gallery space. After a few minutes I began to experience this crushing sense of melancholy and began to have a difficult time breathing. These cubes had such an immense visual weight they began to suffocate me. I knew that the experience I was having was completely illogical but I was powerless to overcome it. After leaving the gallery I had to view several more shows before I was able to return to normal. To this day I don't understand what happened, but I do know that the experience I had was very real and very powerful. It sounds absurd that someone could be affected this way by a bunch a steel cubes but it happened.
I've seen dozens of Serra's sculptures since that and they've never had anything near the impact as that afternoon in the mid-nineties. The arcs he's been doing recently leave me cold. They do some weird perceptual stuff when you're walking through them but they seem more theatrical than sculptural. It's not surprising that these big tilted arcs mess with your equilibrium, but how about being blown away by big metal cubes?
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/soho-1996-10-richard-serra/
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