"Seeing Serra: MoMA 2007, Nasher 2006"

MoMA is now running "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years," a stunning exhibition of the artist's new and selected works. While Serra's works are often deemed menacing, as they are situated on two floors inside MoMA and in its outdoor sculpture garden the pieces read rather like a strong poetry collection instead of thudding, intimidating structural force. The three new major works, Band, Sequence, and Torque Torus Inversion , anchor the exhibition with steel -- they are playful yet cerebral long lyrics, arguments about spacial imagination and material texture. The sixth floor galleries provide historical context for the new efforts. The smaller works, done in steel, lead, and rubber, are portraits of Serra as a young man. The older efforts are presented as a narrative of progress so viewers can observe the maturation of concepts and the merger of forms -- rubber's flexibility is vulcanized to mimic steel's turgid enormity with Serra eventually reversing the shift in the larger recent works, making steel appear as limp as silk and as elastic as rubber bands. Outdoors, walking through the sculptures, one notices that the seasonal elements -- sun, rain, heat -- have battered the weatherproof steel, shaving extra-sculptural art off of Intersection II and Torqued Eclipse: the rust stains on the marble piazza, the flaking steel, and the shifting colors of the material (silver to red to brown) are powerful minor chords in these tone poems.

"Seeing Serra: MoMa 2007, Nasher 2006" is a short photo-poem about two Serra sculptures Intersection II, part of the Serra retrospective, and My Curves Are Not Mad, housed in the Nasher Sculpture Center garden.












Walton Muyumba

J. M. Coetzee: On Lust and Democracy

J. M. Coetzee has published an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year, in The New York Review of Books. One of my favorite writers because of his playfulness and intelligence, Coetzee's new work takes on sexuality and democracy, building the novel by merging a narrative about an old man's lust for a young woman with a philosophical excursis about modern democracies. As usual, Coetzee's philo-political writing is sharp and crackling and his narrative sensibilities are at high pitch: the drama of odd attractions, the old man's subtle but smarmy come-on, and the hint of erotic dangers . . . Ooo, how will it end? The novel will not be on book stands until January 2008 but below I've placed a few nuggets from the excerpt that made me nod, smile, laugh, and crave the arrival of Diary:

"She has black black hair, shapely bones. A certain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word. As for the bright red shift, that is perhaps not the item of attire she would have chosen if she were expecting strange male company in the laundry room at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Red shift and thongs. Thongs of the kind that go on the feet."

"As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things. Which she did not particularly like, did not want to evoke, though it was a tribute to her, to her beauty and freshness as well as to the shortness of her dress. Had it come from someone different, had it had a simpler and blunter meaning, she might have been readier to give it a welcome; but from an old man its meaning was too diffuse and melancholy for a nice day when you are in a hurry to get the chores done."

"'Spreading democracy,' as is now being done by the United States in the Middle East, means spreading the rules of democracy. It means telling people that whereas formerly they had no choice, now they have a choice. Formerly they had A and nothing but A; now they have a choice between A and B. "Spreading freedom" means creating the conditions for people to choose freely between A and B. The spreading of freedom and the spreading of democracy go hand in hand. The people engaged in spreading freedom and democracy see no irony in the description of the process just given."

"Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? To Aristotle the answer is that politics is built into human nature, that is, is part of our fate, as monarchy is the fate of bees. To strive for a systematic, suprapolitical discourse about politics is futile."

"Australia is by most standards an advanced democracy. It is also a land where cynicism about politics and contempt for politicians abound. But such cynicism and contempt are quite comfortably accommodated within the system. If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian."

Read the full piece here

Walton Muyumba