Richard Serra's art plays with perception

Richard Serra stands within the site-specific installation he created at the Menil Collection for Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective. The two large "drawings," hung so that they look as if they are tilting up, play with the viewers' perspective of the room. less Richard Serra stands within the site-specific installation he created at the Menil Collection for Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective. The two large "drawings," hung so that they look as if they are tilting ... more Photo: Nick De La Torre Photo: Nick De La Torre Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Richard Serra's art plays with perception 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

The screech of power tools reverberated through the Menil Collection's lobby recently as a crew readied "Richard Serra Drawings," a landmark retrospective focused on a not-so-well-known aspect of one of America's most revered living artists.

Serra is best known for monumental, site-specific steel sculptures that alter viewers' perceptions of space.

The workers were securing industrial-size picture hangers within four indents carved from the lobby's back wall. Crates held the 400-pound pieces that would be attached. Being shown together as "Forged Drawing, 1977/2008," they're made with paintstick, an oil-based medium, on forged steel.

These are the first hints Serra doesn't treat the term "drawing" lightly.

The artist, who's 73, was at the museum to walk through the exhibit. Spry and fast-talking, he bounded forward on black tennis shoes, wearing a gray shirt under a black jacket and pants. He appeared monochomatic but for the flush of his skin, his intense blue eyes and the notebooks he held, one of which was red.

Serra always carries a notebook or two - the diaries of his life - marking their pages with the thick lead of his favorite German pencils.

"They're just notations. They're not seen as works of art," he said. About 30 of these notebooks are on view in the exhibit, but he's never shown them before and didn't create them with that intent.

Demographics check

More Information 'Richard Serra Drawings' When: Opens Thursday. Book signing 5 p.m.; conversation with Serra and Menil curator Michelle White 6 p.m.; exhibit preview 7 p.m. Through June 10 Where: Menil Collection, 1515 Sul Ross Admission: Free; www.menil.org

During his time in Houston, Serra has carried notebooks to places not on the typical visitor track, including the Ship Channel, which he found "a little like 'Blade Runner,' " and Trader's Village. ("If you want to see the demographics of a town, go to the flea market," he said.)

This is the first time the Menil has devoted so much space to the work of one artist, nearly three-fourths of the museum. And all of the pieces are black, or some variation on blackness. Lack of color is often a given in the practice of drawing, although Serra has expanded the definition considerably. His stark, large-scale works of paintstick on Belgian linen, hanging on white walls, seem like doorways to black holes.

The exhibit's two main galleries are arranged chronologically - starting with early drawings Serra said he never thought would be shown. He'd even forgotten about a series of loosely drawn vertical lines until one of the exhibit's curators encouraged him to open some old sketchbooks.

Serra said he made them as he walked through "Circuit," a site-specific sculpture he created in 1972 at the German art fair Documenta. "Circuit" consisted of four steel plates held up by the corners of a room, with an empty space in the center. "It seems like such a simple construct," Serra said.

Displayed as "Drawings After Circuit, 1972," this series is still in the mode of traditional "mark making" - what happens when an artist puts pencil or ink (or in this case, paintstick) to paper.

Early in his career, Serra explained, "I never thought a body of (drawing) would grow and exist autonomously as a practice."

The first gallery sheds light on the evolution of his process. But the prime Serra experience is at the end of the maze of rooms built into the Menil's large west gallery: the site-specific installation he created for this show.

Although the Menil organized the exhibit, it appeared first at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Serra created a site-specific drawing at each venue. (Michelle White of the Menil Collection co-curated with Bernice Rose of the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center and Garry Garrels of SFMOMA.)

An illusion

The Menil installation, using two of Serra's big painstick-on-Belgian-linen canvases, creates a fantastic illusion. It's not a "drawing" per se, but a long, narrow room that plays tricks on the eye.

The canvases are hung so they appear to slant up toward the door. You'd swear, standing there, that the far wall is uphill.

"I have the sensation that I'm looking down on the floor, and the wall is the floor," Serra said. He noted how juxtaposing the two huge black canvases "activated" the space between them. "What's really occurring is that you're in a space you haven't been in before that is probably playing with your inner ear. Because it's a little, uh, disorienting. Is that not true?"

Sunlight streamed through architect Renzo Piano's fluted roof, creating patterns on the back wall. Serra didn't seem too happy about that, especially after another visitor said it reminded him of work by Giorgio de Chirico in the Menil's collection.

"I like the de Chirico, but I don't like much Surrealism," Serra said.

He declared the installation the most interesting thing in his show.

"You know artists are always attached to the last thing they did," he said. "But for me, the reason to do shows like this is to be able to do new work. If it's just looking in the rearview mirror, you're going to get bored."

Serra has experimented with perception since the late 1970s. Another large drawing that works especially well is "Pacific Judson Murphy, 1978," which wraps across a corner, close to the floor.

"Some people see space differently than other people. But if you walk within this space," Serra said, moving toward the drawing, "there's a different degree of weight."

Because of the way the black paintstick contracts light, you feel as if you're in a "volume," as he calls it ­- a container within the container of the room.

"I don't want to get into hocus-pocus here, and that may not even be interesting to people. But for me, I find it particularly interesting," he said.

Of course, "Pacific Judson Murphy" isn't hocus-pocus. The Menil's black wood floors even emphasize the effect, which Serra said didn't happen at the Met or SFMOMA exhibits.

He also liked what was happening in the room with some of his "Rounds" and "out of rounds" drawings.

"I like the index of the language here," he said. "It's also rougher than it was in the other two shows. It's grittier."

To the unpracticed eye, "out of rounds IX," "X" and "XI" look pretty similar, each with a circular form out of which liquid seems to have splashed. Serra gravitated to "X."

"These things take a long time to build up. But this one has a look as if it happened all at once," he said.

Innovative texture

That buildup of materials is another Serra innovation. All the paintstick smudged on the handmade Hitomi paper looks as textured as the moon's surface.

It also easy to see the weight and volume of the material in works like "Solid #1, 2008," one of several prints Serra made by dipping a screen into liquified paintstick, placing it on handmade paper, then pulling off the screen in a quick motion, "so the pattern of the pull is evident in the marking."

"It almost looks fossilized in a sense," he said. "If you didn't know they were made in that way, you would never know how this was made. … You think, someone didn't draw that on the surface; that happened some other way. Or maybe they don't say that, but how would you draw that on the surface?"

Read the exhibit catalog and all the theorizing can sound pretty lofty. But Serra also has a seriously down-to-earth side.

"I did these five just in one afternoon," he said, pausing at "A Drawing in Five Parts, 2005."

"I put them on the wall, and my wife saw them and said, 'Keep them together like that.' She was right."

molly.glentzer@chron.com