Off the Pedestal

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Just yes­ter­day, after two weeks, I took my muddy boots out of the plas­tic bags I had stored them in, and climbed out the win­dow and stood on the roof, and cleaned the mud off them with a lot of rags. I used twigs and water too. They had been so caked in mud, I think they will remain a lit­tle bit muddy forever.

Then, later that day, I was cook­ing while lis­ten­ing to an inter­view with ­Richard Serra that was play­ing on a dvd in the next room. The inter­viewer, Charlie Rose, intro­duced him as “widely con­sid­ered to be one of the best American sculp­tors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury.” I kept return­ing to the room with the tv in it, to go back to the begin­ning of what Serra had been say­ing about sculp­ture com­ing off the ­pedestal: “It was prob­a­bly the biggest thing to hap­pen in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Because once it got off the pedestal, you no longer looked at an object that was depict­ing a real­is­tic aspect of either a hero, or some­thing to idol­ize, or some­thing to wor­ship, or some­thing to be seen as apart from the space you are in. Once it came off the pedestal, it was in exactly the same behav­ioural space that you were in, so you had to deal with it in rela­tion to time and space, and not as some­thing removed from you to deal with as a kind of icon of worship.”

Last week, four friends and I went to see Henry’s band play. I barely knew Henry, but he was friends with my friends. “You’re all a bunch of sheep!” Henry cried into his micro­phone at one point. They were per­form­ing in a nar­row bar and there was no stage; the audi­ence was pressed all around them. 

Behind me, the mother of a twelve-year-old boy who had been allowed to stay home from school for his birth­day lay curled up on a couch, try­ing, it seemed, to sleep. She tucked and retucked the hair under her head and closed her eyes and folded her hands together in a pil­low. Her son stood close to the band, look­ing around quickly, wide-eyed, jump­ing arry­th­mi­cally, a ­lit­tle pet­ri­fied, never smiling.

The refrain to the final song of the night was Fuck you, Henry. The crowd and the band were to scream it together. Lee and Kathryn had already gone home because Lee was too para­noid from get­ting high. “Go make out with some­one you haven’t made out with before!” Henry cried, but no one did. Rick was act­ing strange. Where was Jorg? A tiny woman stand­ing near the piano had picked up a mike and was say­ing loudly into it — not with the cho­rus, but dead­pan: Fuck you, Henry. Fuck you, Henry.

Rick turned to me, grin­ning, and said, “That’s his ex-girlfriend. They’re always in each other’s faces.” 

The song ended. Henry, in the crowd and cov­ered in sweat, walked fee­bly back to the mike stand. I didn’t like him. His shiny red blouse was stick­ing to his body and his long hair was thready and wet with sweat. Rick wanted to say hi, so I went and found my bag and sweater and my coat, which had fallen under a table. When we got out­side, the audi­ence was milling about. Henry was stand­ing around with a cigarette.

“When are you going to be in Vancouver?” I asked, feel­ing uncom­fort­able. “I want to send a friend to your show,” I said, though I didn’t want to.

“November 17 and 18. Saturday and Sunday,” he said. Then, with some inter­est, “Are you going to be there?”

“No.” I was going to be here, in Toronto.

He paused for a moment. “Good.”

Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irri­tated at Henry, at Lee for get­ting stoned and being para­noid and leav­ing with­out say­ing good­bye, at Rick, at every­one. A few days ear­lier, we had all been walk­ing together in a field of mud, after dri­ving to King City to tres­pass through a field to see a Richard Serra sculp­ture that had been built there years ago. It had been a cold, cloudy day. My boots got all muddy. We had been fuck­ing happy then.

It was sev­eral weeks ago when Rick men­tioned that the archi­tects he was work­ing for had been asked to con­sult on the future of a Richard Serra piece sit­u­ated in a field in King City, an hour out­side Toronto. None of us knew the piece existed. It had been built in the early sev­en­ties and was one of his first site-specific works. The Canadian ­col­lec­tor Roger Davidson had com­mis­sioned Serra to make some­thing in the potato field his fam­ily owned. A cou­ple years after it was built, the prop­erty was sold to devel­op­ers, but no men­tion of a sculp­ture appeared on any of the deeds. Since that time, the sculp­ture had received no upkeep, no care. The land around it is cul­ti­vated to this day — heavy machin­ery dri­ves within inches of the piece — and the work itself was reported to be disintegrating.

“Let’s go see it,” Rick said, so for the first time together, we all left the city.

On a Saturday morn­ing — early for all of us — we drove the rental car north and parked at the edge of a coun­try road. Lee, Rick, Kathryn, Jorg and I got out. The sin­gle map we had was rudi­men­tary: an aer­ial view of two roads inter­sect­ing, and in the top left quad­rant, patches of crop­land and the topo­graphic out­line of six walls zigzag­ging across a field, iden­ti­fied with a line and the words Richard Serra’s Shift.

We hopped the gate; we were tres­pass­ing, so we kept to the edges of the field and hid our­selves as we wan­dered through the corn. Someone pushed some­one into the bram­bles. I ripped my coat walk­ing through the net­tles. We were giddy and laugh­ing — just being in the fresh air was mak­ing us dizzy. Kathryn walked into a low-hanging branch and we all laughed.

After an hour of wan­der­ing and sup­pos­ing we would never find it, we saw a look­out attached to a tree; Jorg climbed it and pointed. “I see it,” he said.

He climbed down and we crossed out of a small for­est and went up a slight incline. Before us lay an open field of dried grass and heavy mud, and mov­ing down through the field, into the dis­tance, was what we had come to find: six con­crete walls cov­ered in lichen and crack­ing in places. They were eight inches thick and five feet high at most. They snaked down through the field at angles to each other, buried in the slop­ing ground and ele­vat­ing with the land.

I said to Lee, “We’d never be out here, together in a field, if it wasn’t for that sculp­ture.” And he said, “It’s really the best thing about it — it’s not just some­thing to look at, but it’s like a silent char­ac­ter in your life.” Since the sculp­ture got so few vis­i­tors, it seemed like the walls existed for the field too, and that the field existed for the walls, and the walls and the field existed for our bod­ies, and our bod­ies existed for these things in space.

It was a free­ing feel­ing, as if being a human was an easy thing. Just a body sit­u­ated somewhere.

I saw how the field was cut flat, but branches and grasses grew tall against the sculp­ture, like they were cling­ing to it, like the grasses loved it, like they had moved across the field just to be near it. A feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion came over me. Nature clings to art — art is what our natures cling to. I thought about how we return to the same paint­ings, how we attach our­selves to the best sto­ries, and explain our­selves through them. Or maybe it’s the kind of thought you get in a potato field.

When I returned to my friends, I smiled to see that Lee had set up his cam­era and an elab­o­rate flash with a sil­ver umbrella and was tak­ing pic­tures. The wind knocked the umbrella to the ground, and it got dam­aged and cov­ered in mud. He said, “This umbrella’s ruined. But it came free with the equipment.” 

Kathryn said: “When we came upon the field, I thought, Everything’s going to be okay. I never think like that.” We sat on the sculp­ture. We played on it. Rick pissed on the sculp­ture, though I didn’t see. “I really had to do that,” he grinned. Jorg said he peed on it too. But not cold-bloodedly — like you would pee on an old friend.

Several weeks after I had found Lee cry­ing inside one of Serra’s torqued spi­rals in Bilbao, where we had expe­ri­enced his work for the first time, Lee emailed me a para­graph from the Guardian, writ­ten by the art critic Robert Hughes about the Serra room of the Guggenheim: “Once you are absorbed in their space and pac­ing out their con­vo­lu­tions, you sud­denly feel free — far from the dead zone of mass-media quo­ta­tion, released from all that vul­gar, tedious post­mod­ernist lit­ter and twit­ter… It’s quite a good feel­ing… The work is as new as new could be, but when you are expe­ri­enc­ing it you may also think of an 18^th-century def­i­n­i­tion of the spirit of clas­si­cal sculp­ture: ‘A noble inward­ness,’ wrote Johann Winckelmann, ‘a calm grandeur.’”

That was how we felt, tres­pass­ing, full-size.