Terra Serra: Swept Away by MoMA's New Installation

A particularly complicated passage in "Sequence," 2006, Collection of Richard Serra

It's not often that you see seen-it-all art journalists and critics walk through an art installation with jaws permanently dropped. But when I first realized, while perambulating Richard Serra's three new tours de force, that my crooked mouth had slackened into a torqued ellipse, I looked around me and discovered that my colleagues wore matching expressions of dazed awe.

It's not that we haven't seen Richard Serra installations before. Among other places, I've experienced great examples at Dia:Beacon and at the Guggenheim Bilbao (but not Bilbao's current, permanent installation, The Matter of Time, for which I've only seen the models, when they were shown in in New York).

But this was a different order of magnitude from the already high achievement of this artist. The three pieces installed on the Museum of Modern Art's second floor (as part of the artist's retrospective, opening Sunday) were, as director Glenn Lowry told me at the press preview, made site-specifically: They were designed to fit perfectly into MoMA's loft-like contemporary gallery, the floors of which had been expressly designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi to bear the mega-ton force of Serra's steel behemoths.

What's more, as this now mellowed and astonishingly press-friendly artist told us during a long, informal briefing conducted beside his most ingeniously convoluted work (above), his latest efforts are enhanced by technological advances that enable these giant sheets of steel to be bent in more interesting ways than ever before.

Everyone, as Serra observed, experiences these pieces differently: Composer Philip Glass, for example, told Serra they were musical. To me, careening through the exhibition's magnum opus, "Sequence," felt like skimming over ever-changing undulations of water.

I'm not the first to say this, but it is an enormous loss that these three site-specific pieces will be seen at this site only until Sept. 10. There's no keeping them: The Los Angeles County Museum, thanks to patrons Eli and Edythe Broad, has already snapped up one of the three. Lowry told me that MoMA has no current plans to acquire from this show. It already has two other major Serras (one a gift of Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, the other a fractional and promised gift of Leon and Debra Black), both of which look incongrously industrial on the elegant marble floor of MoMA's usually sedate sculpture garden, where they have been installed for the retrospective.

This is exactly what MoMA QNS (the museum's loft-like space in Long Island City, which displayed its collection and exhibitions during the Manhattan construction) should have been repurposed for---the long-term exhibition of site-specific installations. That idea was at one time considered and then dropped. Let's see what they can do with the new space in the next planned expansion, on the lot to the museum's west.

Meanwhile, enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime art thrill while you can, and try to get there when things are not too crowded, so that you can feel the magnetic pull of the metal, instead of the jostling of the flesh. It's very rare that I leave a museum in a trance, feeling that my entire day and spirit have been transformed by the experience.

This was one of those days.