Olafur Eliasson meets... Richard Serra

In 1995, Richard Serra and a team of respirator-wearing workmen re-created Serra's landmark Gutter Corner Splash at SFMOMA. The original site-specific work, made in Jasper Johns' studio in 1969, was destroyed when Johns moved his studio. Later he 'gave' the piece to SFMOMA, which brought Serra in to create a 1995 version.

Over the course of several nights -- it was imperative to make sure the fumes from the toxic lead were completely out of the museum before it was open to visitors -- Serra and his team heated up 15,000 pounds of lead. Serra ladled it out of a pot and flung it against the right-angle formed where an SFMOMA gallery wall and the floor met. Each time Serra completely plastered the section of wall and floor with lead, he and his workers crowbar-ed the metal away from the wall and started again. The piece, re-titled Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift, is permanently installed at SFMOMA (though sometimes it's hidden behind a false wall of drywall). You can see video of Serra's installation here.

Olafur Eliasson's Moss Wall (1994) is the B-side to Serra's Gutter Corner Splash. The Eliasson is a sheer gallery wall covered in arctic moss, complete with a little roughly foot-long 'extension' at the base of the wall, on the gallery floor. (The photo is a detail of the piece. The only images I can find, including those on SFMOMA's website, are of a different installation.)

Where Serra used a highly toxic, mined material, Eliasson chose an organism that grows naturally. While the physical Serra slung his heavy, leaden ladle to make his piece, Eliasson's is delicately constructed, with each little bit of moss having to be carefully handled and placed. Serra's material is heavy, Eliasson's is light. The lead had to be heated to 621 degrees Fahrenheit before it would melt. Arctic moss grows at the bottom of tundral lakes, safe from surface temperatures that average -15 Fahrenheit in the winter. With Arctic Moss Eliasson is responding to Serra's danger-daring, occasionally earth-moving, macho minimalism with something that's less GTO and more Prius.

There's one other broader art historical level on which Moss Wall works: As a landscape painting. Quite simply it's landscape, on a wall. Presto: Landscape painting.

Related: Olafur Eliasson meets... art history. Pieter de Hooch.