Abstract
Rosalind Krauss analyzes aspects of Richard Serra's oeuvre, and Clement Greenberg's opposition to it, by way of a discussion of several of his sculptures, particularly One Ton Prop (House of Cards), as well as Verb List, locating the essence of Serra's work in that of the medium of sculpture itself: contrapposto.
The article begins: “My flight from the house of Greenberg (Judd called us “Greenbergers”) began with Richard Serra: In conversation, Clem would dismiss him outright.
“I think this derived from his indignant reading of One Ton Prop: House of Cards, with its four lead plates abutted corner-to-corner, indeed like a “house of cards.” My guess is that Clem made a snap judgment from this almost-cube that Serra was a Minimalist—an aesthetic neighbor of Flavin and Judd. But from the first, starting with my encounter with One Ton Prop at the Whitney's Anti-Illusion exhibition in 1969, I have seen Serra's work as being adamantly opposed to Minimalism and exploring, instead, sculpture's “aesthetic support.” All mediums derive their logic from such a core postulate. We could say that poetry's is metaphor; ceramics' is symmetry (as the two hands shape the wet clay on the pottery wheel); and sculpture's is most emphatically that of contrapposto: the bilateral articulation of the human form in terms of weight and support.”
“Contrapposto: art-history speak for counterpoise—the necessary balance for the upright human posture. Freud tells a simple evolutionary story in Civilization and Its Discontents, the dénouement of which is the moment mankind stood up—left the ground behind and rose above it on his two legs. This moment engineered a momentous realignment of man's perceptual organs, he reasoned. Nose and teeth and jaws receded before the supremacy of eyes and ears, the animality of pawing and sniffing being replaced by the visual, giving way, instead, to beauty and detachment. Thus the mental space in the armor of humanity expanded. Detachment in turn opened onto newly established cognitive zones: reflection, logic, memory.
“Perceptual distance opened a space within which memory developed and with it the grasp of history—of the moment of realization that one has left the ground. The brevity of that moment contracts it into a timeless purity, and the purity of this snap of the fingers makes it abstract.”