Mind over matter: Richard Serra's Bilbao Guggenheim sculptures both respond to and challenge their context.

It was always going to be a showdown between architecture and art, but which would hit the ground first? The Guggenheim Bilbao has kept its legend well--a Herculean feat of impossible architecture saves the city and becomes the benchmark for signature architecture today--its rippling volumes still impress, even if, walking round the building, you find its deliberate playfulness (butch solidity versus flimsy scenography) a trifle wearing. But that's the outside, a territory architect Frank Gehry (aka The Greatest Living Architect) does well. Inside, the game is very different, with curators smiling wanly over the fragmented arrangement of gallery spaces and the overwhelming presence of the architecture, a landscape of such tectonic restlessness that it has produced an anti-myth--a place where curators' ambitions lie down and die.

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Enter Richard Serra, the grand old man of American sculpture, although he still looks as if he could throw a mean punch. His latest project, boldly labelled by the Guggenheim as 'the largest site-specific sculptural commission in modern history', comprises seven massive new steel sculptures that now fill the central ground floor chamber--the space has been renamed the Arcelor Gallery after the steel manufacturer that has sponsored this permanent installation. It embraces Snake, a long, lazily winding Serra work that's been at the museum since 1997, but now gives it a new purpose as a central link in the unfolding narrative of twists and turns that constitute the artist's reorganisanon of this challenging space. Entitled The Matter of Time, the project is quite simply an artistic and technological triumph, one that, in deliberately constructing a dialogue with Gehry's architecture, only adds to its impact. 'The building is made of cones', explains Serra, 'but I couldn't make a form that closed into itself without being conical in some form. If you look at Snake, it's still built with conical sections and I wanted to look beyond this. Everything that has been built in architecture up to this point in the history of form making has been dealing with cones. No one has figured out how to take an ellipse on the ground and rise it in elevation, twist it, while keeping the radius the same', claims Serra. 'That radius up there'--he points to the top of Torqued Ellipse, an oval-shaped piece where the upper long axis crosses that of the oval on the ground at a 90 degree angle 'is the same as it is down there'. Serra describes his moment of inspiration, which came in Borromini's church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome a few years ago--a building that he's spoken about with awe many times before to me. Initially misinterpreting the architect's solution to the changing geometries that build towards its celebrated dome, the artist then returned to New York where, Serra says, 'I asked someone in Frank Gehry's office if they could take a plane on the floor and a plane in the air and rotate one above the other keeping the radius the same: not smaller or bigger, the same. The guy said to me they couldn't play with me then as they were building the Guggenheim at Bilbao'. Undeterred, Serra took a piece of wood and made a wheel out of it by adding it to the end of a stick. 'I rolled the wheel up a piece of lead and the kind of movement gave me a form that was a template. Because I didn't know the kind of bending pattern this would require when trying to make the same form in a different, less pliable material like steel, I sent this back to my computer guy at Gehry's office and he said "are you using a CAD too". I said, no, I was using a stick. He then said "we can play with you tomorrow". All my architectural friends were telling me to make this piece out of concrete but I didn't want to do this. I wanted to make it in two inch steel'.

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Serra's excitement about his 'discoveries' is palpable--'this hasn't happened in the history of nature, architecture, pottery. It's enabled me to make forms that until now were unforeseen', he exclaims with characteristic bravado--but while some might find his pedagogic bombast a little much, in exploring the physical limits of steel and by focusing on increasingly reductive geometrical problems he's pushed his creative vocabulary forward and found within it not fewer but more adjectival possibilities. Torques, spirals, forests of curves--Between the Torus and the Sphere, a series of twisting convex-concave walls that closely slice through one end of the gallery--combine to produce a range of narrative options. Serra doesn't prescribe the way the sculptures should be accessed, but there is a distinct and quite manipulative choreography at play, in which visitors are invisibly spun out of one opening and into the hidden vortex of the next. The trick which he pulls off is to hold these pieces together so the sequential effect--akin to a great Wagnerian cycle--becomes epic in both scale and sensation.

A principal aim of Serra's work is to produce a feeling of disorientation (so many turns), something it succeeds in doing due to the height of these sculptures (average 14 foot), and so you seek relief by looking upwards and this is where the building's flaws are revealed. You can't help comparing the pristine joins of Serra's steel plates (fabricated in Siegen, Germany) with the less-than-slick plaster ceilings and partial cupolas above, with their random rows of spotlights and whimsical curves, and find them wanting. Even the rusting surface of Serra's work, which in its worn smoothness suggests the patina of archaic buildings, seems to thumb its iron-orange-smudged nose at Gehry's pallid Baroque. Oddly, the effect produced by walking through these sculptures isn't contemporary in feeling: you sense the silent testament of ancient ritual spaces, places in which the horror and the mystery of the human imagination have been played out. Here's Serra on steel: 'It lives, it breathes, it implicates you in the space in ways that unless you understand the fact that it's dense, solid, that it gives you a psychological sense that it's happening, that you can't get away from. It happened to me because I was working rivets and so it's a material I know. It takes about 40 years to figure out what to do with it'.

The title of Serra's installation, The Matter of Time, references many things, among them the experiential narrative visitors undergo as they weave in and out of Serra's massive curving blades, as well as the mutable processes of chemical change evident in the surface of the oxidising steel sculptures. 'The time of architecture is usually narrative--there's a programme built into the function of the architecture', says Serra. 'But here the duration of time is different in each piece and is very personal and is diverse. There's no hierarchy here. It doesn't have the narrative imposition of architecture. Instead, you familiarise your body rhythms to the object around you. The focus is on you and your experience as the subject. That's a big shift between what Modernism told us it was going to be--that the presence of the object in itself was the aesthetic hit--and what happened in the 1960s, when after Judd another generation came along that said there's also the time it takes for the duration of the experience. The viewer, not the object, then became the subject of the work'.

Where is hope in this installation, I asked Serra? 'It lies in the fact that experience doesn't have to be mediated. These works, like all my work, involve an agitation that animates you. This subtext of anxiety only reminds you that you have a choice. These are individual spaces, places where you make your own mind up'. And that's perhaps the greatest gift the work bestows: the chance to hold time still for a while, to allow you to trace the experience of walking through them safe in the knowledge that you can always return and start again. In a sense, despite their intimidating size, they are perhaps forgiving.

All photographs by Robert Polidori, 2005