Richard Serra’s  “Equal Weights and Measures”, six rectangular annealed steel blocks rested in Gagosian’s gymnasium size Chelsea gallery in New York in 2006.  Each was 4’ 3” by 5’ 3” by 6’ 3” and, if I correctly remember, approximately 40 tons apiece, lined in a row with each lying on a different face.  This is as usual in the simple but elegant systems Serra constructs.  On three different occasions I circled and stood in their presence.  I say “presence” because I had not encountered anything like these, they were not like dense stone; these objects with their patina of steel and rust made basalt appear light.  My grasp of how and of what the objects were made contributed to the feeling of the pull and repulsion of such massive density, in its brute simple and austere beauty.

Each block pressed cracks radiating in the concrete floor as I observed visitors wander in and, after a glance or two, pause to read a label on the wall to sum up their experience.  A few lingered.  In an interview I read some years ago, Serra said “nothing sucks the space out of a room like a Giacometti”.   This has been my experience, and it is especially true when we see a Giacometti in a white cube without the distraction of paintings; the interior of a white cube can define space as absolute.  Serra’s six steel weights in a white, sky-lit space did not suck the space so much as breathe it.  The expanse of the room, with its natural light, let gravity push and pull the mass crushed into compactness beyond its original molecular structure.  The solidity of the blocks cancelled all poetic nonsense.  Here was a case of presence versus appearance like no other.  It was the exact opposite of a mythical, personal, iconic, or spiritual presence, not in the sense of the spiritual’s negation of evil, but that the material compression, identical with the rectilinear forms, grounded any generalities.