RICHARD SERRA: THINKING ON YOUR FEET
Directed by Maria Anna Tappeiner
Produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk with Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
In English and German with English subtitles
Germany. 93 min. Not Rated

Any documentary that features a celebrated art star must walk a fine line—honoring that artist’s work and legacy without straying into meaningless hero-worship. Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet focuses on the famous sculptor’s creation of “The Matter of Time,” a site-specific, $20 million steel installation commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The film is, at times, beautifully shot, but unfortunately, it lionizes Serra at the expense of a deeper exploration of his life, work, and legacy. It’s also painfully slow moving and repetitive, and would be deeply improved by a 45- or 50-minute cut. As a sociologist with a specialization in arts and culture, I tend to like “movies about artists talking about themselves” (as an acquaintance put it) better than the average filmgoer, but to me, Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet was so tedious that I was tempted to walk out several times. There are many long, long sequences of men slowly measuring things that rival Warhol’s Empire in absurdity.

Serra describes his work as “process pieces.” Like the music of his one-time assistant Philip Glass, the works are often about the process of making them. “Most people are interested in the what,” says Serra, “I’m interested in the how.” His enormous, multi-million dollar works are made with rusty steel, weigh many tons, and demand hundreds of hours of labor from teams of workers. They beg another question: why? This juicy question should be taken up in all artist documentaries, whether tacitly or obviously. Serra, who says that he worked to untrain himself after getting an academic art degree at Yale, doesn’t address what drew him to the kinds of works that he makes. In terms of the how, the movie is also unfortunately thin—we see how men walk from place to place with tape measures or set up models of Serra’s steel sculpture, but not how he makes one of the world’s most cumbersome metals look mobile and delicate.

We see nothing of Serra’s personal life or his initial creation process. However, there’s some discussion of the controversial nature of Serra’s work—critics have protested his public art pieces, which are often commissioned using public funds that one interviewee argues might better be spent on youth centers than on “four pieces of rusty steel.” One of his dealers compares this controversy to the uproar over the Impressionist painters, who initially had to set up a venue to show their work. The difference is that the Impressionists used relatively inexpensive materials, worked alone, and didn’t use tax money to have a giant team of workers build their creations.

Filmmaker Maria Anna Tappeiner doesn’t turn a critical eye toward Serra at any moment. The best artist profiles, however adoring, show some of their subject’s vulnerabilities, and I couldn’t help but feel that Serra himself must have had a heavy hand in the filmmaking process. He spews a lot of heartily academic sound bites that have an emperor’s new clothes quality to them, and Tappeiner doesn’t show us any alternatives to Serra’s narrative.

A more thorough examination would help you understand the artist’s process and his or her context in the art world. Instead, this film just made me antsy and resentful, irritated at both Serra and the filmmakers. My friend, who appreciated the camerawork and is more drawn to Serra’s sculptures than I am, was also eager to walk out during Richard Serra’s final, interminable 45 minutes. Elizabeth Bachner
August 20, 2008