I went outside to walk (old) Irving today.
At the same time that I was getting him ready to go around and about – this teenage-style-kid wearing a bright red hood pulled all over his head (which is only important in a second here) was walking down the street holding a boom-box – maybe plugged into an ipod – so that everyone in the world could hear him flipping through song after song after song . . . basically he was drawing a bunch of attention to himself – which made what he was doing even odder.
He was walking very slow – not on the sidewalk – but on the street side of the cars – and I only really started paying attention when I noticed that he was stopping at the cars as he went by – and looking to see what was in the cars.
So my partner Irv and I sprung into action – and walked about 10 (ten) feet behind him until he was far away from our little world – slowing down when he slowed down . . . stopping when he stopped.
He never acknowledged that we were there – and I have no idea how any sort of confrontation would have gone if he had . . . but it was an exciting time for us all.
Now – before anyone gets itchy about “Why can’t a kid in a hoodie listening to a boom-box walk down the street without being followed by the likes of you – then anyway?!” – know this . . . one of the first cars that he stopped to look into . . . was mine. And that bird don’t fly.
Well the story unfolds a bit more in this evident age of Serra . . . because as it times-out, MOMA is just so happening to have a Serra retrospective up right now. The show is called “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years” and as retrospectives seem to go . . . there was a lot of work that I had never seen. The stuff from the late 1960’s was made of vulcanized rubber, neon, lead and fiberglass – and I wasn’t a huge fan of it (especially this one piece – “Belts” from 1966-67 that had a series of rubber belts hung on a wall – with the last belt having a neon tube twisted in and around it. This one irked me as particularly annoying because – from my perspective – it was a simple one-shot idea that just didn’t dooooooo anything). It seemed like he really hit upon something when he started playing around with ginormous pieces of steel that threatened viewers with a kind of an object versus human conundrum – a battle that I am pretty sure the objects would have the upper hand if they chose to ever come to that point.