San Francisco Cinematheque Program Notes (1994)

Program Notes 1994 conducting sculptural experiments that called attention to the activity of making art. In the following decade, Serra came to the attention of the general public through his controversial, large scale urban sculptures, more than a dozen of which have been erected in Western Europe and North America. Forged with raw, weighty masses of delicately corroding metal, Serra's "site-specific" works have often been received with distrust and hostility. Addressed to such conceptual issues as repetition, space, weight, tension and balance, his nonexpressive minimalist forms give cold comfort to viewers whose aesthetic values are tied to traditional concepts of beauty and art. Serra has been producing film and video work since the late sixties and to date has directed more than twenty works. The films in tonight's program represent in moving images many of the daring ideas that make Serra's sculptures so controversial. Hand Catching Lead (1968); 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 1/2 minutes In Hand Catching Lead, Serra's first film, his right hand is in frame and he tries to catch pieces of lead as they are dropped through the frame. The artist's hand develops a personality as it rather unsuccessfully attempts to grab these intermittently falling shards of metal. "Films by artists who primarily practice an art other than cinema are often curious objects because they straddle two traditions—the artist's native one and film—in ways that give the object different, even incommensurate meanings. Serra's Hand Catching Lead illustrates this nicely. This film has a rich set of connotations when seen in the context of the recent history of contemporary sculpture, where Serra is a prominent figure, but it doesn't have the same implications when viewed in the context of avant-garde film. The art critic assesses Hand Catching Lead as concerned with the material conditions of sculpture- weight and gravity. Thus, the art critic situates Hand Catching Lead in the line of works that make their 'thing-ness' their subject Yet, for the film critic. Hand Catching Lead can't count as a reflexive film for the simple reason that the material Serra emphasizes isn't film but lead. As a result, his film doesn't easily fit into the category of avant-garde films that display the material conditions of film. What is a gesture in the direction of the Real, from the viewpoint of art history, is pure symbolism in the context of film. To the extent that the rhetoric of both film and art criticism finds these categories mutually exclusive, the uncommitted film viewer is stuck with two equally compelling but incompatible ways to interpret the film." — Noel Carroll Hands Tied(1968); 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 1/2 minutes Serra's Hands Tied is the artist's second foray into the medium of film and is another spirited investigation of the issues approached in his first film, Hands Catching Lead. Rather than being a task. Hands Tied is the performance of a feat, which lasts as long as it takes Serra, whose hands are tied with rope inside the frame, to untie the knots. The film sets up a dialectic between hands £uid material as the hands move and strain in attempting to loosen the rope. As in his other films Hand Catching Lead and Hands Scraping, his hands become the performers and acquire a physical expressiveness of their own. Frame (1969); 16mm, b&w, sound, 22 minutes In this film, Serra employs a ruler to measure the dimensions of the camera's field of view against a white wall. In turn, he then projects a film of the field and measures that. The structure of Frame demonstrates the disparity in perception between what is seen by the cameraman looking through the lens and what is seen by a person looking directly at the same space. 79