Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet.

Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "The film is nominally devoted to documenting the preparation and execution of The Matter of Time, a massive grouping of Mr Serra's signature steel walls, cones, and ellipses commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It is directed with enthusiastic remove by the German filmmaker Maria Anna Tappeiner, who exhibits the same kind of deference for space and emphasis on meticulous construction as the artist's well-known work."

Updated through 8/21.

"While it's true that Serra can expound at length and in formidable terms about the 'load-bearing, tectonic concerns' of his art, he's also the kind of guy who can't help going with 'directionality' when 'direction' would suffice," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "Ironically, after a little background on Serra's working-class upbringing (he even took a job in a steel mill) and a testimonial from Philip Glass, it's when Serra himself takes over - with sophisticated color commentary on his Guggenheim Bilbao exhibit - that the film's portrait of the artist loses focus."

"Listening to Richard Serra talk about sculpture is like listening to Russell Crowe talk about acting: after a while you feel you're either in the presence of genius or the victim of an elaborate con," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Fortunately for both, their work speaks for itself."

Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "The film ends welcomingly with Serra stating that he creates artwork that positions the spectator as the subject, but for those suspicious of modern art, the film's focus on Serra's obsession with symbolic iconography, the lexicon of geometric spheres, articulating spatial problems, and creating forms that have never been seen before in nature mostly confirms how closely entwined more modern contemporary-art practices are with intellectual wankitude."

"Artists can sometimes ramble on a bit," concedes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York, "but Serra's process-centric comments are weirdly riveting. 'We start with the void,' he says, and you realize that his real subject is open space: the reshaping of the volume of a gallery and our movement through the tunnels his walls create."

Updates, 8/21: "Tappeiner's reverence for her subject... leaves one hungering for a more complex engagement with Serra's art and its legacy," writes Artforum's Brian Scholis.

"In sharp distinction from Louise Bourgeois, whose recent biopic at Film Forum was considerably more interesting than this film, Serra's art contains little of his own experience and therefore the omission of his personal life is somewhat justified," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "That said, it's this lack of a more candid connection in favor of modernist artspeak that keeps Thinking on Your Feet from transcending the category of DVD-bound artist documentaries into something more engaging."

Posted by dwhudson at August 20, 2008 6:43 AM