Nobody in the group that I arrived with had ever seen anything like it. We’d come in the main gate to The Farm, which at that time was a rough timber construction sporting the skull and horns of a steer, and along the drive past Richard Thompson’s sculpture till we came over the brow of a hill and there, rising out of a large, sloping field of mown kikuyu grass was the most extraordinary thing: a great curving wall of rusting steel, perfectly horizontal, slicing up the landscape. It was three or four times the height of a man, five centimetres thick, more than 250 metres long, and it came out of the ground on a pronounced lean. As I walked around it, moving in and out of its curves, I was conscious of raising a sweat. On this summer afternoon, the steel radiated heat. Someone said, accurately as it turned out, that the sculpture must weigh 600 tons. It was exhilarating.
I’d joined a hundred or so people for one of the more significant events in the history of art in New Zealand, a celebration of the installation of Richard Serra’s sculpture, Te Tuhirangi Contour, at The Farm on 1 February 2003. Long recognised as one of the pre-eminent artists of the modern era, Serra had attracted admiration and controversy in almost equal measure over his lengthy career.1 His Tilted Arc, a 3.7 metre high steel wall across New York’s Federal Plaza, had been destroyed by the US government in 1989 after years of furious public debate; in 1999 his exhibition of Torqued Ellipses at the new Guggenheim Bilbao had attracted great interest. But he hadn’t yet done anything on quite the scale of Te Tuhirangi Contour. Gibbs had not brought a minor work by a master to The Farm; he’d extracted from Serra his largest and one of his most interesting site-specific works. He was introducing something that was entirely new to New Zealand, as well as commissioning an artwork that has aroused considerable international interest.
Jenny Gibbs was there with her friend the novelist Witi Ihimaera. She’d featured frequently in the New Zealand news since the separation, most sensationally in the celebrated 1998 saga of the stolen Colin McCahon painting, the Urewera Mural. It had been stolen from the Department of Conservation’s visitor centre at Lake Waikaremoana. Te Kaha, a heavily tattooed Tuhoe activist, and another man were eventually charged with its theft.2 Jenny Gibbs agreed to take part in an elaborate scheme to recover the painting, whereby on 29 August 1998 she was driven blindfolded in her car to a secret location where it was loaded into the back. The media went crazy — ‘the millionairess’ tangled up with Maori activists and art thieves. TVNZ devoted its final 60 Minutes special of the year to the story of ‘Mokos and Millions’.3
One art critic wrote of Richard Serra’s work that it ‘uses industrial materials to attain a zone of experience at once more concrete and stranger than the sad habits of our ordinary lives’.4 The scene, the people, the atmosphere, the experience that February day at The Farm was far from the ordinary.
Serra made the first of five visits to New Zealand and The Farm in February 1999 with no specific brief or preconceived idea of what he might do. He spent several days walking over the undulating Kaipara landscape in search of a suitable spot. Gibbs wanted him to locate his work on the harbour side of a line of trees; Serra insisted that the paddock behind that line of trees was where he wanted to work. He was interested in the fall of the land there. He then spent the next year or so thinking about what he might do. He thought first of placing a number of objects in the landscape, such as he’d done at Storm King and elsewhere. But then, when looking at a model that revealed the contour lines of the paddock, he found himself passing his finger along a single contour. ‘What if I use one contour to pass through the swales and the valleys and the elevations?’ he asked himself. ‘Would that mediate the site in the way that other things didn’t?’6 Having alighted on that idea, he thought initially of a 500 metre wall, 1.2 metres high, then of two walls following two contour lines that people could walk between. Finally, he returned to a single line, but with a lean that made it perpendicular to the fall of the land.
Eventually he received word that Friedhelm Pickhan’s steelworks near Cologne, Germany could form the plates at six metres and persuaded Gibbs that it was worth the considerable cost. Work on 56 plates, weighing 11 tons each, began in June 2000. Each was bent differently, following computer modelling by a designer who had experience in the aerospace industry. Disaster struck, however, when they were loaded on the ship bound for New Zealand. They had been designed to be stacked 10 plates high, but the captain had them stacked much higher, to the point that they fell over, nearly sinking the ship. All the plates had to be returned to the plant, set up again and re-measured. Most needed some reworking. It delayed the project by a whole year.
The 600-odd tons of steel plate finally reached The Farm in November 2001, starting the installation phase, which fascinated Gibbs. Serra’s contract was to provide the plates of steel; Gibbs’ job was to find a local engineer to design a system that would hold them up. He turned to Peter Boardman, a structural engineer. ‘One of the interesting things about sculpture,’ Boardman says, ‘is that the artists are usually pushing technology, the engineering and some of the physics right to the limit, and they tend to work by the seat of their pants; they say, “I think we’ll do this,” and wave their arms around, and we try to do it.’8 The 11 degree lean added significantly to the challenge. Boardman had to pile down nine metres and then produce a continuous concrete foundation on which the steel could be erected. Each plate had four massive steel feet welded to the bottom that were bolted to the concrete.
Another complication with steel is its capacity to expand and contract with changes in temperature. The 250 metre long wall had to be engineered so that it wouldn’t buckle on a hot day. The simplest solution was to have a small gap between each of the plates, but Serra wouldn’t hear of such a lazy compromise. The wall had to be continuous and without flaw, with the plates touching each other. The whole wall then needed to be able to expand and contract (with a total movement of around 40 millimetres), which Boardman provided for by allowing the steel plates to slide on their foundations. The feet stood on low-friction plastic and there was a little room left around the bolts. The wall was completed by May 2002, followed by extensive landscaping work.
没有评论:
发表评论