Richard Serra’s “Ballast” was installed in 2005 in the East Plaza at Mission Bay. It consists of two separate plates of steel – each nearly 50 feet high and 15 feet wide – tilting in opposite directions.
Each plate tilts edgewise slightly off the vertical, one northward, one southward. From afar, their opposing slants register clearly, but stand between them and face one, then the other, and each appears to tilt the same way. Their dissonance from the architectural verticals all around creates the spatial "agitation" that interests Serra.
He relates the seeming perceptual paradoxes in "Ballast" to his boyhood memory of growing up in San Francisco's Outer Sunset District. "I'd walk to Seal Rock and back," Serra said. "And I always thought, 'Isn't it fascinating -- when I went out, the ocean was on my left, when I turned around and walked back, following my own footprints, the ocean was on my right and it was a completely different experience."
Serra's large-scale work always risks being misread as a complex of objects, especially in outdoor settings.
"If people are looking at sculpture as an object, that's just not the dialogue you enter into with this piece," Serra said. "There are a lot of people around still making objects, but I'm interested in a situation where what we call the sculpture is a catalyst for walking and looking and thinking about what you're looking at. If this work can do that, if it can just inform and change how you see, even minutely, that's a reason to do it. I mean, nobody thinks sculpture's going to change the world."
