Clara-Clara and the bicycles

Wednesday April 16, 2008 in Paris.
''Clara-Clara'' was conceived for the Forum of the Pompidou Center at the time of the Serra retrospective in late 1983. Questions about the effect of the weight on the museum floor led Dominique Bozo, the director of the center to suggest placing the sculpture in the Jardin des Tuileries. Serra agreed, and it remained there during the exhibition and for several months after. The city subsequently acquired the sculpture, and working with the artist, found a site for it in Paris's 13th arrondissement, in the Square de Choisy, one of the stately small parks that are so indispensable to the quality and texture of Parisian life.

''Clara-Clara'' - named after the artist's wife, Clara Weyergraf - consists of two identical, irregularly inclined, curved steel bands, each one 120 feet long and 10 feet high. The bands, placed on their sides, curve away from each other at the ends and stand almost belly-to belly in the middle, but with a six-foot passageway between them at the nearest point through which people can move and observe. The sculpture seems both to open like magical doors and to squeeze inward like a trap, both to expose itself like a flower hungry for the sun and to curl up like a sunflower at dusk.

While Serra's sculptures are invariably concerned with physical as well as optical experience, ''Clara-Clara'' is nevertheless unusually sexual and anthropomorphic. It brings to mind longstanding conventions in Western art, such as the reclining woman, particularly its treatment by Surrealists, as well as the tradition of the anatomical study, which was so important to Leonardo and Michelangelo because the human being was for them the measure of all things.

Then the neighbourhood asked for Clara-Clara to be removed to a storage site in Ivry sur Seine.

In April 2008, Clara-Clara is back in the Jardin des Tuileries for a six months period.