Andrew Lummus

University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
aglummus@gmail.com

Richard Serra’s False Double

https://www.doi.org/10.66966/COTAA.2025.11

Richard Serra’s Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi (1986/2006) is a postminimalist sculpture at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. It ambitiously aims to both erode the category of art object through minimalist phenomenology and form a political critique through establishing a double with Pablo Picasso’s wartime masterpiece.
On both counts, the work defeats itself. As the sculpture provides few clues to its interpretation, I use Gilles Deleuze’s concept of repetition and Slavoj Žižek’s critique there of to analogize and provide clues as to the critique posed by Serra unto Picasso
and modern art, through which Equal-Parallel exposes its own logic of violation. The subsequent histories of Bengasi, Libya and the sculpture itself have remade Serra’s doubles back into a commercial art object, thereby negating its transgressive character and transcendent capacity, demonstrating that it was always-already limited as such. The double, as a critical postmodern device, is meant to liberate art from its history and thereby its constraints. But the architectural space of museum display is enduring, as is the weight of history. This liberation proves to be instead a more advanced set of shackles, revealing the nature of these dissents to be less transgressive than first imagined.

Keywords: Richard Serra; Gilles Deleuze; Slavoj Žižek; repetition; postmodernism; institutional critique.