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As you approach Joe at the end of the open-air court, an opening at a tilting angle invites you to enter its inner space. Joe is a sculpture at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, MO, a torqued spiral with leaning diagonals and accelerating curves. Richard Serra has made Joe from five contiguous steel plates that have rusted a sensuous golden brown. They are connected as a continuous band that is 12 ft high, 45 ft across, 2 inches thick, and “wrapped into an ever tighter configuration towards the center” (Curtis, 2001, p. 32). The huge dynamic force of Joe is conditioned by a circle on the bottom and a smaller circle on top, which gives you a sense of its surfaces either falling away from you or reaching up over you. You enter, as you do a psychoanalytic experience, not knowing what to expect, and you fill with wonder and reverie as you realize that you are not just a spectator but also a participant in this work of art that enfolds your body.
As I enter Joe I am aware of entering a massive sculpture with a man's name,1 almost everyman's name, and made by a man. The nonrepresentational abstraction stirs my imagination and evokes reverie about possible performances of gender, in particular, masculinity. Although some critics have characterized Joe as a “womb of steel” (Sylvester, 2004), I, thinking of myself as feminine, experience Joe, as well as Serra's torqued ellipses, as artistic gestures toward masculinity as penetrability and interiority.
Gender polarities have been ossifying for at least 2,500 years. Masculinity has conventionally been characterized by outwardness, precise boundaries, shapes, entities, and definitions; by penetration, deconstruction, and cutting through; by differentiation and separateness; by objectivity and thinking; by representation; and by doing. And femininity has conventionally been characterized by inwardness, ambiguity or fluidity of boundaries, shapes, entities, and definitions; by receptivity and holding;