A hand darkened with soot struggles to grab falling lead ingots in Richard Serra’s three-minute film Catching Lead (1969). Sometimes the hand is victorious in capturing the commodity, but often the hand snaps shut, only grasping air. Many authors have suggested the film is about the limits of the artist’s intentions.
In 2020, US sawmills closed due to the pandemic and shipping slowed, causing timber prices to increase 288% by May of 2021. ‘People were redesigning with hollow steel when lumber [timber] prices got so bad,’ Ryan Elmendorf and Evan Beloni of the engineering and fabrication studio Elmendorf Geurts tells Hyperallergic. Ongoing labour shortages have meant timber prices only recently came off the highs.
