RICHARD SERRA: For the most part, work comes out of work
in terms of how I develop an idea.
I never begin with an image and I never begin with a drawing.
I usually begin with a model.
It’s a way of working from the inside out.
I think I’m probably building upward of 12 to 15 pieces
right now, in various stages—
I’m building a piece in St. Louis, I’m building a piece in Woodside, California,
I’m building a piece in Sinagpore, I’m building a piece in Qatar,
I’m building a piece in New Zealand—
I’m building quite a lot of work right now.
I never think in terms of metaphor,
nor do I think in terms of what the image is going to look like beforehand,
What concerns me is the relationship of the elements
that I happen to find interesting at that point.
And if I think I can invent a new way of looking at those elements,
or make the possibility of walking in and through
and around a piece something that startles me,
then I think that there’s a possibility to proceed.
With “Charlie Brown” in particular,
the problem was how to bend a shape as it elevated
that leaned away from you and turned….
and that came out of having worked with the “Ellipses” prior.
I was surprised in that people who had absolutely no information about sculpture were able
to enter into these pieces and find a certain amount of engagement
with the sculpture in ways that they probably hadn’t before.
The experience for a lot of them was fulfilling because, in some sense,
it was startling, because it was new, because they couldn’t locate themselves.
It had nothing to do with architecture, it had nothing to do with landscape,
it had nothing to do with buildings or mountains or ravines,
or anything that they could have a touchstone to.
This piece has a continuous movement even if you remain stationary,
so this piece has a very big stretch,
and this piece makes you concentrate more
on the elasticity of the steel itself than the physicality of the space.
The steel in this piece becomes something other than steel.
It almost has a feeling that it’s being stretched like rubber.
It becomes a band, not a plane.
One of the things I also find gratifying about this piece
is that the overhang on the piece is upward of five or six feet,
so you’re able to walk under the piece…
where the overhand is almost like the hull of a ship.
Probably one of the most primal experiences I had,
or generative experiences I had,
is watching the launching of a ship
when I was about four years old in Marin Shipyard—
I went there with my father.
To see a big, massive, obdurate shape being launched where it becomes
buoyant and free and afloat and adrift—
where it changes from something that’s massive to something that’s weightless,
was something that affected me, that I never forgot about,
and for a while, it really became a reocurring dream.
MAN: What do you do in that book all the time, Richard?
SERRA: Um, I keep track of myself.
MAN: Are you writing poetry?
SERRA: No, it’s a way of keeping your eye and hand together.
I started drawing when I was very, very young
in order to compete for, I guess, affection
with my parents, because I had an older brother
who was very articulate,
and very good-looking, very tall—
And I was like the little runt.
And in order to kind of capture my parents’ imagination,
after dinner I could make drawings every night.
And they would support those drawings.
And so it became something that I could do that was personal and private to me
as a way of keeping my hand and eye coordinated in relation to what I would see.
So if my father and my brother were taking the car apart,
I would draw the parts.
So I’ve always done it, and it’s a way just to keep
in touch with, not only everyday life for me,
in a diaristic notion, but in order to enable me to see.
And I think the eye is king og a muscle.
And the more you draw, the better shape the muscle’s in,
actually, the better you see.
I don’t particularly think of notation drawing that I do every day as drawing per se—
I make other drawings in which I deal with autonomous things in the world,
and the history of drawing.
But in terms of just informing myself, as a way of keeping a dialogue doing,
unlike Woody Allen talking into a tape recorder, I draw.
MAN: You’re not going to clear it.
SERRA: It’s this way, yeah?
Take it back up, take it back up.
That’s the moment, it’s called a 5-millimeter moment—
it’s where you have to set it and you have to get it within 5 millimeters.
MAN: Hey, John…
This is going to be a nightmare, trying to weld these…
I didn’t tell it to rain, come on.
Blame it on Tony, he picked the date.
MAN: It’s a real collaboration—
for all the steelworkers putting this together and everybody that’s involved—
and I think the art is the process as well as the piece.
But I like the way it’s coming together.
MAN: Definitely, and it’s like omnipresent.
SERRA: Yeah, yeah, you can’t get away from it.
Oh, yeah, it’s right there.
MAN: Nice job, very nice job.
SERRA: It’s almost like a pneumatic structure.
MAN: Pneumatic?
SERRA: Yeah, because it seems like it’s being stretched
and pumped from the inside.
MAN: Where do you want to weld that now?
MAN: Here.
MAN: John…
SERRA: To be able to contain space and hold space
and make space the content of the work that you’re dealing with
comes with a certain kind of acuity of understanding
your relationship to a volume.
Very simple if I said it’s very different than walking into a telephone booth
than a football stadium and say, “Oh, yes, I understand—
telephone booth, claustrophobic; football stadium, vast.”
If you take something in between the telephone booth
and the football stadium, you say,
“I’m dealing with the subtleties of walking across the room,
“about what’s on the right-hand side,
“And if you turn around and walk back, what’s on the right-hand side.”
This piece is generative in that it’s a new piece for me,
it opens a whole other body,
a whole other series of work for me.
I don’t know how that’s going to spill out,
I don’t know what kinds of works are going to come out of it,
but there’s still a kind of wonder in that,
because that piece hasn’t reached closure for me.