Richard Serra Answers: Why Make Art?

Why make art?

What do you find by doing it?

What does it get you?

I always wanted an alternative existence,

and by that I mean I wanted to do something

where I could study my own

sentiments and experiences.

And I found that I could do that

in relation to making things

and making art in particular.

And I did it since I was a kid,

and it was a place that I always could go to,

that I could concentrate and

deal with problems

that I thought were of interest to me.

And, if I was clear enough about

what it was that I was probing

and stayed with the premise

of what I was probing,

it was possible that it could also

be clear to someone else.

And it was important that it not be

something that somebody else had done.

I think one of the things art does is it

asks you to perceive what it is

on its own level.

And it can come up and grab you at any time.

It can be reassuring.

It could be exactly the opposite.

It could agitate you.

It could be something you dismiss.

It could be something that engages you.

It could be something you recall.

It could be something that leads to things

that have nothing to do

with what you're looking at.

So, I think, works of art engage, possibly,

an internal memory bank

that isn't linear, and it can make you see

the outside reality in that way, also.

Like, you probably see the world

in ways that you would not have seen it

if those artists had not existed.

And do I think that Cézanne changed

how people saw a landscape in France

in the last century? For sure.

Do I think Warhol changed how we see

contemporary society through painting,

through the media-ization of,

the commodification of objects? For sure.

And you can just go through

the history of art that way,

and immediately you conjure up something that

you, yourself, could not have expressed,

and it fulfills in each of us something we lack.