Richard Serra: Tools & Strategies | "Exclusive" | Art21

Episode #171: Filmed in 2000 at Richard Serra's Manhattan studio, the artist describes the various tools and conceptual strategies he has used throughout his career when working with lead and steel. Serra discusses his early focus on the nature of the art production process itself which resulted in his writing a "Verb List" (1967-68). Multiple lead works that resulted from Serra acting out the "Verb List" are shown through archival images. Serra's invention of a tool that twisted sheet metal around a wheel enabled him to shape steel in a new way--from the inside out. "Torqued Ellipses" (1996-97), which resulted from this process, are shown at Dia:Beacon in 2004.

Richard Serra's work since the 1960s has focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead. Serra's work is known for it's immense physicality, compounded by the breathtaking bends and curves of steel plates that carve private moments out of public spaces.

CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins & Catherine Tatge. Camera: Ken Kobland & Pete Shanel. Editor: Morgan Riles. Artwork Courtesy: Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York & Dia Art Foundation. Theme Music: Peter Foley.

When I first started, what was very very important to me

Was dealing with the nature of process.

So, what I had done was I had written a verb list--

To roll, to fold, to cut,

To dangle, to twist--or whatever.

And I really just worked out pieces in relation to the verb list

Physically in a space.

Now, what happens when you do that is

You don't become involved with the psychology of what you're making,

Nor do you become involved with the after image of what it's going to look like.

So, basically, it gives you a way of proceeding,

With material in relation to body movement,

In relation to making,

That divorces you from any notion of metaphor,

Any notion of easy imagery.

I think what artists do is

They invent strategies that allow themselves to see

In a way that they haven't seen before

To extend their vision.

Various artists do it in different ways:

Cézanne did it in his way,

Obviously, Pollock did it his way

By dripping downward in a horizontal plane.

But I think what's interesting about artists is

They constantly come up with ways of informing themselves

By inventing tools or techniques or processes

That allow them to see into a material manifestation

In the way that you would not if you dealt with standardized

Or academic ways of thinking.

These ellipses only came about because

We'd invented a wheel to make these things

In order for us to understand what we were doing.

And albeit it's a small invention

And on another sense, it has never come up

In the history of form making before.

We're not drawing the outside of the piece

Like a pear or a donut.

What we're doing is trying to figure out

What the internal volume will revolve like.

We made a wheel to figure that out,

And that wheel predicates the outside the skin.

So it's the way of working from the inside, out.

I think one constantly tries to invent ways

Of seeing into what one's doing

So you don't get into some lock-step notion

Of how to do what you do.

I have to kind of invent new strategies

In order to not go back to something that's just a reflex action.