Richard Serra in "Place" - Season 1 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.