Richard Serra

© 2007 Richard Serra. Photo by Lorenz Kienzle

Richard Serra, "Sequence" (2006)

© 2007 Richard Serra. Photo by Tom Powel

Richard Serra, "Intersection II" (1992–93)

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That’s one of the functions of art. That’s what artists do; they ask questions. I think that art, to its benefit, is not linear. Artists are always going to ask unexpected questions about art’s definition. Artists will always reframe history or reshape structure. That is the continuous input into the language of art. One can never predict innovation. Younger artists will always revolt against what they’ve been spoon fed and find ways to reinvent. That’s how art remains vital.

But you’ve been asking questions about the nature of sculpture for 40 years. Do you feel that you’ve come to understand it yet?

No, not at all. I’m not interested in sculpture, per se. Right now, I’m more interested in movement, in time and how the body measures time, and how movement through time affects one’s experience. Sculpture is the vehicle for structuring that experience. How the body moves in step, in stride, in balance informs all my recent work, regardless of its formal disposition.

How do you think that art carries meaning, particularly when it's as utterly abstract as yours?

When the viewer becomes an interactive subject, and the content no longer resides in the work but in the personal experience of the work, meaning it will always be relative. Origins, age, education, countless contingencies form different potentials for experience and awareness. The shift of meaning from the art object to the viewer places a personal obligation on the viewer to acknowledge, examine, reflect and expand on his or her experience, but there is also a communal aspect to it.

What do you mean by a communal aspect?

Do I mean that people understand a given installation in the same way? No. People tend to collect within the paths and volumes of the pieces, and what I noticed is how people communicate with each other. It’s very different from the contemplative isolation of viewing art objects. Whether the experience is private or communal, I hope it empowers them not so much to think about sculpture, but to think thoughts that they hadn’t thought before. If art can act as a catalyst to allow people to think thoughts that they hadn’t thought before and to move them in new directions in terms of their own sensibility, then art is of use without being functionally useful.

I was fascinated by the way people reacted to your last show at Gagosian, especially to the piece Elevations, Repetitions (2006). Visitors seemed to be almost as aware of one another as they were of the sculpture.

That was surprising to me as far as this particular sculpture is concerned, because it has a strict logic. I saw the piece as reduced to the specifics of how one understands aspects of circulation, elevation, repetition. But that was not how it was viewed. This piece was truly experienced collectively. Kids were running through it and chasing each other, people were shaking hands over the plates and talking to each other. It became an interior space for people to observe each other as they were walking and being measured by the elevations. That’s something that I did not foresee.

But I’d have thought that by now public response would be a large part of the conception of your work.

I do not program my sculptures either for effect or affect. Maybe over the years, as people have seen more of my work, they have come to realize that the experience is going to afford them something that they do not find either in nature or architecture or other venues.