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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It seems a lifetime ago that Serra’s mammoth steel projects were the subject of bitter contempt. In 1981, his Tilted Arc caused such public outcry when it was installed in Federal Plaza in Manhattan that it became the subject of a public hearing and was eventually removed in 1989.

Nowadays, his architecturally scaled, abstract and curiously lyrical sculptures are sited around the world and have gone a long way toward forming a public appreciation for this uncompromising approach to Modernist art.

Indeed, so influential has his work been since the 1960s that, when the late Kurt Varnedoe was drawing up specifications for the new second-floor contemporary galleries at MoMA, he planned them specifically for Serra’s work.

Now in his late 60s, the artist himself seems as energetic as ever, and—as his conversation with ArtInfo demonstrates—just as passionate about the possibilities for sculpture and as intrigued by its rhetoric as he was 40 years ago.

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Richard, you’re well into the organization of your upcoming retrospective at MoMA. How have you found the experience of looking back over 40 years’ of your own work?

A retrospective is an occasion to reflect and take stock, but it’s double edged in that it puts me into a nostalgic relationship to my own history, which I’d rather not dwell upon. The rearview mirror perspective is not one that I’d take if there wasn’t a retrospective pending. I would rather think about the work that I am doing and the work that’s in front of me to do and not have to look over my shoulder. It’s obvious to me that I am not the same person that I was 40 years ago, nor are the issues that I am concerned with the same. A retrospective might give the impression of a seamless linearity of development, but my work does not evolve that way. It evolves in fits and starts. Oftentimes, the solution to a problem leads to an altogether different idea.

Has the process made you see things in your own work you hadn’t appreciated before?

It made me see connections that I had not realized. In the 1960s, when I first started to think about how I wanted to proceed, I wrote down a list of verbs that I would enact in relation to material. One of the verbs was “to lift.” I simply took a sheet of rubber 3 feet wide by 8 feet long and lifted up a long edge from its center and the rubber sheet remained freestanding, forming a continuous exterior and interior topological surface and volume.

[In this retrospective] there will be a new work on the second floor of MoMA, Band, which functions almost like a Mobius strip, in that there is no inside or outside. It’s a continuous form that unfolds and doesn’t repeat either in surface or volume. That’s not dissimilar from To Lift, although one wouldn’t necessarily connect a sheet of rubber 3-by-8 feet to a steel sculpture that is 36 feet wide by 70 feet long and 12 feet high; however, the topological concept is definitely a shared subtext.

How different is this show from your first MoMA retrospective, in 1986?

In the first exhibition there were only 10 pieces, due to limited space. In this exhibition there will be 27 pieces altogether, including three large new sculptures made specifically for the second floor, two works in the garden and earlier pieces from the 1960s to the ’80s on the sixth floor.

Since the ’80s, how has the public comprehension of your work changed?

The Tilted Arc controversy that divided public opinion as well as the art community was ongoing in ’86. There was a split in terms of how people judged my persona and the sculpture. However, a sea-change in reception occurred when the first torqued ellipses were shown at the Dia Center [in 1997]. A new generation came along and viewed the work for its invention. The forms were new to them. The properties of space became an obvious issue and the time of movement became a value in and of itself. Those pieces—and it actually dismayed me—were met with a great deal of enthusiasm. The audience for the Dia installation was not confined to the art world.

People often say that your work asks many questions, especially about what sculpture might be.

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.