Richard Serra

In conversation with William Furlong

From Audio Arts Volume 12, Number 4 1993

Transcript

The extent to which Richard Serra’s works establish an exacting tension within the space where they are installed is surprising given the economy of his materials and the reductive nature of the formal elements he employs. Serra’s drawings in the Serpentine Gallery, London comprised rectangles of canvas covered with several layers of paint stick, a waxy, oil-based crayon.

William Furlong: You have a show here of drawings that are installed on the walls, but could we start by talking about the work that you are perhaps primarily known for, that is your publicly sited sculpture. I was wondering what sorts of comparative issues there were between making a work for a public place and making a work to be installed within the museum context.

Richard Serra: Usually within the museum context you are bounded by the architecture and either the tyranny of the white cube or the constraints of the flat floor or the physiognomy of the building. You also have to take into consideration that within the museum structure viewers are usually more thoughtful in that they are going to a context where works of art are to be perceived. Contrary to that, if I were working in a public space and place, you enter into a whole host of relationships that are not precluded but are different from those of museums or institutional structures in that the interface with everyday life is the mix of the casual observer or the audience. So it is not just people who keep their finger in the cultural pie. The other thing that happens is that the context that you are presented with in urban sites, rather than landscape sites, usually has an interface with a host of things that you can’t foresee. Exits and entrances, subways, train stations, traffic flow, the character of the pavement, the context of the surrounding buildings, the ideological overtone of the situation you are placed in. Often what happens, particularly in outside situations, is that there is a presumption amongst corporations that want to support outside work that they will exhibit their liberalism by consuming works of art and using them as garnish or decor or badges, and invariably that eclipses any meaningfulness those works could have. The best example of that would be to drive up Sixth Avenue in New York and you can see where works that were built for one studio situation have been site-adjusted to become nothing more than décor.
On the other hand, museum situations offer the possibilities of experimentation and they offer the possibilities of using spaces and places to extend the boundaries and definitions of your work. I don’t make distinctions between the audiences, because if you do that I think then what you are going to do is cater to the populus, and often what I’ve found is that if you start undercutting yourself and starting to second-think what the audience might be, then you are probably playing a populus scheme where you are going to diminish your work for the so-called art of the people. My notion about that is that I would just as soon project a work that is not only significant in my mind’s eye but interesting to an intelligent person, even more advanced in thinking than myself or more advanced than the audience that exists. I think the fact that when artists sell their invention to the status quo and diminish their creative drive to make accommodations they fall into the position of being bought off, either by corporate manipulators or government ideologies, and that art then becomes a part of the service community. For most art in public spaces and places there is a presumption of a kind of freedom that is usually a sham. Usually you are asked to accommodate or serve, or glorify, or enhance, and the notion of sculpture as sculpture isn’t taken into consideration. What the presumption is by most power brokers is that somehow they want to increase the value of their property and their philosophical outlook in terms of their liberal agenda, and it usually runs contrary to the development of a particular artist’s work. There is a whole group of people now who purport to be architectural artists, and that has come about because, particularly in America, there is one per cent of finances given in new buildings for the acquisition of art, and architects, being fearful of most sculptors and painters, would just as soon take that upon themselves and use the money for their own purposes. So in place of sculpture we have Philip Johnson doing a golden boy for AT&T out of gold leaf and about eighteen feet high, which is nothing more than an appropriated pastiche on neoclassical Greek art. You will also have someone like Michael Graves in Portlandia doing a cornucopia for economic revival in terms of the sculpture. I think all of those things not only demean sculpture and what it does is it prevents serious sculpture from taking part in the general dialogue in the outside world.

What I have tried to do is maintain my invention and build where I can in relation to spaces and places, and often what happens is an analysis is done of the site and the context, and the works are only built in the sites and contexts in which there is a comparative relationship, either formal or experiential, between the site and the piece. But I think when artists take on the potential of building in outdoor places they have to confront the history of sculpture and the history of decoration and consumption and analyse the situation and decide whether or not they can make their most intelligent work in those spaces and places without having their hands tied.

WF: Do you have a sense of what an ideal space would be for one of your publicly sited works?

RS: I don’t think there are ideal sites. I think every site has its ideological frame and overtone. There are leftover sites,traffic islands or whatever, but still they are subject to a lesser degree of a certain kind of ideological cover. There are sites that certainly are less than ideal. They would be military installations or governmental buildings or God knows what. I think if the pieces are just to serve those institutions they are going to be eclipsed by the context and the content in no way is going to be able to override the context. I think the artist has a possibility of walking away from those sites.

I think every site presents a problematic and I think it is up to the artist to try to deal as intelligently as he can within the nature of his own work see if he can make a significant and thoughtful statement. I am really interested in the potential of sculpture as sculpture. I am not interested in the potential as some self-serving material for populus consumption.

WF: What would be the criteria that you would bring to one of your works in relation to whether it succeeded or failed within a particular situation?

RS: I think that anyone going to site-specific works can reconstruct the reason for their inclusion on whether the work fails or succeeds in what it attempts to do in relation to its context. If they find that it enters into a critical dialogue in relation to that context, and it alters the nature and shape of how we know that context, and they have to rethink what that context means, and if it is then brought back into one of a sculptural concern not an urban concern per se, then I think that one has to either accepts the definition being altered into one of sculptural convention or not. I think there isn’t any way of saying that this is just some arbitrary belief system. That is not up to me to decide. I think that is up to the viewer to decide. I think what I object to in some instances is that you have either politicians or people with political agendas not willing to enter into a dialogue with work in public spaces but rather to censor those works and to use works of art as a scapegoat for their own political agenda. It is a very easy scapegoat because most people are very uninformed about the nature of sculpture. In some sense there is very little audience for sculpture. What I find disheartening is that for the most part painters and sculptors have been divided by a commercial gallery situation which has kept them, like horses in a stable, competing against each other, and there is no political solidarity amongst them. Not only were my pieces destroyed to dismantle the Governmental General Services Administration Organisation that came in under the Kennedy administration, but then further the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) scapegoated Robert Mapplethorpe to use him as a signpost to enforce their censorship. It has actually gotten to the point where it is divisive in terms of the larger body politic in America, and they have started with artists and they have moved right on to women and gays, and if you listen to it carefully the language reiterates the early language of the Third Reich.

WF: Can we move now to some other issues. Obviously issues in your work such as weight, balance, equilibrium and the sense of the weight of materials are important, but I wondered how you actually arrived at orchestrating those values?

RS: Well, it depends on the context in which you are building. I think one of the things that was interesting to me about working in the Tate is that you realise that there is a preponderance of stone in that building, it is heavy and massive. What I have always thought in seeing work placed in those three rooms is that they were invariably reduced to objects. The architecture in its pompous grandiosity consumed everything in there, so sculptures, no matter how autonomous to their own internal dialogue, always seem to be somehow left over in a volume of space. That is not to say I haven’t seen some good works there, because I have. Offhand I can think of Giacometti, who did it with a sliver of plaster and you probably don’t need a lot of weight to do it. Degas drinks in the whole space with a kick of a foot.

In my situation I have learned to focus on certain aspects of work. You just start dividing them up: you take something like balance and offhand you start naming sculptors and say, okay, Donatello, where’s the balance? Giacometti, where’s the balance? Calder, where’s the balance? And you run it like that. Brancusi, where’s the balance? And then you divide it again: Brancusi, where’s the drawing? Where’s the surface? Where’s the concentration of mass? It would be the same as looking at a painter in relation to colour, line, shape, composition. How you isolate those elements and choose to focus on one aspect or the other informs your content and allows other people to be engaged or not. You can’t get away from the fact that you are using material. You can’t get away from the fact that it has to be configured in some way. There are obviously conventional ways of dealing with it and non-conventional ways of dealing with it. If you want to put the focus on mass and weight it could be that you are doing that to avoid the piece being a leftover Easter egg in a big field. It could be that you want to make the whole space and place a volume and deal with the work, this field in its entirety.

WF: The material you use, the Cor-ten steel, rusts, as everybody knows, but it changes, it has a life.

RS: I think the notion that Cor-ten steel rusts is some sort of denotation of toxicity. It is probably the most interesting material in that it oxidises, rusts, so to speak, and then stops after seven, eight years, depending on how much saline or other toxins are in the air. When it stops it holds its skin and no longer rusts, and so after a period of eight years the pieces turn a dark amber, and hold a continuous surface in perpetuity. That is the nature of the material itself. Now I have found it the working material most qualified to emphasise the nature of what I am trying to do. One of the problems that I see in most sculpture from the beginning of the century, from Gonzalez to Picasso to David Smith to Calder, is that steel was used as a picture-making element. It was cut, folded and pasted together and then painted, and no one really emphasised the fact that we had gone through an industrial revolution and there were other ways of thinking about steel, namely point load mass, statics, weight, gravity. Those principles had been applied by the engineers and the architects of the century but not by the sculptors. I have used the Industrial Revolution as an index to my own invention, which is very, very different from using steel as the handmaiden to painting, where you cut and paste in glue or weld and configure in a way to make shapes or figurations.

WF: Preserving that reference to the integrity of an industrial material presumably is a vital factor for you.

RS: It is not the integrity, it is just realistic. It is the most intelligent way to use the material, because the material was formed for a particular function, and to deny that function, to make it look as if it were three-dimensional painting, or to paint it to cover what it isn’t doing, to give it another emphasis, isn’t really about the integrity of the material, because it sounds like some sort of qualification. It is just the most intelligent, realistic way to extend the potential of the material.

WF: Is that a reference to industry and to industrial processes

RS: I think that you can look at different sculptors or different painters and understand that often their inventions are extended by employing the processes that were handed down through various craft concentrations: Don Judd: carpentry; Roy Lichtenstein: layout design; Cellini in the fifteenth century: the work of goldsmiths; Julio Gonzalez: forging and cutting. There are ways that works are extended not simply through the notion of design or conceptualisation but through parallel structures or processes that then inform the making of art. I am not interested in the Industrial Revolution per se, although I have a tremendous admiration for people like Maillart, Roebling, Mies van der Rohe and a lot of architects, like Corbusier. I think Rogers and Foster in this country are interesting because they have been able to use engineering as a potential capacity for extending their architecture. That is not just to say that I am interested in the content of the Industrial Revolution. I am trying to use the most intelligent extensions of how I see materials can be used, and if you have to apply engineering principles you have to become knowledgeable in terms of material.

WF: Here in the Serpentine Gallery you have installed a series of drawings on the walls. I wonder if you could talk about them?

RS: One of the things that become clear not only in plan but in any kind of analysis of the Serpentine is that it is a very regular space with a hierarchy of rooms. It is a central room which is squared with a circular dome. It has a very rigorous formality to it. If you align the works to the overriding formal context, I think there is a real possibility of entering into an affirmative relationship with that context, where the square and the circle are going to be reasserted for what they are and the architecture remain dominant.

What I did in the centre room was I tried to put the focus on the room as you enter and exit. I tried to put the focus on the walls to make you turn to the right and to the left and to make you deal with the room in terms of right-angle perception. Having said that, the piece is only successful if you find, when you walk in through the room, that the work is meaningful in its own right, rather than that the architecture is dominant.

The way we know works of art is different from the way we know other things, in that there is a sensation of time, and that sensation of time is probably one of the focuses that other things don’t have. Nature doesn’t have it in the same way, furniture doesn’t have it, some architecture has it. It means there is a thoughtfulness and a concentration and a sensation of time that is not literal time; that you are asked to participate in a dialogue where the works are a catalyst for experience that allows you to refer to things that you lack or pushes you in directions that have nothing to do with what you have just seen but open up other avenues of thought. I think artworks in themselves are only interesting of they engender other ways of thinking about the world. If in these drawing situations you arrive at this space and place, you come to conclusions about how you understand spaces and places. Particularly there is a piece in the back called Serpentine Corner, and since I have been coming here I have always found that that space is a little bit like walking through an airport where there is no possibility of locating anywhere; it is always in flux, always moving. I have tried to give that space a considerable amount of weight and location by anchoring a corner concentration in terms of its breadth and its height, and I think actually of all the pieces that piece is probably easier to understand because the focus is so clear. The other pieces might be a little more difficult to comprehend in that they take time and there is a certain thought and analysis that has gone into them. Having said all of that, people will come with different amounts of information in terms of what it means to make a drawing in a museum. They don’t have to be depictions or illustrations, they can be open to other kinds of articulations that have to do with how we know spaces and places. I’m not interested in painting per se because I am not interested in the content solely deriving from the definition of the boundary of the stretcher bar. I am really interested in the context being the informing aspect of the content and I have tried to make drawings that will bring you back into a dialogue between the context and the content.