July 6, 2006
Richard Serra interview in the Brooklyn Rail
This FishBowlNY post, which comments on a New York Sun article lamenting the demise of several Brooklyn-based magazines, led me to peruse the Brooklyn Rail website. Currently featured in the site's art section is an interview with artist Richard Serra, conducted by Phong Bui and published in the paper's June issue. After glancing at it while at work yesterday afternoon, I returned and read it closely last night, when 3 Quarks Daily linked to it. It's a long, fascinating talk, covering Serra's time at Yale, early influences, and paintings; "the problem with today's art"; his criticism of some contemporary architects; the "given" conditions for sculpture; his "Stop Bush" image and its presence in the Whitney Biennial; and his brother, a lawyer who defended Huey Newton, among others. A few excerpts:
[In Albers's class, we] had to find ways to enable form to distinguish itself from matter. Basically, it was an open-ended experiment. What I came to realize is that matter imposes its own form on form. Working your way through a problem with a specific material is not theoretical. For me the choice of material is subjective and accounts for one’s sensibility and intuition.[ . . . ]
The problem with a lot of work today is its predictability. Its only allusion is to something we already know; it reframes, or re-references the known over and over again. It can’t possibly give us the same kind of inventive diversity and fulfillment and complex evolution of the formal language of art that invention can provide.
[ . . . ]
There are certain conditions that are a given and that you can rely on. In sculpture gravity is undeniable. Sculptural form must necessarily confront gravity. I am interested in process and matter, in construction, in how to open up the field. The problem for me is to address within a work circulation or movement that is outside of all representation; that is to make movement itself the subject which generates or constitutes the work.