Preface

Foster, Hal

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Preface

Hal Foster

Conversations about Sculpture

~Richard Serra and I met at the Odeon in Lower Manhattan in the early 1980s, back when that restaurant was still a hangout for artists and writers who lived in the neighborhood. I was in my late twenties, Serra only in his mid-forties, but he was well known, and I was intimidated. His reputation as a forceful debater also put me on guard. At the same time, I was...

Author

Hal Foster

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00033.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19774

Preface

Richard Serra and I met at the Odeon in Lower Manhattan in the early 1980s, back when that restaurant was still a hangout for artists and writers who lived in the neighborhood. I was in my late twenties, Serra only in his mid-forties, but he was well known, and I was intimidated. His reputation as a forceful debater also put me on guard. At the same time, I was struck that he wanted to engage a young critic, and to do so late into the night. (It was always late at the Odeon, yet the soft halo of the pastel clock over the long bar somehow made the hour seem beside the point.)

During that period Serra had begun to produce large steel pieces in situ, most notably Tilted Arc (1981), which was only a few blocks away, and they had already attracted the attention of architects like Frank Gehry, who was with Serra that night. We talked about this latest development in his sculpture, but he also wanted to know about a group of artists then on the rise, “Pictures” artists such as Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler, most of whom were my friends. What innovation did they bring? Given its fascination with media images, was this art anything more than Pop come again? Although his critical suspicion was hardly free of the competitive streak that runs deep in his personality (as the reader will see, not even the dead are safe from his challenges), his desire to understand the new work was genuine. For all his commitment to his sculpture, Serra remains inquisitive about other practices. This curiosity is fully on display in the conversations that follow.

A few years after our first meeting, the controversy around Tilted Arc broke, and Serra was the object of attack in the press and on the street (we discuss the case in “Controversies”). When the General Services Administration, the federal agency that commissioned the sculpture, staged a skewed hearing about its removal, I testified on his behalf, but not with the passion that he required, and we fell out of touch after the destruction of Tilted Arc in 1989. Like the economy at large, the art market experienced both a boom and a bust during the Reagan-Bush years, and galleries and museums expanded further in the 1990s. None of these structural changes in the art system appeared to faze Serra, who continued to elaborate his sculptural language on his own terms. In fact, he did not adapt to the changed scale of the art world (richer patrons, grander galleries, bigger museums) so much as he bent it to his will. I followed this development closely, and gradually we fell back into conversation.

Serra has always sought the resistance of another voice. Philip Glass fulfilled that role early on; then there was Robert Smithson, whose dialogue with Serra was cut short by his premature death. Critics and curators like Rosalind Krauss, David Sylvester, and Kirk Varnedoe also stepped up over the years, and for decades he has had an essential interlocutor in his wife, Clara Weyergraf-Serra, who participates in some of the conversations here. Serra turned back to me because, even though I was influenced by his generation, I am not part of it: I speak a similar language but have a different perspective. We know how to agree just enough so that when we disagree the differences count.

If any artist disproves the old F. Scott Fitzgerald line that there are no second acts in American lives, that artist is Serra. The acclaim that greeted his Torqued Ellipses, which emerged in the mid-1990s, was equal to the abuse heaped on Tilted Arc a decade before. The torqued sculptures are that rare thing, a radical innovation in art that people outside the art world also appreciate deeply. To come to terms with this invention and to convey its import to others, we started to have regular discussions. In the early 2000s we did a few public talks, and a little later I began to record our private conversations. Although I was sometimes on the defensive in our initial sessions, I soon learned to push back, not only for the sake of the debate but also for the elucidation of the work. I remain largely a foil in this dialogue, yet I get my touches in as we move along. That said, as I test Serra, he calls me into question, and some of my assumptions are laid bare in the process. Although I could have pressed him harder at times, my aim was to prompt, not to provoke—and not to let the conversation falter.

This was tricky when it came to accounts I had heard before. Most artists have stories that assist in the retrospective positing of an origin or the narrative shaping of a career; such set pieces render moments of inspiration or innovation dramatic. And Serra has excellent ones to tell, such as his witnessing a massive ship launched in San Francisco Bay as a little boy or his coming upon a pod of whales beached several years later—powerful intimations of great weight buoyed and great weight grounded. Perhaps, like many origin stories, they become partly fictive in the telling, but it was not my role to probe them too much: I am not a biographer, much less an analyst, and often memories are memories, not screens. In any case, what makes these anecdotes effective is that they transform private moments into public explications, as when Serra recounts his mistaking of the ellipses of the Borromini church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane as torqued (in “Torqued Shapes”); or they turn everyday experiences into fresh insights, as when he reflects on how the world seems to rotate when we reverse directions along a beach (in “Symbolic Forms”). One of the subcurrents of this dialogue is his ambivalent relation to psychological readings, which is both specific to Serra and general to his cohort (he names Smithson, Eva Hesse, and Bruce Nauman, in particular). Yet his insistence on the phenomenological experience of art is not necessarily a resistance to its unconscious dimension.

Personally, I am most interested in exchanges in which we either collide or glide by each other, as when we take up the distinction between site and context (in “Specific Sites”), the difference between a critical approach from within an art form and one from outside it (in “Prime Objects”), the role of symbolism in sculpture (in “Symbolic Forms”), the nature of materialism in art (in “Sculpture Hadn’t Dealt with Steel”), and the changed valence of industrial production in society (in “Controversies”). Even more than I, Serra wanted to avoid moments of agreement, though he provides a key instance in our discussion of political commitment in art: “I don’t direct my work toward engagement, but I think part of its autonomy includes engagement. Why can’t it be both?” This resistance to reconciliation makes for reflections of great honesty—Serra is open about the role of mortality in his late style—as well as expressions of real modesty: “Duchamp said that you’re lucky if you get thirty or forty years. . . . Warhol said all we get is fifteen minutes. Who knows? The fact is you can’t know.” An undergraduate student put it to me best: “Serra often speaks in a manner that is filled with passionate imagination while at the same time stubbornly simple and averse to ostentation.”

Our conversation begins with his childhood in San Francisco and his work in steel mills as a young man, then moves to his encounter with painting in college (the Mexican muralists were most important) and his graduate training at Yale (at a time when Josef Albers was still influential). Serra recounts his sojourn in Paris, where he was immersed in the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti, as well as his contact with Arte Povera in Rome. On his return to New York he first experimented with rubber and lead, which leads him to distinguish the “dirty” Minimalism of his cohort from the “shiny” version of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Here, too, we discuss his affinities with the Minimalist music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as his admiration for the Judson Church dance of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti, whose matter-of-fact choreography supported his own commitment to basic actions performed on non-art materials. Critical of the Duchampian readymade, Serra used gravity to free sculpture from its traditional supports, and process to break up its integral forms. His next move was to turn to steel construction, which allowed him first to vector sculpture into space and then to delineate a field in a manner partly inspired by Japanese gardens. Thus began his long engagement with the framing of sites and the gathering of people, whether in a gallery, a city, or a landscape.

His torqued ellipses and spirals marked another transformation in his sculpture, and from the mid-1990s onward Serra elaborated this language of complex spaces and fast surfaces, which often disconnect inside and outside and disorient the viewer radically. During this fertile period he also explored other geometrical sections (such as the torus) and other spatial intervals (such as offset grids of straight plates at different heights), which test our ability to see and to think on our feet in different ways. At the same time Serra insisted on the weighty concentration of his forged rounds and blocks as a counter to the light thrust of his curvilinear pieces—and continues to do so to this day.

At moments we pause the narrative of his sculpture to discuss fundamental issues that exceed any one practice: How does an artist enter into the history of his or her medium? How might he or she break with given forms and innovate new types? How might these prime objects return in different guises in the course of a career? Serra also fields questions slightly outside his comfort zone, such as on the role of symbolic forms like stelae and sarcophagi and psychological icons like towers and bridges in his work. More than once we take a run at the difficult issue of monumentality, about which Serra remains conflicted.

This inquiry leads us into an expanded field of art where we discuss his fascination with prehistoric figures, Etruscan sculptures, and Cambodian pots, as well as with unusual works by canonical artists like Donatello and Michelangelo, all of which he takes as so many “triggers for thought.” Crucially, this expanded field includes architecture: Serra describes the importance of his visits over the years to sites such as Luxor and the Hagia Sophia, Machu Picchu and the Mozarabic buildings near Madrid. In all these experiences structure is as important as place: to a great extent Serra has refashioned sculpture through an emphasis on tectonics—hence his deep interest in certain engineers and architects of the modern period, especially Robert Maillart, Mies van der Rohe, late Le Corbusier, late Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Hans Scharoun, and Jørn Utzon, all of whom he comments on here. (We also speculate on the significance of his sculpture for contemporary designers.) In part his turn to architecture was driven by his dissatisfaction with avant-gardist paradigms of the readymade and the assemblage, as well as with immediate precedents in welded sculpture and “specific objects” (David Smith and Donald Judd).

The book includes a frank discussion of accidents and controversies in his career, such as the death of a rigger in Minneapolis in 1971, the fight over a tower in West Germany in 1977, the abandonment of one public commission in Washington in 1978 and another in Berlin in 2005, and of course the destruction of Tilted Arc in 1989. By way of conclusion I ask Serra about other tensions in his art, such as the public address of most of his sculpture versus the private setting of many of its presentations, or his identification with industrial labor in the midst of a plutocratic art world. Sometimes our conversation is heated, but one of his mottos is to work through contradictions, and I admire his commitment to do so. I also respect his double insistence that innovation comes through critique and that critique begins at home.

Although we use terms such as “prime objects” and “symbolic forms” that might not be familiar, we do our best to define them when they appear. However, one keyword should be parsed here. Gestalt (German for “shape”) is a term once used in experimental psychology to convey how the mind organizes a unified perception out of discrepant stimuli. One of its famous slogans—“the whole is other than the sum of the parts”—captures its thrust for Serra, for whom gestalt readings resolve a complex sculpture too readily into a simple form. “The gestalt is a great limitation, a pictorial limitation,” he argues. “The viewer can complete the image of an object by looking at one part only.” This resistance to gestalt accounts runs throughout his work, and it is overdetermined. Not only is Serra averse to imagistic kinds of art such as Surrealism or Pop that, focused on literary or media content, tend to devalue expressive form and embodied experience, but, as suggested in the anecdotes mentioned above, he is also committed to a phenomenological orientation to the world that refuses to frame it as a picture. Finally, this critique has a target close by: “Most Minimalists are stuck with gestalt readings,” Serra avers. “They don’t truly open the space; for the most part their constructions remain objects.”

I stress this resistance to imagistic accounts because it helps to explain his insistence on material and process. With this emphasis Serra aims, in good modernist fashion, to break with convention in order to refresh perception, but he is also wary of preconception (this is behind his suspicion, also voiced here, of Conceptual art). In fact, Serra often points to moments when he is inspired, not stymied, by his own puzzlement before a new work (“I couldn’t have anticipated that” is a repeated refrain). He trusts in his experience to correct what he thinks and to change how he works. Such is his version of materialism: practice before theory but not against it; drawing after sculpture to learn from it rather than to predetermine it; “work comes out of work.”1Serra and I have also discussed his drawing, but we decided to focus on his sculpture for this book. There is an ethical lesson to extract from this belief: “With most art, if you’re patient, you can find a way into the language, and it will give you some feedback. It’s probably true with most people too.” And a political implication too: questions are best pursued in the open, with others if possible, in conflict if need be.

Certainly Serra finds his strength in the material language of his sculpture, insisting on the category when others abandon it or stretch it beyond recognition. In this way he keeps faith with the great art of the past; at the same time he insists on the present of our own experience. Such is the first and last criterion for him: How does the work engage us, and how do we engage it, right here, right now? This suggests that our experience is never prescribed, that, however private, it is also public, and that, however intense, it is also testable. This is why, though the seeds of his work are European, its roots are American. “I’m a person who wants to deal with his own experience,” Serra says early on, “and the things I want to know I want to know myself.” This statement aligns him not only with transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson but also with pragmatists like John Dewey (my first title for this book was “Sculpture as Experience”), as well as with materialists like Albers, who brought his “learning by doing” approach from the Bauhaus first to Black Mountain College and then to Yale.2Asked by the New York Times about the ten books he would take to a desert island, Serra listed Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Emerson first: “I read ‘Self-Reliance’ when I was seventeen as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the 1950s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgment, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work” (New York Times, October 28, 2016).

“A lot of people downtown were involved with making and doing, only everybody was making and doing different things,” Serra tells us about his initial milieu in New York. “Everybody was just making something, and everybody was everybody else’s audience.” He captures a spirit of collaboration across art forms, and acknowledges the generosity of older artists like Jasper Johns as well. Yet, in the midst of such cooperation there is also rivalry, both sibling and Oedipal, fired by a group insistence on individual innovation. “I was trying to find a way to assert my own way of making, of confronting the artists in front of me, and offering an initial proposition of what sculpture could be,” Serra says of his first years in New York. In one instance he points to how his early work, Plinths (1967), takes up a columnar piece by Barnett Newman titled Here I (1950), and this exchange follows:

RS: I think the subtext was “How can I attack Barney?”
You see, I loved his work.

HF: You loved it so you attacked it?

RS: That’s a familiar dynamic. Harold Bloom discusses
it in The Anxiety of Influence—it’s about how you go about
trumping the precursor.3Serra placed The Anxiety of Influence tenth in his New York Times list: “A young poet who is up against old masters must clear an imaginative space for himself through a creative misunderstanding or misreading of the poets of the past. Bloom defines six categories of overcoming the influence of precursors. He calls these categories ‘Revisionary Ratios.’ They are useful to all artists.”

Even though Serra avows that art moves forward by critique, he insists elsewhere that “artists don’t replace one another.” For me this is one of the great provocations in this dialogue: to think through the apparent contradiction between a history that is agonistic in the short term, a pitched battle between artists, and a “history that doesn’t go away” in the long run, an open source for all artists. Somehow Serra inscribes this double temporality in his spatial art: he focuses on the next step within his own development in a contested field on the one hand, and looks back into the deep past of sculpture, in the West and across cultures, on the other.

At one point I ask Serra what motivated the acerbic intelligence of his friend Robert Smithson, and he replies directly: “A need to overcome Catholicism through nihilism—he and Warhol both.” What drives the fierce intelligence of Richard Serra? I hope this dialogue provides enough clues for readers to formulate their own answers, and that it prompts further questions about this essential artist and his extraordinary generation, about modern sculpture and its connection to architecture and landscape, about contemporary art and its relation to culture and politics, and much more besides.

HAL FOSTER

1 Serra and I have also discussed his drawing, but we decided to focus on his sculpture for this book. »

2 Asked by the New York Times about the ten books he would take to a desert island, Serra listed Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Emerson first: “I read ‘Self-Reliance’ when I was seventeen as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the 1950s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgment, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work” (New York Times, October 28, 2016). »

3 Serra placed The Anxiety of Influence tenth in his New York Times list: “A young poet who is up against old masters must clear an imaginative space for himself through a creative misunderstanding or misreading of the poets of the past. Bloom defines six categories of overcoming the influence of precursors. He calls these categories ‘Revisionary Ratios.’ They are useful to all artists.” »

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