Richard Serra (October Files)

RICHARD SERRA Hal Foster Gordon Hughes, Editors The MIT Press RICHARD SERRA OCTOBER FILES Rosalind Krauss, Annette...

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RICHARD SERRA

Hal Foster Gordon Hughes, Editors

The MIT Press

RICHARD SERRA

OCTOBER FILES Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes

RICHARD SERRA

edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes

essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster

OCTOBER FILES

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Bembo and Stone Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richard Serra / edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes ; essays by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — (October files) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-56130-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Serra, Richard, 1939– —Criticism and interpretation. I. Foster, Hal II. Hughes, Gordon, 1965– III. Buchloh, B. H. D. IV. Series. N6537.S385 R53 2000 730′.92—dc21 00-037237

Contents

Series Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra (1978)

Annette Michelson

1

The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview (1979)

Yve-Alain Bois

21

A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara (1983)

59

Rosalind Krauss

Richard Serra: Sculpture (1986)

Douglas Crimp

Redefining Site Specificity (1986)

Hal Foster

The Un/making of Sculpture (1998)

Index of Names

201

99

147

175

Series Preface

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar period that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature, which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather, it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its own right, on its own terms and with its own implications. To this end we feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elaborate different methods of criticism in order to elucidate different aspects of the art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one other as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art to political context and historical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time. The Editors of OCTOBER

Acknowledgments

“Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra” by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh first appeared in Richard Serra: Works ’66–’77 (Tübingen: Kunsthalle, 1978). “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview” by Annette Michelson was originally published in October 10 (Fall 1979). “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara” by Yve-Alain Bois was first published as “Promenade pittoresque autour de Clara-Clara” in Richard Serra (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983); the English translation by John Shepley appeared in October 29 (Summer 1984). “Richard Serra: Sculpture” by Rosalind Krauss and “Redefining Site Specificity” by Douglas Crimp were originally published in Richard Serra: Sculpture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1986). “The Un/making of Sculpture” by Hal Foster first appeared in Richard Serra: Sculpture 1985–1998 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998). The editors wish to thank Gary Peters, Trina McKeever, and Matthew Abbate for their assistance and expertise.

RICHARD SERRA

Hands Scraping, 1968 16mm film Black and white 4 minutes, 30 seconds

Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

But when you’re talking about intentions, all you’re telling people about is the relation of physical facts. And I think an artwork is not merely predicting correctly all the relations you can measure. Richard Serra in an interview with Liza Béar, Avalanche, 1973 Today the art work can identify less than ever before with the secure role that the classical categories of media used to afford it. Artistic practice now seems historically convincing only when it raises doubts not only about itself as art but also about its allocation of specialized roles, methods of production, and conventional materials. Without exception, real progress has occurred only when a fundamental transformation has been made in the procedures rather than merely the forms of a particular tradition in art. If a work ceases to be painting or sculpture, one must focus on what it is beginning to be. Richard Serra’s films meet these criteria of transcending the traditional terms of a métier, for they cannot be included in the specific tradition of any single medium. They are neither purely sculptural, if this implies the acceptance of certain conventions regarding materials and procedures, nor do they unequivocally obey the specific formal principles of film, a hybrid form combining narrative elements with a photographic image language. Being “sculptural films,” they also differ from the general run of films by artists who, until the mid-1960s, had almost without exception either adopted the traditional criteria of a more literary film language or translated their own artistic approaches literally into film

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language (though this, of course, does not apply to those artists, such as Hollis Frampton, who had renounced the traditional plastic arts in favor of filmmaking). The phenomenon of the sculptural film is thus relatively undefined. It does not necessarily imply more than the fact that the author is a sculptor whose work can be seen to belong to the modern tradition since Rodin, and that the approach in his films is specifically “sculptural”—i.e., that they are clearly different from the filmic or painterly practices that we observe in other artists’ films. To take but one example, for all the essentially sculptural concern with the movement of bodies in space that its title implies, Fernand Léger’s famous Ballet mécanique (1924) could be described as a cubist film employing the resources of cinema to translate a painterly analysis into a synthesis of collage, painting, and narrative filmic techniques. In so doing, Léger failed to perceive the inherent potential of film for a project that would have paralleled the then-incipient dissolution of the concept of sculpture. This dissolution was articulated in concrete terms in an integration of positive and negative spatial elements, as well as a gradual opening of the solid continuity of closed sculptural bodies to the surrounding architectural space, as put programmatically by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner in their “Realistic Manifesto” of 1920: Space and Time are reborn to us today. Space and Time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed. . . . The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of Space and Time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art. . . . We renounce volume as a pictorial and plastic form of space; one cannot measure liquids in yards: look at our space . . . what is it, if not continuous depth.1 Even though the revolutionary technical possibilities of film (the medium was then just coming into its own) strike one as eminently suited to that kind of sculptural aesthetics, other factors prevented the creation of a specifically sculptural film tradition. The truly revolutionary film artists of the period, such as Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov, saw the purpose and promise of the new medium not primarily in aesthetic (let alone in sculptural) terms but in its potential as an instrument for the political enlightenment of the masses. This in turn led them to see the capacity for documentary reproduction of real space-time events as the characteristic possibility of film. On the other hand, in the West the Dadaists and their surrealist successors were profoundly retro- and introspective artists. As

furtive types and melancholics, they were chiefly attracted to the magical and evocative qualities of the new medium (if they used it at all) whose literary aspect approached their traditional artistic notions. The films of Man Ray and Joseph Cornell, those two American artists whose sculptural works had exercised considerable influence on the evolution of American sculpture, are clearly not to be seen as sculptural films but as filmic equivalents of the painterly juxtapositions of objects that they had developed as formal principles in collage and assemblage. The impressive extent to which the influence of these traditional filmic procedures—a narrative convention on the one hand, a representational and illustrative function determined by plastic and painterly considerations on the other—continued to affect post-surrealist film can be gauged from Claes Oldenburg’s films, such as Store Days (1962) and Nekropolis (1962). Oldenburg must be seen as a figure of central importance to Serra’s concept of sculpture, for he had taken the reduction of plastic phenomena to its natural origin: the system of coordinates formed by gravity and the temporal-spatial continuum where gradual processes involving masses and relative forces become plastic events, as seen in his “Soft Objects.” Serra’s (but also Bruce Nauman’s) early works were basically arrived at by eliminating the representational object relation of Oldenburg’s sculpture in favor of an immediate implementation and demonstration of these fundamental plastic phenomena. One historic precursor did, however, meet the criteria of a specifically sculptural film: Moholy-Nagy’s Light Display, Black and White and Gray (1928–1930). Exploiting the technical possibilities offered by a specially designed functional sculpture, the Light/Space Modulator (1921–1930), this film gave an immediate representation of plastic phenomenon as process, and so dismissed the ossified conception of sculpture as a clearly defined mass in space in favor of a visualization of the continuum that involves the whole of space in the plastic definition. As Barbara Rose wrote in 1971: The films of the Hungarian Constructivist Moholy-Nagy and the American Dadaist Man Ray have special relevance as historical precedents for the current cinematic activity on the part of painters and sculptors. Their films were a response to certain contradictions inherent in the very aims and ideologies of the modernist movements themselves, and thus provide a locus for studying a crisis within the plastic arts which reasserts itself today. . . . In this context, artists questioned as they are questioning today the social relevance of the

Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra

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traditional arts, as well as their ability to sustain a level of innovation equal to that of modern science and industry.2 However, if numerous artists in the latter half of the 1960s—Serra, Nauman, Dan Graham—became involved in the more “public” medium of film, this was not only out of reflection upon the inadequacy of certain traditional forms of artistic production. It was also because of a politically motivated desire to see the art work divorced from its predetermined character as a unique original with guaranteed commodity value, and to develop forms of production more in keeping with the available means of production and the public character of the art work. It is easy to see— especially now that McLuhanite optimism has been exposed as a sham and the general euphoria concerning media has evaporated—that another important element was involved in this transition from a traditional plastic medium to film and video. This is the insight that the new understanding of the nature of sculpture would translate most readily into the medium of film, which by its very definition permits the reproduction of the spacetime continuum. It is therefore hardly surprising that this use of film and video evolved only in the generation of the post-minimalist artists. For the transformation and expansion of plastic thought brought about by artists such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd—though consequential as an attack on traditional forms of sculptural discourse and influential as a prerequisite, together with Oldenburg’s work, to Serra’s sculptural conception— certainly did not include the dimension of process. Minimalism involved an analysis of the very principles that constitute plastic phenomena, and such procedures of plastic production as alternating positive and negative spatial segments, casting materials in molds, setting up masses against gravity, and weighting and balancing them in the space-time continuum. It was the recognition of these principles and the need to render them in visual terms that required the introduction of filmic means into sculptural discourse. What distinguishes Serra’s films is that, in arriving at a new definition of plastic phenomena through the necessary use of film, they demonstrate their own necessity as films. In this context it is also not surprising that it was the generation of the post-minimalist artists who in the mid-1960s developed the relations between plastic spatial arts and musical or choreographic temporal arts. There was a great deal of mutual influence between musicians and dancers on the one hand and visual artists on the other. This led to collaboration on numerous projects that ended up being collectively and somewhat am-

biguously labeled “performance,” a term that implied at the time, in contradistinction to its more recent theatrical usage, an amalgam of static plastic and temporal arts. Yvonne Rainer’s essay “The Mind Is a Muscle (A Quasi Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A)” (1966), whose very title suggests a combination of plastic and temporal arts, a synthesis of physiological and mental practice, could be regarded as a programmatic exposition of this development that was a logical sequel to the minimalist period.3 The collaborations between Rainer and Robert Morris, Nauman and Meredith Monk, or Serra and Joan Jonas would also have to be considered in this context. At the same time visual artists and musicians also evolved new forms of collaborative work. Whereas the traditional approach, as illustrated in the collaboration of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, had aimed to integrate the various performing arts in some sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, the new forms were based on an awareness of the objective correspondences between the investigations in the plastic and the temporal arts. His friendship with musicians Steve Reich and Philip Glass stimulated Serra; and in discussing the parallels between plastic art and music, Reich made clear this collaboration’s departure from the seemingly related tradition: “The analogy I saw with Serra’s sculpture, his propped lead sheets and pole pieces (that were, among other things, demonstrations of physical facts about the nature of lead), was that his works and mine are both more about materials and process than they are about psychology.”4 Serra twice participated in the performance of Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968),5 a piece now seen by many artists as a key post-minimalist work, and he conceived and executed Long Beach Word Location in 1969 with Glass, who in turn was involved in the production of Serra’s early films. It can be assumed that the decision to work with “processes” rather than psychology, as described by Reich, was also behind Serra’s early films— Hand Catching Lead (1968), Hands Tied (1968), Hands Scraping (1968), Hands Lead Fulcrum (1968), and Frame (1969). As Reich said: “That’s what makes the piece interesting: there’s more in it than I put in it. That’s the joy of working with processes. If you follow your personal taste, you get your taste back. But if you follow a musical process you get your taste plus a few surprises that may educate you to make some other music.”6 Candle Piece (1968) is one of Serra’s earliest process sculptures, and it is probably no coincidence that it belonged for a long time to Reich. Here the introduction of process into sculpture is all the more striking, as it still


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Candle Piece, 1968 Mixed media 1’2” x 4” x 8’8” Collection: Steve Reich, New York Photo: Peter Moore

seems embedded in an almost unconscious post-surrealist arbitrary juxtaposition of heterogeneous objects, a combine or assemblage approach that evidences the impression Rauschenberg’s work had left on Serra. At the same time the piece affords us insight into the early forms of Serra’s investigation of minimalist sculpture. Candle Piece resembles Andre’s early Brancusi paraphrases, such as Last Ladder (1959), as if Serra had turned it from the vertical to the horizontal and “enlightened” the sculpture. The serial disposition of positive and negative spatial segments combined with the row of candles transforms the piece—when it is lit—into an elementary minimalist object that implements an elementary process. Although object and process are still disparate elements, Candle Piece can be seen as an early precursor of the later process sculptures, and even more so of the films that integrate object and process in one sculptural unity. In Candle Piece Serra attempts to overcome, with an archaic inflection, the rigidity and heavy materiality of minimalist sculpture. Unlike the se-

rial principle that had so largely informed minimalist sculpture, his operation goes beyond the merely formal dimension of series in that it embodies a process of change. On the other hand, minimalist sculpture had already taken series and process to the threshold of this transition. A Fibonacci series employed as a compositional principle in one of Judd’s progressions, for example, could be seen as a frozen process. But even Andre’s Spill (Scatter Piece) (1966), the first minimalist work to introduce an actual process into sculpture, was essentially determined by traditional conceptions of space and material, though its formal disposition was redefined each time the elements were scattered, thus directly integrating the process of its execution into the plastic appearance of the sculpture. Though Spill had introduced into sculpture Pollock’s principle of confronting the viewer with a de-differentiated field in its all-over structure, this piece was to the same extent defined in a traditional way by the identical cubic elements that composed the field. This becomes more evident in comparison with the first true process sculptures, such as Nauman’s Flour Arrangements on the Floor (1966), Serra’s Scatter Piece (1967), and, above all, his Splashing (1968) and the subsequent “castings.” Such manipulation of plastic materials has probably done more than anything else to erode the traditional idea of the closed sculptural body and to substitute a spatial field for it, in the same way that the sculptural object as a body in space dissolved and was replaced by the visualization of the production process and the sheer presence of sculptural materiality. The fact that science has shown matter to consist of molecules and processes, and the extent to which this has become general knowledge, seem to have gone a long way toward discouraging the conventional representation of matter in geometrically defined masses. The manifestation of process in sculpture around 1966 was thus based both on the discovery and representation of the forces that constitute sculpture, and on a more precise understanding of the properties of matter itself, an understanding that may have come about in part through Andre’s prior reflection on the specificity of materials. Another aspect of process is revealed in the explicit observation of the procedures involved in the production of sculpture, such as those listed systematically in Serra’s Verb List (1967–1968), which he himself referred to as “actions to relate to oneself, material, place and process.”7 A whole group of early works (in fact all sculptures prior to the “prop” pieces) corresponds to this catalogue of possible manipulations of sculptural material. In each case one activity determined the form and appearance of the sculpture: the casting of


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Verb List, 1967–1968

liquid material, the rolling of sheets of lead, the folding of lead, sawing, tearing, setting up (e.g., Splash Piece: Casting, 1969–1971; Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, 1968; Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure, 1969; Scatter Piece, 1967; Sleight of Hand, 1967). Such a systematic differentiation is performed on all the various elements that go into the making of sculpture—subjective activity and decision, physical work, objective materials and their specific properties,

physical laws concerning matter in the space-time continuum. This leads, in Serra’s process sculptures and early films, to an analytical exposition, endowing these elements with rational transparency. At the same time his work is shown as a synthesis of necessary reduction, and this is the source of its stringent plastic dynamics. Dan Graham paraphrased the differentiation process precisely, and Serra himself uses Graham’s commentary in a documentation of his film work:8


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Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, 1968 Cast lead 5” diameter; 2’ length (approx.) Collection: Horace Solomon, New York Photo: Peter Moore

The works are described by a simple verb action performed on the material by the artist, available to the viewer as residue of an in-formation (the stage of the process described in applying the verb action to the material place where it is present). The viewer’s time field is as much part of the process (reading) as the artist’s former relation to the same material and the material’s process in the former time. . . .9 With the idea of the “time field” as another modality of experience— contingent, as a form of perception, on the spatial field—Graham points to another essential aspect of the change in the conception of sculpture as articulated in Serra’s work (especially his films) in contrast to, and logically based on, minimalist sculpture. The spatial conception of the minimalist artists had always been based ultimately on a post-cubist representation of space in a grid system. Sol LeWitt’s Open Modular Cubes (1966) remained the only work that brought this conception of space to its logical conclusion and transcended it. In discussing Serra’s sculpture and the conception of space expressed in it, Rosalind Krauss notes that they are clearly op-

Scatter Piece, 1967 Rubber latex 25’ x 25’ Collection: Donald Judd, Marfa, Texas Photo: Peter Moore

posed to the minimalist conception of space, which positioned both viewer and sculpture like chess figures in a geometrically defined field, one moving around the other: The distinction between Serra’s sculpture and that of Minimalism comes in part out of Serra’s rejection of the a priori geometries of the grid. For the grid is an abstract tool describing a space which always begins at a point just in front of the person who views it. The diorama of analytic sensibility, the grid, forever leaves the viewer outside looking in.10 With his Splashing (1968) deliberately inserted in the right angle between wall and floor, Serra had made a point of visually canceling that angle and thus dissolving the architecturally defined “artificial” cubic space by eliminating its demarcation lines. At the same time, process


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Splash Piece: Casting, 1969–1971 Lead 1’7” x 9’ x 14’11” Collection: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jasper Johns, New York Photo: Peter Moore

sculptures such as Splash Piece: Casting, by virtue of the evident presence of a material procedure, had not only dissolved the traditional mode of appearance of a rigidly defined (geometrical) body; they had also emancipated its shape (i.e, that which is separate from space) from the clear division of the figure-ground relation. By decentralizing the viewer’s visual field in an amorphous all-over structure, in a de-differentiated distribution of sculptural masses, sculpture as “container of space” and space as “container of the container of space” were transcended in the discovery of a spatial continuum that is experienced by the viewer both physiologically and phenomenologically as a mode of transition to the temporal continuum. The transition from spatial to temporal field is no more than a logical continuation of the systematic analysis of the relations between perceiving subject and sculptural object that had been initiated in minimalist sculpture.

If the temporal field as a mode of experience is linked in this way with the spatial field of perception—and once this is recognized to be constitutive both of the plastic phenomenon and of its perception—the technical formal necessity of the step from process sculpture to sculptural film becomes evident, since the perception of a spatial-temporal field is the very mode of film, and the viewer’s simultaneous observation can be seen to be uniquely appropriate to its continuity. Therefore it can be hypothesized that sculptural reflection reaches its most advanced position precisely at the point where sculpture as a concrete phenomenon is transcended and transformed into sculptural film, in works such as Serra’s early films Hand Catching Lead, Hands Scraping, and Hands Tied (1968). No longer sculpture or film, these works induce the viewer to perceive active physiological and psychological identity in more modes than the traditions of these two categories permit, or as Serra put it in describing one particular film project: “As a telecommunication tool, it informs the viewer in an area of kinesics abstraction. The interacting, sequential flow of a complex kinemorphic construction (film) reveals a communication system derived from body motion.”11 At the same time this step—the dematerialization of sculpture—was historically due. It resulted necessarily from the sum total of all those apparently divergent concerns and intentions in the plastic art of the mid-1960s such as stated, for example, in Rainer’s programmatic essay: objectivation of cognition, de-individualization, non-psychological forms of representation, dissolution of the traditional manufacture of the art work and destruction of its commodity status, and general dissemination and accessibility of the work through its reproducibility by technical means. The media of film and (to an even greater degree) video were useful instruments in this transformation, and at first it seemed as if they would altogether replace traditional sculptural means. This shift in the material use of aesthetic and formal-technical resources, in some respects both a cause and an effect of a concept of art radically changed since 1965, has been analyzed with regard to its historical necessity by Graham, who himself pioneered this development in the sculptural use of technical media: Ironically it wasn’t the new medium of cinema which devolved from Edison’s invention, but the steps along its path—the analysis of motion—which first “moved” artists. Marey’s work is recalled by the Futurists and most notably by Marcel Duchamp’s paintings, culminating in Nude Descending a Staircase, whose overlapping timespace was directly modeled after Marey’s superimposed series. Léger,


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Moholy-Nagy and others did utilize the motion picture (also Duchamp at a later date), but only as an available tool and not in terms of its structural underpinnings. It wasn’t until recently with the “Minimalist” reduction of the medium to its structural support in itself considered as an “object” that photography could find its own subject matter.12 Serra’s films occupy a central position in this evolution, and it is significant that Krauss begins the last chapter of her history of modern sculpture, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), with a detailed description of his first film, Hand Catching Lead (1968). (At the end of the chapter, in another analysis of the main characteristics of this film, she compares it to Rodin’s Balzac and Brancusi’s Torso of a Young Man, thus placing it in a series of key works in twentieth-century sculpture.) This appropriate judgment might easily lead to the conclusion that contemporary sculpture reached its climax in sculptural film, and that Serra’s process-sculptural films occupied an eminent position in his oeuvre, transforming our conception of sculpture into the historically adequate form that transcends the traditional understanding of morphology and phenomenon, material and procedure, medium of presentation and mode of perception. However, all of Serra’s early films imply two essentially new procedures, which change substantially the methods of sculptural reflection and have farther-reaching implications than a strictly formalist analysis like Krauss’s might reveal.13 One of the procedures is fragmentation, also applied in such later films as Frame (1969) and Color Aid (1971); the other is the real-time process of a task-oriented performance, which defines the films dramaturgically and limits them temporally. The principle of fragmentation results necessarily from Serra’s more general procedure of analyzing the elementary constituents of a plastic phenomenon. On the one hand, the reduction of the cinematographic segment, showing, for example, only the hand and arm of a person as the veritable “actors” of the film, points to the essential element of the process to be visually represented. On the other hand, defining the segment according to Ernst Mach’s diagram of the visual field, it delimits the subject’s boundaries of self-perception. Therefore no subject-object relationship is established between viewer and actor; the viewer experiences the bodily activity in an optical frame that remains within the limits of his own self-perception, which seems extended by the filmic image. Fragmentation here thus means the deliberate abolition of the separation between

subjective perception and objective representation. From this abolition, however, results the elimination of any narrative or dramatic quality in the representation of a sequence of actions, reducing it to a self-referential activity, a self-evident representative function without any “meaning” whatsoever. This is how Serra, for the first time in the filmic representation of body movements and actions, succeeds in applying a formal principle, originally developed in Pollock’s painting, which he had already introduced into sculpture: to change the perception of the images of the human body itself through a de-differentiation of the visual field, the abandonment of central perspective or fixed focus in favor of an all-over structure. In traditional drama or film the gaze had always been oriented by an anthropomorphic hierarchy, the head or the physiognomic expression being the focus of perception, and ultimately all hierarchical compositions were derived from this order. The objectification of action in Serra’s early films necessarily results in an enhanced self-perception of the viewing subject, who no longer experiences the filmic process in illusionist identification with the actor but begins to see it as an objective process involving the transformation of bodily energy into movement and work. A lucid description of this process was again given by Graham, who, since 1969, has made the change in perceptions of body representation a central concern in his own work in film, video, and performance, contributing substantially to this development: Phenomenologically, the camera’s representation and the spectator’s view is the meeting point between the elements of visual consciousness, if consciousness is partly external (situated in the object / situated in what is seen), partly internal (situated in the eye or camera) and partly cybernetic or interpretive (situated in the central nervous system or the process of attention which, with a body’s muscle/skeletal systems, achieves the orientation in world). . . . The process of physiological orientation—attention—of the performer(s) is correlated to the spectator’s process of attention.14 Such an objective presentation of an action reduces the representation to the performance of the task to be completed and to the time span needed to complete this task, during which a certain quantity of motion and energy is exhibited. Analogous to the objectification of temporal representation, this reduction of action to the performance of a task


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determined by the physcial laws governing time, space, and energy can be seen to result from formal reflections previously developed in painting and sculpture. As early as 1964 Frank Stella, in his notorious interview with Bruce Glaser, had stated his maxim “What you see is what you see,” which implied a commitment to identity between the signifier and the signified in painting. Subsequently this principle was applied to sculpture in minimalism. Finally, the same demand can be recognized in Serra’s reduction of dramatic action to a self-contained performance of a task. In fact a statement by Serra concerning the need to see action and meaning as an integral entity comes close to Stella’s: “It’s how we do what we do that confers meaning on what we’ve done.”15 Serra’s only public performance of one of these self-evident sequences of action and motion demonstrated this principle even more strikingly. Off-stage he had friends spin him round until he became dizzy and was about to lose his balance and fall. At this precise moment he was pushed on stage, and it became the task of his performance to overcome his dizziness and regain his balance. In “A Quasi Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies,” Rainer had elaborated the parallels between the painterly and plastic arts and the temporal arts of dance and performance, and she had seen the need for an exact correspondence between the formal criteria of the new sculptural conceptions and those of the temporal arts. She stipulated that “neutral performance” corresponds to the “non-referential forms” in painting and sculpture after Stella; that “repetition of discrete events,” of self-contained events or sequences of action, corresponds to the “uninterrupted surface,” or wholeness, of visual form and visual field in minimalism; and that “task or task-like activity” in the temporal arts corresponds to “literalness,” the identity in minimalist sculpture of the signifier and the signified.16 All these principles were introduced with great precision in Serra’s early films, as if he had applied to sculptural film the catalogue of aesthetic norms of the new temporal art as defined by Rainer. It would be difficult to conceive of anything that could surpass these films as a synthesis of plastic-spatial-static and mimetic-temporal-dynamic conceptions of art, as an analytically transparent integration of all the elements that combine to form the appearance and perception of these phenomena. In Hand Catching Lead the sculptural material (lead pieces dropped from above into the visual field of the camera by Philip Glass) is missed, caught, held, or deformed by Serra’s hand according to the laws of chance. In that the falling pieces imitate the downward movement of the film print in passing

through the projector, the visualization of the gravity of the falling metal corresponds to the materiality of the filmic medium. In contrast to Serra’s process sculptures, his films are thus characterized by a greater identity of their constituent elements, since they demonstrate the process itself (rather than merely the result) and so enable the viewer to reconstruct it (this does not apply to the “prop” pieces created since 1969, in which process and appearance are thoroughly fused). The confrontation of manual (subjective) labor power with (objective) matter and physical laws determines the early films. But the proportions in which these various elements and forces become effective differ from film to film. If the manual part is relatively insignificant in Hand Catching Lead, if the intervention by the subject in the objective laws of physical necessity begins to appear absurd and arbitrary, the proportions are reversed in Hands Tied, where the subjective capacity for work is the dominant function in the solution of the sculptural task. These forces themselves—the hands freeing themselves from the fetters—become plastic phenomena in the same way that the protagonists succeed in freeing themselves from the traditional laws that conditioned and created sculpture: employing sculptural material by means of force or inertia in such a manner as to obtain a spaceencompassing volume or body of stretched material. To the extent that Serra’s early films and sculptures succeeded in showing, by means of fragmentation and reduction, the self-evident procedures of the sculptural as its true meaning, they have provoked problematic metaphorical interpretations. It is as if real processes, sequences of actions that refer only to themselves, and sculptural phenomena that are governed simply by the exigencies of physical laws and material properties were so intensely present as to be unacceptable to human perception, which would therefore attempt to protect itself through the projection of metaphorical meanings. Thus Liza Béar, for example, on Serra’s films: “As in Hand Catching Lead and Hands Scraping, the hands become the performers and acquire a physical expressiveness of their own which is akin to that of the thief in Bresson’s Pickpocket.”17 Kenneth Baker succumbs even more readily to the temptation of a metaphorical reading: “As constructions, Serra’s pieces were metaphors for the condition of the constructions we put upon what happens.”18 Philip Leider, who seems to have recognized the problem from the outset, avoids it so dramatically that he almost ends up falling into it nonetheless: “The process and the work are one, the art and its making both delivered with complete clarity. It is


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difficult to account for the energy that is released when the mystery of the making is dispelled, but one feels it.”19 The transition from identical plastic reality to the level of metaphor can be perceived even in Krauss’s description: Richard Serra’s sculpture is about sculpture: about the weight, the extension, the density and the opacity of matter, and about the promise of the sculptural project to break through that opacity with systems which will make the work’s structure both transparent to itself and to the viewer who looks on from outside. . . . Again and again, Serra’s sculpture makes a viewer realize that the hidden meanings he reads into the corporate body of the world are his own projections and that the interiority he had thought belonged to the sculpture is in fact his own interiority—the manifestation from the still point of his point of view.20 Paradoxically, it is the more objective visual or linguistic forms that, by virtue of their hermetic identity, seem to trigger this projective mechanism. One has only to recall how the language processes in Kafka’s or Beckett’s work, in describing nothing but their own linguistic structure, have provoked a host of projections. On the other hand, Serra himself, in the statement quoted at the beginning of this essay, points out that the art work does not consist merely in a correct prediction of all the relations one can measure. Notes

1. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, “Realistic Manifesto” (1920), in Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 9. 2. Barbara Rose, “Kinetic Solutions to Pictorial Problems: The Films of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971), p. 68. 3. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–1973 (New York and Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), p. 63. 4. Steve Reich, “An Interview with Steve Reich,” by Emily Wasserman, Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972), p. 48. 5. Serra, for example, participated repeatedly in the performance of Steve Reich’s now famous Pendulum Music: once in 1968 with Bruce Nauman and Michael Snow, another time with Laure Dean and Steve Paxton—a combination of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and dancers that illuminates very clearly this phase in the transition between the traditional categories. On the other hand, Serra produced his early films together with the musician and

composer Philip Glass, and also conceived and realized Long Beach Word Location in 1969 with him. 6. Reich, interview by Wasserman, p. 49. 7. Richard Serra in Avalanche (Winter 1971), p. 20. 8. Ibid.; quoted from Dan Graham, End Moments (New York, 1969). 9. Ibid., p. 21. 10. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture Redrawn,” Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972), p. 38. 11. Serra in Avalanche (Winter 1971), p. 20. 12. Dan Graham, “Muybridge Moments,” Arts Magazine (February 1967). 13. Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture,” Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), p. 279. 14. Dan Graham, “Six Films 1969–1974,” Katalog der Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 1976), p. 22. 15. Richard Serra, “Interview with Liza Béar,” Avalanche (Summer 1973), n.p. 16. Rainer, Work 1961–1973, p. 63. 17. Liza Béar, Castelli/Sonnabend Video Tapes and Films, vol. 1, no. 1 (New York, 1974), p. 188. 18. Kenneth Baker, “Some Exercises in Slow Perception,” Artforum 16, no. 3 (November 1977), p. 28. 19. Philip Leider, “Richard Serra, a Review of the Castelli Warehouse Show,” Artforum 8, no. 6 (February 1970), p. 69. 20. Rosalind Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum 11, no. 1 (September 1972), p. 48.


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Hand Catching Lead, 1968 16mm film Black and white 30 minutes, 30 seconds

The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview Annette Michelson

ANNETTE MICHELSON:

How and when did you come to filmmaking?

The first year that I was in New York, in 1967–68, I went to see the films that were being shown around St. Marks Place. I saw Bruce Conner’s films, Ron Rice’s films, and Jack Smith’s films, and I started to go to Anthology Film Archives. One thing probably influenced me more than anything else to go get a camera and do something about it. I saw a film by Yvonne Rainer called Hand Movie. Do you know the film?

RICHARD SERRA:

AM:

I’m not sure I do.

RS: This is a film that Yvonne made very early, of a finger exercise, where she puts one hand in front of the camera and manipulates her fingers, hand straight out. And then she did another film with a woman, all in white, measuring a line on a white wall. I can’t remember what the third film was. It may have been about a chicken coop, but that may have been a year later.1 The same week I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. At that point, I was building sculpture using material for the sake of its manipulative possibilities. Seeing Chelsea Girls and Yvonne’s hand film, I felt that making film was open to me. Up to that point, I’d felt a deference for film, and maybe I was a little bit frightened of it; I wouldn’t have picked up a camera. That must have been in ’67, and then we started to shoot film in ’68.

Anthology didn’t open, I think, until 1970. But I do remember that from the time it opened, particularly in its early years, you were the one New York artist whom I saw most frequently looking at the films in repertoire.

AM:

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I would also go to the Cinémathèque in Europe. When was that?

RS: 1965–1966 in France. Then I spent one year in Italy, where I saw an Olmi festival. I saw Il Posto, and I saw a lot of Italian ’30s films. That gave me some notion of the potential for communicating social propaganda in film while still epitomizing a reality that seemed matter-of-fact.

Let’s go back to Jack Smith and Bruce Conner and so on. What was it in those films . . .

AM:

What do you mean, “What was it?” Do you mean how did those films differ from commercial films? RS:

AM:

Yes, for you.

RS: There was an aspect of unpretentious, indigenous American poetry that was difficult to deny, and it spoke so directly that I was moved by the people who were making it, and by the images that were brought forth. The spirit and joy of it were simply not to be questioned.

It is my feeling, though, that your experience of those films is fairly singular in comparison with that of a number of other artists of your generation. I don’t think that a great many other artists involved just then in pictorial and sculptural enterprise were particularly struck by those films.

AM:

RS: I really wanted to have some grasp of the history of film, and when Anthology opened, there was a real possibility to understand at least one historical viewpoint. I probably saw everything they showed for the first couple of years. I used to go early and stay for both programs.

Yes, I think from time to time we would talk about the Russian films in particular. I think that in the late ’60s, or perhaps around 1970, however, you were directly involved with a number of people who were active in filmmaking. I’m not speaking so much of Conner and Warhol; I am thinking of Michael Snow, possibly Hollis Frampton. Did you know Frampton?

AM:

RS: I knew Hollis, but through Michael Snow; I knew Michael very well. I knew him when he was working on Wavelength and when the rushes were coming back from Back and Forth; I saw the rushes before he put the film together. I knew him because he was in the neighborhood; we used to see each other on the street. He had an interest in my sculpture,

and I became one of the in-the-neighborhood audience for his films. He was the only filmmaker I knew who was working in New York, and he was just emerging. When I went to Europe for the second trip, in 1969, I took Wavelength with me and showed it at various places. Michael thought that would be interesting for me to do, and so I showed it at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it stopped the house. They knocked over the projector. I showed it in Cologne and Düsseldorf. In a period of a year and a half, I showed Wavelength twelve times, not because I thought I was Michael Snow’s promoter, but because I really wanted to see the film again and again, and because I thought it was an important film. If there was going to be an audience for contemporary work—at the time Phil Glass was playing concerts in Europe and I was putting up sculpture in Europe—then they might as well understand what was happening in film, and as far as I was concerned, Wavelength was the most interesting thing that was happening. Well, those of us who have been interested in, let’s say, Glass’s work, Snow’s work, your work, Reich’s work, often feel that the late ’60s was a time of . . . partial coalescence. To someone like me, involved with the history of independent filmmaking in this country over the past fifteen years or so, it is evident that the relationship of pictorial and sculptural enterprise to film is extremely important; that is, film has been nourished by that enterprise. It is, for example, very difficult to understand earlier work such as [Stan] Brakhage’s and [Maya] Deren’s without some kind of reference to the painting and sculpture of the mid- and late ’60s. It was a time of considerable interaction.

AM:

I read Mekas’s interview with Brakhage,2 and I think it was brought out there that Brakhage had a relation to the abstract expressionists. And someone like Snow or Frampton has a relationship to another kind of aesthetic that was developing within the larger framework of art. It is easy to deduce certain influences and to make assumptions about why people formulate a particular language at a particular time, but I think that kind of reasoning can only be taken so far.

RS:

AM: Okay, but it seems to me that it’s never been a matter of influences. That’s a touchy, delicate, and not very interesting subject. But what I think one does see is a certain number of presuppositions and formal strategies which are shared at a given moment. Last week there was a festival of new music at the Kitchen;3 there were a number of people from Europe in town

The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview

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for it, and I gathered them together to show them some films. These are people who have been listening to Glass, Reich, Terry Riley, a lot of postCage American music. I showed them three or four of your films, Hand Catching Lead, Railroad Turnbridge, and the one about gathering up . . . RS:

Hands Scraping, which was actually made with Glass.

Exactly. I showed them a film by Paul Sharits, Touching; I showed them one by Ernie Gehr, Serene Velocity . . .

AM:

RS: AM: RS: AM: RS:

Yes, I know it. I showed them a film by George Landow . . . Which one? Institutional Quality. That’s beautiful.

Yes, it’s marvelous. And I also screened Wavelength, which some of them had never seen. What fascinated them was that, in that period between about 1966 and 1971, our concerns in music seem to be related to what had been happening in film. Well, obviously this is a very approximate kind of perception, but it’s not totally erroneous. I think that there are a certain number of concerns and presuppositions which do animate those films and the American music with which those Europeans have been involved. But as far as your own filmmaking is concerned, you’ve cited Yvonne’s films as a very immediate example.

AM:

RS: The films that I saw at that point were what she would probably call experimental, tentative films, but I felt a very direct relationship to them, yes.

I want to ask you about your view of Snow’s films for the following reason: I’ve been looking at this essay on your work by Benjamin Buchloh,4 which I find interesting. He is concerned with the relationship of your films to sculpture, and not just to your sculpture, but to the project of epitomizing sculpture at a time when the discrete sculptural object seems to have dissolved into the sculptural field, a field which is experienced in time. Now, the films of Snow are often sensed as sculptural; that is, they are presented in terms of pictorial and sculptural strategies. Snow himself speaks, for example, of Back and Forth as a kind of sculptural film. One might talk of his films as being sculpturally inflected, of the way in

AM:

which Wavelength, for example, is about procession and depth. Did that aspect of Snow’s films strike you when you were looking at them? No. I simply thought that Snow was a complex and interesting artist with a high ability to entertain contradiction within a very limited strategy. As soon as the term “sculptural film” comes up, I get very confused about what I understand sculpture to be and what I understand film to be. When someone uses a slow dolly with a camera, or progressively moves into a foreshortened space, it still seems to me that you are dealing with an illusion on a flat plane which you can’t enter into. The way it is understood denies the progressive movement of your body in time. It’s from a fixed viewpoint. It takes into consideration the very flatness of the screen. I’ve always thought that the basic assumptions of film could never be sculptural in any way, and to beg the analogy between what is assumed to be sculptural in sculpture and what is assumed to be sculptural in film is not really to understand the potential of what sculpture is and always has been. I have always thought it was a bit journalese to discuss it in that way. That is not to say that you can’t talk about languages that people share, languages in different material manifestations. But to say that an experience of sculpture can be similar to or influenced by the illusion in film—I’ve always thought that was nonsense. RS:

I’m interested and, I suppose, glad to hear you say that, because it seems to me that those claims are very vulnerable, to say the least.

AM:

That’s not to say that I don’t think people approach the notion of materiality similarly. I think that Landow, in the film which disintegrates, and in which there are hairs and whatever on the leader . . . I think that in that film and even the earlier film by Stan Brakhage, Mothlight, one can speak of a strategy which could be compared to the materiality of some painting, the way in which material is handled as an end in itself. Because of the direct manipulation of the material, that is an analogy that I can accept more easily than the sculptural analogy. RS:

Well, the question then remains, and maybe it is even sharpened and intensified, as to the nature of the impulse to make film. Given that your sculptural pursuits were developing very rapidly, very intensively, that film for you represents a discrete and separate mode.

AM:

I know exactly how it happened. Someone said to me that he was going to make a film of the construction of House of Cards. At that time RS:


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Glass and I were standing it up in my loft and we were worried about the possibility that it would collapse, and so there was a lot of dollying around and leaning plates and poles with linchpin accuracy. A great deal of concentration was needed just to assemble the pieces. Someone wanted to make a film of our doing that, but I thought that such a film couldn’t be anything other than an illustration or depiction. I thought that if I was going to deal with some sort of filmic analogy—I was using lead to construct those pieces—that I could probably do that just by using my hand as a device. That, coupled with having seen Yvonne’s films, and Warhol’s great freedom to pick up the camera the way he did, with the detachment that he had, made it seem possible, made it seem like something I could really entertain. I hadn’t shown any work publicly in New York at that time. I think I had just shown some pieces with Richard Bellamy,5 and there was going to be a museum show at the Whitney called “Anti-Illusion.”6 So when I first presented work there, I did the House of Cards and the splash piece [Casting]. At the same exhibition I presented the hand films, and I think Snow presented Wavelength or Back and Forth or both. AM: Back and Forth had its premiere at the Whitney. I remember seeing it there. RS: At that time I was very interested in dance. I had just got to know Joan Jonas and I was seeing her every day. She had a particular relationship to film that differed from mine. We decided that we both wanted to continue, and Anthology provided a place for us both to grow together.

Just one more question about the films you were looking at, and then we can start talking about your films. The films that you talked to me about most, and were most enthusiastic about, were those I think you knew I was working on at that time, the Soviet films. It seemed to me that you were discovering, or perhaps rediscovering, the films of the immediately postrevolutionary period, that is to say, 1924 to 1929, early Eisenstein and Vertov. Is that so?

AM:

RS: That is so. I think that sometimes films connect with experiences you’ve had and you are able to make a leap into the filmmaker’s imagination. As a kid growing up I’d worked steel mills, and I knew that Glass, who was a friend of mine, had also worked steel mills. There is a generation of American artists who had grown up that way. Andre had worked the railroad and Morris had worked steel mills, or railroads. So we came from a postwar, post-Depression background, where kids grew up and

worked in the industrial centers of the country. The first films I saw that connected with that working experience were Eisenstein’s films. That hadn’t happened before. I thought that for all of their disjunction and cutting, and all of the beauty of the black and white, they were also portraying a human condition that I had some knowledge of, although I wasn’t totally aware; I just joined the union, paid my dues, and made my money like everyone else. But I thought, “Oh, someone has found a way to construct an illusion to influence our understanding of what those people do and what that condition is.” I thought it was fascinating. Have you since seen all of Vertov’s films on industrial construction, the films made between 1924 and 1929: The Eleventh Year; One-Sixth of the World; Stride Forward, Soviet?

AM:

RS:

No, I haven’t seen those.

Those are the films which are most involved with the actual industrialization of the Soviet Union in the period following the revolution and should be extraordinary for someone like you. But obviously, when one sees Railroad Turnbridge, one also feels that it was made by someone who must have been very struck by that extremely important sequence in Eisenstein’s October of the lifting of the bridge, in which the bridge is analyzed and described in detail. AM:

That has been mentioned before. Either that or Léger’s Ballet mécanique. It always seemed to me that Léger was involved with quick-cut collage that was akin to his cubism, and that he could throw in anything from lipstick to wine bottles, intercut with someone swinging back and forth on a . . . RS:

AM:

It never occurred to me to think of Léger.

RS: The film has been connected to that because of its “industrialness.” But in fact my film probably couldn’t have been made if it hadn’t been for Michael Snow. It has to do with the long take.

Those of us who know Michael’s work well are aware of that, but I think that fewer people today are aware of the fact that you had seen and considered the Soviet films of the 1920s.

AM:

Also, when you make something, you know your reasons for making it. You know the direct sources of what you are doing, and you can only work out of where you find yourself. In the shooting of the film, I RS:


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Railroad Turnbridge, 1976 16mm film Black and white 19 minutes

never thought about the Russians; I thought about the Russians in cutting the film, and I wanted to avoid that relationship, and for that reason we dropped many shots. You have just raised a very interesting question having to do with the relationship, in Railroad Turnbridge, between shooting and cutting, and between the long take and framing, a Snow strategy par excellence. This is a film which frames the landscape through a turnbridge revolving within it. For me, it is fascinating in that it seems to be very much involved with the basic strategies which were laid out in the early ’60s. But it seems as well to synthesize—quite remarkably, I think—a great deal more in film culture than just the local concerns of American filmmakers in the ’60s. AM:

RS: I think that’s true. Not only does it use the device of the tunneling of the bridge to frame the landscape, but then it returns on itself and frames itself. In that, there is an illusion created that questions what is


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moving and what is holding still. Is the camera moving and the bridge holding still or vice versa? That is contained within the framing structure of the material of the bridge itself, right down to its internal functioning element—the gear. We put the gear in the center so that everything that came forward would be understood as being propelled by that gear, and everything that came after it was also understood in relation to it. I think the logic of the film, the way it was constructed, probably owes a great deal to the filmmaking of the late ’60s and early ’70s. But the content of the film has to do with the transition, between 1905–1906 and 1925, from welded iron construction to riveting; and as soon as they began riveting, they built extraordinary steel structures, epitomized by the bridges we have in this country. Those bridges were built during a ten- or twelveyear period, and they are the most obvious representatives that we have of indigenous, unpretentious American building. They are built for efficiency and support and for nothing else. You don’t have to understand what sculpture has been in this country to have a love affair with American bridges. You grow up in complete wonder at them, especially in this city, with Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge. I grew up in California, and I’ve been on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge all my life. I think, if it comes down to little girls liking silk and little boys liking corduroy, that little boys like bridges. Later on a bridge becomes more than simply a steel artifact spanning two points; it begins to assume symbolic connotations. I think if you investigate the notion of a bridge, even if you are a sculptor and you are particularly interested in a structural analysis of the bridge, you are also investigating an important psychological icon. Railroad Turnbridge took a year to shoot; I went out to Portland six times. I didn’t go out and shoot a bridge because I thought it was an interesting industrial object, or an indigenous American relic. I think there was really a need to investigate what “bridgeness” meant to me. I found something else very curious at that time. Joel Shapiro started to carve little bridges out of balsa wood, maybe even a couple of years before. When he did that, I asked him where it was coming from and he said it was coming from dream imagery. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do find that at certain points something in one’s experience prompts the need to materialize something. When I first saw that bridge over the Willamette River, I went out onto it and passed the bridge tender. I asked him if he would turn it around for me, and he did. He just gave me a ride on the bridge, and at that moment I thought, “Oh, I just have to look at this in another way. There has to be some other way to grasp this, since it is all

Frame, 1969 16mm film Black and white Sound 22 minutes

happening too fast.” So I immediately went and got a camera, and the first shot I took became the first shot of the film. When the rushes came back two days later, I saw what had happened in the illusion of the first shot— I was shooting with a CP 16, which has a flicker, so that what you see through the lens is very close to a film image—I thought that that in itself was sufficient cause to continue. One central aspect of this film is the manner in which it amplifies the strategy of framing in a much earlier work of yours. You made a film in the early ’70s called Frame . . .

AM:

In ’69. It took me several years between Frame and Railroad Turnbridge to put my eye behind the camera, to understand that I could put the frame between my eye and what I was experiencing. At the time that I made Frame, I was curious about what the parameters were for the person who was looking through the camera, as distinct from those of the subject who was being filmed, and how each of those viewpoints was contradictory (if the film was edited) to what the person viewing the film sees.

RS:


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Watching something happen as it is happening while being aware that it is going to end up as another structure defined by the frame of the camera seemed reason enough to use the frame as a device to determine the entire making of the film. I found the illusion of measurements to be very interesting for the contradictions it posted in relation to the illusion of film. At that time I was also making a sculpture called Base Plate Measure in which I was using measurement, and it didn’t seem to be very difficult to go from one measuring device in one material to another device in film. We used a small ruler in order to make it very clear that the film was about the increment of measurement. Here is a description of the film from the Castelli-Sonnabend film catalogue.

AM:

RS:

I think that’s a very good description.

AM: “Richard Serra, Frame, 1969, black and white, twenty-two minutes, sound. Camera, Robert Fiore. “The structure of Frame demonstrates the disparity in perception between what is seen by the cameraman looking through the lens and what is seen by a person looking directly at the same space. Serra has written: ‘Perception has its own abstract logic and is often necessary to fit verbal and mathematical formulation (in this instance measuring) to things rather than the other way around. The size, scale and three-dimensional ambiguity of film and photographs is usually accepted as one kind of interpretation of reality. These media fundamentally contradict the perception of the thing to which they allude. Objective physical measurement of real and physical depth, coupled with the apparent measurement of film depth, points to the basic contradiction posed in the perception of film or photo. The device of a ruler which functions as a stabilizing or compensating system in the film is the subject of its own contradiction’ (Avalanche, Winter 1971). “In Frame, four sets of measurements are made with a six-inch ruler. In the first, the rectangle of the camera frame is measured and perceived to be untrue from the camera viewpoint. In the second, the camera is placed at an angle, and the trapezoid measured is perceived as a rectangle. (Although one views the measurement of a totally white frame, it is in fact the angle of the camera to the wall which is being measured.” I’m not sure I understand that. “Thus at the end of the sequence the measurements spell out a trapezoid.) In the third, the rectilinear window frame is measured as a rectangle but perceived as a trapezoid. In the fourth, the film im-

age of the window is measured as a trapezoid but perceived as a rectangle (the reverse of the second image).”7 Which point didn’t you understand? The camera had dollied to the side and was at an angle to the wall. RS:

AM:

I think that movement was not clear to me when I saw the film.

RS: When the person measures up the vertical measure of one side of the frame and then goes across and comes down the vertical of the other side, you understand that the vertical that is being measured on the outside of the rectangle is a different dimension. That means that he is measuring a trapezoid. I didn’t even realize that while doing it until after I was asked to pull the board away and compute the figures. When I computed the figures I thought, “Oh, this leg is longer than that leg by a great degree.” In fact what he is measuring is his angle of incidence to the flat wall. I think that what the film points out is that there is a basic flat illusion of film, there isn’t any real space. And I think that probably my need to demonstrate that was the need to make the distinction from sculpture even clearer to me. At the time I probably didn’t realize it, but it has since seemed to be one of the reasons for doing the film. I’ve had my sculpture down to a tape measure, a snap line, and maybe a level for about the last four or five years; I’ve reduced my tools to just what’s needed. But measurement has always been integral. The necessity of being precise about measurement has always been in the work at least in certain pieces. Even though I consider measurement as a sort of metaphysical necessity, I don’t pay too much attention to it. I know it because I need to know it. AM:

Then it’s a real necessity.

RS: It’s a real necessity, but I don’t believe it totally. I don’t believe in measurement totally. It’s a real imposition that I use.

But in this film you were implying a strategy of measurement to make a demonstration about the nature of film, about the fact that depth is not there.

AM:

Or the fact that if someone is shooting at an angle to the lens, what he sees if he moves his head beyond the lens is a trapezoid. The framing device itself is flattening the trapezoid out so that it is coincident with the frame of the picture, which is the frame you see. And so everything relates to that rectangle, not to the actual trapezoid (or parallelogram, or RS:


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whatever space you are in), which is why I think there is no possibility for the frame to be thought of as sculptural. It denies the possibility of experiencing the actual physical space that is sculptural. In 1971, I was invited by Phil Leider, who was just about to leave Artforum, to do a special film issue of that magazine. It provided the first opportunity to introduce a large audience to developments that seemed to me to be of prime importance in independent American filmmaking. My emphasis was on those people who were giving their lives to making films, not to the artists who, at that time, were beginning to turn to film. I was concerned with those who had put all their energy into it and were radically inflecting that medium. I mean of course Snow, Sharits, Frampton, and so on. But there were two other artists who seemed to me to be of fundamental importance, and whom I asked for texts for that issue. One was Robert Smithson, and the other was you. The text you published was descriptive of Paul Revere. I’d like you to describe what that project meant for you at that time. AM:

I had been living with Joan Jonas for several years and was involved with her work in performance. I had found the Paul Revere script in Birdwhistell,8 that’s where it comes from. I had read Birdwhistell in relation to Joan’s work—how one could analyze body movement and body language, what the body’s signals are. We used certain devices—cards to be read, lights to be turned on and off—which were related to Joan’s development of what one might call the performing cut; she used cinematic devices as transitions from one scene to another within her performance structure. We made the film together. To me it represents a sketch of the possibilities of using theatrical devices within a specific language framework. I think the films and tapes that were more successful in that respect were those which, instead of imposing a script, originated out of a loosely defined scheme. For example, there is a videotape called Boomerang, done later with Nancy Holt, in which she is asked to respond to her own words which she hears through a feedback system. In a very detailed and clear way, she states what is happening to her as it is happening: her relation to herself as subject. Boomerang has proved more interesting in the long run than Paul Revere, which is more analogous to theater. I think the other tape which is more successful, where I did work directly from a script, but which doesn’t have that analogy to theater, is the one called Television Delivers People. There we decided to use language together with Muzak to say something definite about the different natures of video and TV, RS:

and why artists find themselves in a dilemma when dealing with broadcast television. I should perhaps explain that Television Delivers People is a text which unrolls, to the accompaniment of Muzak, on the screen before the spectators.

AM:

RS: Something becomes really clear in hindsight, as you look at Television Delivers People in relation to Steelmill:9 in neither film was I worried about the self-reflexive quality, the material as such. I decided that there was something worthwhile to say directly to people, and I just chose devices for presenting the material that I thought could reach a large audience. I thought that the easiest way to do that was the most direct way. And I think that in both the steel mill film, curiously, and this early tape there is an explicit, graphic quality. In the steel mill film it is more an iconic/graphic quality, while this tape consists of pure graphics. With some work, I have decided to use the medium to communicate explicitly. I have used that form when I’ve felt there was something politically valid to say.

I saw the film about the making of the sculpture, about the steel mill, first; in other words, I saw them out of their chronological order. Television Delivers People was made when?

AM:

RS:

1973.

I was struck by the way in which you had revived, in a very different and interesting way, for the steel mill film, the notion of a central message that unrolls before the spectator together with a sound track which is disjunctive from the text. Here is the beginning of the text of Television Delivers People . . .

AM:

RS:

I like the text very much.

“The product of television, commercial television, is the audience. Television delivers people to an advertiser. There is no such thing as mass media in the United States except for television. Mass media means that a medium can deliver masses of people. Commercial television delivers twenty million people a minute. In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold. It is the consumer who is consumed. You are the product of TV. You are delivered to the advertiser, who is the customer. He consumes you. The viewer is not responsible for

AM:


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programming. You are the end product. You are the end product delivered en masse to the advertiser. You are the product of TV.” RS:

Very good! If I ever need audio, Annette, I’m getting you.

I’ve worked for Snow, Rainer; why not work for Serra? How did you come to make this tape?

AM:

RS: There had been a meeting in New York of people from NYU, Columbia, National Broadcasting, and they all presented papers. The papers were printed in various journals and I cut them up and put them together to form a script. Then I went with Carlotta Schoolman to Channel 13 [WNET, New York] where we got a character generator. I figured how much space I would want between each sentence. I asked the people at Channel 13 what color would be most effective for a readout, and they said yellow and blue. We sat down in the morning with four cans of beer and made it. When it first went on the air—it was put on briefly as a sign-off in Amarillo, Texas—the reaction to it prompted me to send it to the government for censorship verification. It was passed for television under an anti-advertisement provision. That means that if there are advertisements, there can be anti-advertisements: equal time. And this year it was shown in Chicago. AM:

What kinds of reactions did you get?

RS: It was shown in Chicago on WTTW, a station similar to Channel 13 here, and it received newspaper reviews the next day, which made me very happy. AM:

So this was made in ’73.

RS: In ’73 I was looking into video; I had gone to Japan and bought video equipment. I immediately began to understand that what people call video and what people call television are very different things, that television in this country had a stranglehold on anybody who wanted to make video. There was an idealistic notion that there would be home video transmitters and alternative stations, but the fact of the matter is that it’s controlled by the government. If you want people to see work, you have to contend with those structures of control; and those structures of control are predicated on the capitalistic status quo. I simply decided to make that explicit.

I began by asking you about your early work, and Paul Revere in particular, because it seemed to me that the role of information communication through a very concise and conventional form of signaling was extremely important and extremely interesting. I therefore asked you about that film with the intention of establishing a relation between it and another videotape called Prisoner’s Dilemma. When we began to talk about Paul Revere, you explained how it came out of certain concerns with performance, and with Joan Jonas’s work in particular, and you went on to say that you felt that other tapes had been more interesting and more successful in that regard. But it strikes me that Prisoner’s Dilemma is perhaps, together with Television Delivers People and the recent film on the steel mill, one of a triad of works which are, within the general spectrum of your work, most concerned with social issues. They seem to have a particular status within your work that has to do with document, that has to do with engagement with specific concrete social issues in a way which is less elaborately mediated by formal concerns than your other work.

AM:

RS: AM:

That’s absolutely true. Could we talk about Prisoner’s Dilemma as part of that spectrum?

Prisoner’s Dilemma was done as a performance at 112 Greene Street in ’74. It was done by dividing the space with paper between the audience watching the monitors on one side and the TV crew, the special-effects generator, the participants, and me on the other. The audience could hear what was going on through the paper, but could see it only on the monitors. It was my way of switching multiple cameras—I had three cameras—of being able to direct in a way that was similar to putting together shows for live television. The effect was probably more exhilarating for the live audience than for those who see the resulting tape. I was fortunate enough to work with very good people—Spalding Gray, Richard Schechner, Babette Mangolte, Robert Fiore, Mark Obenhaus. That was a very tight crew; and, for my own needs, I thought that there was something interesting about putting Bruce Boice, who was a critic at that time, opposite Leo Castelli, who epitomized the art dealer. To have them both in the cellar of a warehouse building with the audience wondering what their fate was going to be satisfied something that I suspect I needed to work out about art dealers and critics. Actually, it angered some people. Towards the close of the performance, they tore down the paper and demanded Castelli’s release, which I thought was curious.

RS:


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I think at certain times you feel the need to extend yourself in various ways, but you never get too far out of your own backyard. Right after that I found that I was much more interested in the disciplines that had always been closer to me and more self-reflexive. Now the tape looks dated to me. I saw it in Berkeley six months ago, and to see Schechner and Spalding and Joel Shapiro (who is also in it) and Gerry Hovagymyan and Jeffrey Lew—to see those people at that time in their lives, and to see Leo [Castelli] at that age, is something of a document of what my life was then. It is nice for me to have, but I don’t know if it has a broader relevance. I think that, in order to be relevant, those works which you refer to as dealing with social issues have to speak not of a personal repressive situation, but of a collective repressive situation. In showing the steel mill film in New York I found that everyone wants to beg the comparison between what they call agit-prop or social documentary and my earlier films. In Germany the response to the film had nothing to do with my earlier work. The audience responded directly to the problems of industrial repression. When the film was shown in Oberhausen, it was shown on the same day as a pro-union film. As a result, my film elicited hostility, but also support. The film is being shown continually in Germany now, not as a film that is solely about the issues of art, but rather to speak of the steel situation in a country that hadn’t had a steel strike for fifty years, until this film was made. Not that one fostered the other, but it is true that I was aware of a condition that needed alleviation. It could be that the response that people are having in Germany to the film has to do with their knowing that it was made right before the steel strike that nearly crippled the country. You can imagine what a prolonged steel strike would do to this country right now. It would break the back of the country. At this point Clara Weyergraf, who made Steelmill/Stahlwerk with Serra, joined the conversation. A few minutes ago you were asking me about the film by Yvonne in which I’m working, and I was telling you that it was a convergence of things, that it comes very largely out of her experience of politicization in Germany. It’s a special kind of politicization that takes place on a particular level, and I think that the film’s structure epitomizes the difficulty of that politicization; the film is the work of someone at a stage where political synthesis is not yet possible. It attempts to establish a relationship be-

AM:

Steelmill/Stahlwerk, 1979 In collaboration with Clara Weyergraf 16mm film Black and white Sound 29 minutes

tween personal situations of a traumatic nature, mediated through the psychoanalytic process, and public issues of violence, repression, and political terrorism. After the retreat of most artists of your and Yvonne’s generation following a brief encounter with politicization in the late ’60s, it is interesting to see both of you working in modes which involve an extension of concerns to very large political areas. It is also interesting that this should come out of an experience of working in Germany. I thought we might begin by talking about that. In what way did your experience in Germany act as a kind of precipitant or catalyst for this direction? RS: I didn’t go to Germany with a particular political attitude, nor did I plan to address issues other than the usual material ones, such as getting a support situation together, cross-referencing it with the workers, and finding a place for the piece. In this instance there was support from the


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National Gallery in Berlin. I worked briefly in Thyssen, which is a mill in the Ruhr valley. The working conditions in this mill were obviously oppressive. I think that there are always internal and external contradictions involved in work, and I always try to determine how to continue to work and not exclude those contradictions. That may be; but, Richard, the conditions of the workers in the steel mill, which is very largely the subject of your most recent film, are conditions which prevail everywhere. You have a long-standing personal knowledge of the experience of the worker in that industrial situation. How did it come to be that suddenly, to outside appearances, you became involved in the way you did, making this film instead of, say, a film about working experience in the decade previous to ours?

AM:

You mean there are always contradictions, and there is never a possibility of excluding them, so why in this situation did I find it necessary to become involved with the nature of the oppression and the contradiction? RS:

That’s right. Particularly since you had the experience. You work in very particular circumstances, on a very particular scale, in a very particular way. One can understand why a number of other painters or sculptors would not normally encounter in their work the kind of structures that engender those contradictions. But you had.

AM:

RS: I think that I really wanted to demythologize for myself an ideal that I had about the working class. As a kid I worked steel mills. I worked when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-four, twenty-five. And it could have something to do, on a very personal level, with the fact that my father, who was a factory worker all of his life, had cancer and was dying. So I began to think about his relationship to his work in order to understand what that had meant, to understand what a worker’s life is about. When I first went there, I met Clara, and Clara said, “Richard, before you go into the factory and work on your sculpture, why don’t you find out who those people are, what they are about, and what their situation might be.” So, before I started working, I accustomed myself to the place for four or five days, and what I found was that they didn’t identify with the function of their labor, with the product they were making, or the function of the end product. In effect, it was as though they were automatons which were being worn down. The situation seemed quite hopeless, very repressive.

But still, if you ask me why I decided at this point in my life to investigate the fact that these people’s efforts were going into building my work . . . Certainly when you go to a steel supplier in America, you don’t trace the product back to its origins, to where that steel was poured in Akron. You simply accept the fact that labor has afforded you a product that you can then remanipulate and offer to another class for another kind of consumption. Here I had an interest in following the product from its inception, through the making, pouring, and forming of the material, and in observing the workers’ relation to all of those steps. The source of the need to do that is very hard to define. I didn’t think of making a political point of it. It just seemed apparent to me that all of the luxuries or commodities that one class has are produced by the oppression of the class below it. We form notions of what we think a class is, what’s right for that class, without ever really investigating the working experience of that class. Having worked in steel mills in America, and having some admiration for the working class, I thought I was going to find the healthy, happy, heroic German worker who lives for his work. In fact I found a situation that probably hasn’t changed for two or three centuries. It’s hot. It’s like an enormous cavern, tremendously loud. I was there at one time for three days straight, and on the fourth day I could hardly hear. I was coming back on the plane and I actually could not hear what they were saying on the airplane. The men themselves know that they can’t do it for too long at a time. They have no sense of self-esteem. They are reduced to a dehumanized function necessary to the world economy, and no one examines it. If a film is made about it, there is a narration explaining to the class that is in the film what they are doing in a way that is beneficial to the union, or the administration, or the power that is funding the film. So most documentaries flagrantly support the status quo, thereby keeping the worker oppressed, or they function as advertisements for the class that wants to sell the products to the class that is dying making them. The workers do not identify with what they are making, and moreover have naive good will and good-heartedness about being good workers that is tragic, absolutely tragic. I thought that this needed to be voiced and that the only people who could voice it were the workers themselves. Clara decided to interview the workers and I felt at that point that I had been there long enough to establish a working situation that would not interfere with or compromise the workers. If they took a halfhour off to answer questions, that would at least give them a half-hour of leisure. They chose not to be identified, probably for fear of retaliation.


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I would like, at this point, to have some vital statistics of the film: when it was made, the name of the factory, the general product of that factory, its market orientation, how large a factory it is, how many workers it employs, etc. We are talking about a steel factory which is located where?

AM:

RS: AM:

Hattingen. And this is in the Ruhr valley?

Yes, the Ruhr valley. The next larger town is Bochum. Hattingen is a small village, actually; it’s not even a real town.

CLARA WEYERGRAF:

RS:

There are steel villages in the interior of the valley.

And these are what we would call company towns, in which the entire village . . .

AM:

RS: CW:

Absolutely, yes. Everyone has something to do with the company.

There would be more than one steel mill per town, or is each town dominated by a particular firm?

AM:

In this town there is only one mill. It had been the property of Rheinstahl but then was taken over by Thyssen.

CW:

What is the production of this factory? How large is it? How many workers, would you say?

AM:

CW:

A couple of thousand workers.

Five thousand, I think. I was in the forging plant, but there are other parts of the factory. There is a pouring part; there are two or three rolling mills; there is a scrap mill; there is a finish-down mill where they have a tool-and-die shop; there is a burning section. They produce train wheels, turbines . . . RS:

CW:

There is a special part for nuclear reactors; that’s new.

RS: In fact, there was one of those on the floor during the first shooting of the film; and during the second shooting it wasn’t there anymore; they immediately got it off. But it was in the first tracking shot. In the forging mill the material is only compressed; the final tooling of the product is not explicit, so the worker has no way of knowing what he is making. It’s done very primitively. It is forming a large-scale turbine

using a handicraft tradition. It’s still a matter of the labor of one’s back. They export turbines all over the world, to Saudi Arabia, to Canada, to South America, some for bridges, some for dams, some for reactors, who knows what. But these turbines are hand-tooled, and the fact that Germany can hand-tool efficiently on a large scale is in part a function of her labor force’s being kept in the position of not quite knowing what they are doing, of being paid well to enslave themselves. What do you mean “not knowing what they are doing?” I mean it’s hand-finishing, which presumably is a highly skilled . . .

AM:

RS: You can have a 650-ton block of steel, molten hot, and it would be formed with a jet of oxygen from a machine on the end of something that looks like a forklift. It is comparable to turning a wooden leg on a lathe, only here it is compressed material and everything is overemphasized. But the people who are turning the turbine have no notion of how it works, no notion of where it’s going, no real idea of what they are making. They only know that it has to be cut a certain way at a certain point. They handle five or six in one afternoon, because you can keep them hot for only so long, and if you heat them up to 1,280 degrees, you can only keep them that way for maybe two hours. There is a bank of six or seven ovens where they are coming in and going out. So the workers don’t really pay much attention to what they are actually making.

In other words, what you are describing is a classic instance of alienation of the worker in relation to his work through a system of division of labor, which is probably intensified by the extremely difficult physical condition of this work.

AM:

RS: I think you are right. The division of labor is what reinforces that alienation. AM:

It is generally considered to be the basic condition of the alienation.

CW:

It is the cause.

I guess what is striking is that the extraordinary noise, heat, etc., work in a way that conditions in, let’s say, a dress factory or even an automobile factory might not. These are extreme physical conditions involving specific health hazards—growing insensitivity to sound and so on—which intensify the process of alienation.

AM:


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The place is so loud it precludes dialogue, so that people can’t talk to each other unless they have a break, and when they have a break they usually just drink water. So most of the communication is done through hand movements, or whistling, or body motion. RS:

AM:

Tell me how you came to work there.

RS: I wanted to build a piece for Documenta 6 (1977), and I met a dealer there from Galerie m called Alexander von Berswordt-Wallrabe, and I decided to present him with a project. He said he would fund it if he could get support from some people here; but when they decided to back out he funded it himself; and that piece [Terminal ] has recently been installed in Bochum. It’s right near the train depot. The streetcars miss it by a foot and a half. I was very happy with the installation.

So it was installed in the large town nearest to where it was manufactured.

AM:

RS: That was my choice. Actually it was my preference the first day I got there. The piece could have gone to Kassel or to Cologne, next to the church. It would have given it some sort of picture-postcard, tourist visibility. I thought it would be best to go right back to the situation where it was made. Most of the workers go in and out of that train depot, and I wanted very much to put it up there. When we did the piece for Documenta, the work was not so extreme. We just had to order, cut, and tool the plates. I saw the forge while I was there, and I’d never seen a machine like that. The forge was probably sixty to seventy feet high. And I had never seen anyone singly handtool a forty- or fifty-ton block of steel. In the interim I was asked to go to the National Gallery in Berlin and propose a piece for them. I saw that the Mies van der Rohe deck was already a rectilinear construction, interior to the building, a square within a square, so it didn’t seem possible for me to build still another construction on that construction. I didn’t want to add another fabrication, yet I wanted to make something that in its own right would hold its volume and its weight and specify a certain gravity; so I decided to sink one edge of the cube three inches into the cement deck. In the forging process I wanted to get the edge of the cube down to ten millimeters, so that it didn’t look like a sugar cube, so I went to the factory with a proposal. They had never made an exact cube before, although they had made things that approximate cubes. They were able to get down to five millimeters on the edge, but, besides making it

more precise than usual, their labor was absolutely no different from what they do every day. You said, as you began to answer my first question, something that amazed me—that you had entered the situation with no intentions other than to document it, with no particular presuppositions except one, which you mentioned: the expectation of finding the healthy, happy, heroic German worker.

AM:

RS: Something else happened to me which I should mention here. I had just come out of a situation in this country in which the government had asked me to build a piece for Pennsylvania Avenue.10 I found that greed was unaccountable to anything but a desire to preserve one’s job, that the power that had run amok in this country was horrendous—I’m not sure whether that situation politicized me, but it made me think about who made what, how and where it was placed, and what all the contradictions were. And I felt that I was being sacrificed to a power structure in this country that has had no use for anything we would call art. I was very angered by it. This government operates in a way which is all about its own internal consumption. Everything is for sale in this country, and that makes a horrendous condition for the artist when he confronts his relation to the government. I went to Germany thinking about my relation to my work in America, and what it was to be in Germany. I wanted to take a more explicit look at where I stood in relation to a museum commission for a piece which people kill themselves to make. I think the situation in this country is more covert in some way, more hidden, probably just as horrendous, just more hidden.

Well, Richard, it may be more hidden to you, but is it more hidden to the steel worker in Pittsburgh than it is to the German worker in the Ruhr valley? How is it that you, who worked in steel mills in your youth, expected to find healthy, happy, heroic workers when you went to a German steel mill?

AM:

RS: When I worked in the steel mills there were a lot of people who had just come through the Second World War wanting to find money by joining the labor force. I was working my way through school; and there did seem to be an ethos of putting in a day’s work for a day’s pay. When I was seventeen or eighteen I guess I believed the idealistic notions that had been fostered in me. I think that the way conventional values are


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propagandized to the working class in this country is an example of our more covert repression. Popular films like The Deerhunter, which shows steel mills, or Norma Rae, foster a false, soap-opera identification with heroes and heroines of the working class. And when workers see those films they are persuaded by a kind of weekend indoctrination. I think it’s more covert, whereas the misery is quite explicit in Germany. There is more of a sell-out here. We talked to a black guy in the elevator, and we got three or four straightforward sentences which absolutely described his relationship to his work. I guess that every worker you talk to here in America gives you more or less the same answers you get from German workers. If you really confront the situation of the American steel mill, I’m pretty sure that it is no different from the German steel mill. I just think that you happened to have had a personal experience in a German steel mill. It was a learning process that everybody went through while this piece was being forged. I remember that the first time we went to the mill something made me very angry, and that was the fact that you projected your fascination with your work onto the workers. You kept telling me that they were totally into their jobs, that they did their jobs in a fantastic way, and that they really seemed to like doing their jobs. I just couldn’t believe it. I had never worked in a mill, but I had worked in other factories, and I just couldn’t believe that there was joyful labor done there. It was at that time that we had a lot of discussions and began to do the film. We knew we wanted to document something, but for a long time nobody was very clear about where it would end. I think we finally figured out how the film would have to be when we looked at the shooting of that German camera team, when we saw that that was absolutely the wrong way to go about it.

CW:

AM:

What did you see there?

The gallery wanted to document the making of the piece, and they brought in a German camera team, who did a lot of shooting. We looked at their footage and we realized that they only dealt with the big block. They shot beautiful images of the mill, and when the workers appeared, it was in such a way that they seemed heroic. You can manipulate everything with a camera. They looked like what the cameraman wanted them to look like—heroes, big, happy German workmen. Then we began to discuss the purpose of the film and decided that the shooting had to be different too. So it was a long process. For months I

CW:

didn’t think that I was going to work on the film. We didn’t go into the mill with a very clearly defined purpose; the purpose developed while we were working, quite slowly. RS: Also, initially the solidarity the workers must have in order to survive is something I felt a certain regard for. You can walk in and say, “My, don’t these people work hard together,” without going a step further and saying, “they have to work that way together in order to survive and it doesn’t change the fact that they are doing this every day and the conditions are horrible.” But initially one is impressed with their ability to move that efficiently with that much tonnage, every day, confronting those conditions. I was very impressed with it. I think anyone would be. I’ve worked a lot of steel mills all over the world; that is the most difficult task I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a group of people work in those conditions that well, and I guess I was taken in with that. In the course of my being there, my romantic notion of the worker—who he is, what he does, and why he does what he does—was totally . . .

I don’t think you can say that that is a romantic notion. I think it’s a notion that is based on projection. You are an artist, and you are one of the rare people in this society who do not have to cope with alienation. You can identify with what you are doing, and you have actually chosen to do what you are doing. I think for you and for a lot of other artists it is very hard to imagine that at least 75 percent of the people living in this society are living a totally different life, that they are really the Other. They have a completely different relationship to their work. That is something that we only learn about theoretically. We read about their lives.

CW:

RS: They don’t choose to do what they are doing, and their needs are not satisfied by their work. Is that what you mean? CW:

That’s right.

There is a question related to what Clara has said, and which returns to one I asked before. When you were working in the steel mill in your teens, did it not occur to you that your coworkers were not involved in an identificatory relationship to their work? That they too were involved with piecework? That they too were involved in a process determined by the division of labor, in the course of which their relation to what is produced in the end, to the whole product, is attenuated? Did you not feel that?

AM:


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My first experience of that was when we were building the CrownZellerbach Building in San Francisco. We were building it at Bethlehem Steel. I was on a bucker, which is the other end of a rivet gang; the hot rivet would be thrown up and we’d catch it and put it in a hole, and what they call the buck, or the bull, would compress the rivet on the other end to make its head. At the end of the day they would go around with a ballpeen hammer and hit the heads and listen to the sound to determine if there are any that are put in wrong or are otherwise defective. If so, you have to spend about an hour taking them out. We were getting some piecemeal over the clock, so the older workers would say, “Okay, you can make a dime a rivet for an hour, and after that just put in a couple of cold rivets, and we’ll sit out a couple of hours.” That was my first glimpse of the fact that the people who had to be there all the time, who weren’t just temporarily employed, needed to react in some way to a condition which enslaved them to the clock. But I would come and go, and I felt I had nothing at stake. Also I found that the steel mills in this country hired foreign workers—Irish, Italians—right off the boat. That’s probably still true. RS:

Did you draw any conclusions from that? There are two conclusions one might draw. One is that this country welcomes all foreigners to its hospitable shores. The other is that this country badly needs cheap labor, and it will get it cheaper when it is fresh off the boat.

AM:

Not only cheaply. In Germany, the worst jobs in the factory are always done by the foreign workers. There are jobs that German workers simply would not do, and these are exactly the jobs that are done by the workers who don’t speak the language, or who come from countries that are extremely underdeveloped, not Italians, but the Turkish workers, for example.

CW:

AM:

Turkish, Yugoslav, Greek.

CW:

They do the worst jobs you can imagine.

AM:

Are these what you call the Gastarbeiter?

CW:

Right.

RS: If you’re from California, you see it all the time in the Mexican labor force. You just accept the plantation system. I used to summer in a place called Oxnard, California, where I picked beans with Mexicans. I saw those conditions there, but I don’t think that when you are that young you

understand it. You don’t think about the fact that you are in a class system in which foreign workers are brought in and oppressed in the most horrible ways. In California, but for Cesar Chavez, it still goes on every day. You were saying before that when you began to work in the mill in the Ruhr valley you had just had a difficult and very negative experience in Washington, that in a way the experience in Germany seemed perhaps to have been conditioned by that.

AM:

That’s right, and also the Schleyer murder had just taken place.11 In order to drive to the mill, I had to drive next to the prison where three of the people who had supposedly just shot Schleyer were incarcerated, and so it was on my mind constantly. I think that when you are in a political situation, in a country that is being politicized, there is no way that you are not affected by it.

RS:

And you said that one of your preoccupations while there, one that led to making the film, was “Where do I fit in?” That’s the phrase you used.

AM:

RS: AM: RS:

Did I say that? That is a very interesting phrase. What is the role of the artist?

Where in fact do you fit in? Arriving in that situation, witnessing extreme repression, alienation, confirmed by things that were happening around you in a wider social arena, feeling undoubtedly privileged, as you are as an artist, would you regard the making of this film as, in a sense, the repayment of a debt?—“What can I do? Well, I can offer testimony to this condition.” I’m not asking you where you fit in, because I don’t think you are going to find that you fit in anyplace. But what I can ask is what is the function of this film? Does it have a function?

AM:

RS: The function for us so far has been educational, and I think probably its extension will be to provoke dialogue from the audiences that see it. Also, Ulrich Gregor of Kino Arsenal Berlin has decided to distribute it in several ways. One was to distribute it with other films of mine; but then also independently, as a film that could go to teaching institutions for workers, which I find very encouraging. The Kommunale Kinos in various cities, Frankfurt, Munich . . . want us to travel with the film and speak about it.


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When the film was shown in Oberhausen, it provoked heated discussion in the news media. The media referred to what they considered to be our indifference, which was in fact our not identifying with the people in the film. That made them feel that we were dehumanizing the people in the mill. If you show someone attached to a machine without showing what he’s making, or why he’s making what he’s making, one might think that the viewpoint of the filmmaker only reinforces that tragic condition. I don’t think so. I think that is what you actually see. You see parts of people attached to machines, day in and day out. That seems to be the clear way of looking at it, and the alternative way of looking at it—by saying, for example, “These people have their lunch breaks and they have their children and their gardens”—is simply false. That is not what you see when you are there. You see people serving machines. You see them fragmented, and you see the machines fragmented. AM: RS:

This leads us to some considerations that are specific to the film. The distancing of the shots: that is what I was talking about.

In the first part of the film you hear the voices of the workers but you don’t see them; you see in print what they are saying in response to Clara’s questions. I realize that it is conditioned in part by the double audience for which this film is made, but what it does is focus what is being said; one hears, if one understands the German, and one reads at the same time, thereby attending very strongly to what is being said, and the disjunction between the printed titles and the screen image and the sound makes one focus on what is being said. Then in the second part of the film one is introduced into that sound environment, which is so extraordinary. So there is a necessary disjunction, one that is simply inscribed within that situation, between any one worker and what he says, because you cannot hear him anyway, any more than his comrades hear him. They communicate, as you said, by whistles and signals, so there is a primary distance or disjunction that is inscribed in the film.

AM:

RS: We were interested in reinforcing that disjunction, not only between text and image, but also within the image structure. We tried to do it in other ways. When we tried to put the language interior to the film, it seemed to break the film and to be even more redundant. In that case the language seemed to point specifically to either the frame that was coming or the frame that had just passed. Or, if we put the language on the film,

which we tried, that seemed to depict or illustrate the frame in a false way. So we had the information, or the voices of the workers, and we had their condition, and I think that became the biggest problem of the film, how to retain the clarity of the disjunction and yet achieve the impact of the information we wanted to put across. When we got to the cutting of the film, I wanted to give a very definite sense of place, similar to that in the bridge film, to track the place one or two times and then to locate the working process. If you follow the cutting process, the block is introduced, it tracks down, it goes into the forge, people work on it, it’s taken out of the forge, it goes back into the oven, they burn it, it comes back into the forge, they work on it, they take it across to the other side, and they name it, and that’s the end. The cutting was done in a linear way to approximate what was done in the mill on a given day. However, the images are put together so that, had you never been in the mill, you would never know that these juxtapositions were, in effect, following the operation of the shop. In the same way, if you hadn’t been on the turnbridge—you see it open, a boat goes by, it closes, a train goes over it—you might not understand that that follows the linear operation of the bridge. You might just think that those are random shots. So there was a coherent plan for the sequence of images, from which images had to be excluded, to keep the logic of the place consistent. I don’t think that anyone who hasn’t been to the mill follows it, but I’ve found that people who come from working backgrounds understand it immediately. They have no problem knowing where they are in relationship to the place, what is near and far, who is on the right and who is on the left. People who haven’t been in those working conditions seem to see it only as juxtaposed pictures. We also tried to keep some of the images complete within themselves, and then to cut them very abruptly to enforce the way you see each image, or each development in each image. We tried not to run them together to make a relationship in which one image would be predicated on another, where one shot would demonstrate what is to come in the next. We tried to avoid all those linear, functional descriptions in the film. We structured the language and image sequentially to avoid explanations and illustrations. The text and image separation prompted the need in the viewer to connect the two parts of the film, to dig out the ideas for himself, out of his own inner necessity, and derive meaning from these connections.


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Also, the purpose of the cut is to function as a metaphor for alienation, so that you don’t abstract a false linearity. We tried to get the message across that the different working processes that you see, for the workers who are doing them, don’t really follow one another and fit together and achieve the notion of a whole.

CW:

RS: When people see the film, one of the first things they say is, “How is it that I didn’t understand what the people were doing?” People who have not been around industry want to make a story out of it, want to have it make sense, want to understand the language in relation to the image. Whereas, if you are there, that would seem false; that isn’t the reality. CW:

It doesn’t make sense.

RS: Also, we cut it abruptly at the end to give the sense that it is ongoing. I think that of the nineteen shots, probably seventeen—that is, not including the two tracking shots—have men working in them. We excluded shots that were just about the mill, particularities of place, color, or light, and we tried to focus on the men’s relationship to their work. And in each shot the manifestation of that is divorced from any identification with them. That came about for two reasons: One, from having seen the TV cameraman overglamorizing them; and two, just my predilection in shooting. I think I wouldn’t have shot it that way if I had not seen the earlier cameraman’s footage, but once I began to shoot the film, once I got the distance of the camera that I needed to maintain, the film came quite readily. The ratio of shooting to image went probably from 6:1 down to 4:1. I think I got closer to the working process in shooting the film. I went back to shoot several times, and I would stay there all day and shoot maybe four hundred feet. So it became a matter of synthesizing, on a given day, what it was that allowed you to see the interior mechanism of the plant. It might even come down to a detail in a shot which allows you to see the larger framework. I don’t think you can understand that detail unless you have a distance with the camera. It’s hard to understand detail if you are in really close. If you are doing something very personal, I guess you can handle detail in that way. When I was in Germany I looked through a lot of old German photographs by Heinrich Zille. I think that may have a lot to do with the way this film was shot. Do you know Zille’s photographs? AM:

No, tell me about them.

Actually, Zille is not really known as a photographer. He is known for drawing. He lived in Berlin at the turn of the century, and he made photos as studies for his drawings. The photos are all of the working class—not even the working class, the subproletariat, the lowest of the low. You feel when you look at the photos that, on the one hand, he sympathized with them; on the other hand, he always kept an objective distance. He doesn’t emotionalize the subject matter, which would be quite easy, because poor people can be quite picturesque.

CW:

AM:

Especially at the beginning of the century.

RS: I was impressed by the black and white of his photographs. There always seems to be an internal light within the photographs. AM:

Why did you use black and white?

I am really interested in black and white. When I shot the turnbridge film, almost every day the sun was obscured by the fog; there were no shadows. So there was a flattening and compressing of space. In the steel mill, I realized that all the large blocks would be the light source of the film. And that light source, as it moves, makes for a very strong black-andwhite contrast. An internal light source was something I really wanted to explore. I think color distracts from the way light structures and restructures form. Also, when something is 1,280 degrees, it is white hot, not red, and I wanted the whiteness of it as a light source and a volume in the frame. I am not sure about color, about color stops, about what I think of color, the illusion of color. I’ve never been able to deal with it. Maybe I see the world more clearly in black and white. Some people see the world in color. I taught the Albers color course; but I don’t think about it much. I do think about black and white. I think about the range, the nuances of black and white, certainly in regard to drawing. RS:

I want to discuss something else, still in relation to this film, though. I remember once, during the period that I so often saw you at Anthology, your telling me that Strike [Eisenstein, 1924] was a very good film.

AM:

RS:

Oh, yes, I still think it’s a great film.

I think it’s a very great film; and of course it’s a film which takes place in a factory. It is one of the most powerful images of a factory. It is a factory in which the issues of repression and alienation are explored in some

AM:


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detail, in some depth. And then I remember your having telephoned me from California one night and telling me that you’d just read a piece I’d written on Vertov and that you’d liked it. Vertov’s Enthusiasm is a film that I gather has meant a lot to you. RS:

Oh, yes. I think that’s a great film.

AM: Enthusiasm is, of course, a film about the production of steel and coal—coal mining, by the way, is a job done under conditions as bad as or worse than those of the steel mill. But there is a way in which it is almost impossible for someone at this point in the century to make a film about the industrial process at its most hyperbolic—which is to say a steel mill— hat is not fraught with a sense of difficulty, the alienation, the incredible tension under which that kind of work has to be done. But the two Soviet films you looked at, and particularly the Vertov, are films which heroicize that productive process. Do you look at those films differently, now that you have made your film? RS: I haven’t seen those films since I’ve made my film, but I’m sure I would look at them differently. I might even find them reactionary. I might admire their form, their cutting, their energy, but I might find the content reactionary. I might find suspect the idealistic narrative about the heroic worker even though it’s in the service of the revolution.

Are you saying that there are some forms of labor which are, independent of their political and social context, by their very nature alienating?

AM:

RS:

Yes, I think so.

Would you not think, however, that to have been a worker in a Soviet steel mill in the 1920s, even under very difficult conditions, might have been very different from being one in Helmut Schmidt’s Ruhr valley?

AM:

RS: I’m sure it’s different. But if you’re asking what I’d think of those films now, after having made this film, I might be very suspicious of the filmmakers’ intentions. You can manipulate the portrayal of a steel mill or a coal mine to conform to any party ideology you want, but the result might not have anything to do with the realities that exist.

But those films were done in very different political circumstances. If Strike or Enthusiasm were made in the Soviet Union today they would

CW:

be reactionary films, but made at that time they were quite realistic, because there was a lot of genuine hope for the working class. Those filmmakers didn’t invent it, and at that time they didn’t illustrate the party ideology. They dealt with something which was really there. There were prospects for the working class which, though they may be lost now, at that time affected not only the working class, but also many Soviet artists. Artists who had been preoccupied with formalistic concerns before the revolution responded to that atmosphere of hope. I don’t think they were reactionary at all. You have to see them as films made in a certain situation at a certain time. I think it was a very great time. If you come back to what you asked—“Is there something in the nature of the work itself?”—no matter how you serve it up, for whatever hope or idealism, if you’re using it to enforce those references, they may be a falsification. RS:

I think it depends on the relationship that you have to your work. I think it’s more difficult when you work very hard, under very difficult conditions, knowing that you are working for the profit of someone else.

CW:

RS: I don’t know whether someone in a coal mine or a steel mill is any less alienated after the revolution than before the revolution.

Perhaps he isn’t less alienated, but there is a great hope that things will change in his life, in the way he relates to his work, in who makes the profit from his work, and even in the way he works.

CW:

Do you think anything has changed in the steel mill for a hundred years? RS:

AM: RS:

Not in that steel mill, but in Russian steel mills things changed. How much did they change?

I think things changed for a while. They changed in China for a while, too. I saw that film that was shot in a steel mill in China recently by . . .

CW:

AM:

Joris Ivens.

RS: . . . and I thought it was theatrical propaganda to have the performance in the steel mill. It seemed so artificial, so heavy-handed. That’s a party-line film. There was no clear picture of the alienation in those plants. It may be the privilege of the filmmaker to foster hope in a situation where


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the conditions are hopeless, even though the political ideology has changed. It may come down to the politics of the filmmaker. Yvonne [Rainer] saw my film and found it interesting because it overlapped various areas of filmmaking—social document, agit-prop, various artistic conventions. And in being a hybrid, she said, it pointed to various ways of dealing with various circumstances. I think probably in Vertov and Eisenstein there is a point of view which can never really coincide with the reality of the situation. They’re taking a point of view about a particular subject to serve other ends. Enthusiasm does it; I guess our film does it also. To what degree are we involved with making propaganda? And how conscious are we of it? That’s not a question I would ask, because I take it for granted that ideology is inscribed in the work of art.

AM:

Notes

1. Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1968) was shown as part of the final version of The Mind Is a Muscle at the Anderson Theater, New York. The second Rainer film mentioned by Serra is Line (1969), which was shown, independent of any performance, at an exhibition organized by Hollis Frampton for the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. The third film is Rhode Island Red (1968), which was shown as a part of Rose Fractions at the Billy Rose Theater, New York. 2. Serra is referring to the exchange between Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage that took place at Millennium, New York, on 4 November 1977, an edited transcript of which was published together with commentary by Mekas as “Brakhage and the Structuralists” (New York, Soho Weekly News, 24 November 1977). An exchange of letters between Brakhage and Mekas about the published transcript appeared in the Soho Weekly News, 8 December 1977; a further exchange of private letters between Brakhage and Mekas is on deposit at the Anthology Film Archives, New York. 3. New Music, New York: A Festival of Composers and Their Music at the Kitchen Center, New York, 8–19 June 1979. 4. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra (Tübingen: Kunsthalle, 1978); included in this volume. 5. Richard Bellamy was a private art dealer in New York City. 6. “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” was organized by Marcia Tucker and James Monte at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1969. 7. Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films (New York: Castelli-Sonnabend, 1974), p. 191. 8. Ray L. Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970). 9. The full title of the film is Steelmill/Stahlwerk. 10. Serra is referring to a sculpture commission from the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation in which it was intended that he collaborate with the architects Venturi

and Rauch with George Patton, Jerome Lindsay, and the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg, for the improvement of the western end of Pennsylvania Avenue. When it became clear that Serra’s and Venturi’s plans were incompatible, the PADC withdrew Serra’s commission. The Venturi and Rauch scheme for the plaza was to have included two pylon structures to frame the portico of the Treasury Building. Serra was quoted in the New York Times about the failed commission: “It’s not the nature of my work to reassert ideological values of the government. The value of my art isn’t other value—it’s contained within the structure of the work. Nor do I feel there is any need to ‘frame’ the Treasury Building—the notion is a reactionary and rhetorical device. The pylon concept is an attempt to direct the viewer’s eye toward the symbolic function of government in a way that’s dictatorial, that plays with human needs and historical values.” (Quoted in Grace Glueck, “A Tale of Two Pylons,” New York Times, 7 April 1978, sec. C, p. 20.) 11. Hans-Martin Schleyer, 62, West German industrialist and government advisor, was kidnapped on 5 September 1977 by terrorists associated with the Baader-Meinhof group who demanded the release of eleven prisoners. He was executed on 18 Ocotober.


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Spin Out (For Bob Smithson), 1972–1973 Weatherproof steel Three plates, each 10’ x 40’ x 11⁄2” Collection: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, The Netherlands

A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara Yve-Alain Bois

“When Smithson went to see Shift,” Serra tells us, “he spoke of its picturesque quality, and I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.”1 This incomprehension is quite comprehensible, at least if one sticks to early definitions of the picturesque, all of which go back to the etymological origin of this word, that is to say, the sphere of painting. For the pictorial is one of the qualities that Serra would like to banish completely from his sculpture. In speaking of his first “prop” pieces, he criticizes them for retaining pictorial concerns (the use of the wall as background), since such a reminder detracts from their meaning (which is prescribed by the way they are made).2 In speaking of the numerous works created by laying out materials on the floor, works that appeared in the late 1960s as a criticism of minimalism, in which he himself had participated, Serra severely judges their debt to painting: “Lateral extension in this case allows sculpture to be viewed pictorially—that is, as if the floor were the canvas plane. It is no coincidence that most earth works are photographed from the air.”3 Which takes us back to Smithson: What most people know of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty for example, is an image shot from a helicopter. When you actually see the work, it has none of that purely graphic character. . . . But if you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph . . . you’re denying the temporal experience of the work. You’re not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you’re denying the real content of the work.4

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Far be it from Serra, of course, to suggest that Smithson had approved such a reduction of his work to the planimetric surface of a snapshot (we know that he found the movie camera, because it involves motion, to be a more suitable means for conveying the Spiral Jetty), but this animosity toward aerial photography plunges us into the very heart of the experience of the picturesque. Why this animosity? Because aerial photography produces a “Gestalt reading” of the operation, and reconstructs the work as the indifferent realization of a compositional a priori. (Serra goes so far as to say that it is a kind of professional distortion peculiar to photography: “Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.”)5 Now, all of Serra’s oeuvre signals a desire to escape from the theory of “good form” (and from the opposition, on which it plays, between figure and background). Notice what he says about St. John’s Rotary Arc: no one who circumnavigates this sculpture, whether on foot or by car, “can ascribe the multiplicity of views to a Gestalt reading of the Arc. Its form remains ambiguous, indeterminable, unknowable as an entity.”6 The multiplicity of views is what is destroyed by aerial photography (a theological point of view par excellence), and the multiplicity of views is the question opened by the picturesque, its knot of contradiction. “I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He wasn’t talking about the form of the work. But I guess he meant that one experienced the landscape as picturesque through the work.”7 Serra’s interpretation of Smithson’s remarks is based on one of the commonplaces of the theory of the picturesque garden: not to force nature, but to reveal the “capacities” of the site, while magnifying their variety and singularity. This is exactly what Serra does: “The site is redefined, not re-presented. . . . The placement of all structural elements in the open field draws the viewer’s attention to the topography of the landscape as the landscape is walked.”8 As early as Shift (1970–1972), and then in connection with all his landscape sculptures, Serra has insisted that the spectator discover, while walking within the sculpture, the formless nature of the terrain: the sculptures “point to the indeterminacy of the landscape. The sculptural elements act as barometers for reading the landscape.”9 Or again: “The dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape establishes the sculptural experience.”10 I believe, however, that there is more than that in Smithson’s remark, and that this remark clarifies all of Serra’s work since 1970, that is, ever since he took an interest—starting with a trip to Japan where for six weeks he admired the Zen gardens of Myoshin-ji—in deambulatory space and

peripatetic vision. All of Serra’s sculpture, meaning not only his landscape sculptures, but also the sculptures erected in an urban setting and those he executes in an architectural interior. Indeed, although Serra himself makes a very clear distinction between these three types of sculpture—noting, for example, that while in his urban works the internal structure responds to external conditions, as in his landscape works, “ultimately the attention is refocused on the sculpture itself ”11—all his work is based on the destruction of notions of identity and causality, and all of it can be read as an extension of what Smithson says about the picturesque: The picturesque, far from being an inner movement of the mind, is based on real land; it precedes the mind in its material external existence. We cannot take a one-sided view of the landscape within this dialectic. A park can no longer be seen as a “thing-in-itself,” but rather as a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region—the park becomes a “thing-for-us.”12 Despite what he says about it, all of Serra’s work is based on the deconstruction of such a notion as “sculpture itself.” This is how Rosalind Krauss describes the relations between Serra’s oeuvre and MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception;13 in order to describe in a different way the “identity crisis” operating in Serra’s sculpture, I should like to stick to the notion of the picturesque, which, I might add, could only have been developed (in the eighteenth century, in England) after the critique of the relation of causality formulated by Hume, that forefather of modern phenomenology. What does Smithson say? That the picturesque park is not the transcription on the land of a compositional pattern previously fixed in the mind, that its effects cannot be determined a priori, that it presupposes a stroller, someone who trusts more in the real movement of his legs than in the fictive movement of his gaze. This notion would seem to contradict the pictorial origin of the picturesque, as set forth by a large number of theoretical and practical treatises (the garden conceived as a picture seen from the house or as a sequence of small views—pauses—arranged along the path where one strolls). Even further, it implies a fundamental break with pictorialism, most often unbeknown to its theoreticians, and in my opinion Serra’s art, more than two centuries later, furnishes the most striking manifestation of this break. How does Serra work?

A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara

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The site determines how I think about what I am going to build, whether it be an urban or landscape site, a room or other architectural enclosure. Some works are realized from their inception to their completion totally at the site. Other pieces are worked out in the studio. Having a definite notion of the actual site, I experiment with steel models in a large sandbox. The sand, functioning as a ground plane or as a surrogate elevation, enables me to shift the building elements so as to understand their sculptural capacity. The building method is based on hand manipulation. A continuous hands-on procedure both in the studio and at the site, using full-scale mock-ups, models, etc., allows me to perceive structures I could not imagine.14 Or again: “I never make sketches or drawings for sculptures. I don’t work from an a priori concept or image.”15 In short, Serra does not start with a plan, he does not draw on a sheet of paper the geometric figure to be delineated by the aerial view of his sculpture. This does not mean that there are no drawings: they are done later (the Kröller-Müller museum owns a very “pictorial” drawing done by Serra from Spin Out, after Spin Out had been executed). This does not mean that there are no plans: these are the business of the engineers and of the firm that will carry out the material execution of the sculpture; they are the translation, a posteriori and into their own codes, of the elevation projected by Serra: “When you are building a 100-ton piece [the approximate weight of the piece commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou that was to become Clara-Clara], you have to meet codes.”16 Serra does not start from the plan, but rather from the elevation: “Even in pieces low to the ground, I am interested in the specificity of elevation.”17 Now this is precisely where Serra comes together with the theory of the picturesque and where in a certain sense his work is closer to it than Smithson’s (whose drawings are often ground plans of his sculptures). For the picturesque is above all a struggle against the reduction “of all terrains to the flatness of a sheet of paper.”18 It may seem trite to say that a fundamental shift (from plan to elevation) should appear in an art of gardens based, at least in the beginning, on the imitation of the painting of Claude Lorrain or Salvatore Rosa. Indeed, painting, at least until recently, has never confronted the spectator as a horizontal plane (one might suppose that an art wishing to imitate painting, the verticality of painting, would stress the elevation).19 It was not, however, something that happened by itself, and one finds it expressed only

rather late in the theory of picturesque gardens. It was the Marquis de Girardin, patron of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first formulated it directly: “What has hitherto most retarded the progress of taste, in buildings as well as in gardens, is the bad practice of catching the effect of the picture in the ground plan instead of catching the ground plan in the effect of the picture.”20 The artificial arrangements of French gardens are condemned because they produce the effect “of a geometric plan, a dessert tray, or a sheet of cut-outs,”21 as is symmetry because it “is probably born of laziness and vanity. Of vanity in that one has claimed to subject nature to one’s house, instead of subjecting one’s house to nature; and of laziness in that one has been satisfied to work only on paper, which tolerates everything, in order to spare oneself the trouble of seeing and carefully contriving on the terrain, which tolerates only what suits it.”22 But the point is that Girardin is not content with these declarations of intention: he advises apprentice landscape gardeners to place on the site itself full-sized models of the various elements that they wish to include in it, “poles stretched with white cloth” for the masses of plants and facades of buildings, and white cloth spread on the ground to represent surfaces of water, “according to the outlines, extent, and position needed to produce the same effect in nature as in your picture.”23 In speaking of the architecture of constructions (but this also applies to the other elements), Girardin adds: “In this way, long before building, you will be able to contrive and guarantee the success of your constructions in relation to the various points where they ought to appear, and in relation to their form, their elevation . . . ; by this means you will be able to take into consideration all their relations and their harmony with the surrounding objects.”24 Of course, there is no question here of reducing Serra’s art to the contrivances of an eighteenth-century gentleman farmer, since Girardin’s whole vocabulary shows that he clung to a scenographic view of the role of the landscape gardener (for him, groves of trees are stage flats, the surrounding countryside a backdrop). And, of course, no work by Serra seeks to create a picture (the idea of representation is foreign to him). But even though Girardin is content with a pictorial conception of the picturesque (his book is entitled De la composition des paysages), and even though the elevation of Girardin’s constructions actually remains an illusion, his recommendation to use full-sized models testifies to a very early understanding of what distinguishes size from scale, and this distinction lies at the heart of Serra’s interest in the “specificity of elevation.”


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We have long been aware of Serra’s aversion to the monumental works of most contemporary sculptors, as well as his wish to make a sharp distinction between his own work and the production of monuments: “When we look at these pieces, are we asked to give any credence to the notion of a monument? They do not relate to the history of monuments. They do not memorialize anything.”25 Finally, we know he is irritated by architects who take only a utilitarian interest in sculpture (to adorn their buildings, to add something soulful to their central banks and multinational headquarters). Serra calls this mediocre urban art, which has invaded our old as well as our modern cities, “piazza art.” That he has no fondness for architects is certainly his right: he has often had a bone to pick with them, including one of the Beaubourg architects who suppressed his work.26 But the chief reproach he directs at them deserves to be noted, for it is the same one that he directs at other creators of monuments, whether they be Moore, Calder, or Noguchi—that their works do not have scale, since scale depends on context; that only the size of these sculptures is imposing: they are small models enlarged. “Architects suffer from the same studio syndrome. They work out of their offices, terrace the landscape and place their building into the carved-out site. As a result the studiodesigned then site-adjusted buildings look like blown-up cardboard models.”27 One can imagine the laughter and disdain of architects for a sculptor who presumes to tell them that they should make full-sized models of their buildings. There was a time when Mondrian, who cared much more for the process than for the plan, wondered how architects could avoid doing so (“how can they solve each new problem a priori?”).28 One more difference between our period and Mondrian’s lies in the fact that such a proposition would not then have seemed incongruous, and that it was even carried out directly by architects: in 1912, Mies van der Rohe, on the site chosen in The Hague, built a full-sized model (in wood and canvas) from his designs for a large villa for Mme. Kröller-Müller; and in Paris in 1922, before Mondrian’s very eyes a few months after he had written his text, Mallet-Stevens took the opportunity to erect at the Salon d’Automne at full scale a design for an “Aero-Club Pavilion.” One can only say that Serra’s sculpture is, among other things, a reminder to architects (a “rappel à MM. les architectes,” in Le Corbusier’s words) of some forgotten truths. The relationship between architecture and Serra’s sculpture is one of conflict: he says of his Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin, placed in Mies van der Rohe’s Nationalgalerie in Berlin, that it was all done “so that it would

contradict the architecture.”29 Furthermore, ever since his first writings, he has insisted on the need to distinguish sculptural problems from architectural ones.30 And when, having enumerated different qualities of space operating in a number of his sculptures, he is asked where he has found “these concepts of space” (perceptive, behaviorist, psychological, cognitive, etc.), Serra replies: “They were the result of working through various sculptural problems. Some of my concerns may be related to architectonic principles—geometry, engineering, the use of light to define a volume—but the pieces themselves have no utilitarian or pragmatic value.”31 In this sentence I read a denial. Not only because architecture— fortunately—does not always limit itself to its “utilitarian or pragmatic value,” but especially because the architectonic principles to which Serra refers have nothing, or very little, to do with his work. He even acknowledges his surprise, a few pages earlier in this same interview, at the role played by light inside Sight Point in Amsterdam.32 Serra, therefore, does not wish to be mistaken for an architect. Which does not keep his sculpture from being a lesson in architecture, or a criticism of architecture— something that he ended by admitting when an architect, to be exact, put him on the defensive: When sculpture . . . leaves the gallery or museum to occupy the same space and place as architecture, when it redefines the space and place in terms of sculptural necessities, architects become annoyed. Not only is their concept of space being changed, but for the most part it is being criticized. The criticism can come into effect only when architectural scale, methods, materials and procedures are being used. Comparisons are provoked. Every language has a structure about which nothing critical in that language can be said. To criticize a language, there must be a second language available dealing with the structure of the first but possessing a new structure.33 This is exactly the position in which Serra’s sculpture finds itself in the presence of modern architecture: the former maintains a connection that allows it to criticize the latter. Both have a common denominator that allows them to communicate. What is this common element? Serra doesn’t say, although all his remarks about his work speak of it implicitly: this element is the play of parallax. Parallax, from Greek parallaxis, “change”: “the apparent change in the position of an object resulting from the change in the . . . position from which it is viewed” (Webster’s New World


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Sight Point, 1971–1975 Weatherproof steel Three plates, each 40’ x 10’ x 21⁄2” Collection: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Photo: Claes Oldenburg

Dictionary). Serra uses the word only once, about Spin Out (For Bob Smithson),34 but all his descriptions take it into account. See, for example, how Sight Point seems at first “to fall right to left, make an X, and straighten itself out to a truncated pyramid. That would occur three times as you walked around.”35 Or again, see how the upper edge of St. John’s Rotary Arc seems sometimes to curve toward the sky, sometimes toward the ground, how its concavity is curtailed before the moving spectator discovers a convexity whose end he cannot see, how this convexity is then

St. John’s Rotary Arc, 1980 Weatherproof steel 12’ x 200’ x 21⁄2” Installed: Holland Tunnel exit, New York Photo: Gwen Thomas

flattened to the point of becoming a barely rounded wall, until this regularity is suddenly broken and in some way turned inside out like a glove when the spectator ascends a flight of steps.36 Other examples could be given; I prefer for the moment to go back to architecture. In Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, Peter Collins sees the new interest in parallax, in the middle of the eighteenth century, as one of the prime sources for the establishment of modern architectural space. People were interested at first in the illusionistic effects of parallax—hence the proliferation of large mirrors in Rococo salons—and later in architectural effects themselves: these effects did not occur frequently in existing architecture. “Before the mid-eighteenth century, the interior of a building was essentially a kind of box-like enclosure,” Collins notes,37 but they were invariably to be seen in ruins, and this may be one of the reasons why ruins became so popular in that period. Robert Wood,


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when visiting the ruins of Palmyra in 1751, was as much impressed by their aesthetic as by their archaeological qualities, and remarked that “so great a number of Corinthian columns, mixed with so little wall or solid building, afforded a most romantic variety of prospect.” . . . The fondness at this time for multiplying free-standing Classical colonnades inside buildings, as well as outside buildings, may also be explained by the new delight in parallax. Boullée’s most grandiose projects were to show many variations on this theme, but it had been exploited as early as 1757 by Soufflot in his great church of Ste. Geneviève. . . . Soufflot had noticed that in the cathedral of NotreDame, “the spectator, as he advances, and as he moves away, distinguishes in the distance a thousand objects, at one moment found, at another lost again, offering him delightful spectacles.”38 He therefore attempted to produce the same effect inside of Ste. Geneviève.39 And in a text that Peter Collins mentions without quoting, the successor of Soufflot as master builder at the church of Sainte-Geneviève was to say that the chief object of that architect “in building his church, was to combine in one of the most beautiful forms the lightness of construction of Gothic buildings with the purity and magnificence of Greek architecture.”40 At first sight the interest of a neoclassical architect in Gothic buildings would seem impossibly remote from our subject. The very strangeness of this interest, however, leads directly to it, since, as Collins notes, it is the result of the new taste for parallax that develops in this period. Collins’s intuition is confirmed by a supplementary element: on 6 September 1764, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone for Sainte-Geneviève, Julien David Leroy, famous for Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, a work he had published in 1758 and which marked the beginning of the Greek revival, presented a small pamphlet to the king. Now this little book, which ends with a panegyric on Soufflot’s future church, is probably the first architectural treatise that “relies on an experimental knowledge of movement in space—that metaphysical part of architecture, as Leroy calls it in his letters.”41 The hymn to the varied effects produced by a peristyle is even more vibrant in this pamphlet than in his book on ruins, where Leroy had already addressed the question. But I would rather quote a less effusive passage of the book in which Leroy, in order to explain his rejection of pilasters and engaged columns, then a great subject of debate among French architectural theoreticians, brings up the art of gardens. His demonstration is very simple:

If you walk in a garden, at some distance from & along a row of regularly planted trees, all of whose trunks touch a wall pierced with arcades [as engaged columns do], the position of the trees with respect to these arcades will only seem to you to change very imperceptibly, & your soul will experience no new sensation. . . . But if this row of trees stands away from the wall [like a peristyle], while you walk in the same way as before, you will enjoy a new spectacle, because the different spaces in the wall will seem successively to be blocked up by the trees with every step you take. And Leroy’s description becomes surprisingly precise—as precise as the account given by Serra of one of the possible readings of Rotary Arc— for one of the routes he suggests in his promenade. You will soon see the trees divide the arcades into two equal parts, and a moment later cut them unequally, or leave them entirely exposed & conceal only their intervals; finally, if you approach or move away from these trees, the wall will seem to you to rise up to where their branches begin, or cut their trunks at very different heights. In short, despite the regular arrangement in both cases of tree and wall, the first of the decorations will seem immobile, while the other, on the contrary, being in some way enlivened by the movement of the spectator, will show him a series of much varied views, which will result from the endless combination that he obtains of the simple objects that produce these views.42 Of course, the garden described by Leroy has nothing picturesque about it; what is picturesque is the importance accorded to the movement of the spectator, since it corresponds to that fundamental rule that Uvedale Price, one of the theoreticians cited by Smithson, called “intricacy.” Indeed, for Price, the first so-called English gardens were not picturesque enough, for they neglected, he writes, two of the most fruitful sources of human pleasures: . . . variety . . . [and] intricacy, a quality which, though distinct from variety, is so connected and blended with it that one can hardly exist without the other. According to the idea I have formed of it, [Price adds] intricacy A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara

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in landscape might be defined as that disposition of objects which, by a partial and uncertain concealment, excites and nourishes curiosity.43 To be sure, as Collins points out, theoreticians of the picturesque have never been able to extricate themselves from a veritable malaise engendered by a contradiction in their theory, by their stubborn determination to treat the scenic garden (promenade, temporal experience) and landscape painting as though they were one and the same thing.44 Some of those theoreticians, however, were aware of this contradiction, and it even became a stumbling block in their polemics. See Repton, responding to Price: “The spot from whence this view is taken is in a fixed state to the painter, but the gardener surveys his scenery in motion.”45 Now it was the discovery of the play of parallax that made them specify the terms of the contradiction (static optical view/peripatetic view). Furthermore, it is in connection with architecture, the perception of architecture, that it appears in their texts: Avoid a straight avenue directed upon a dwelling-house; better for an oblique approach is a waving line. . . . In a direct approach, the first appearance is continued to the end. . . . In an oblique approach, the interposed objects put the house seemingly in motion: it moves with the passenger . . . [and] seen successively in different directions, [it] assumes at each step a new figure.46 In short, despite the “pictorial” bias, it is necessary to break the assurance of the organ of vision, to eliminate the presumption of “Gestalt,” and to recall to the spectator’s body its indolence and weight, its material existence: “The foot should never travel to [the object] by the same path which the eye has traveled over before. Lose the object, and draw nigh obliquely.”47 This is the great innovation contained in embryo in the picturesque garden: The Classical notion of design, whether in gardens or buildings, regarded the totality of such schemes as forming a single unified and immediately intelligible composition, of which the elements were subdivisions constituting smaller but still harmoniously related parts; [the picturesque garden was], on the contrary, designed in accordance with a diametrically opposite intention, for here the overall concept was carefully hidden.48

Now if I said before that Serra’s sculpture was a “reminder to architects,” it is precisely because modern architecture was born of this rupture (analyzed by Collins in connection with gardens)—a rupture that architects themselves, perhaps under the influence of certain theoreticians, have almost completely repressed. In his short book on modern architecture, Vincent Scully raises at the outset (but one swallow doesn’t make a summer) the question of the rupture: it is first of all necessary, he says, to “travel backward in time until we reach a chronological point where we can no longer identify the architecture as an image of the modern world.”49 And this point of rupture is situated in the middle of the eighteenth century (it is surely not by chance that it exactly coincides with the war conducted by the English garden against the symmetry of the garden à la française): taking issue with Sigfried Giedion, Scully shows that baroque space (i.e., the architectural space that comes prior to this point of rupture) is in no way the antecedent of modern space, and that modern space is its negation. In the baroque, order is absolutely firm, but against it an illusion of freedom is played. . . . It is therefore an architecture that is intended to enclose and shelter human beings in a psychic sense, to order them absolutely so that they can always find a known conclusion at the end of any journey, but finally to let them play at freedom and action all the while. Everything works out; the play seems tumultuous but nobody gets hurt and everyone wins. It is . . . a maternal architecture, and creates a world with which, today, only children, if they are lucky, could identify.50 Who brought about the rupture? asks Scully. It was Piranesi in his Carceri: In them, the symmetry, hierarchy, climax, and emotional release of Baroque architectural space . . . were cast aside in favor of a complex spatial wandering, in which the objectives of the journey were not revealed and therefore could not be known.51 Although one of the sources of the picturesque, Piranesi’s art participates in the rupture that goes well beyond the picturesque that succeeds it. And if Serra, because of the connotations of delicacy attached to this term picturesque, balked at its use to characterize his sculpture, I would say that in


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Giovanni Battista Piranesi Prima parte di architetture e prospettive Plate 11: Group of Stairs, Embellished by Magnificent Architecture

a certain sense he was right, for his art is the first response in sculptural space to the questions raised about representational space more than two centuries ago by Piranesi. The first point in common between the Venetian’s engravings and Serra’s work: space in them is not maternal, that is to say, it is not oriented, not centered.52 There are indeed some axes in Piranesi’s engravings, but as Ulya Vogt-Göknil has remarked, they are always multiple and either run parallel or mutually exclude each other.53 Serra: “The work is not goaloriented.”54 Or again, “the center, or the question of centering, is dislocated from the physical center of the work and found in a moving center.”55 Or finally: “The expanse of the work allows one to perceive and locate a multiplicity of centers.”56 Another feature in common, which, as we have seen, was contained in embryo in the picturesque: both Piranesi’s work and Serra’s are based on the abolition of the prerogative of the plan. Let us dwell for a moment on the famous Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, and look at plate 11 of that work, entitled Gruppo di Scale ornato di magnifica Architettura, le quali stanno disposte in modo che condocano a varii piani, e specialmente ad una Rotonda che serve per rappresentanze teatrali. Who among us, having been

Reconstruction by Ulya Vogt-Göknil of the ground plan of Piranesi’s plate 11: Group of Stairs, Embellished by Magnificent Architecture

shown this image (elevation) and its title (isn’t a rotunda circular, and doesn’t it presuppose a completed geometrical space?), could have imagined that the floor plan, as patiently reconstituted by Ulya Vogt-Göknil, would turn out to be so architecturally formless, a pleading for the fragment right there on the plan? It is as though Piranesi had not simply been content to break existing architectural rules (by the eccentric points of view adopted in his vedute), but had surreptitiously destroyed, in the very elevations, the identity of the plan. Now this is one of the essential strengths of Serra’s sculpture. Clara Weyergraf has remarked about Terminal, a sculpture that stands today in Bochum, that “the information gathered from the construction drawings . . . cannot be verified in the experience of the sculpture.”57 And indeed the square opening of light that the spectator finds above him when he enters the sculpture cannot be inferred from his previous walk around the work (just as it is impossible for him to know, at any particular moment, that “Terminal is made of four trapezoidal slabs of steel of the same size,”58 something specifically revealed by the construction drawings). The elevation cannot provide the plan, for as one walks


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around it, one finds no element that has maintained a relation of identity with the others: “The decision to break with the expectations about the sequentialness of like elements make [sic] a dialectical relationship between inside and outside.”59 Terminal is in some way a critique of the “narrative” space developed by Sight Point (three times three consecutive “views” when one walks around the sculpture), for the number of views of it cannot be counted. But Piranesi’s principle of disjunction was already at work in Sight Point: even though this sculpture is constructed of a series of similar elements, nothing acts to forewarn the observer that it is, in Serra’s words, a “truncated pyramid” delineating an equilateral triangle at its top. Or again, when Serra, with some reluctance, describes the placing of the three steel slabs of Spin Out in geometric terms, he says nothing about what the spectator’s experience will be: he pretends to give a key to that experience, and this key is not the right one: “The plates were laid out at twelve, four and eight o’clock in an elliptical valley, and the space in between them forms an isosceles triangle.”60 I have spent some time surveying Spin Out, trying in particular to determine whether some sort of geometry was at work there, and never was I able to come to that conclusion (on the contrary, it seemed to me that any a priori geometry was absent and that the work, like Shift, was a function of the topography). And Serra is right to express his reservations and prefer to speak of the work in terms of parallax and the progress of the spectator, since in no way does he work with a view to the recognition of a geometric form in his sculpture—he does not work, as he puts it, “for the sake of anything in that way.”61 The elevation does not provide the plan, and the plan cannot provide the elevation. Had it been erected in the place for which it was conceived, the piece commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou would have been the radical confirmation of this fundamental division. Because the work would have been placed in the pit of the Centre’s entrance hall, the spectators would have had from the outset an inkling of the plan in its symmetry (two equal arcs of a circle arranged as an X, one opposite the other): they would have first seen the work from above, and even if their view would not have been exactly aerial, let us say that their first apprehension of Clara-Clara would have been a “Gestalt” one. But this view would have been false. And it is fortunate that in the site actually occupied by the work at the time of its exhibition, between the Musée du Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie, something of this initial false impression can

continue to exist, thanks to the sloping partitions that overhang the sculpture on each side. So at the Tuileries, as would have been the case at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the spectator of Clara-Clara had knowledge of the overall plan of the sculpture before going up to look at it more closely. Geometrically, the two arcs of a circle are two identical segments of a section of a cone (and not of a cylinder), which means that the curved walls of these arcs are not vertical—the first fact that the plan doesn’t tell us. Since the arcs are placed not parallel but mirroring each other (their convexity almost meeting in the middle), one logical conclusion would be to have the walls each lean in the opposite direction, each toward the inside of its own curve. But Serra’s invention—the second element not apparent from the plan—lies in having broken this symmetry by using what forms the top of one of these arcs as the base for the other—in other words, in having put one of them upside down. Thanks to this reversal, the two walls lean in the same direction (one toward the inside of its curve, the other toward the outside), and this will increase, as one can imagine, the play of parallax. In walking inside Clara-Clara, going toward the bottleneck that these two arcs form at their middle, the spectator constantly has the strange impression that one wall goes “faster” than the other, that the right and left sides of his body are not synchronized. Having passed through the bottleneck, which reveals to him the reason for his strange feeling—although the slant of the walls is actually rather slight—he then sees the lateral differences reversed: the symmetry of this effect is foreseeable, but not the surprise that accompanies it. To get back to Piranesi: William Chambers, one of the first theoreticians of the English garden and a critic of Price, reports that “when the students at the Academie de France in Rome accused [Piranesi] of being ignorant of the art of plans, he produced one of extreme complexity.”62 This Pianta di ampio magnifico Collegio, the only plan in Piranesi’s oeuvre, is first of all a critique of the baroque tradition. “The most singular feature,” writes Monique Mosser, “may be the effort made by Piranesi to develop at the same time two ideas that are difficult to reconcile [I would say mutually exclusive]: that of a building with a central plan and that of the staircase as the dominant motif.”63 What Piranesi actually does in response to the students’ accusation is to compose, to be sure, a centered plan, but this center, on the one hand, is considerably smaller than the rooms at the periphery (especially those at the four corners); on the other hand, it is


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nothing but a thoroughfare: its sole function is to provide access to eight staircases. From such a plan, swarming with useless and redundant stairways, which are conceived as elevation sections leading nowhere, from this falsely circular structure (going up/down/up), one can infer nothing but an endless rotary and vertical circulation. The center is a thoroughfare: as Ulya Vogt-Göknil had seen, this is the essential nature of Piranesi’s architectural space—whether it be the space represented in the Carceri, or the vedute he provided of the Roman architecture he had before his eyes, or again of this school design.64 The center is a thoroughfare, i.e., an indifferent place, with no other identity than the one conferred on it by the passersby, a nonplace that exists only through the experience of time and motion that the stroller may make of it. In a certain way, Piranesi can be understood to foreshadow not only the space of Serra’s sculpture, but that of all modern sculpture as well. For, as Rosalind Krauss has shown, this space, from Rodin to Serra, is one of passage and displacement from the center, a space interrupted by the discontinuous time of involuntary memory, a slender space whose divergences it is up to the spectator to explore, while eventually connecting its threads for himself.65 In speaking of Shift, Krauss compares Serra’s sculpture to Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiments in montage. In these experiments, the montage was revealed as an “index of difference or separateness within a prevailing matrix of sameness.”66 Kuleshov’s montage demonstrated the perceptive primacy of spatial continuity, but at the same time expressed the fact that this continuity was produced by means of discontinuity. This is exactly what Serra accomplishes in Shift and in many other sculptures as well. One has only to reread the pages Serra has written on Rotary Arc to be convinced that film fragmentation is an apt metaphor with which to describe his work: as one drives around the rotary, both Arc’s convexity and its concavity foreshorten, then compress, overlap, and elongate. The abrupt but continuous succession of views is highly transitive, akin to a cinematic experience.67 The “transitivity” to which Serra here refers is the notion that he tried to work out in his first films (an action perpetuated on an object, with no conclusion) and in the sculptures in the Skullcracker Series (1969), and which he expressed in the simplest way of all by inscribing a list of verbs on the invitation announcement for one of his first exhibitions.68 Now this very transitivity was discovered by Eisenstein in Piranesi when he compared to the space in the Carceri the sequence from October in which

one and the same piece showing the ascent of the head of state up the marble staircase of the Winter Palace has been cemented together in succession “ad infinitum.” Of course, not really “ad infinitum,” but in the course of the four or five variants in which this same scene was shot, which during the actual shooting was intended to be a very luxurious . . . episode.69 Naturally the filmmaker’s intention was ironic (to show that Kerensky’s irresistible rise to power was built on sand), but that is not important here, since montage can express whatever it likes with “one and the same shot.” What matters on the one hand is that this description of an almost endless repetition of the same gesture with no conclusion (climbing stairs for no other reason than to climb stairs) exactly matches the repetitive nonevent of Serra’s first film, Hand Catching Lead (a hand tries to catch some falling pieces of lead, sometimes does catch one, and immediately lets it go: there is no “climax,” no orgiastic release, as there is in the baroque).70 What matters on the other hand is that Eisenstein discovers this transitivity in Piranesi’s work. Not only through the theme of an endless climbing of stairs (a romantic interpretation of the Carceri, and one that has been a commonplace since the famous passage in De Quincey, quoted by the Soviet director),71 but especially because in his opinion Piranesi works like a master of montage and bases his spatial continuities on discontinuity: Nowhere in the Carceri do we find a view in depth in continuous perspective. Everywhere the movement begun by a perspective in depth finds itself interrupted by a bridge, a pillar, an arch, a passageway. Each time, beyond the pillar or the semicircle of the arch, the movement of the perspective is once more resumed. . . . [But while] the eye expects to see behind the arch the continuation of the architectural theme preceding the arch normally reduced by perspective, [it is in fact] another architectural motif that appears behind the arch, and moreover, in a reduction of perspective almost double what the eye had supposed. . . . Hence an unexpected qualitative leap from the space and the grand scale. And the series of planes in depth, cut off from each other by pillars and arches, is constructed in independent portions of autonomous spaces, being connected not by a single continuity of perspective, but as in the successive shocks of spaces of a qualitative intensity differing in depth.


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This, says Eisenstein, is exactly the way montage operates in the cinema: This effect [in Piranesi] is constructed on the capacity of our eye to continue by inertia a movement once it has been given. The collision of this “suggested” path of movement with another path substituted for it also produces the effect of a jolt. It is on the analogous ability of retaining imprints of a visual impression that the phenomenon of cinematic movement is built.72 Serra says somewhere (I have been unable to locate the exact wording) that he is interested in abrupt discontinuities: no doubt “the experience of shock,” elsewhere described by Walter Benjamin as the experience par excellence of modernity, is what gives rise to his sculpture. As though echoing Eisenstein, he speaks of “memory and anticipation” as “vehicles of perception” for his sculptures,73 the two being dialectically opposed in order to prevent “good form,” a “Gestalt” image, or a pattern of identity from taking over. One might say a good deal more about the relations between Eisenstein’s montage and the art of Serra. We know that Eisenstein disagreed with Kuleshov (and others) on one fundamental point: he did not want montage, the experience of shock, to involve only “the element between shots,” but wanted it to be “transferred to inside the fragment, into the elements included in the image itself”74 so that the dissociation between the shots would end by operating in the very interior of the shot, just as Piranesi’s disjunction of plan and elevation surreptitiously destroyed the identity of the ground plan and its traditional domination over traditional space. Serra shares with Eisenstein this wish to introduce discontinuity into discontinuity itself, and this takes us back for one last time to the question of the picturesque. We have seen that Terminal constituted a sort of deconstruction of the narrative space created by Sight Point. Now the problem of narration unquestionably lies at the heart of Serra’s enterprise: in his films as in his sculptures, he seeks to destroy that which has been the age-old foundation of narration, namely its conclusion. Hand Catching Lead is almost endless, “not actually endless, of course,” as Eisenstein would say, but almost. And the descriptive account of his walk or drive around Rotary Arc describes a complete circle: it begins and ends at an arbitrarily chosen—almost arbitrarily chosen—point, and could perpetuate itself indefinitely. When Peter Eisenman spoke of his sculptures as “framing the landscape,” Serra bridled:

If you use the word “frame” in referring to the landscape, you imply a notion of the picturesque. I have never really found the notion of framing parts of the landscape particularly interesting in terms of its potential for sculpture. Smithson was interested in the picturesque. . . . That’s an interesting notion in terms of its relation to the narrative of seeing but it’s not of particular concern to me.75 I noted above this pictorial limitation of the theory of the picturesque, which made gardeners develop in their parks a series of small pictures to be discovered while walking. It is to this narrative conception of discontinuity that Serra is opposed, and it is this, more than anything else, that separates him from the picturesque. In December 1782, Hannah More reported to her sisters a conversation she had with Capability Brown, the first great master of the English picturesque garden: He told me he compared his art to literary composition: “Now there,” said he, pointing his finger, “I make a comma, and there,” pointing to another spot, “where a more decided turn is needed, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”76 This, among other things, is what distinguishes Serra’s art from that of landscape gardeners: he has no full stop. His art is not an art of punctuation (although often, while speaking of one of his sculptures, he draws on paper, at the rate of ten drawings a minute, a storyboard of its various aspects). It is an art of montage, an art that is not satisfied to interrupt continuity temporarily, but produces continuity by a double negation, by destroying the pictorial recovery of continuity through discontinuity, dissociation, and the loss of identity within the fragment. Now what? This whole additional excursion into the eighteenth century just to be able to say that Serra and the picturesque are completely different? They’re not completely different, although the use made by Serra of ideas developed two centuries ago could hardly be identical with what was done with them then, in that cult of rationality represented by the Enlightenment. One might therefore wonder why I have insisted on circumscribing my interpretation of his work in a vocabulary and a debate two centuries old. There are two fundamental reasons. The first has to do with Serra’s manifest hostility to architects. If this hostility is, in my opinion, wholly justified, if Serra can rightly say of


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Terminal that this sculpture reduces almost all the architecture surrounding it to the mediocrity of its “cardboard-model inventiveness,”77 it is because he once again brings to bear on his work notions that appeared in the architectural debates of the eighteenth century, and which architects have since repressed. The history of this repression, which I have tried to trace here, has seemed to me indispensable if we are to understand the singular nature of Serra’s work. It was never a question to my mind of unearthing sources for him, of seeking connections and influences. Quite the opposite, it was a matter of showing that the strength of his innovation was the raw one of the return of the repressed. Let us take another look at this aspect of architecture. After Leroy, the only theoretician who conceives architecture anew in terms of the effect it will produce on the moving spectator is Boullée. He does so in exactly the same way as Leroy, but he adds a word to his predecessor’s vocabulary, a word to which I will come back: sublime. (I might add that a whole parallel could be traced between the idea formulated by Boullée of a buried architecture and Serra’s sculptures that are sunk in the ground.) Following Boullée, but a century later, the historian Auguste Choisy was to be the first to reexamine this question of the peripatetic view. He did so in connection with a discovery very much his own (truly unheard-of and incomprehensible to architects trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, for it pointed directly at something they had obscured at the very heart of the example they wanted to imitate), that of “Greek picturesque” (namely, the asymmetrical arrangement of Greek temples, depending on the site).78 Then came Le Corbusier, one of the few architects spared by Serra in his general anathema. Leaving aside the issue of whether the architectural concept of “promenade” invented by Le Corbusier is strongly influenced by Choisy’s fantastic discovery, the important thing here is that, for the first time since Boullée, an architect speaks of the play of parallax for his architecture, if necessary borrowing from other cultures, as the cubists did from primitive art. We know the text in Le Corbusier’s Oeuvres complètes that accompanies his designs for the Villa Savoye: Arab architecture has much to teach us. It is appreciated while on the move, with one’s feet; it is while walking, moving from one place to another, that one sees how the arrangements of the architecture develop. This is a principle contrary to Baroque architecture. . . . In this house [the Villa Savoye], we are dealing with a true architectural promenade, offering constantly varied, unexpected, sometimes as-

tonishing aspects. It is interesting to obtain so much diversity when one has, for example, allowed from the standpoint of construction an absolutely rigorous pattern of posts and beams.79 Now here two things should be stressed. On the one hand, this “pattern of posts” is certainly not absolutely rigorous (contrary to what Le Corbusier says a little later, the posts are not “equidistant”). On the other hand, this disturbance of the plan has been made necessary by the first vertical breach constituted by the ramp, then further complicated by the displacement, in the planning stage, of the staircase (which became on this occasion a spiral one)—that is to say, in two different ways, by thoroughfares. It has sometimes been asked why Le Corbusier kept this troublesome ramp (he who claimed that the plan generated the architecture) when a simple staircase (especially a spiral one) would have posed fewer problems. Now the very subject of the Villa Savoye is the penetration of a vertical section into a horizontal grid (the “Dom-ino” grid dating from 1914 and tried out in the designs for the Citrohan houses of 1920–1922, in which the staircase was always conceived as exterior to the grid). It is this vertical penetration by the passageway into the arrangement of the plan, this disturbance of the plan by the elevation and by the movement of the stroller, that creates the richness and intricacy of the Villa Savoye (and in a certain way one could say that the aim of the free plan corresponds in Le Corbusier, despite what he says about it, to a wish to free his architecture from the generating tyranny of the plan). Le Corbusier, as his vocabulary shows, again takes up the idea of the picturesque, and tries to imagine what a picturesque architecture might be. But with him, as with Serra, it is a question of a modern picturesque, and not one of narrative and pictoriality. Hence the necessity, in the Villa Savoye, of a division of labor and a duplication (“one ascends imperceptibly by a ramp, which is a totally different feeling from the one provided by a staircase formed by steps. A staircase separates one floor from another, a ramp connects them”).80 It is from this unequal duplication, this conflict between continuity and discontinuity, that the experience of shock is born: quite late in the development of the project Le Corbusier pierced the stairwell, which had been conceived at the beginning as a semi-cylindrical blind box, and bored openings in it that are like the displaced projection onto the cylinder of the triangles delineated by the ramp. Why this give-and-take? Because the machine is not inhabited by a hermit: “It is most exhilarating when we can sense our movement in relation to another person on another path, catching and


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losing sense of that person, playing curve off straight and step off stride. Then we are acutely aware of our own movement by its periodic relation to that of another participant.”81 The fact that these remarks are by a present-day architect and critic in no way detracts from my general thesis (that architects today have much to learn not only from Le Corbusier but also from Serra), for just as Le Corbusier’s kinetic intelligence was something exceptional, so the understanding of that intelligence among architects today remains the thing least shared in the world. Now it is just this, this attention to the effects of a dual movement, that makes Serra’s sculpture a lesson in architecture. At the time he was developing his ideas for Shift, Serra spent five days walking about the site with Joan Jonas: the “boundaries” of the work were determined by the maximum distance that two people could cover without losing sight of each other. “The horizon of the work,” says Serra, “was established by the possibilities of maintaining this mutual viewpoint.”82 Or again: “My open works [those that one can pass through] are not concerned with internal relationships. They have to do with looking from where they are into space, or from where they are to where the other one is placed.”83 Whether this “other one” is another element of the sculpture (as in Open Field Vertical/Horizontal Elevations: ten steel cubes scattered in a seemingly huge park) or another spectator comes to the same thing, for here we are dealing with an experience of reciprocity, of mutuality. It is over this fracture of identity, this division of one into two, that the history of parallax and of the picturesque promenade enters into Le Corbusier’s architecture and Serra’s sculpture. Hence the necessity I feel to trace back the discontinuous threads of this history, even though it might mean a temporary retreat into the eighteenth century. The second reason for this backward look in time is less direct but no less essential. Anyone concerned with the history of sculpture during these last twenty years will recall the fundamental and vehement attack on minimalism published by Michael Fried at the end of the 1960s. In a certain way, all of Serra’s oeuvre is an implicit reply to Michael Fried’s text. Here it is not a question of going back over the terms of the discussion or even of summarizing “Art and Objecthood.”84 Let us merely say that, according to Fried, minimalist art sinks into “theater” (understood as the identification of the space of art with that of the spectator, daily life, and the world of objects), while for him the essential goal of modernist art, and of sculpture in particular, has been to affirm its autonomy in relation to this real space. More than just an attack on the confusion between two kinds

of space—which would simply have repeated Adolf von Hildebrand’s criticism of panoramas and Canova’s tombs at the end of the last century85— Fried’s text denounced in the minimalist work its implication of the duration of the spectator’s experience. To Tony Smith’s enthusiastic account of a drive on an unfinished turnpike (an account of a journey conceived as a model of the minimalist experience), Fried opposed the atemporality and instantly intelligible perception of the sculptors he was defending (“at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest”).86 Fried opted for a pictorial conception of sculpture (following in this an idea of Greenberg’s: sculpture is doomed to exist in the world of objects, and should therefore be as two-dimensional as possible in order to escape this condition of existence as much as it can).87 “Pictoriality,” on the contrary, seemed to Smith too narrow a framework to be able to produce experiences similar to the one he had had on the turnpike. The position termed modernist (both Greenberg’s and Fried’s, despite their differences) relies openly on Kant: an absolute distinction between the world of art and that of artifacts, immediacy of judgment about the beautiful, indifference to the object’s material existence (Greenberg never speaks of texture, for example, or does so only in general terms). Furthermore, for Kant, the beautiful “is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having [definite] boundaries,”88 and Fried tells us that it is the absence of a priori determination of their limits that radically distinguishes minimalist sculptures from modernist works of art. Indeed, in speaking of Spin Out, Serra states: “there isn’t any definition of boundary.”89 Finally, for Kant (as for Fried), “in the case of the beautiful taste presupposes and maintains the mind in restful contemplation.”90 Kant makes no reference, in his “Analytic of the Beautiful,” to the duration of the spectator’s experience (even when it is a question of music), nor to the movement of his body (especially when it is a question of architecture). That the modernist aesthetic is Kantian through and through, no one will deny, nor that Fried’s or Greenberg’s interpretation of the first book of the first section of the first part of the Critique of Judgment is well founded. It is simply that this interpretation is singularly partial, in both senses of the word. It is as though modernism had obliterated that whole other side of the Kantian aesthetic, Book II of the same portion of this work, entitled “Analytic of the Sublime.” For although “the beautiful and the sublime agree in this, that both please in themselves” (i.e., without finality), “there are also remarkable differences between the two.”91 While the beautiful, for example, concerns the form of the object, and thus its limitation, “the


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Shift, 1970–1972 Concrete Six sections: 5’ x 90’ x 3”; 5’ x 240’ x 8”; 5’ x 150’ x 8”; 5’ x 120’ x 8”; 5’ x 105’ x 8”; 5’ x 110’ x 8” Overall: 815’ Collection: Roger Davidson, Toronto, Canada Installed: King City, Ontario, Canada

sublime, on the other hand, can be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented in it, and yet its totality is also present to thought.”92 And while in the beautiful totality is immediately apprehended, the feeling of the sublime comes from the contradiction between apprehension (which “can go on ad infinitum”) and comprehension (which quickly reaches a maximum, beyond which the imagination cannot go”).93 In other words, the feeling of the sublime lies in the separation between the idea of totality and the perceived impossibility of understanding that totality. The amazement of someone entering Saint Peter’s in Rome for the first time is for Kant a sublime experience par excellence (it was not sublime enough, I might add, for a Leroy or a Boullée, for whom the church seemed much smaller than it actually was, due to the lack of attention paid to the play of parallax). Here is what Kant says about


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this virgin spectator penetrating to the heart of the papacy: “For there is here a feeling of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole, wherein the imagination reaches its maximum, and, in striving to surpass it, sinks into itself, by which, however, a kind of emotional satisfaction is produced.”94 (The pleasure I felt while walking in Spin Out did not occur in spite of my inability to grasp its geometric form, but because of that inability.) In a word, Kant, in his “Analytic of the Sublime,” is forced to imagine a mechanism of perception quite different from the one he assumes in his theory of judgment about the beautiful. In particular, he is obliged to introduce the temporality of the aesthetic experience. Of course, for him, it is still a question, as Smithson remarks about all idealist theories of art, of a movement of the mind, but this movement is induced by the characteristics of the object (“the feeling of the sublime brings with it as its characteristic feature a movement of the mind bound up with the judging of the object”).95 Why? Because the feeling of the sublime can only come from the grandeur of the object and the impossibility of controlling or understanding this grandeur by thought—from the impossibility, as Serra would say, of having a “Gestalt” view of it. For when apprehension has gone so far that the partial representations of sensuous intuition at first apprehended begin to vanish in the imagination, while this ever proceeds to the apprehension of others, then it loses as much on one side as it gains on the other; and in comprehension there is a maximum beyond which it cannot go.96 So far as I know, this is the only passage in the whole Critique of Judgment where Kant speaks in temporal terms (“begin,” “proceeds,” “then”) of the mechanism of the aesthetic imagination, and one could call it a paraphrase of Serra’s comments about his Rotary Arc. That it is a question of the “Analytic of the Sublime” and not that of the beautiful simply shows that the Kantian criteria applied by Greenberg and Fried in their condemnation of Mminimalism were inappropriate, since one cannot judge the sublime by the criteria of the beautiful.97 I can imagine Serra’s negative reaction to Fried’s indictment interspersed with Kant (since his work, even more than minimalism, falls under the hammer of this neo-Kantian diatribe). But it seemed to me that a brief return to Kant, by way of the sublime, was called for here. Not only because if the rupture of modernity actually took place in the eighteenth

century, it is necessary for us today to go back over that past (that is, incidentally, what Michael Fried has done, endeavoring to describe, in order to shore up his position, what was produced at the time of this rupture, i.e., “in the age of Diderot”).98 But also because the picturesque, as Smithson observed, flows from the sublime: Price extended Edmund Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) to a point that tried to free landscaping from the “picture” gardens of Italy into a more physical sense of the temporal landscape. . . . Burke’s notion of “beautiful” and “sublime” functions as a thesis of smoothness, gentle curves, and delicacy of nature, and as an antithesis of terror, solitude, and vastness of nature, both of which are rooted in the real world, rather than in a Hegelian ideal [it is this empirical basis of Burke’s text that Kant criticized]. Price and Gilpin provide a synthesis with their formulation of the “picturesque,” which is on close examination related to chance and change in the material order of nature.99 For Burke, the beautiful and the sublime were irreconcilable; they remained so for Price and William Gilpin. But as Price wrote: “the picturesque appeared halfway between the beautiful and the sublime; and this may be why it allies itself more often and more happily with both than they do with each other.”100 There is thus a beautiful picturesque and a sublime picturesque: it is to this second category, if you like, that Serra’s art belongs. The word picturesque, says Smithson, is itself like a sublime tree struck by lightning in a picturesque English garden of the eighteenth century: “This word in its own way has been struck by lightning over the centuries. Words, like trees, can be suddenly deformed or wrecked, but such deformation or wreckage cannot be dismissed by timid academics.”101 It has taken all the support of Serra’s work for a timid academic like myself to attempt to repair the damage. Postscript

The preceding text was written for the catalogue of the Richard Serra exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, from 26 October 1983 to 2 January 1984. As mentioned above, Clara-Clara was supposed to be installed in the Forum, that is, the giant pit at the ground level of the Centre


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Clara-Clara, 1983 Weatherproof steel Two elements, each 12’ x 120’ x 2” Tuileries, Place de la Concorde Collection: City of Paris Photos: Dirk Reinartz

Pompidou (henceforth called Beaubourg), an unusable space that looks like something between a train station and a pool in a zoo. While writing this essay, I believed that for the first time Clara-Clara would have dramatized the specifics of this space and would have articulated its bare hollowness. It was in my capacity as author (my text would have to be altered slightly) that I was advised of the eleventh-hour change of site: the Beaubourg technicians had waited until the last minute to inform the exhibition’s organizers that it would be impossible to install Clara-Clara in the pit, since the building would not be able to sustain such a weight. Richard Serra does not take the notion of site-specificity lightly: if he finally accepted the relocation of his piece to the main entrance of the Tuileries gardens, it is because it had similarities with the Beaubourg pit (notably, in its proportions). But he knew no more than anybody else who had followed this affair (myself included) just how much his sculpture would gain by such a displacement. Yet the outcome was indisputable: in the Tuileries, where Clara-Clara was on view until April 1984, it breathed a lot easier than it would have at Beaubourg. Moreover, while

gaining a kind of delicacy new to Serra’s work, it gave Parisians a lesson in urbanism. Placed just behind the monumental gates opening onto the Place de la Concorde, Clara-Clara was on the baroque axis Défense–Arc de Triomphe–Concorde–Louvre, a kind of sacred urban conception to which architects are occasionally asked to pay tribute. This “Triumphal Route” is full of bottlenecks, said Le Corbusier in 1929. Clara-Clara was undoubtedly one more. Partly because of the abuses perpetrated under de Gaulle’s and Pompidou’s rules, the Parisian public is quite conservative toward the urban environment (see, for example, the recent turmoil about I. M. Pei’s pyramid, projected on the same axis for the “Grand Louvre”).102 Hence, the risk of public hostility toward the sculpture was considerable. Furthermore, even in cities undergoing rapid transformations, like Bochum or New York, works by Serra have sometimes not been well received. But here, against all expectations, the response was especially warm: a veritable hommage to Paris, Clara-Clara seemed the first successful urban gesture to appear in the twentieth century on the “Triumphal Route” that Le Corbusier scorned. Why? Although the preceeding essay is not concerned with Clara-Clara alone, my argument was based upon an anticipated installation in the Beaubourg Forum. My point of departure was the fact that the spectator would first have an overall “Gestalt” view of the work. That is, it would


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initially be seen in plan, from above. Thus, the visual information gleaned from this intellectual apprehension would be contradicted by the experience of descending into the pit. From these assumptions resulted an analysis of Clara-Clara in terms of parallax, an analysis not at all invalidated by the change of site. On the contrary, for I had never imagined that the slight asymmetry in the elevation of the arcs (contradicting the symmetry of the ground plan) would produce such distortions of scale and tempo. My description was too simple, too linear: it presupposed a spectator who would have walked through Clara-Clara only along its axis of symmetry. But at the Tuileries there were at least three different approaches to the piece. Of course the type of spectator I have just mentioned might have had the same limited experience of the sculpture even at the Tuileries—but only if he were rushing. He would have entered the garden through its monumental gate. In order to reach the east end of the park, toward the Louvre, as quickly as possible, he would have remained on its axis of symmetry (the axis of the sculpture coinciding with the baroque urban axis mentioned above, which is also the axis of the garden). Second possibility: a person wandering from the direction of the Louvre might have also walked along the axis of symmetry. He might have wondered about the slightly leaning, rust-colored twin plaques framing the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde. Indeed, from a distance and from head on each visible half-arc was flattened by the effect of perspective and Clara-Clara appeared merely as two walls. But, at a given moment, this pedestrian would have had to abandon his axial path (even if he subsequently returned to it). Significantly, he would have had to follow the curve of a circular fountain located between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde. Even before nearing the sculpture, then, he would have performed a kind of dance that the slight asymmetry in elevation of ClaraClara would have echoed. Willingly or not, the spectator would have opened a dialogue with the sculpture (and I saw more than one person retrace his steps and begin the dance again, not believing his eyes). The closer he came to the piece, the more distorted it appeared. Once he was inside, one step off the axis of symmetry was enough to shake up the sculpture: one of the sides was suddenly gigantic, the other suddenly dwarfed. A heady sensation took hold, as if, with each step the viewer took, this tangible object of his senses was eluding him. The third approach to the sculpture was from above. (Although, contrary to what I wrote in conjunction with the Beaubourg pit, there was no question here of a “Gestalt” view of a ground plan: the highest point

was barely two feet above the top line of Clara-Clara.) One could enter the park by two semicircular walkways that gradually descend from the platform of the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie; these two inverted commas embraced Clara-Clara without strangling it. Together with each of the concave walls of the sculpture, they formed two immense, asymmetrical, open ellipses. Those revealed to the spectator the vastness of the interior space of the sculpture through which he would later have the impression of dashing. Even for a wanderer getting to the piece from ground level, this disjunction between the accelerated view of the canyon between the two arcs and the more peaceful, oceanic feeling experienced when leisurely strolling around the piece produced a stunning rhythmic change that would not have been possible at Beaubourg. There’s more involved, however, as I spoke of a lesson of urbanism. In the essay for the catalogue, I attempted to trace the history of parallax in Western art (and the disjunction it implies between plan and elevation). Relying on Vincent Scully, Manfredo Tafuri, and Peter Collins, I located in Piranesi the break from the centered, axial space of the baroque age and designated Serra as the heir of an anti-baroque tradition that modern architecture, although itself a descendant of this tradition, has almost completely repressed (except for Le Corbusier, particularly in his Villa Savoye). But the greatness of Clara-Clara, in its Tuileries location, was that it contended, firmly, frontally, with the overall baroque axiality that all Serra’s previous works had attempted to eliminate. At the center of a resolutely baroque complex of spaces (elliptical, axial, surrounded by contrasting curves) and borrowing its vocabulary from the baroque, Clara-Clara insistently yet delicately pointed up the precariousness of the type of illusionism upon which this system is grounded. Causing the vertical of the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde to jump like a compass needle, Clara-Clara affirmed that baroque axiality, an authoritarian structure, is a flexible thing that one can play with without being trapped by it. The Tuileries location was ideal for this sculpture. Many hoped the French administration would leave it there (this was too big a dream). One can nevertheless be thankful to the Paris mayoralty for having purchased it: it is today permanently installed on the Square de Choisy, in the 13th arrondissement. If it no longer benefits from the casket it enjoyed in the Tuileries, at least it brings to life a rather unattractive urban area, while continuing to teach what it means for sculpture to engage in a dialogue with architecture.


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Notes

1. Richard Serra and Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra: Urban Sculpture: An Interview,” in Richard Serra: Interviews, Etc., 1970—1980 (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1980), p. 181. 2. “Interview: Richard Serra and Bernard Lamarche-Vadel,” in ibid., p. 142. 3. Richard Serra, “Play It Again, Sam,” interview by Liza Béar, in ibid., p. 16. 4. Serra and Crimp in ibid., p. 170. 5. Ibid. 6. Richard Serra, “‘St. John’s Rotary Arc,’ 1980,” in ibid., p. 161. 7. Serra and Crimp in ibid., p. 181. 8. Richard Serra, “Notes from Sight Point Road,” Perspecta 19 (1982), p. 180. 9. Richard Serra and Peter Eisenman, “Interview,” Skyline (April 1983), p. 16. 10. “Interview: Richard Serra and Liza Béar,” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 72. 11. Serra and Crimp in ibid., p. 181. 12. Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 119. 13. Rosalind Krauss, “Abaisser, étendre, contracter, comprimer, tourner: regarder l’oeuvre de Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), pp. 29–35. 14. Serra, “Notes from Sight Point Road,” p. 174. 15. Serra and Lamarche-Vadel in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 146. 16. Richard Serra, “Rigging,” in ibid., p. 121. 17. Richard Serra and Friedrich Teja Bach, “Interview,” in ibid., p. 50. 18. René-Louis de Girardin, De la composition des paysages (1777; Paris: Editions du Champ Urbain, 1979), p. 19. 19. The rupture performed, according to Leo Steinberg, by Rauschenberg (passage from the vertical plane of the painting to the horizontal plane of the “flatbed”) precisely matches the one I analyze here, through the picturesque, as performed by Serra in the field of sculpture. As I will shortly do, Steinberg analyzes this pictorial turning point in Rauschenberg as a response to the theories of Clement Greenberg. See Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 82–91. 20. Girardin, De la composition des paysages, p. 83. 21. Ibid., p. 17. 22. Ibid., p. 19. 23. Ibid., p. 31. 24. Ibid. 25. Serra and Crimp in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 178. 26. On this point see ibid., pp. 172–173. 27. Serra and Eisenman, “Interview,” p. 15. 28. Piet Mondrian, “De realiseering van neo-plasticisme in verre toekomst en in de huidige architectuur,” 2nd part, De Stijl 5, no. 5 (May 1922), p. 67. On this point and what

it implies in Mondrian’s thought, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Du projet au procès,” in L’Atelier de Mondrian (Paris: Editions Macula, 1982), pp. 34–35. 29. Serra and Crimp in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 172. 30. Serra, “Play It Again, Sam,” p. 16; Serra and Teja Bach, interview, p. 55; and Serra, “Rigging,” p. 128. 31. Serra and Béar in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 73. 32. Ibid., p. 66. 33. Serra and Eisenman, “Interview,” p. 15. 34. Serra, “Document: “Spin Out ’72-’73 for Bob Smithson,” interview by Liza Béar in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 36. 35. Serra and Béar in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 66. 36. Serra, “‘St. John’s Rotary Arc,’” pp. 155–161. 37. Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1965), p. 26. 38. Jacques-Germain Soufflot, “Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique” (1741), reprinted in Michael Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève und der französische Kirchbau des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1961), p. 138. 39. Collins, Changing Ideals, pp. 27–28. 40. Brebion, “Mémoire à M. le Comte de la Billarderie D’Angiviller” (1780), reprinted in Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève, p. 147. This synthesis of Greek and Gothic was exactly the program expounded by Boullée in his famous Essai sur l’art. 41. Richard Etlin, “Grandeur et décadence d’un modèle: L’église Sainte-Geneviève et les changements de valeur esthétique au XVIIIe siècle,” in Soufflot et l’architecture des lumières, proceedings of a conference held in Lyons in 1980, supplement to nos. 6–7 of Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale (1980), p. 30. I am wholly indebted to this text for having put me on Leroy’s track. 42. Julien David Leroy, Histoire de la disposition et des formes différentes que les chrétiens ont données à leurs temples depuis le règne de Constantin le Grand, jusqu’à nous (Paris, 1764), pp. 56–57. 43. Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: J. Mawman, 1810). 44. Peter Collins, Changing Ideals, p. 54. 45. Humphry Repton, The Art of Landscape Gardening (1794; Boston and New York: Houghton–Mifflin, 1907). 46. Henry Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762). 47. William Shenstone, Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764). 48. Peter Collins, Changing Ideals, p. 53. 49. Vincent Scully, Jr., Modern Architecture (New York: Braziller, 1965), p. 10. 50. Ibid., p. 11. 51. Ibid., p. 12. 52. “The child’s visual space is centered, inhabited by the body charged with libidinal interest from the mother. This space may be ‘depopulated’ and the boundaries where it loses itself become fascinating with their insecurity, their flow, their lack of guideposts, their


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boundless opening for the view, by a sort of extrusion of the gaze.” Guy Rosolato, “Destinations du corps,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (Spring 1971), p. 12. 53. Ulya Vogt-Göknil, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carceri (Zurich: Origo Verlag, 1958), p. 21. 54. Serra, “Notes from Sight Point Road,” p. 173. 55. Richard Serra, “‘Shift,’” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 33. 56. Ibid. 57. Clara Weyergraf, “From ‘through Pieces’ to ‘Terminal,’ Study of a Development,” in Richard Serra, Works ’66–’77 (Tübingen: Kunsthalle, 1978), p. 214. 58. Serra, “‘Shift,’” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 33. 59. Richard Serra and Lizzie Borden, “About Drawing,” in ibid., p. 86. 60. Serra, “Document: ‘Spin Out,’” p. 36. 61. Ibid. 62. Quoted by Monique Mosser in the exhibition catalogue Piranèse et les français (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1976), p. 287. 63. Ibid., p. 288. 64. Vogt-Göknil, Piranesi: Carceri, pp. 22–23. 65. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), passim. See especially pp. 280–287, where the question of the “passage” in Serra is directly examined. See also my review of this book, “The Sculptural Opaque,” Sub-stance 31 (Winter 1981), pp. 23–48. 66. Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra: Sculpture Redrawn,” Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972), p. 38. 67. Serra, “‘St. John’s Rotary Arc,’” pp. 155–156. 68. On this subject, see Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 272–276, and Krauss’s essay in this volume. 69. S. M. Eisenstein, “Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms,” trans. Roberta Reeder, in Oppositions 11 (Winter 1977), p. 103. 70. See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 243–244. The analysis of Hand Catching Lead opens the chapter on the development of sculpture since the late 1960s. 71. On the passage in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater devoted to Piranesi and his influence on romanticism, see Luzius Keller, Piranèse et les romantiques français: Le mythe des escaliers en spirale (Paris: José Corti, 1966), passim. 72. Eisenstein, “Piranesi,” pp. 105–106. 73. Serra, “Notes from Sight Point Road,” p. 180. 74. Quoted by Roland Barthes in “The Third Meaning,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 67. 75. Serra and Eisenman, “Interview,” pp. 16–17. 76. Quoted in Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 74, n. 86. 77. Serra, “Rigging,” p. 129. 78. “The Greeks do not imagine a building independently of the site that frames it and the buildings that surround it. The idea of leveling the vicinity is absolutely foreign to them.

They accept, while scarcely regularizing it, the location as nature has created it, and their only concern is to harmonize the architecture with the landscape; Greek temples are as worthy for the choice of their site as for the art with which they are built.” There follows a description of the various groups of temples, especially the Acropolis in Athens, according to the effect produced on a moving spectator. “Le pittoresque dans l’art grec,” Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’Architecture, vol. 1 (1899). My thanks to Jacques Lucan for having pointed out this text to me. Since the first appearance of this essay, two important articles appeared on the matter of Choisy’s “Greek picturesque.” The first is by Jacques Lucan, “The Propylaion of the Acropolis in Athens: An Architectural Mystery,” Daidalos 15 (15 March 1985), pp. 42–56. It is discussed and criticized in the second, by Richard Etlin, “Le Corbusier, Choisy, and French Hellenism: The Search for a New Architecture,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 2 (June 1987), pp. 264–278. Kurt Forster has revealed that before Choisy, Karl Friedrich Schinkel was definitively thinking in terms of parallax and movement of the spectator through architecture. For the monumental staircase and colonnade of his Altes Museum in Berlin (1823–1829), Schinkel conceived an extremely complex spatial play which Forster described in terms reminiscent of my account of Serra’s work. Unfortunately, Schinkel’s extraordinary thoroughfare is inaccessible to the public. (Forster, “Travelling Eyes: The Long and Short of Panoramic Representation in the Work of Rusca and Schinkel,” in the symposium “Architecture and Representation: History and Problems,” Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 31 October-1 November 1987.) 79. Le Corbusier, Oeuvres complètes, vol. II (Zurich: Editions d’Architecture, 1964), p. 24. 80. Ibid., p. 25. 81. Robert J. Yudell, “Body Movement,” in Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 68. 82. Serra, “‘Shift,’” p. 25. 83. Serra and Teja Bach in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 51. 84. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 116–147. 85. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1903). For Hildebrand, Canova’s funerary monuments, unlike those of Michelangelo, are to be condemned because in them there is no “boundary established between the monument and the public.” 86. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 145. 87. See Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), p. 143. 88. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), § 23, p. 82. 89. Serra, “Document: ‘Spin Out,’” p. 37. 90. Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 24, p. 85. 91. Ibid., § 23, p. 82. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., § 26, p. 90. 94. Ibid., § 26, p. 91. 95. Ibid., § 24, p. 85. 96. Ibid., § 26, p. 90.


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97. I find by chance an unexpected ally in the issue of Perspecta containing the article by Serra that I have quoted several times, in the person of Karsten Harries, who teaches philosophy at Yale University. In an article entitled “Building and the Terror of Time,” Harries refers to Michael Fried’s text and to an essay by the sculptor Robert Morris (“The Present Tense of Space,” Art in America, January/February 1978). Although the differences between the art of the two sculptors are striking, I could have mentioned Morris’s text often, for it brilliantly articulates certain ideas expressed aphoristically by Serra, and speaks in particular of Saint Peter’s in Rome and of ruins. Harries concludes the passage in his text devoted to Morris with these words: “Just as Fried can refer to Kant to support his understanding of modernism, in the same way Morris can refer to the Critique of Judgment, but it is another section of the book that is appropriate, the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’” (p. 68). 98. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1980. 99. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” pp. 118–119. On Gilpin, in quite another context, see also Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” October 18 (Autumn 1981), pp. 45–66. 100. Quoted by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “En blanc et noir,” Macula 1 (1976), p. 13. 101. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” p. 118. 102. The foes of Pei’s pyramid are providing grist for my mill. Indeed, they remind us that for the ceremony celebrating the laying of the first stone of the church Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (that is, the very occasion of Leroy’s dedication of his brochure to the king), “a fullscale model of the future portal of the church was erected in carpentry and canvas, with its columns, its entablature and its pediment” (Bruno Foucart, Sebastien Loste, and Antoine Schnapper, Paris mystifié—la grande illusion du Grande Louvre [Paris: Julliard, 1985], p. 81). Asking that the same thing be done for Pei’s pyramid, the authors note that full-scale models had also been made for the Arc de Triomphe of the Place de l’Etoile, for the Elephant of the Place de la Bastille and for the Colonnade of the Place du Trône (those two last projects were abandoned after provisional models were set up); see pp. 82–86.

Richard Serra throwing lead, 1969 Castelli warehouse Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Richard Serra: Sculpture Rosalind Krauss

I. Portrait of the Artist . . . Throwing Lead

The artist appears in a photograph. Backlit against the luminous distance of the far wall of a room, his body is reduced to silhouetted gesture: legs braced, arms outstretched, the instrument in his hand whirling above his head, like a slingshot about to release its stone. Dressed as though for battle, he is helmeted, goggled, gas-masked. The field on which he stands is strewn with slag. In the foreground are an acetylene tank and two large iron pots. Behind him several vertical planes describe precarious geometries. At the top of this image, above the ceiling of the room, above the picture itself, we read the title of the book for which this portrait serves as cover: The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies.1 The artist so portrayed is Richard Serra, and what he is doing, ladle in hand, is throwing molten lead. The history of twentieth-century art is punctuated by famous portraits of the artist at work. It is impossible to look at Serra’s gesture without remembering the lithe athleticism of Jackson Pollock in the photographs depicting him balanced above his floor-bound canvases, the balletic master of flung paint. And having opened the door to that image, we realize that behind it stands a whole series of others, artists at work with brush and paint deployed in vigorous gestures, as in the famous films of Picasso and Matisse magically creating something out of nothing as each demonstrates his art for us upon the transparent surface of a pane of glass. We are interested in the process of their work as it is revealed through their passion, their intensity, their caprice, their skill. Matisse draws a line

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that is hopelessly, wrenchingly simple, just an arc that a slight pressure of the brush causes to widen at one end. But the flank of a body magically appears—sensuous, immediate, complete—and the economy of the gesture is revealed in all its mastery, in its total, wanton perfection. The artist is at work. Although it focuses on the physical act of making, this portrait of Matisse is conceptually compatible with another of which we have only written accounts, the image of the sign that Saint-Pol-Roux posted on his door every night before going to bed: “Poet Working.” For both the labor of producing dreams and the work of spinning a web of line upon the surface of an indifferent world presuppose the same nature of the creative act. The externalization of perceptions, feelings, ideas of the artist, this act is expressive, elaborating a trace or index of interior states. So that the picture of the artist at work comes to stand in a symmetrical relationship with the artist’s works: all of them are images of the man himself. In Pollock’s portraits—in their still-photographic and filmic versions—this symmetry is insisted upon. What we see as we look at that black-shirted figure, blurred in the rapidity of its motion, reduced to a kind of graphic sign, is a fusion between expressivity and expression, between gesture and trace. Portrait of the artist . . . as a Work. Serra’s throwing lead mimes Pollock’s flinging paint, but with a difference that makes all the difference. The first aspect of that difference is the gas mask. The mask entered the art of this century as a challenge to psychology, a refusal of the personal, individualized, privatized interior space that had been the construction of nineteenth-century naturalism. From the African shaman, to the Balinese dancer, to the celebrant of Carnival, the wearer of the mask performs a role that he may assume but did not invent, a role that is culturally or socially given, delivered to him from outside the boundaries of his “private” self. The mask may be expressive, but what it expresses has very little to do with a romantic conception of selfhood or with individual creative will. The Portrait of the Artist Masked will thus not line up with that series of portraits just described, for the mask, opaque and impassive, is the enemy of expression. To the impersonal status of the mask the gas mask adds the depersonalizing conditions of industrial work with associations to repetition, seriality, things-in-a-row all alike, but also associations to labor itself, to a kind of work in which a task is given in relation to a set of materials, in which operations are fixed by matter rather

than “inspiration.” Thus the mask not only collectivizes the notion of “expression,” but it folds “creativity” back into the condition of labor. There is a second aspect of difference between Serra’s portrait and those of Picasso, Matisse, Pollock. That is the absence, within the frame of this image, of the work on which the artist is working. If Serra’s gesture has an issue, it is nowhere in the picture. And indeed, one of the documents reproduced inside The New Avant-Garde is Serra’s list of verbs suspended in the grammatical mid-air of the infinitive tense: “to roll, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist, to twine. . . .” These verbs describe pure transitivity. For each is an action to be performed against the imagined resistance of an object; and yet each infinitive rolls back upon itself without naming its end. The list enumerates eighty-seven acts before something like a goal of the action is pronounced, and even then the condition of object is elided: “of waves,” we read, “of tides,” or again, “of time.” The image of Serra throwing lead is like this suspension of action within the infinitive: all cause with no perceivable effect. An action deprived of an object has a rather special relation to time. It must occur in time, but it does not drive toward a termination, since there is no terminus, no proper destination, so to speak. So, while the list of active verbs suggests temporality, it is a temporality that has nothing to do with narrative time, with something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is not a time within which something develops, grows, progresses, achieves. It is a time during which the action simply acts, and acts, and acts. One of the founding arguments about visual art’s relation to narrative turns on the essential distinction between the medium of narration— time—and that of the depicted image—space. In this difference, Lessing had argued in the Laocoön (1766), one should locate both the separate problems of the various aesthetic mediums as well as the genius particular to each. The problem for the visual artist who is limited to just one moment in a narrative sequence, he concluded, is to find the most suggestive or most “pregnant” moment, the one that will imply both what has already happened and what is to come.2 Lessing’s treatise had enormous resonance for late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century painting, for which the depiction of historical subjects was centrally at issue. But, it can be argued, modernism has dispensed not only with historical narratives, but with all narrative, to achieve the stunning simultaneity of the experience of the work itself, the picture as pure aesthetic object.

Richard Serra: Sculpture

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This supposed voiding of narrative within modernism is, however, only seeming. For modernist art’s simultaneity is still understood as a “most pregnant moment”—an experience extended and made replete with a certain kind of understanding, a certain kind of ecstatic or spiritual dilation, a certain kind of drive to completion.3 Within this situation the genre of the Portrait of the Artist has a special role. It is the signifier of art’s hidden but persistent narrativity, for the unfolding of the artist’s gesture on this work, which models on a small scale the larger unfolding of all his gestures into that totality of his works to which we give the name oeuvre, is the story of the artist which each portrait has the potential to encapsulate. It tells of those larger movements of the artist’s personality, his persistence, his intuitiveness, his cunning, his triumph. The portrait is always pregnant, we could say, with his development: a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are many types of portraits of the artist. We have spoken of photographs and films and obviously we could mention paintings. But there are as well texts, like this one, monographic studies which are also conceived as portraits of the artist: at work, making works, and through those works, producing the story of his oeuvre. But it is against this easy, culturally given cliché that the Portrait of the Artist Throwing Lead operates as a kind of cautionary sign, warning one not to think that the point of a portrait’s story is already given by its form. This caution is like the one that Jean-Luc Godard pronounced for his films, which themselves had a strong effect on the way narrative was reconceived in the ’60s. Stories had beginnings, middles, and ends, he conceded, “but not necessarily in that order.” Chronologically speaking, the portrait of Richard Serra throwing lead stands very near the beginning of his career. But whether we are also to understand this as signifying the beginning of his story—that is the warning we must read off that gesture in which an act is spun into pure repetition by avoiding its object. One of the verbs on Serra’s 1967–1968 list—“to grasp”—opens specifically onto a work that underscores this relation to time. In Serra’s 1968 film Hand Catching Lead, a fixed frame centers on an extended arm, fingers splayed. Into the frame, at regular intervals, there falls a succession of pieces of lead that the hand endeavors to catch. Sometimes missing its prey, sometimes capturing it—but in the latter case immediately releasing the metal scrap, allowing it to continue on its way out the bottom of the frame—the hand opens and closes in a performance of the same slightly irregular pulses as the falling lead. Simultaneously tense and desultory, the hand’s relation to the object is both intentional—catching lead is what it

is doing—and pointless, for making a catch does not seem to be its objective. In this insistence on the constitutive act itself, the film thus constellates an image of what came to be known in the late 1960s as “pure process.” Yet insofar as this action is pulsional, made up of regular beats, it also creates the kind of special seriality that Donald Judd had described in a famous characterization of his own work’s structure as “just one thing after another.”4 This spatial repetitiveness, and its refusal to deploy the organizing, hierarchical devices of those compositional schemes upon which most of Western art had based itself, had entered the vocabulary of the American avant-garde with minimalist painting and sculpture: with the repetitive bands of Frank Stella’s “stripes”; with the stacked, identical boxes of Judd’s wall reliefs; with the blankly juxtaposed metal plates of Carl Andre’s “rugs.” Turning this spatial seriality into a temporal hum was the work of a group of musicians slightly younger than the first minimalists, and exactly contemporary with Serra. Indeed one of the most important of these, Philip Glass, had been a part of much of Serra’s aesthetic apprenticeship. Serra’s year in Paris on a traveling fellowship from Yale had been spent with Glass, cementing a friendship and working relationship that was not to be diminished by their return to New York in 1967. It was there in New York that Serra and Glass encountered the figures who would be working out of minimalism and into the later manifestations of process. At that time Serra made special contact with Steve Reich and Michael Snow, composer and filmmaker respectively; Sol LeWitt and Walter de Maria, conceptualist modifiers of minimalism; Eva Hesse, early process artist. He also formed important friendships with Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, both of whose rhetorical gifts made their theoretical sparring, night after night at the bar downstairs at Max’s Kansas City, a kind of continuous intellectual circus, one extremely important for Serra’s intense need to theorize his own position, an attitude that had been, if not formed, then particularly focused, during his studies at Yale. But there is a final aspect of Hand Catching Lead that addresses Serra’s attitude toward the problem of producing art within modernism, no matter what the conviction about process or seriality. This is the condition of self-reflexiveness that Serra builds into this film. For the falling lead’s passage into and out of the frame of the image imitates, and thereby pictures, the movement of the celluloid strip of film itself and its steady passage down into the gate of the projector and out again. In imaging-forth the constant movement of the band of film as it unwinds from reel to reel,


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Hand Catching Lead participates in that experience of the auto-referential, that sense of the way the content of a work exists as an echo of its formal, and even material, structure that we associate with high modernism. Three things combine, then, to produce the peculiar flatness of the temporal profile of Hand Catching Lead: a modernist-derived concern with the representation of the work’s physical support; a minimalist-connected critique of composition, of those organizing hierarchies which had come to be regarded as merely arbitrary; and a process-conditioned exchange of the goal or “object” of an action for the logic of the action itself. Yet it would not be wholly accurate to say that Serra had no interest at all in what it was in Hand Catching Lead that the hand was catching. Or to put it another way, it is not irrelevant that what falls through the frame of the image in representational reflection of the filmic support is lead, which is to say, the metallic support of another medium, namely, sculpture. The logic of process that had led Serra to turn to film as a way of manifesting a pure operation on a physical material was also a way of opposing the rigid geometries of minimalist sculpture in which a viewer was presented with an object whose construction was a closed system, secreted away within the interior of the object, invisible and remote. For this reason process artists like Eva Hesse had turned to materials like latex or fiberglass or clay, materials that would yield to the imprint of the action applied to them, and carry that on their surface as their only mark of structure. “To catch” is a process conceived within the strategic terms of this critique; but “to catch lead” represents a decision that what is at stake in this critique is the status of sculpture. Serra had not been a sculptor when he went to Paris. His training at Yale had been as a painter (he had been a teaching assistant in Josef Albers’s famous color course and had helped proof the plates of Albers’s book The Interaction of Color), and in Paris in 1965 he continued to paint. But he also found himself drawn to the Brancusi atelier that had been reconstructed at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (located then on the Avenue Président Wilson), where he returned day after day to sketch his way into the internal logic of Brancusi’s way of thinking about sculpture. The following year Serra went to Florence on a Fulbright, and it was there that his identity as a painter was submerged by the rising tide of the logic of process. Serra’s last paintings consisted of grids that he would fill with color, understanding the application of pigment as an act (“to paint”) to be determined by the arbitrary measure of a unit of time, meted out in this case by a stopwatch. But it soon occurred to Serra that having turned paint into

brute material, he had no reason to privilege it above any other material; and as this reasoning took hold of him, painting receded as a coherent and therefore possible medium. Before leaving Italy for New York, Serra had an exhibition at the La Salita Gallery in Rome in which his pictorial grids were transformed into the three-dimensional geometric lattice of a set of cages and his “material” had become the aesthetically disarticulated medium of biological life, as he filled these cages with animals, both live and stuffed. “Somewhere between Kienholz and Samaras and Rauschenberg,” as he himself has characterized it, this exhibition confirmed what had been building since his entry into the intense but provisional coherence of the space of Brancusi’s studio: that painting no longer held his imagination. II. To Prop, to Prop, to Prop . . .

Shortly after composing his list of transitive verbs Serra discovered the enormous flexibility of lead as a support for the actions he had projected. Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up (1968), Tearing Lead from 1:00 to 1:47 (1968), and Casting (1969) all result from the variability of this material— soft enough to be torn, malleable enough to be rolled, easily melted and thus able to be cast. It was during the performance of the last of these possibilities that the portrait of Serra throwing lead was made, recording the throwing of molten metal into the “mold” formed by the angle of floor and wall of a Castelli Gallery warehouse space, the resultant casting pulled away from the angle when hardened to allow for yet another wave of molten liquid.5 The logic of Casting demanded, of course, that it be exhibited in immediate proximity to the place where it had been made, so that the relationship between the cast element’s shape and the “mold” that had determined it would remain perspicuous. The castings were therefore displayed directly on the floor in the order in which they had been pulled away from the angle with the wall. Tearing Lead was also, perforce, displayed on the floor where the ten-foot-square “rug” of lead had lain while Serra tore successive strips of metal from its edges, leaving these clustered at the four corners. But in less than a year Serra was to look back critically on this idea of displaying process against the “background” of the floor and thereby, paradoxically, rendering the result pictorial. “A recent problem with the lateral spread of material, elements on the floor in the visual field,” he explained, “is the inability of this . . . mode to avoid arrangement qua


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Casting, 1969 Cast lead Area occupied by work: 4” x 25’ x 15’ Executed for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Photo: Peter Moore

figure/ground: the pictorial convention.”6 To think about the organization of material by means of a physical process applied to that material is obviously to desire to strip the work of art of all possible illusionism, to imbed its existence in the world in which tearing, rolling, or casting physically take place. But the critique that Serra mounted arose from his sense that there was a fissure in the logic of process; because as long as non-rigid materials were employed such that the floor had to be used as the vehicle of display, then the procedure took on a figurative quality, and one was faced with the “picture” of tearing, the “image” of rolling, the “tableau” of casting. “When pieces are viewed from above,” he declared, “the floor functions as a field or ground for the deployment of decorative linear and planar elements. The concern with horizontality is not so much a concern for lateral extension as it is a concern with painting. Lateral extension in this case allows sculpture to be viewed pictorially—that is, as if the floor were the canvas plane.”7

Thus the logic of process had gone in a circle: when a material operation was used to break the grip of the “image,” the image came back to lay hold of the operation and to convert it into the terms of painting, to threaten it with a space that was virtual rather than actual. One of the constant arguments that had kept Andre and Smithson going until 3:00 in the morning at Max’s had been just this question with regard to the logic of Andre’s work. Lever (1966), Andre’s thirty-foot row of bricks placed endto-end, functioned for him as the most insistent anti-illusionism: My first problem has been to find a set of particles, a set of units and then to combine them according to laws which are particular to each particle, rather than a law which is applied to the whole set, like glue or riveting or welding. . . . No extraneous forces apply to the set to make it have properties which an individual particle does not have.8 Smithson didn’t see it that way. Receding along the luminous plane of the floor, Lever read, for Smithson, as a “line.” By 1970 Serra had come to agree. In 1968, in addition to cast, roll, and tear, Serra had used lead to enact another transitive relation: prop. One sheet of lead, tightly rolled to form a pole, was inclined against another, still flat sheet that was hoisted against the plane of a wall so that the dense, inert weight of one sheet propped up the leaden expanse of the other. Insofar as Prop depended upon the wallplane as a ground, it was of course open to much the same criticism from its maker as Casting and Tearing . . . But where it differed from the others was that the process informing this work was not something that had been applied to the materials of the object, imprinting itself upon them, an external force coming from outside them to leave its trace, so to speak. In Prop the process was a function of a relationship between the two elements of the work, working against each other in a continuous labor of elevation. It was in this constantly renewed tension, active within the object at each moment, necessary to the very prolongation of its existence, that Serra located a special aspect of his vocation as a sculptor. The “prop” pieces of 1969—One Ton Prop ( House of Cards), Inverted House of Cards, 2-2-1, Equal, 5:30—provided the basis for Serra’s criticism, voiced in 1970, of his earlier work. For these sculptures are resolutely vertical, their internal dynamic securing their independence of any external “ground,” be it floor or wall. And the extremely simple principle of their verticality is the heaviness of lead and its earnest response to the


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One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969 Lead antimony Four plates, each 4’ x 4’ x 1” Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the Grinstein Family, Los Angeles Photo: Peter Moore

downward pull of gravity; for in that pull there operates the resistance that is the principle of the prop—stability achieved through the conflict and balance of forces. In One Ton Prop (House of Cards) four lead slabs (each five hundred pounds) maintain their erectness through the reciprocity of their leaning sides, propping each other up by weighing each other down. And in 2-2-1 five lead slabs of the same dimensions remain upright through no other agency than the crushing inertia of a rolled bar, which, barely kissing each of the slabs at one corner, presses down on their resistant forms, goading them into a continuously precarious verticality. In this continuous remaking, the temporality organized by these props has shifted from the register of time in which Hand Catching Lead was inscribed. The serial nature of the film, its “one thing after another,” its flattened profile in which an action is denied its climax, its point, has here been powerfully recharged into something more like a perpetual cli-

max, an end-point that continues, and continues, and continues. In the prop pieces Serra discovered what might be called an erotics of process. And this erotics of process can be thought of as a new site within which to locate the problematics of sculpture. Serra has said that a whole generation of American artists was indebted to Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918): The fact that [it] measured a definite space from floor to ceiling anticipates Judd’s thinking from floor to ceiling, and what Andre had done from wall to wall. The idea of the infinite implied by the module extension was most impressive in Brancusi. It changed the sensibility of the entire sixties. . . . Stella’s black pictures and Judd’s serial relationships are indebted to the Endless Column. But the problems in the Endless Column didn’t interest me at that time. I was more interested in Brancusi’s open pieces, like the Gate of the Kiss.9 As opposed to the flattened, serial rhythm of the Endless Column, there is the Brancusi of The Kiss, the Brancusi of the technics of a body whose feeling is found within the pressure of opposition. Over and over again, in 1907, 1910, 1911, 1915, 1921, 1933, 1937, Brancusi explored that line of compression between two figures meeting in a kiss, a line that simultaneously breaks the stone monolith into two separate bodies and forges the endless moment of their fusion. Rippling down the center of the block in a constant making and unmaking of union, this line describes what could be called a phenomenological fissure at the center of the stone, a point of compression in which each body experiences itself only along that surface crushed against its mate. The phenomenological fissure, in which unity of the body’s Gestalt is radically opened and differentiated, occurs with great frequency in Brancusi’s work and is, we might say, the peculiar invention of his particular sculptural “drawing.” For Brancusi’s unitary forms, his painstaking geometries, his ovoids, his fins, his rhomboids, open themselves to a kind of found drawing, a line that forms and reforms itself as light and reflection are cast along the smooth surfaces of these objects. In the polished bronze ovoid of Beginning of the World (1924), for example, the “line” that describes the median of the prone form, dividing it into a lower and an upper half, is cast onto the surface by opposing sets of reflections from above and below the work, reflections that meet at the physical crest of the object to form, through an optical moment, a line of opposition. It is in


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Prop, 1968 Lead antimony Plate: 5’ x 5’ x 1” Pole: 8’ length, 4” diameter Collection: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation Photo: Harry Shunk

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the grip of this optical crossfire that the actual symmetry of the object is rewritten as a powerful disequilibrium between its two halves. For the underside, mirroring the dense smoothness of the base on which the sculpture lies, appears slightly flattened by the heaviness of the object’s weight bearing down against a resistant ground; while the upper half, carrying on its surface the scatter of random reflections from space at large, seems almost to float as it expands outward into its surroundings. In this sense of a body’s yielding to pressure while simultaneously dissolving toward an absence of sensation, there is configured the radical dissymmetry of the lived body, the body as experienced from within. A whole series of ovoid heads leads, within Brancusi’s work, up to this Beginning of the World: heads cushioned against a supporting base as they figuratively drift toward sleep (Sleeping Muse II, 1914); heads shattering their profiles through the contortion of a cry (The Newborn, 1915); heads spilling their weight into the prop of a supporting palm (A Muse, 1917). The reconfiguration of its external relationships as this ovoid “remakes” itself in relation to lived sensation is the work of the reflective line that constantly splits and resutures the Brancusian geometries. Serra made a video tape called Boomerang (1974) in which the fixed frame isolates the head and shoulders of Nancy Holt, the work’s only participant, focusing them as smooth oval and firm neck, while, muse-like, there forms an image of the constant splitting and remaking of the performing persona. Wearing a technician’s headset, Holt spends the ten minutes of the tape talking against the distraction of audio feedback, since her words are audible to her in a delay of about one second after she has actually pronounced them. It is the mechanism of the delay that creates, automatically as it were, a dissynchrony between speech and audition, so that “saying” and “hearing oneself speak” (“thinking”) become actions divided in consciousness. Describing the confusion she feels, Holt explains, “Sometimes I find I can’t quite say a word because I hear a first part come back and I forget the second part, or my head is stimulated in a new direction by the first half of the word.” This stimulation “by the first half of the word” is, of course, less like the condition of speaking than it is like the situation of listening, listening to the speech of someone else, to information not known by the listener in advance. In her moving back and forth between the self-possession of speech and the outward thrust of intentionality in order to grasp the words of another, Holt performs what Brancusi had earlier pictured: the rent in the body’s Gestalt that we have been calling the phenomenological fissure.


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To form, thus, an image of the human subject as disarticulated, and to show it in the process of attempting to recompose itself, is to create through this “muse” an analogue of the sculptural props. House of Cards, in breaking with the closed, pre-formed geometries of Judd’s boxes or Tony Smith’s prisms, does not merely put in place the paradox of an unstable geometric form. It forces a certain analogue between that form and the human body which, like the prop, “continues.” In some sense, of course, we would have to say that all sculpture configures the human body, that it operates as a model—of wildly divergent kinds—of the human subject: as an image of ideal repose, or of the purposiveness of action, of the centeredness of reason, or the abandonment to feeling. Further, we would have to acknowledge that it does this no matter how reduced it might be in the manner of physical likeness to the human body. A generation of early modernist sculptors demonstrated sculpture’s capacity to model the human subject from the simplest forms or the most ordinary ones: from the shape of an egg to the presentation of a teacup. The issue, then, is not that the props create for their viewer the experience of the human subject; rather, the question must be, what kind of subject they insist on modeling. That subject, specific to Serra’s sculptural props, might be located in another passage of Holt’s self-description from within the space constructed for her by Boomerang. Still attempting to analyze her experience, she says, “I’m throwing things out in the world and they are boomeranging back . . . boomeranging . . . eranginging . . . anginging.” Which is a way of conjuring an image of subjectivity as a function of objective space, of what is external to the self, of what impresses itself upon the subject not by welling up from within but by appearing to it from without. They, as we have heard, are boomeranging back. Serra of course belonged to a generation of artists who had grown up with the vastly inflated rhetoric of the claims made for abstract expressionism. action painting had been declared to be “inseparable from the biography of the artist,” from which it seemed to follow that “the act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.”10 This metaphysical sharing between painting and painter was itself organized around an aesthetic model in which the virtual or illusionistic space of the picture—the space that opened backward from its surface into the luminous atmosphere of Pollock’s linear webs, for example, or into the chiaroscuro of de Kooning’s smeared impastos—was understood as an expression or manifestation of what was interior to the artist, what was behind his physical surface—his impassive face, his stolid body. Painting was a way

of displaying those two interior spaces, of aligning the one with the other, of using the first as a registration of the second, a registration whose value was, in some way, confessional. “The result,” it was averred by the apologists of action painting, “has been the creation of private myths.”11 But what, logically, could a private myth be? Since a myth’s function is to account for phenomena collectively, to use narrative to knit together the social fabric, a private myth is a contradiction in terms, a story told not in public, but in confidence. This is the confidentiality of the psychologistic, something that the generation of the 1960s found distasteful. Speaking about the painterly registration of “expression,” Judd found himself saying, “It certainly involves a relationship between what’s outside—nature or a figure or something—and the artist’s actually painting that thing, his particular feeling at the time. This is just one area of feeling, and I, for one, am not interested in it for my own work.”12 The insideness of abstract expressionist space—the analogy with the interiority of the painter—meant that this experience of the psychologistic involved a claim on the viewer’s time, as though a failure to plumb the depths of the work was to render a judgment that both artist and, by implication, viewer were shallow. But speaking in the mid-1960s of this demand, Frank Stella objected, “I wouldn’t particularly want to do that and also I wouldn’t ask anyone [else] to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I would like to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That’s why I make the paintings the way they are, more or less.”13 In this prohibition, this walling up, this opacity, this insistence on the shallowness, the surfaceness of the work, we can to some degree take the measure of the power of rejection behind the flat blandness of that “I, for one, am not interested in it.” But Judd and Stella, in the same discussion as this announcement of disinterest, tie the decisions they have made for their art to alternative models of reality, of what the world is like and how the human subject is constituted. Their objection is precisely at the level of the metaphysic used by writers like Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess to defend action painting. For what they are questioning is “a philosophy,” one that “is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like.” If the expression of the “private myth” had come to seem illogical, absurd, pretentious, it did so against an attack on the notion of private language—the idea that meanings of words are tied to ideas that I, as a speaker, have in my head when I utter them, so that, for example, what I


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mean when I say “I have a headache” is dependent upon a sensation uniquely available to me—my headache—for its truth. Not only did this idealist view of language seem impossibly to multiply the meanings of a given word ( John’s headache, Mary’s headache, Elisabeth’s . . .), but it raised strange problems in the practice of language, making somehow puzzling how one would ever learn the meaning of a word, locked out as one is from all those private spaces. The generation of the 1960s no longer accepted such a view either of language or of human experience. For both structural linguistics and ordinary language philosophy, as well as the returns from the laboratories of perceptual psychology, were demonstrating the way that our very sensations are dependent upon the language we use to name them and not the other way round. So that, for example, if the color spectrum, which is wholly continuous, is broken at point a to create “blue” and point b to create “green,” this is an operation of segmentation that language performs on the spectrum and not a reality that our senses first report to us and that we go on to name. It is language that teaches us to see “green” and to experience “headache,” language that, like myth, is nothing if not public, or to use Wittgenstein’s term, a “form of life.” It was the extraordinary ambition of post-abstract-expressionism to take this notion of “forms of life” seriously: to make an art devoted to the way the human subject is a function of his ambience, his culture, his media bombardment, his promiscuous reading, his vicariousness. In a movement that began with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the generation of the 1960s proceeded to make an art of the human subject turned inside-out, a function of space-at-large, the setting, the siting, the impress of everything outside that once-sacred virtual space of art which had been the “inside” of the pictorial space, the “inner being” of the sculptural one. Coming at the end of this decade, Serra’s prop pieces obviously participate in this project, already formulated by much of minimalism. The way that One Ton Prop creates a geometric form that is all outside, nothing but exterior, so that one’s sense of the “inner being” of this form is utterly demystified, is part of this problematic of public vs. private. Comparing this phase of Serra’s work with what he was then doing musically, Steve Reich said, “The analogy I saw with Serra’s sculpture, his propped lead sheets and pole pieces (that were, among other things, demonstrations of physical facts about the nature of lead), was that his works and mine are both more about materials and process than they are

about psychology.”14 But by making the very constitution of this “outside” a question of an always precarious, restabilizing balance, a matter of propping, a function of an equilibrium that has constantly to be resecuring itself from within the pressures of time, One Ton Prop reformulates the inside/outside issue, for the “outside” itself is now understood as organized within the temporal: “of waves,” we read in Serra’s list, “of tides . . . of time . . . to continue.” The Skullcracker Series, made during the summer of the prop pieces, expanded the principles of 2-2-1 and One Ton Prop to mammoth scale. The lead props were to the stacked slabs of Skullcracker as cottage industry is to a steel mill. The making of the props had been a matter, to use Serra’s term, of “choreography.” Together with friends serving as assistants, Serra “would map out what to do. Two people would be on each plate. There were four or five plates. And then Phil and I would fit in the overhead roll.” But in the summer of 1969 the Art and Technology exhibition mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had commandeered a variety of technological sites within which artists could choose to work and Serra had chosen a Kaiser steelyard. There, in what was called the Skullcracker Yard, he worked with an overhead magnetic crane stacking and propping massive elements of steel—slabs and crop—to form a constantly changing array of precariously equilibrated, giant constructions, towering sometimes forty feet into the air and anchored by nothing but their own crushing weight. “The first day,” Serra recalls, “I built a cantilevered work from slabs stacked up forty feet which tilted twelve feet off axis. It leaned as far as it could while remaining stable. It was at the boundary of its tendency to overturn.”15 Stacked Steel Slabs, one of the sculptures in this series, presents just such a picture of a pile of identical elements canting off-axis so that each addition to the stack extends its mass while at the same time threatening its existence. The plumb line around which this work is organized is the stack’s center of gravity, something that appears as a matter of tensions constantly in force, tensions externalized by the principle of the “stack.” Insofar as the meaning of Stacked Steel Slabs is the struggle for verticality, the vehemence of uprightness and balance, it continues to locate its aesthetic energies in relation to an experience of the human body. It matters very little that the scale of this work (twenty feet high) is vastly over life-size. In this respect the work participates in the kind of expansion of sculptural scale that would preoccupy Serra throughout the 1970s leading to works such as Shift (1970–1972), Circuit (1972), and Delineator (1974–1975). But as would


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Stacked Steel Slabs (Skullcracker Series), 1969 Hot-rolled steel 20’ x 80’ x 10’ Installation: Kaiser Steel, Fontana, California

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be true of them as well, Stacked Steel Slabs is concerned with the dynamics of a relationship between a center and an outside that exercises a powerful pull on that center—a relationship that is, one could say, the very meaning of its existence. And what is at issue in that relation of center to periphery continues to be the nature of the human subject. III. . . . To Continue

For all but the most amateur, or the most perverse, or the most minimal, making a movie entails joining several pieces of film together: splicing different shots to form the complex web of continuity that we call film, a matter of an action or event persuading us that it continues even across enormous gaps in our view of it. The logic of this “continuity” ensures, for example, that during an angle-reverse-angle sequence—in which individual shots of two different people on, say, a couch are spliced together to create the impression of that continuous presence of both parties necessary to what we understand to be a conversation—we are convinced that we are seeing two aspects of a single space, that the unity we attribute to our world undergirds the separate images of the film. The illusion organized by this logic was patiently explored during the heroic years of film experimentation in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1920 Lev Kuleshov demonstrated for his Moscow film classes the way the cut functioned as a magical interstice: a severance that also, and at the same time, seamed; an index of difference or separateness within a prevailing matrix of “the same.” The mere juncture between two strips of celluloid, it was revealed, was enough to convince that the White House stood solid and indestructible in the heart of Moscow, or that filmed details of several different women could fuse beyond the cut to form a single body. Over and over these experiments revealed the primacy of spatial continuity—showing that the cut would have to wedge into it very deeply indeed before that continuity would break. The films of the Russian avant-garde—Eisenstein, Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovshenko—were recycled regularly in the programming of the Anthology Film Archives, which had been opened in New York in 1970 by Jonas Mekas and was devoted to both the historical, and the contemporary cinematic avant-garde. There, in a bizarrely designed visual solitude, one could view, over and over, the deft precision of Russian “film form.” And there, several nights of every week, sat Richard Serra, often accompanied by Robert Smithson or Joan Jonas, building on


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Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure, 1969 Wood, steel, lead Indeterminate dimensions Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York Photo: Peter Moore

his already formidable film education begun at Yale, extended in the Cinémathèque in Paris, and refined in New York in the late 1960s. There he sat, intently becoming the master of this syntax.16 “To cut” had been the sixteenth item on the 1967–1968 list of verbs, but when Serra started making sculpture by means of cutting, it became evident that he intended this cut to operate like the one in film—to function as the ineluctable marker of the continuity of experience across a “break,” to be the very thing that articulates continuum. Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure (1969) is about the juncture of disparateness, as lead sheets, steel piping, a wooden beam, and a marble slab are aesthetically “joined” by the very operation that hacks into their substance and splays them apart. These materials, having been laid sequentially on a two-footwide steel base plate, their disparate lengths extending beyond it on either edge, were sliced through by a circular saw, to fall and scatter on both sides of the relatively narrow base/template. But the Gestalt that magically forms through the agency of this cut seems to exist both “inside” the work—holding it together—and mani-

festly “outside,” an operation performed on the latency of matter. Opening the performance of this unity to the viewer’s inspection, displaying it in slow-motion, as it were, it allows us to see just that leap in the dark where the site of one filmed detail joins up to another, places us at just that moment of dawning perceptual sense when the object that “disappears” by passing in back of another, reappears to the infantile viewer not as a third object, but as the same one as before, seamed together in his cognitive understanding by the transformational idea “behind.” Continuing to operate with this linear device in which it is the cut that paradoxically forges the wholeness of the work, Serra in 1970 made an extremely lyrical untitled piece, in which a twenty-four-foot steel plate is wedged into a gentle fall of ground and then torch-cut along its exposed portion to produce a fallen triangle visibly wedded to its now mostly invisible mate: the other half of the original plate, still buried, below its exposed cut edge, in the earth. And in the same year he created what was perhaps his most extravagantly Dada version: Sawing: Base Plate Measure (Twelve Fir Trees), in which twelve twenty-five-foot logs, each approximately four feet in diameter, were cut off a cement base-plate template ten inches high, seven feet wide, and fifty feet long, filling the main space in the Pasadena Museum with a massive challenge to the very concept of the gallery as a site for sculpture. By 1972 something fundamental had happened to Serra’s conception of the cut. For in that year he made Circuit and Twins: To Tony and Mary Edna, in which cutting was no longer a force exerted on the patient body of the world outside the viewer, but was, somehow, what tied that world to the viewer, what shaped his perception and, in so doing, could be shown to shape him. Intervening between the Base Plate Measure works and these later ones was Strike: To Roberta and Rudy (1969–1971), a sculpture conceived as operating the “cut” on space itself and organizing it in relation to the viewer’s body, so that the interdependence of body and space—coming apart and being put back together—is choreographed in relation to the work. Strike is simply a steel plate eight feet high and twenty-four feet long butted into the corner juncture of two walls for its only means of vertical support, the steel plate transecting the right-angled volume of the space. As the viewer moves around the work, plane is perceived as contracting to line (or edge) and then expanding back into plane. Reciprocally, the space is blocked off and then opened out and subsequently reblocked. In this movement open-closed-open, the space itself is experienced as the


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Strike: To Roberta and Rudy, 1969–1971 Hot-rolled steel 8’ x 24’ x 1” Collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Panza Collection) Photo: Peter Moore

matter on which the cut, or slice, of Strike operates, as though it were the space of the room that had been laid across the work’s steel template and had been severed in three. And, as in the earlier work, it is the cut that knits back together the raveled sleeve of experience, that unites it beyond the split into the splice. And because it is the viewer, moving through the space, who is himself the operator of this cut, its activity becomes a function of his perceptual work as well; he is working with it to reconvene the continuity of his own lived world. In Circuit this implication of the viewer’s body in the action of the work is unavoidable, since the only place to experience the sculpture is at its center—as one stands in the three-foot opening in the midst of the jut of four plates—each eight by twenty-four feet—pushing diagonally from the four corners of a room to stop just short of its mid-point. In that center the viewer must turn 360 degrees in order to see the work, and the

Circuit, 1972 Hot-rolled steel Four plates, each 8’ x 24’ x 1” Overall: 8’ x 36’ x 36’ Installed: Documenta 5 (1972), Kassel, West Germany

wholeness of his own body becomes the guarantor of the reconstructible wholeness of the room’s continuity beyond the cellular segmentation of the separate quadrants or “shots” into which the plates cut the architectural space. With Twins this drama of a perceptual center is played in a variant that combines the Strike phenomenon with the earlier notion of cut. A huge steel plate, forty-two feet long and eight feet wide, is bisected diagonally, and one half is then flipped so that when the two elements are projected from opposing corners of an oblong room they form two triangular fins, parallel in plan but inverse in elevation, each presenting a profile that stretches from high in one corner and narrows to a point at the floor when it reaches the wall across the room. Given the simplicity of the geometrical relationships, it is extremely easy to reconstruct the original single plate, to understand, that is, the way the cut has bifurcated and dispersed the formerly unified plane. But to stand between the two walls of the work is to feel this reconstruction in a very special relation to one’s own body, to experience it through an extraordinarily acute sensation of the body’s own symmetry—of the way that symmetry does not work as an


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Twins: To Tony and Mary Edna, 1972 Hot-rolled steel Two plates, each 8’ x 42’ x 11⁄2” Collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Panza Collection) Photo: Peter Moore

identity between right and left sides, but in inverse, mirror relationship— or through a heightened sense of the manner in which what is present to me in the space that exists behind my back, shares in the formation of the meaning of what I experience in front of my eyes. Standing between these two fins is a matter, that is, of feeling the way one giant element has been sheared off from the other and, rotated backto-front into place, now exposes the outer surface of its mate to the inner area within which the viewer stands. Thus the plate that is at the viewer’s back is, literally, the “back” of the plate he faces. And with this incredibly simple maneuver, orientation—or what phenomenology would call situation—is added to geometry. What might have been understood as a “simple” geometrical enclosure—a kind of box articulated by two walls and two fins—has been articulated in relation to a point-of-view onto, or within, this construction. And this, it must be underscored, is not an abstract point of view, like the projective point of Renaissance perspective that suspends a disembodied single “eye” before the visual array. This is a point of view that is defined instead as being situated in a body, a body that itself has a back and a front. Thus insofar as Twins articulates its own con-

cern with the double-sidedness of each element, it coordinates this with the conditions of its viewer’s body: the fact that that body has a front from which it sees and a back which it knows to be there but cannot see. Yet it is this very unseen, and unseeable, side that thickens the world for the perceiver, that assures him that things have reverse sides, namely those aspects that, being hidden from him, they reveal to one other. And just as the continuous presence of the body was experienced as providing the ground of continuity that seamed together the cuts of Circuit, so the sitedness of that body is revealed as the precondition for “knowing” the density and multiple-aspectedness of the structure of Twins. Two years after making Twins, Serra constructed yet another work that articulated itself against the background or horizon of the viewer’s physical self, which was given an added density and corporealization by feeling itself to be the very precondition for experiencing the density and weight and inner relationship of the work. The sculpture in question is Delineator (1974–1975), consisting of two steel plates, each ten by twentysix feet, one laid directly on the floor, the other attached to the ceiling right above it, the two plates with their planes parallel and their major axes at right angles to each other. One could of course read this juxtaposition through a notion of abstract coordinates and relate it to the red bars crossing black of Malevich’s suprematism or the graphic crosses of Mondrian’s Plus and Minus series. But that would be to omit the way a space is corporealized through those two anonymous plates, a space called into being in relation to the viewer’s body. “When you’re outside the plates,” Serra explains, the overhead plate appears to press upward against the ceiling. That condition reverses itself as you walk underneath. There aren’t any direct paths into it. As you walk toward its center, the piece functions either centrifugally or centripetally. You’re forced to acknowledge the space above, below, right, left, north, east, south, west, up, down. All your psychophysical coordinates, your sense of orientation, are called into question immediately.17 Explaining that he was not interested in a reading of Delineator that would see it as a kind of column or zone of light suspended between the two planes, he added: “It’s not opting for opticality as its content. It has more to do with a field force that’s being generated, so that the space is discerned physically rather than optically.”18


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Delineator, 1974–1975 Steel Two plates, each 10’ x 26’ x 1” Installed: Ace Gallery, Venice, California Photo: Gordon Matta-Clark

Delineator is thus to Twins as Twins is to Circuit. In all three of these examples, what is experienced is a powerful imbrication of the visual with the physical, as the space that one sees is shown to be interdependent with the space that is corporealized within oneself, and that space in turn is manifested in its reliance for its meaning upon space-at-large. This concern with the body as the ground of the sculptural experience is partially comparable to the way the abstract conditions of the body were modeled by One Ton Prop (House of Cards) or by Stacked Steel Slabs: the body as a will toward erectness, as the seeking of containment through balance. Where the three 1970s sculptures depart from the props and stacks, however, is that the body occurs as the precondition not for existing but for perceiving. Indeed throughout the decade of the 1970s Serra conceived of the sculptural project as a problem in the domain of perception—perception, that is, grounded in a living, moving, reacting body.

IV. To Pair . . . to Bind . . . to Bond

Richard Serra makes several different appearances in The New AvantGarde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies. We see him and Robert Smithson from the back, setting off on the rocky road of the Spiral Jetty; we see him making the various casting pieces in the Castelli warehouse; and we see one torso-length close-up of him—amazingly dirty, in coveralls and a tee shirt, hair wild and face spattered with white. And as with the Portrait of the Artist Throwing Lead, precedents come to mind. For there is another twentieth-century sculptor who relished being portrayed as though in a cocoon of studio grime, who wore the dirt of his artistic life as a kind of filmy, glamorous veil: Alberto Giacometti with plaster in his hair, in the deep grooves along his cheeks, in his lashes, on his clothing. And curiously enough, Giacometti was the focus for a certain phase of Serra’s attempt to assimilate the fact of Paris as a living center for art, during that first year in Europe after Yale. In the course of several months he and Philip Glass would go, many times a week, to La Coupole, the Montparnasse restaurant to which Giacometti repaired every evening toward midnight to eat his dinner. Sometimes alone, but more often accompanied by his brother Diego and a few assistants, Giacometti would arrive covered in plaster, the noble workman of the rue du Moulin Vert. Every night he would eat a bowl of mussels and drink red wine. And every night Richard Serra and Philip Glass would watch him eat. Later, at Glass’s insistence, they would go to the cafe where Samuel Beckett could usually be counted upon to show up for endless games of snooker. One night Giacometti acknowledged this youthful audience of two. There are many stories of Giacometti’s having found this kind of attention highly irritating, but that evening he seemed intrigued by these gawkers at the marks of his labor. He invited them to come to see him the next day; but when they got there, no one was home. For Serra, riveted on what he was experiencing as Brancusi’s abstractness, this failure to enter Giacometti’s studio was not an aesthetic tragedy, for Giacometti’s postwar work was determinedly figurative, presenting again and again the rigid, standing body of his model. It is only from a later perspective that that meeting—which could have taken the title “to miss”—assumes the character of a charming historical irony. For Serra and Giacometti did later “meet”—if only to miss—over a text, that strangely enough, could serve as a kind of theoretical key to the work of both, despite the radical difference between them.


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The text in question is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), from which passage after passage could be cited to illuminate the nature of Serra’s sculptural elaboration of the perceptual field. We remember, for instance, the question of back and front as that was developed in Twins; and we read: To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other or behind me. In other words: to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it. But insofar as I see those things too, they remain abodes open to my gaze, and being potentially lodged in them, I already perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision. Thus every object is the mirror of all others.19 Yet The Phenomenology of Perception was first thought not to address issues raised by Serra, but to create a kind of explanatory ground for late Giacometti. For the matter of his sculpture—those attenuated figures, rising like stalks, built up as though through a process of destruction, an erosion that establishes them as a kind of crumbled vagueness at the center of vision—this attack on matter was often seen as the parallel in sculptural terms to phenomenology’s recharacterization of perception as a function of intentionality, as the simultaneous cause and result of the viewer’s “gearing into the world,” his prise sur le monde. In the light of this notion of seeing as a kind of grasping or meshing, no objects are imagined as being given to us neutrally, to be then modified by the distance from which we see them or the angle of view we are forced to take. The distance and the viewpoint are not added to the object, it is argued, but inhere in the object’s meaning, like the sounds that infuse our language with an always-already-given ground of sense, separating it at the start from mere noise or babble. “Is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away?” Merleau-Ponty asks. “He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same man seen from farther away.”20 Perceptual “data” are thus recharacterized by phenomenology. They are no longer neutral stimuli to enter the bodily sensorium for pointby-point processing, but are now defined as the meanings that things present to a given point of view. “Convergence and apparent size are neither signs nor causes of depth: they are present in the experience of depth in the

way that a motive, even when it is not articulate and separately posited, is present in a decision.”21 Or further, “They do not act miraculously as ‘causes’ in producing the appearance of organization in depth, they tacitly motivate it in so far as they already contain it in their significance, and in so far as they are both already a certain way of looking at distance.”22 It was precisely “a certain way of looking at distance” that set the formal conditions of Giacometti’s postwar sculpture. And his work, insofar as it appeared to represent the mutual relationship between the object and its spectator, the viewer and the viewed, was directly associated with phenomenology. The “distance” imprinted on those represented bodies, inscribed there by means of their hieratic removal, their frontality, their rigidity, their kneaded and blurred surfaces, could not be effaced by moving close up to the sculpture to examine it, by peering into the clefts of its surfaces. These bodies were, instead, marked by a meaning that nothing could erase: their separation from the viewer, their existence as a kind of limit condition of his gaze. Forever caught in the field of the spectator’s look, the works constructed the sitedness of vision, of what it means to be seen “by” another “from” the place from which he views. “He chose,” Sartre wrote about Giacometti, “to sculpt situated appearance and discovered that this was the path to the absolute. He exposes to us men and women as already seen but not as already seen by himself alone. His figures are already seen just as a foreign language that we are trying to learn is already spoken. Each of them reveals to us man as he is seen, as he is for other men, as he emerges in interhuman surroundings . . .”23 Published in 1948, this reading established the critical ambience within which Giacometti’s art was assimilated. The sponsorship by Sartre meant that for American receivers of the work, for the most part unaware of Merleau-Ponty’s still untranslated Phenomenology of Perception, Giacometti was understood as exemplifying the moral lessons of existentialism, of what man-in-a-situation meant for human responsibility, human choice, human freedom. It meant also that figuration seemed to be a minimum requirement for these kinds of issues to emerge, for how else would one get at the question of “interhuman surroundings”? But by the time that American readers encountered The Phenomenology of Perception (it was translated into English in 1962), their aesthetic horizons had become restructured by a conviction in the necessity of abstraction. The Minimalist generation, becoming aware of Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology against the background of the problematic inherited from Pollock and Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, thus did not read it


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as a call for figuration. For the minimalists, the interest of phenomenology was located precisely in its assumption of a “preobjective experience” that underlies all perception and guarantees that even in its abstractness it is always and already meaningful; for otherwise, without an expectation of meaning located precisely in it, we would have no reason to go on to commit acts of seeing, hearing, moving. This description was pertinent to their ambitions, seeming to eclipse those of postwar France. In MerleauPonty’s text the generation of the 1960s encountered the analysis of “a spatiality without things” that gave intellectual and theoretical ballast to their own preoccupations with a seriously intended abstract art. “Once the experience of spatiality is related to our implantation in the world,” they could read there, “there will always be a primary spatiality for each modality of this implantation. When, for example, the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in the night. . . . Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me.”24 In the context of this desire for abstraction and this welcome to the idea of “a spatiality without things” we might read what Serra wrote about the far-flung structure of a work that extends over three hundred yards of field in rural Canada, a work that he constructed during the period 1970 to 1972 and titled Shift: Surrounded on three sides by trees and swamp, the site is a farming field consisting of two hills separated by a dog-leg valley. In the summer of 1970, Joan [ Jonas] and I spent five days walking the place. We discovered that two people walking the distance of the field opposite one another, attempting to keep each other in view despite the curvature of the land, would mutually determine a topological definition of the space. The boundaries of the work became the maximum distance two people could occupy and still keep each other in view. The horizon of the work was established by the possibilities of maintaining this mutual viewpoint. From the extreme boundaries of the work, a total configuration is always understood. As eye-levels were aligned—across the expanse of the field—elevations were located. The expanse of the valley, unlike the two hills, was flat. What I wanted was a dialectic between one’s perception of the place in totality and one’s relation to the field as walked. The result is a way of measuring oneself against the indeterminacy of the land.

. . . Insofar as the stepped elevations [the six “walls” that are the built elements of the work] function as horizons cutting into and extending towards the real horizon, they suggest themselves as orthogonals within the terms of a perspective system of measurement. The machinery of renaissance space depends on measurements remaining fixed and immutable. These steps relate to a continually shifting horizon, and as measurements, they are totally transitive: elevating, lowering, extending, foreshortening, contracting, compressing, and turning. The line as a visual element, per step, becomes a transitive verb.25 Verbs surface once more in this description, a list of verbs that might remind us of that earlier sequence of actions contemplated by the Artist Throwing Lead: “to splash, to knot, to spill, to droop, to flow, to swirl. . . .” And like that earlier set of named actions, these also appear to float in grammatical space, in a free-fall divorce from any specific object. But there is not a real synonymy between these lists. For the parade of infinitives suggests acts to be performed on an object, in its passivity. Whereas this list of gerunds, even as it is enacted by the continuity of the progressive tense, seems to indicate an action that is reflexive—modifying the subject in the process of modifying the object. Neither pole of the action is named, but the type of action imagined—foreshortening, contracting, turning—implies a field of reciprocity, as though it were impossible to think of an object without thinking at the same time about the way it carved out and determined a place for oneself. Thus from the coming into being of Shift as the recorded trace of the mutual sighting of two people as they walk opposite sides of a hilly ground but struggle to keep each other in view; to its construction as a network of perspectives that would establish an internal “horizon” for the work (as opposed to the real horizon), which in turn would continually define one’s vision of the object through one’s physical relation to it; to its idea of the transitivity of this relationship such that the work marks the activity of the viewer’s connection to his world: Serra’s conception of Shift seems to arise quite naturally from the kind of phenomenological setting in which it is argued, “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world.”26 The opening movement in the making of Shift is a kind of choreographed version of that determination to experience the self only, as Sartre


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had said, “as he is for other men, as he emerges in interhuman surroundings.” (It is perhaps a marker of the distance separating the immediate postwar era from the post-’60s that Serra’s connected space dispenses with the “interhuman” as something naturally to be articulated “for other men,” and instead articulates it through both sexes, “Joan Jonas and I.”) And by the next movement, in which one passes from the interpersonal into an interaction with space itself, it seems to follow that one will discover a network of horizons, a system that will constantly reorganize itself not as one stands back and surveys the terrain, but as one gives way to the topographical embrace. It is in this movement in which the horizon is redefined not as a spatial limit operated by measurement but as a coordinating limit operated by meaning, that we hear the echo of phenomenology’s account of perception: “because to look at the object is to plunge oneself into it, and because objects form a system in which one cannot show itself without concealing others. More precisely, the inner horizon of an object cannot become an object without the surrounding objects’ becoming a horizon and so vision is an act with two facets.”27 Shift does not, of course, relate to The Phenomenology of Perception as work to source. Rather, the ideas developed by Merleau-Ponty had been generally assimilated by a first generation of minimalist artists, affecting the assumptions by Judd or Robert Morris that sculpture had better own up to what it had, in its former idealism, attempted to hide, namely, that “if the object is an invariable structure, it is not one in spite of the change of perspective, but in that change or through it.”28 In the play of perspectives in which minimalism now grounded the object, abstract geometries were constantly submitted to the redefinition of a sited vision. And it is against this background that Serra arrived at the choreography of Shift in which a work could be conceived as the mutually established “horizon” of two people at a distance. Within this context, too, we understand how Serra’s idea of “seeing at a distance” can never coincide with or map onto that of Giacometti. For where Giacometti locates the depiction of distance in the object world, and specifically in the representation of the human figure, it was Serra’s assumption that the ground for the perception of distance was not to be found in figuration, but in abstraction, an abstraction that parallels the notion of the preobjective experience. Which is to say that for Serra, the only way to approach that primordial, preobjective world is through a use of form that, though palpable and material—directly engaging the viewer’s body—is rigorously nonfigurative, insistently abstract.

The abstract elaboration of the plane in Twins and Circuit and Strike is deployed over the vast expanse of Shift. Moving over the grounds of the work, one experiences the walls as elements in constant transformation: first as line, and then as barrier, only to become line once more. From the vantage of high ground, the upper edges of the walls are the vectors along which one sights as one stands above them looking down, and they thereby establish one’s connection to the distance. Whereas from the vantage of one’s “descent” they broaden and thicken to become an enclosure that binds one within the earth. Felt as barrier rather than as perspective, they then heighten the experience of the physical place of one’s body. Without depicting anything specific, the walls’ oscillation between the linear and the physical articulates both a situation and a lived perspective. And it does this in the most abstract way possible: by the rotation in and out of depth of a plane. The opening sections of The Phenomenology of Perception sketch something of the preobjective world when they speak of the internal horizon of an object as that network of views from everywhere within which it is caught: When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the table can “see”; the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it “shows” to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far as objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats the others round it as spectators of its hidden aspects which guarantee the permanence of those aspects by their presence.29 This passage opens a section titled “The Body,” in which the author argues that it is the interconnectedness of “back” and “front” within a system of the meanings of these relationships, given preobjectively by the space of the body, that we can construct as a primordial model to explain perception. The body as the preobjective ground of all experience of the relatedness of objects is, indeed, the first “world” explored by The Phenomenology of Perception. As the plane of Shift rotates to become now internal, now external horizon, it functions as a kind of syntactical marker—an equivalent within the abstract language of sculpture for the connection between the body’s “horizon” and that of the world beyond. The abstraction of Shift, like that of Twins, is therefore a function of the abstractness of the open vectors that


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are marked, the possible coordinates that are mapped in their latency, rather than being a matter of the nonfigurative character of the plane itself. Constructivist sculpture had, throughout the opening half of the century, based its own claim to abstraction on the nonobjective, nonreferential forms of the elements it put to use: smoothly transparent rectangles of celluloid, shiny grids of aluminum, mattely deadpan ovals of wood or metal. The realness of these materials—their associations to workplace, to laboratory, to transport—did nothing to interfere with the aura of the “abstract” within which these shapes located the constructivist object. For that object seemed to exist in the ideal space of geometric diagrams, of textbook structures, of engineering tables. The transparency of the materials seemed to underscore the way these intellectualist models, these diagrams for objects, could be opened to the inspection of a thought that penetrated them as though from all sides at once, entering and acquiring them. Thus a translucency to thought became the real “subject” of constructivism, the marker of a triumph over matter by the formal operations of logic or of science, the object baptized in the powers of reason. In this way the constructivist plane acts to overcome the “appearances” of things and to redefine the object itself as the géometral of all possible perspectives, which is to say, the object seen from nowhere or, as phenomenology critically characterizes it, the object as seen by God: “For God, who is everywhere, breadth is immediately equivalent to depth. Intellectualism and empiricism do not give us any account of the human experience of the world; they tell us what God might think about it.”30 Now, no matter how geometrical in form, the planes in Shift locate the meaning of the work in a place utterly distinct from that of this constructivism. Which is to say that these planes do not enter the formal domain of transparency, and this not because they are literally opaque (made of concrete, half-buried in the earth, at one with the compactness of the land) but because they participate in a system that finds abstraction only when carnally enacted as the dual coordination of a lived perspective supported by the preobjective space of the body, “an act with two facets.” Acknowledging that vision is this “act with two facets,” the planes in Shift serve to mark both the thickness of the body and that of the world, as well as the mutual, motile engagement that is at the heart of perception. Further, because the constructivist sculpture is seen from a vantage point in the Absolute, as it were, its viewer is represented as immobile, hovering somewhere above it in that total, simultaneous presence to its being that has no need of movement. But Shift’s viewer is represented (through the

sculpture) as in constant motion; and this bridging between the body’s horizon and that of the world, this abstract transitivity—“foreshortening,” “contracting,” “compressing,” “turning”—must be seen as the subject matter of the work. Chiasma is a relationship of crossing and exchange. It can be used linguistically to chart the reflexive crossovers between words, or it can be used to describe a spatial transitivity, as in the mutual interaction of seer and seen—their activity as they exchange positions through visual space, each to leave a mark on the other. By the 1970s this formal loop, this chiasmatic trajectory, became the subject of much of Serra’s work. It is an abstract subject, most often given visual form by correspondingly “abstract” elements, like the diagonally oriented fifteen-foot-long bars and the two steel blocks that they displace within the spectator’s field of vision in the work called Different and Different Again (1973). But it is a subject that one can continue to experience abstractly, syntactically, even when the medium through which it is expressed is not the geometrical plane of Shift or of Twins but a real, functional, and functioning object, an industrial object, for example. It was precisely a bridge, a revolving turnbridge, that became the medium of the chiasmatic loop in the film Railroad Turnbridge, which Serra made in the summer of 1976 as a kind of encomium to his revered masters of the Soviet filmic avant-garde—to the Eisenstein of the raisingof-the-bridge sequence in October (1927) and to the Dziga Vertov of the steel mills in Enthusiasm (1931). In this film the camera, from a position at one end of the bridge, sights down its entire length to make of the bridge itself a giant viewfinder, a kind of semaphor of vision, reaching like an extended bellows toward the remote landscape. The view beyond this tunnel-like construction is thus entirely a function of the distant aperture at the bridge’s end, and in this way the lens of the camera and the opening at the far end of the bridge enter into a mirror relationship: two “frames” set at either edge of a trajectory of space, each reflecting the other. View and viewer are thus mutually implicated both at the level of form and at the level of the dispositif, or apparatus, of vision; the majestically slow turning of the sun-struck bridge operates simultaneously on the position of the seer and on that limited part of the world available to be seen. As Serra says about this work, Not only does it use the device of the tunneling of the bridge to frame the landscape, but then it returns on itself and frames itself. In that,


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there is an illusion created that questions what is moving and what is holding still. Is the camera moving and bridge holding still or vice versa? That is contained within the framing structure of the material of the bridge itself, right down to its internal functioning element— the gear.31 Indeed, in Railroad Turnbridge nothing of the bridge’s physical existence, or its historical density (such as its material place in the development of truss-construction within the nineteenth century’s conquest of spans), is banished from sight, and nothing of the landscape toward which the entire filmic apparatus—camera, bridge, viewer—projects is denied. But what occurs instead is that each of these, in their objective character, is eclipsed by the film’s abstract subject, by that thing that fills the frame and is not so much a thing as a relationship, a transitivity. That film could be abstract without turning its back on the world, without denying the quotidian spaces of rooms and streets, had been part of the ethos of Serra’s generation of independent filmmakers. Thus in the late 1960s Michael Snow had made Wavelength, a forty-five-minute film that consists of a single camera movement—a zoom—that traverses the space of a downtown loft, seeming to distill in startling purity an abstract experience of “suspense.”32 Right after it was made Serra took Snow’s film with him on a working tour in Europe and insisted on showing it everywhere he went. Over and over he watched that dawning of the irreversible, the inexorable, as something that could be not so much pictured as plotted. It was when he saw the turnbridge on a trip to the Pacific Northwest that he realized the relation between this abstract, filmic drive and his own specific subject. In Railroad Turnbridge Serra found access to a space made visible in and of itself by the fact that it is in motion, a space swollen by a brilliant luminosity that serves as a metaphor for vision, yet a space traversed by the mutual implication of back and front, thus creating a visual figure for the preobjective space of the body. The physical turnbridge is the medium, the support, the pretext for this experience, not its subject. The subject of the film remains absolutely consonant with that of Shift. Another aspect of the abstract subject emerges from reading Railroad Turnbridge and Shift together, and that is their parallel preoccupation with time as the medium within which movement unfurls the complications of its connections. For if, for Serra, the abstract subject can only be a function of time, this is because any subject that is timeless—fixed, isolated,

and unchanging—lapses into an image. And an image is by definition not abstract. Always an image of something, it always acts to depict: this person, that chair, this concept. Giacometti’s sculpture has, in this sense, constant recourse to images, not just because it is figurative but because it is resolutely static, a function of the “image” of distance become “picture.” Stamped onto the surface of his works through the indelible fracture of the modeling, through the abruptness with which the sides of the sculpted faces recede before our eyes, this frozen picture operates to insure that, whether physically far or near, we will always be presented with this idea of distance as an image. For Serra the abstract subject only becomes available to the artist once space and time are acknowledged as functions of one another. For it is within the very moment of a shift in vision that what is seen is experienced as not bounded by the condition of being fixed, as is an image. In this insistence on an abstraction that fuses the temporal with the spatial, so that the bridge of Serra’s film is imaginable as a medium only because, like the gears of the camera itself, it is turning, one continues to feel a phenomenological preoccupation: This quasi-synthesis is elucidated if we understand it as temporal. When I say that I see an object at a distance, I mean that I already hold it, or that I still hold it, it is in the future or in the past as well as being in space. . . . But co-existence, which in fact defines space, is not alien to time, but is the fact of two phenomena belonging to the same temporal wave.33 And once again Merleau-Ponty links the space of this continuum to something preobjective and abstract: There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous “functions” which draw every particular focus into a general project.34


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V. But Not Necessarily in That Order

The landscape sculptures—Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation (1971), Shift (1970–1972), Spin Out ( For Bob Smithson) (1972–1973), and Plumb Run: Equal Elevations (1983)—marry form to topography, with the form bringing into a kind of relief the continuousness of the landscape, its meander, its sprawl, its aimless sliding this way and that. The sculptures lay bare a need to read the landscape but assert that no determinate reading can be arrived at, no closure to this experience, no final figure that will resolve once and for all the “ground.” The sculptures “point to the indeterminacy of the landscape,” Serra has said, adding, “The dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape establishes the sculptural experience.”35 But the arcs that Serra went on to construct—St. John’s Rotary Arc (1981), Tilted Arc (1982), Clara-Clara (1983), La Palmera (1980–1984)— presuppose a flat site, within which is set the segment of a regular, geometrical shape. And these two regularities—horizontal plane and vertical arc—might now suggest a different subject for the work, a different relationship between sculpture and meaning. “Et in Utah ego,” wrote Robert Smithson about his 1970 Spiral Jetty. Composing a section of his film on the work, Smithson had choreographed a shot to be taken from the work’s very center, at the endpoint of its trajectory as it spirals out from shore to curl around and into itself. Conceived as a continuous camera movement, that shot is a 360-degree pan along the horizon of the Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point, a horizon now mimed, redefined, and displaced by the outer rim of the Jetty. On the storyboard of the film Smithson composed the shot; it begins: North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water North by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Northeast by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Northest by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water East by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water . . .36 Moving steadily through the points of the compass—north, then east, then south, then west—Smithson’s camera captures the sameness of a monotonous immensity. Unlike the constructivist triumphal entry into the heart of the material object to conquer it cognitively, this centering

Plumb Run: Equal Elevations, 1983 Weatherproof steel Three plates, each 12’ x 40’ x 21⁄2” Overall: 12 x 40 x 731’ Installed: Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York Photo: Gwen Thomas

acknowledges instead a kind of perceptual defeat, a great entropic assault on intuition which would, as Smithson wrote, “end in sunstroke.” Looking for a geometry to end geometry, to collapse it utterly, Smithson found it in the “immense roundness” of his site, which he compared to a “rotary that enclosed itself.” This site seemed to provide the means to undermine what Smithson viewed as the presumptuousness of the certainties produced by the art he knew. “No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions,” he wrote, “could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence.”37 In 1980 Serra located a work within a rotary, a site he found as crushingly disorienting as the sweep of Rozel Point, Utah. This site, a traffic roundabout at the New York City exit from the Holland Tunnel, Serra described as


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a space polluted by exhaust fumes, a scene of incessant change, a hub, a place of rush hour glut, a place of disorientation and permanent rotation where, at various times of the day, the density of traffic screens the inner center of the Rotary, enforcing the distinction between the inside and the outside of the space so that the space seems to open and close with the traffic flow.38 St. John’s Rotary Arc is thus, like Smithson’s Jetty, a regular geometric form placed on a level, regularized “base,” a ground that in its flatness compares to the “thermal mirror” of the Great Salt Lake from which the Jetty rises. And like Smithson, Serra imagined a certain narrative for the viewing of this work, a kind of cinematic scenario even though for a film never really contemplated. Further, like Smithson’s shot plan, this scenario projects its angles according to the points of the compass: first east, then south, then west, then north; although it must be noted that these compass points are urban, functions of the metropolitan grid. The scenario begins: On the East, Varick Street runs South, downtown: walking down Varick Street, the Arc foreshortens, expands and flattens to a plane. Standing on line with the visual center of the work (halfway down the block) its top edge curves outward and up at the limits of peripheral vision. Walking Varick, the Arc can be read as a site-specific metaphor in that it echoes the content of a tunnel: traffic appears, disappears, reappears.39 If Smithson’s refrain, “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water,” relates to the repetitive hum of Serra’s contemporaneous Hand Catching Lead, the narrative of the Rotary Arc breaks away from that earlier serialized sameness. For from its very outset—“the Arc foreshortens, expands, and flattens to a plane”—we are introduced to change. Further, as was the case with the landscape pieces (“the sculptural elements act as barometers for reading the landscape”),40 we are being invited to a “reading”; we are asked to enter a space with the expectation that it will yield up meaning. But that meaning arises, we also realize, within a network of coordinates for which there is no single center. And in this we understand that for Rotary Arc, no matter the geometrical regularities involved—the juxtaposition of the segment of a circle to the rectilinear, circumscribed ground of an urban setting (Varick Street, Laight Street, Hudson Street, Ericsson Street)—the preobjective ground of sense is to be found in a fundamental experience

of the body’s own coordinates defined as pure difference. North-southeast-west equals, then, front/back left/right. Rotary Arc locates two different centers. The first is its own center, the center of the circle of which it is a segment: “standing on line with the visual center of the work” is the filmic direction. But the second is the center of the site, that formed-but-formless terrain vague of gravel whose center is given by the urban network: “On the East, Varick Street runs South.” Rotary Arc is thus a two-hundred-foot section of a vast circle much larger than the urban base of the rotary on which it stands. That larger, projected circle, which would be eight hundred feet if completed, has as its center not the center of the rotary, but a point at its edge: “at the asphalt edge of the Rotary (Varick Street side) where the oval begins to contract.” Hence the play of continual difference, the oscillating attractions of two eccentric orbits. The center of the site versus the center of the arc. To be “inside” one space is to experience concavity, enclosure. To be “inside” the other is to witness the exteriority and the objectification of the convex. But as one walks this work, which operates at the scale of the city itself, one is never wholly inside or outside; one is always moving “toward,” reflexively defined as pure destination, as intentional movement. We return to the “scenario”: On the South, Ericsson Street runs East to Varick: walking across the exit ramp onto Ericsson Street toward Hudson Street, the curve snakes back on itself and reads as a half circle. Moving further down to the corner of Hudson, the concavity is overlapped, abridged. The convex curve moves outward and away in a seemingly unending arc. On the West, Hudson Street runs North, uptown: walking up Hudson Street the convexity of the Arc appears enigmatic, obdurate, wall-like. It flattens gradually to an elongated, slow curve, which appears concentric with the roundabout, when standing on axis with Hubert Street. Here, on line with the visual center of the convexity, the top edge curves downward and away at the limits of peripheral vision.41 From this outside, then, facing this “obdurate, wall-like” closure, a viewer finds as the work’s “inner horizon” the pull of peripheral vision itself, the activation of a field beyond, behind, outside-of. Thus whether the work maps a trajectory (“the convex curve moves outward and away in a


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seemingly unending arc”) or a barrier (“obdurate, wall-like”), it operates in the play of passage between a constant exchange of horizons. It is not so much an object as it is the map of a fluctuating set of exchanges. Serra’s plot underscores this resistance to a condition for the work as object, fixed and knowable before, or outside of, lived experience. Neither the driver who circumnavigates Rotary Arc, nor the pedestrian who moves toward and along it “can ascribe the multiplicity of views to a Gestalt reading of the Arc. Its form remains ambiguous,” Serra insists, “indeterminable, unknowable as an entity.”42 That something might be “unknowable as an entity” does not affect the possibility of its entering into a system with a viewer who moves toward it intending to know, and uncovering through it the resonance of this intention. It does not matter from what angle such a viewer approaches the object, for there is no correct entry into this experience. A rational set of coordinates—north, west, south, east—may exist, “but not necessarily in that order.” The metaphor of the film that Serra uses to plot the experience of St. John’s Rotary Arc brings us back to that remark about narrative that Godard placed in the mouth of one of the characters of Two or Three Things I Know about Her, a film that also, interestingly enough, surveys an urban space by means of a 360-degree pan. “Stories have beginning, middles, and ends,” we remember, “but not necessarily in that order.” How one enters and where one leaves is variable; but all trajectories live in the indissoluble marriage of the spatial with the temporal, an experience which, if we can have it intensely enough brings to us that preobjective condition for meaning I have been calling “the abstract subject” of Serra’s art. The abstract subject can be supported by a functional object, as in Railroad Turnbridge, and remain nonetheless abstract. It can be supported by the precise limits and conditions of a specific site as in Rotary Arc, with its concatenation of city streets at its boundaries, or Tilted Arc, positioned as it is at the particular interface between two eras of government construction. Nonetheless it remains abstract. The specificity of the site is not the subject of the work but—in its articulation of the movement of the viewer’s body-in-destination—its medium. In all of this: the imbrication of the abstract subject within the most carefully observed specificities of place—for it is only through the placing of the one in the other that the abstract subject can be made to appear—we may be reminded of another text, which, like The Phenomenology of Perception, can serve to illuminate Serra’s project without in any way being taken as a source. Rather, from

some considerable distance, it might function as a thematic ground, and a means of orientation. The text to which I refer appears near the opening of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, at the end of the section called “Combray.” It involves a perception, or rather an interlocking set of perceptions, that we are shown not once but twice in succession: first in the narrative time within which the book is being written and then as a citation of a textual fragment written many years earlier, and set down immediately after the author has had the experience in question. By its narrative doubling, Proust underscores what he has already stated: this fragment possesses a talismanic quality in being the first real “writing” he ever produced; and as such it stands as a kind of promise for him of the possibilities of his art. This is all the more so since, as he explains, it was accomplished at the point at which he despaired of ever becoming an author. The text, simply an intensely specific description of the constant pivoting on the visual horizon of the two bell towers of the Cathedral of Martinville (Caen) and the one of Vieuxvicq, interrupts Proust’s youthful notions that writing should concern itself with abstract ideas, or with “a philosophic theme.” Siding with quite another set of experiences, it is a text that involves itself in the voluptuous, changeant glitter reflecting off the surfaces of things. Beneath this perceptual covering, the young Proust is sure that there lies something hidden, something important to grasp, although certainly nothing to do with the abstract truths so necessary to his literary ambitions. In search of this buried treasure, Proust tells us: I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings. It was certainly not any impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind. . . .43 The struggle to find this source of pleasure, this ground that lay beneath the surface of the objects without, however, suggesting for one instant that it could be translated into the realm of concepts, this perceptual


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thickening of experience into which he wished to delve, eluded Proust until the day that he rode in an open coach down the winding road that first approached and then retreated from Martinville. Observing the perceptual network articulated by the towers, and his own ever-changing relation to them, it was this, his lived perspective that he mapped within his written text, a section of which reads: . . . we had left Martinville some little time, and the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already disappeared, when lingering along on the horizon to watch our flight, its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of farewell, their sunbathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; then the road changed direction, they veered in the light like three golden pivots, and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of fields.44 The “fecundity of mind,” the meaning that operates at the heart of perception, is released, then, within a specific site, a precise situation which the young writer actually inhabits. The choreography that sets his movement and that of the towers into a mutually established set of limits—convex, and concave, luminous and dark, expanding and contracting—makes apparent to him the spatio-temporal web that connects him to his world, that defines him as co-existent with it, being buoyed by it on “the same temporal wave.” It is this subject—the temporality that connects him to things—that is released by a site articulated by the towers of Martinville. The doubling of the Martinville passage models in small scale the repetitions of that same pleasure, released over and over again by specific sites established throughout Proust’s novel, on which can be enacted other versions of that movement, renewed each time by the different conditions of the changed context. In a similar relation to what Proust had therefore called “Place Names,” each of Serra’s arcs unfurls before its viewer within utterly new situations and thus new media for meaning. Thus Rotary Arc’s exchange between tunnel and street cannot open perspective in the same way that meaning occurs for Tilted Arc, with its different conditions of interior and exterior, its relation between work-

place and civic spaces. And neither of these can figure within the experience of movement created by Clara-Clara, whose special momentum as one passes between its two opposing but mirroring halves operates preobjectively on the idea of the “gate,” situated as it was along that magical trajectory of Parisian monuments that begins with the Arc de Triomphe, proceeds to the Place de la Concorde, and sweeps off to the Louvre.45 The repetition that is involved in the relocation of this same “simple” form is thus far removed from the kind of repetition that had defiantly been referred to in the 1960s as “just one thing after another.” For in the meantime this elusive thing that dilates within the body, this preobjective, abstract ground of meaning, this pure intentionality, had emerged for Richard Serra behind the obdurate physical object, as his subject. Just one thing after another, we now might say, but not necessarily in that order. Notes

1. Grégoire Müller and Gianfranco Gorgoni, The New Avant-Garde: Issues for Art of the Seventies (New York: Praeger, 1972). 2. Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), p. 92. 3. The kind of understanding to which I am referring has been variously characterized by those critics generally identified with “formalism.” Clive Bell’s idea of “significant form” could stand for this notion of a moment in which understanding subsumes and unifies the formal integers of a work. Stanley Cavell, in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 191, describes this aesthetic moment in which the sense of the work of art is revealed as follows: Works of art are objects of the sort that can only be known in sensing . . . seeing feels like knowing. (‘Seeing the point’ conveys this sense, but in ordinary cases of seeing the point, once it’s seen it’s known, or understood; about works of art one may wish to say that they require a continuous seeing of the point.)” Michael Fried, in “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art (New York: Dutton, 1968), p. 146, conceives this “seeing of the point” as something that suffuses a given work, guaranteeing its experience as an instantaneously intuited whole. It follows from this, for example, that in viewing a great work of sculpture, the succession of different views of the work is “eclipsed by the sculpture itself—which it is plainly meaningless to speak of as only partly present. It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.” 4. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, vol. 8 (1965), p. 82. 5. The photograph of Serra throwing lead was taken during the making of Splashing with Four Molds: To Eva Hesse (1969) at the Castelli warehouse. This work shared the same principle as Casting (1969) made for the 1969 exhibition “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.


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6. Richard Serra, “Play It Again, Sam,” in Richard Serra: Interviews, Etc. 1970–1980 (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1980), pp. 15–16. 7. Ibid., p. 16. 8. Carl Andre, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” by Phillis Tuchman, Artforum 8, no. 10 (June 1970), p. 55. 9. Richard Serra and Friedrich Teja Bach, “Interview,” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., pp. 48, 49. Carl Andre explains the importance of Brancusi and Endless Column for his own development as a sculptor in Andre, interview by Tuchman, pp. 55, 61. 10. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 27–28. 11. Ibid., p. 31. 12. Donald Judd and Frank Stella, interview by Bruce Glaser (1964), reprinted in Battcock, ed., Minimal Art, pp. 159–16l. 13. Ibid., p. 159. For Judd’s objection to the metaphysics of the action painters, see p. 151. 14. Steve Reich, “An Interview with Steve Reich,” by Emily Wassermnan, Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972), 48. 15. Richard Serra and Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculptors: An Interview,” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 168. 16. See Annette Michelson’s interview “The Films of Richard Serra,” in this volume. 17. Richard Serra, “Sight Point ’71–’75/ Delineator ’74–’76,” interview by Liza Béar, in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 61. 18. Ibid., p. 62. 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (Paris, 1945), trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 68. 20. Ibid., p. 261. 21. Ibid., p. 258. 22. Ibid., p. 259. 23. Jean-Paul Sartre, “La recherche de l’absolu,” Les Temps Modernes 3 (1948), p. 1161. Reprinted in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 289–305. 24. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 75. 25. Richard Serra, “Shift,” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., pp. 25–28. Serra further describes the piece: “There are two sets of stepped walls, with three elements in each. The walls span two hills which are, at their height, approximately 1500 feet apart. Each element begins flush with the ground and extends for the distance that it takes for the land to drop five feet. The direction is determined by the most critical slope of the ground.” Ibid., p. 25. 26. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 75. 27. Ibid., p. 67. 28. Ibid., p. 90. 29. Ibid., p. 68. 30. Ibid., p. 255. 31. Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” in this volume. 32. See Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,” Artforum 9, no. 10 (June 1971), pp. 30–37.

33. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 265. 34. Ibid., p. 254. 35. “Interview: Richard Serra and Liza Béar,” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 72. 36. The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 113. 37. Ibid., p. 111. 38. Richard Serra, “‘St. John’s Rotary Arc,’ 1980,” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 154. 39. Ibid., p. 156. 40. Richard Serra and Peter Eisenman, “Interview,” Skyline (April 1983), p. 16. 41. Serra, “‘St. John’s Rotary Arc,’” p. 160. 42. Ibid., p. 161. 43. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 137. 44. Ibid., p. 139. 45. For a brilliant and precise analysis of this work, see Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” reprinted in this volume.


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Splashing, 1968 Lead 18” x 26’ Executed for an exhibition at the Castelli warehouse, New York Photo: Peter Moore

Redefining Site Specificity Douglas Crimp

I know that there is no audience for sculpture, as is the case with poetry and experimental film. There is, however, a big audience for products which give people what they want and supposedly need, and which do not attempt to give them more than they can understand. Richard Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road” It is better to be an enemy of the people than an enemy of reality. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Unhappy Youths” The site was an old warehouse on the Upper West Side in Manhattan used by the Leo Castelli Gallery for storage; the occasion, an exhibition organized by minimalist sculptor Robert Morris; the moment, December 1968. There, strewn upon the cement floor, affixed to or leaning against the brick walls, were objects that defied our every expectation regarding the form of the work of art and the manner of its exhibition. It is difficult to convey the shock registered then, for it has since been absorbed, brought within the purview of normalized aesthetics, and, finally, consigned to a history of an avant-garde now understood to be finished. But, for many of us who began to think seriously about art precisely because of such assaults on our expectations, the return to convention in the art of the 1980s can only seem false, a betrayal of the processes of thought that our confrontations with art had set in motion. And so we try again and again to recover that experience, to make it available to those who now complacently

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spend their Saturday afternoons in SoHo galleries viewing paintings that smell of fresh linseed oil and sculptures that are once again cast in bronze. Of the things in that warehouse, certainly none was more defiant of our sense of the aesthetic object than Richard Serra’s Splashing. Along the juncture where wall met floor, Serra had tossed molten lead and allowed it to harden in place. The result was not really an object at all; it had no definable shape or mass; it created no legible image. We could, of course, say that it achieved the negation of categories that Donald Judd had, some years earlier, ascribed to “the best new work”: “neither painting nor sculpture.”1 And we could see that by effacing the line where the wall rose up perpendicular to the floor, Serra was obscuring a marker for our orientation in interior space, claiming that space as the ground of a different kind of perceptual experience. Our difficulty with Splashing was in trying to imagine its very possibility of continued existence in the world of art objects. There it was, attached to the structure of that old warehouse on the Upper West Side, condemned to be abandoned there forever or to be scraped off and destroyed. For to remove the work meant certainly to destroy it. “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” It is with this assertion that Serra sought to shift the terms of debate in a public hearing convened to determine the fate of Tilted Arc.2 Serra’s sculpture had been commissioned by the General Services Administration (GSA) Art-in-Architecture Program and permanently installed in the plaza of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan during the summer of 1981. In 1985, a newly appointed GSA regional administrator presumed to reconsider its presence there, to ask whether it might be “relocated” elsewhere. In testimony after testimony at that hearing, artists, museum officials, and others pleaded the case for site specificity that Serra’s assertion implied. The work had been conceived for the site, built on the site, become an integral part of the site, altered the very nature of the site. Remove it, and the work would simply cease to exist. But, for all its passion and eloquence, the testimony failed to convince the adversaries of Tilted Arc. To them the work was in conflict with its site, disrupted the normal views and social functions of the plaza, and, indeed, would be far more pleasant to contemplate in a landscape setting. There, presumably, its size would be less overwhelming to its surroundings, its rust-colored steel surface more harmonious with the colors of nature. The larger public’s incomprehension in the face of Serra’s assertion of site specificity is the incomprehension of the radical prerogatives of a his-

toric moment in art practice. “To remove the work is to destroy the work” was made self-evident to anyone who had seen Splashing’s literalization of the assertion, and it is that which provided the background of Tilted Arc for its defenders. But they could not be expected to explain, within the short time of their testimonies, a complex history that had been deliberately suppressed. The public’s ignorance is, of course, an enforced ignorance, for not only is cultural production maintained as the privilege of a small minority within that public, but it is not in the interests of the institutions of art and the forces they serve to produce knowledge of radical practices even for their specialized audience. And this is particularly the case for those practices whose goal was a materialist critique of the presuppositions of those very institutions. Such practices attempted to reveal the material conditions of the work of art, its mode of production and reception, the institutional supports of its circulation, the power relations represented by these institutions—in short, everything that is disguised by traditional aesthetic discourse. Nevertheless, these practices have subsequently been recuperated by that very discourse as reflecting just one more episode in a continuous development of modern art. Many of Tilted Arc’s defenders, some representing official art policies, argued for a notion of site specificity that reduced it to a purely aesthetic category. As such, it was no longer germane to the presence of the sculpture on Federal Plaza. The specificity of Tilted Arc’s site is, however, that of a particular public place. The work’s material, scale, and form intersect not only with the formal characteristics of its environment, but also with the desires and assumptions of a very different public from the one conditioned to the shocks of the art of the late 1960s. Serra’s transfer of the radical implications of Splashing into the public realm, deliberately embracing the contradictions this transfer implies, is the real specificity of Tilted Arc. When site specificity was introduced into contemporary art by minimalist artists in the mid-1960s, what was at issue was the idealism of modern sculpture, its engagement of the spectator’s consciousness with sculpture’s own internal set of relationships. Minimalist objects redirected consciousness back upon itself and the real-world conditions that ground consciousness. The coordinates of perception were established as existing not only between the spectator and the work but among spectator, art work, and the place inhabited by both. This was accomplished either by eliminating the object’s internal relationships altogether or by making those relationships a function of simple structural repetition, of “one thing after another.”3 Whatever relationship was now to be perceived was

Redefining Site Specificity

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Tilted Arc, 1981 Weatherproof steel 12’ x 120’ x 21⁄2” Installed: Federal Plaza, New York Collection: General Services Administration (destroyed by the GSA, 1989) Photo: Anne Chauvet

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contingent upon the viewer’s temporal movement in the space shared with the object. Thus, the work belonged to its site; if its site were to change, so would the interrelationship of object, context, and viewer. Such a reorientation of the perceptual experience of art made the viewer, in effect, the subject of the work, whereas under the reign of modernist idealism, this privileged position had devolved ultimately upon the artist, the sole generator of the art work’s formal relationships. The critique of idealism directed against modern sculpture and its illusory sitelessness was, however, left incomplete. The incorporation of place within the domain of the work’s perception succeeded only in extending art’s idealism to its surrounding site. Site was understood as specific only in a formal sense; it was thus abstracted, aestheticized. Carl Andre, who made the claim that sculpture, formerly equated with form and structure, was now to be equated with place, was asked about the implications of moving his works from one place to another. His reply: “I don’t feel myself obsessed with the singularity of places. I don’t think spaces are that singular. I think there are generic classes of spaces which you work for and toward. So it’s not really a problem where a work is going to be in particular.”4 And Andre enumerated these spaces: “Inside gallery spaces, inside private dwelling spaces, inside museum spaces, inside large public spaces, and outside spaces of various kinds too.”5 Andre’s failure to see the singularity of the “generic classes of spaces” he “worked for and toward” was the failure of minimalist art to produce a fully materialistic critique of modernist idealism. That critique, initiated in the art production of the following years, would entail an analysis of, and resistance to, art’s institutionalization within the system of commerce represented by those spaces listed by Andre. If modern art works existed in relation to no specific site and were therefore said to be autonomous, homeless, that was also the precondition of their circulation; from the studio to the commercial gallery, from there to the collector’s private dwelling, thence to the museum or lobby of a corporate headquarters. The real material condition of modern art, masked by its pretense to universality, is that of the specialized luxury commodity. Engendered under capitalism, modern art became subject to the commodification from which nothing fully escapes. And in accepting the “spaces” of art’s institutionalized commodity circulation as given, minimalist art could neither expose nor resist the hidden material conditions of modern art. That task was taken up in the work of artists who radicalized site specificity, artists as various as Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke, Michael


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Asher and Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra. Their contributions to a materialist critique of art, their resistance to the “disintegration of culture into commodities,”6 were fragmentary and provisional, the consequences limited, systematically opposed or mystified, ultimately overturned. What remain of this critique today are a history to be recovered and fitful, marginalized practices that struggle to exist at all in an art world more dedicated than ever before to commodity value. That history cannot be recovered here; it can only be claimed as necessary for any genuine understanding of Richard Serra’s Splashing and what he was to make afterward. We need hardly be reminded of the dangers inherent in divorcing art practices from the social and political climates in which they took place; in this case, the very mention of the year 1968 as the date of Splashing should serve sufficient notice. The following paragraphs, written in France by Daniel Buren just one month after the events of May ’68 and published the following September, may provide a reminder of the political consciousness of artists of the period. We can find challenges to tradition back in the 19th century—indeed (considerably) earlier. And yet since then countless traditions, academicisms, countless new taboos and new schools have been created and overthrown! Why? Because those phenomena against which the artist struggles are only epiphenomena or, more precisely, they are only the superstructures built on the base that conditions art and is art. And art has changed its traditions, its academicisms, its taboos, its schools, etc., at least a hundred times, because it is the vocation of what is on the surface to be changed, endlessly, and so long as we don’t touch the base, nothing, obviously, is fundamentally, basically, changed. And that is how art evolves, and that is how there can be art history. The artist challenges the easel when he paints a surface too large to be supported by the easel, and then he challenges the easel and the overlarge surface by turning out a canvas that’s also an object, and then just an object; and then there is the object to be made in place of the object made, and then a mobile object or an untransportable object, etc. This is said merely by way of example, but intended to demonstrate that if there is a possible challenge it cannot be a formal one, it can only be basic, on the level of art and not on the level of the forms given to art.7

The Marxist terminology of Buren’s text locates him in a political tradition very different from that of his American colleagues. Moreover, among the artists of his generation, Buren has been the most systematic in his analysis of art in relation to its economic and ideological bases, and thus he has reached a far more radical conclusion: that the changes wrought upon art within practice must be “basic,” not “formal.” In spite of Richard Serra’s continued work with the “forms given to art,” however, he has incorporated important components of a materialist critique. These include his attention to the processes and divisions of labor, to art’s tendency toward the conditions of consumption, and the false separation of private and public spheres in art’s production and reception. Although Serra’s work is not systematic or consistent in this regard, even the contradictory manner in which he has taken a critical position has produced reactions that are often perplexed, outraged, sometimes violent. Determined to build his work outside the confines of art institutions, Serra has frequently met with the opposition of public officials and their surrogates, who have been quick to manipulate public incomprehension for their censorial purposes.8 The extraordinary status that has accrued to the work of art during the modern period is, in part, a consequence of the romantic myth of the artist as the most highly specialized, indeed unique producer. That this myth obscures the social division of labor was recognized by minimalist artists. Traditional sculpture’s specialized craft and highly fetishized materials were opposed by minimalism with the introduction of objects industrially fabricated of ordinary materials. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights, Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes, and Carl Andre’s metal plates were in no way products of the artist’s hand. Serra, too, turned to industrial materials for his early sculpture, but at first he worked those materials himself or with the help of friends. Using lead, and working at a scale proportionate to hand manipulation, his early torn, cast, and propped pieces were still evidence of the artist’s activity, however much the processes Serra employed differed from the conventional crafts of carving, modeling, and welding. But when, in 1971, Serra installed Strike: To Roberta and Rudy in the Lo Giudice Gallery, New York, his working procedure was transformed. Strike was only a single plate of hot-rolled steel, one inch thick, eight feet high, twenty-four feet long, and weighing nearly three tons. That steel plate was not, however, the work. To become the sculpture Strike, the steel plate had to occupy a site, to assume its position wedged into the


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corner of the gallery room, bisecting the right angle where wall met wall. But there is no operation of the artist’s craft that would accomplish this simple fact. The steel’s tonnage required yet another industrial process than the one that produced the plate itself. That process, known as rigging, involves the application of the laws of mechanics, usually with the aid of machinery, “to put [material] in condition or position for use” (Webster’s). Beginning with Strike, Serra’s work would require the professional labor of others, not only for the manufacture of the sculpture’s material elements but also to “make” the sculpture, that is, to put it in condition or position for use, to constitute the material as sculpture. It is this exclusive reliance on the industrial labor force (a force signaled with a very particular resonance in the sculpture’s name) that distinguishes Serra’s production after the early 1970s as public in scope, not only because the scale of the work had dramatically increased, but because the private domain of the artist’s studio could no longer be the site of production. The place where the sculpture would stand would be the place where it was made, and its making would be the work of others. Characterizations of Serra’s work as macho, overbearing, aggressive, oppressive, seek to return the artist to the studio, to reconstitute him as the work’s sole creator, and thereby to deny the role of industrial processes in his sculpture. While any large-scale sculpture requires such processes, while even the manufacture of paint and canvas require them, the labor that has been expended in them is nowhere to be discerned in the finished product. That labor has been mystified by the artist’s own “artistic” labor, transformed by the artist’s magic into a luxury commodity. Serra not only refuses to perform the mystical operations of art but also insists upon confronting the art audience with materials that otherwise never appear in their raw state. For Serra’s materials, unlike those of the minimalist sculptors, are materials used only for the means of production. They normally appear to us transformed into finished products, or, more rarely, into the luxury goods that are works of art.9 This conflict between the product of heavy industry, unavailable for luxury consumption, and the sites of its exhibition, the commercial gallery and museum, intensified as Serra developed the implications of Strike toward the total negation of the normal functions of gallery spaces. Rather than subserviently taking their cues from the formal conditions of room spaces, as site-specific works increasingly tied to purely aesthetic ideas began to do, Serra’s sculptures worked not “for and toward” but against those spaces. The enormous steel-plate walls of Strike, Circuit

(1972), and Twins: To Tony and Mary Edna (1972) took on new dimensions with Slice (1980), Waxing Arcs (1980), Marilyn Monroe—Greta Garbo (1981) and Wall to Wall (1983). These dimensions were also assumed in the horizontal steel-plate works Delineator (1974–1975) and Elevator (1980), and the forged-steel block pieces Span (1977) and Step (1982). Testing and straining against the outer limits of structural, spatial, visual, and circulatory capacity, these works pointed to another sort of specificity of the site of art, its specific historical origins in the bourgeois interior. For if the historical form of the modern art work was conceived for its function in adorning that private interior space, if the museum goer could always imagine the painting by Picasso or the sculpture by Giacometti transposed back inside the private dwelling, it was hardly so comfortable a thought to imagine a steel wall slicing through one’s living room. “Inside private dwelling spaces” would no longer be congenial sites for Serra’s sculpture, and thus another of art’s private domains was defeated by Serra’s use of heavy industrial materials and their mode of deployment. At the same time, art’s institutional exhibition spaces, surrogates of the private domicile, were revealed as determining, constraining, drastically limiting art’s possibilities. By the time Serra installed these later works in commercial galleries and museums, he had already transferred much of his activity out-ofdoors into the landscape and cityscape. The sheer implausibility of the indoor works, shoehorned as they are into clean white rooms, imposes the terms of a truly public sculptural experience within the confines of the usually private site. In effect, Serra reversed the direction generally taken by sculpture as it ventures into public space, the direction concisely spelled out in one critic’s statement of resignation: “All we can ever do is put private art in public places.”10 Unwilling, as we shall see, to accept this calcified idea of private versus public, Serra insists rather upon bringing the lessons learned on the street, as it were, back into the gallery. In the process, the gallery goer (Marilyn Monroe—Greta Garbo is subtitled “A Sculpture for Gallery Goers”) is made excruciatingly aware of the gallery’s limitations, of the stranglehold it exerts on the experience of art. By turning the tables on the gallery, holding the gallery hostage to sculpture, Serra defies the gallery’s hegemony, declares it a site of struggle. That the terms of this struggle hinge in part upon questions of the private versus the public site of art is demonstrated by Slice, installed in the Leo Castelli Gallery on Greene Street, New York, in 1980. A continuous curve of steel plates, ten feet high and over 124 feet long, the sculpture sliced through the gallery’s deep space and lodged itself into the two corners of one of the


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Slice, 1980 Weatherproof steel 10’ x 124’6” x 11⁄2” Installed: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Collection: the artist

long walls. The room was thereby divided into two noncommunicating areas, an area on the convex side of the curve, which we may designate as public, and a concave interior “private” area. Entering the gallery from the street, the gallery goer followed the curve from an expansive open space through the compression where the curve closed in closer to the long wall and then opened out again into the gallery’s back wall. The sensation was that of being on the outside, cut off from the real function of the gallery, unable to see its operations, its office, its personnel. Leaving the gallery and reentering through the door off the lobby, the gallery goer was now “inside,” confined in the concavity of the curve, privy to the gallery’s commercial dealings. In thus experiencing the two sides of Slice as extraordinarily different spatial sensations, neither imaginable from the other, one also experienced the always present and visible but never truly

apparent relations between the gallery as a space of viewing and as a space of commerce. In installing a work that could not partake of the commercial possibilities of commodity circulation, Serra was nevertheless able to make that condition of the gallery a part of the work’s experience, if only in abstract, sensory terms. But possibilities of disrupting the power of galleries to determine the experience of art are exceedingly limited, dependent as they are upon the willingness of the contested institution. This is also true, of course, for museums, although the latter might claim greater neutrality with respect to all art practices, even those that question the privatization of culture as a form of property. The museum, however, in the benevolence of this neutrality, simply substitutes an ideologically constituted concept of private expression for the gallery’s commercial concept of private commodities. For the museum as an institution is constituted to produce and maintain a reified history of art based on a chain of masters, each offering his private vision of the world. Although his work does not participate in this myth, Serra is aware that within the museum it will be seen that way in any case:


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In all my work the construction process is revealed. Material, formal, contextual decisions are self-evident. The fact that the technological process is revealed depersonalizes and demythologizes the idealization of the sculptor’s craft. The work does not enter into the fictitious realm of the “master.” . . . My works do not signify any esoteric selfreferentiality. Their construction leads you into their structure and does not refer to the artist’s persona. However, as soon as you put a work into a museum, its label points first to the author. The visitor is asked to recognize “the hand.” Whose work is it? The institution of the museum invariably creates self-referentiality, even where it’s not implied. The question, how the work functions, is not asked. Any kind of disjunction the work might intend is eclipsed. The problem of self-referentiality does not exist once the work enters the public domain. How the work alters a given site is the issue, not the persona of the author. Once the works are erected in a public space, they become other people’s concerns.11 When Serra first moved out of the institutions of art, he moved very far indeed. It was 1970. Robert Smithson had built the Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake in Utah; Michael Heizer had carved Double Negative into the Virginia River Mesa of Nevada; Serra himself was planning Shift, the large outdoor work in King City, Canada. For all the excitement generated by the development of earthworks, however, Serra found such isolated sites unsatisfactory. An urban artist working with industrial materials, he discovered that the vast and inevitably mythologized American landscape was not his concern, nor were the pathos and mock heroism of working in isolation from an audience. “No,” he said, “I would rather be more vulnerable and deal with the reality of my living situation.”12 Serra negotiated with New York City officials for a site in the city, and eventually they granted him a permit to construct a work in an abandoned dead-end street in the Bronx. There, in 1970, Serra built To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, a circle of steel angle, twenty-six feet in diameter, embedded in the surface of the street. Half the circle’s circumference was a thin line, one inch wide; the other half, the angle’s flange, eight inches wide. From a distance, at street level, the work was invisible; only when the viewer came directly upon it did the work materialize. Standing within its circumference, the viewer could reconstruct its sculptural bulk, half buried under grade. There was, however, a second approach, also from a distance, from which the work was

visible in a different way. The dead-end street gave onto stairways leading up to an adjoining street at a higher level; from there the street below appeared as a “canvas” upon which the steel circle was “drawn.” This reading of figure against ground, rather than reconstructing material bulk in the ground, worried Serra, seeming to him once again to evoke the pictorialism into which sculpture always tended to lapse, a pictorialism he wished to defeat with the sheer materiality and duration of experience of his work. Moreover, this deceptive pictorialism coincided with another way of reading the sculpture that Serra did not foresee and that came to represent for him a fundamental deception against which he would position his work. That deception was the image of the work as against the actual experience of it. To Encircle’s site was, as Serra described it, “sinister, used by the local criminals to torch cars they’d stolen.”13 Clearly those “local criminals” were not interested in looking at sculpture—pictorial or not—and it was Serra’s misconception that anyone from the art world was interested enough in sculpture to venture into that “sinister” outpost in the Bronx. The work existed, then, in precisely the form in which earthworks exist for most people—as documents, photographs. They are transferred back into the institutional discourses of art through reproduction, one of the most powerful means through which art has been abstracted from its contexts throughout the modern era. For Serra, the whole point of sculpture is to defeat this surrogate consumption of art, indeed to defeat consumption altogether and to replace it with the experience of art in its material reality: If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you’re passing on only a residue of your concerns. You’re denying the temporal experience of the work. You’re not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you’re denying the real content of the work. At least with most sculpture, the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception. But it could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings—through photographs. Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading. I’m interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.14


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To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, 1970 Steel 26’ diameter, 8” rim Installed: 138th Street and Webster Avenue, the Bronx, New York Collection: St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Serra’s attempts to enforce the difference between an art for consumption and a sculpture to be experienced in the place where it resides would, however, embroil him in constant controversy. The first work Serra proposed for a truly public location was never allowed to occupy the site for which it was intended. After winning a competition in 1971 for a sculpture for the Wesleyan University campus in Middletown, Connecticut, Serra’s Sight Point was ultimately rejected by the university’s architect as “too large and too close to the campus’s historical building.”15 It was, of course, just this size and proximity that Serra wanted. Sight Point is one of a number of large-scale works that employ the principles developed in the early “prop” pieces, principles of construction that rely on the force of gravity. But at their greatly increased scale and in their particular public settings, these works no longer use those principles merely to oppose the formal relationships obtaining in modernist sculpture; now they come into conflict with another form of construction, that of the architecture of their surroundings. Rather than playing the subsidiary role of adornment, focus, or enhancement of their nearby buildings, they attempt to engage the passerby in a new and critical reading of the sculptures’ environment. By revealing the processes of their construction only in the active experience of sequential viewing, Serra’s sculptures implicitly condemn architecture’s tendency to reduce to an easily legible image, collapsed into, precisely, a facade. It is that reduction to facade, the pictorial product of the architects’ drawing board, site of the architect’s expressive mastery, that, presumably, the Wesleyan University architect wanted to protect for the campus’s “historical building.”16 When asked what Sight Point (1971–1975) lost by being built in the back court of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam instead of its intended location, Serra replied simply: “What happened with Sight Point was that it lost all relationship to a pattern of circulation, which was a major determinant for its original location at Wesleyan.”17 Serra recognized that even public art was generally granted only the function of aesthetic enhancement in the seclusion of museumlike sites, removed from normal circulation patterns and placed, as it were, on ideological pedestals: Usually you’re offered places which have specific ideological connotations, from parks to corporate and public buildings and their extensions such as lawns and plazas. It’s difficult to subvert those contexts. That’s why you have so many corporate baubles on Sixth Avenue [New York], so much bad plaza art that smacks of IBM, signifying its


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cultural awareness. . . . But there is no neutral site. Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones. It’s a matter of degree. There is one condition that I want, which is a density of traffic flow.18 It was just such a density of traffic flow that Serra found for Terminal (1977), erected in the very center of the German city of Bochum at the hub of commuter traffic. “The streetcars miss it by a foot and a half.”19 Terminal is a prop construction of four identical trapezoidal plates of Cor-Ten steel, forty-one feet high. The plates were manufactured at the Thyssen steelworks in the nearby town of Hattingen, one of a number of such towns in the Ruhr industrial district of which Bochum is one of the major cities. Although Terminal was initially built in Kassel for Documenta 6, Serra meant the work for its present site, in part because he wanted it located in the center of the steel-producing district where its plates were manufactured.20 It is this social specificity of its site, however, that would cause a furor over Terminal. At first the work aroused a response not unusual for Serra’s public sculpture; graffiti identifying it as a toilet or warning of rats, letters to the editors of local newspapers deploring the huge expenditure of city funds, declaring the work ugly and inappropriate. As the controversy widened, and as city council elections neared, the Christian Democratic party (CDU) seized upon it as a focus for its political campaign against the firmly entrenched Social Democrats, who had voted to purchase the work for the city. Vying for the votes of steelworkers, who constitute a large block of the region’s electorate, the CDU printed campaign posters showing a photograph of Terminal montaged against one of a steel mill. The slogan: “It cannot always be like this—CDU for Bochum.” The Christian Democrats’ objections to Terminal are extremely revealing of the issues raised in Serra’s public sculptures, especially insofar as his abstract vocabulary intersects with explicit social and material conditions. It is therefore worth quoting at length from the press release issued by the CDU stating its position on Terminal: The supporters of the sculpture refer to its great symbolic value for the Ruhr district generally and for Bochum in particular as the home of coal and steel. We believe the sculpture lacks important qualities that would enable it to function as a symbol. Steel is a special material whose production demands great craftsmanship, professional and technical know-how. The material has virtually unlimited possibilities for the differentiated, even subtle treatment of both the smallest

and the largest objects, both the simplest and the most artistically expressive forms. We do not believe this sculpture expresses any of these things since it looks like a clumsy, undifferentiated, half-finished “ingot.” No steelworker can point to it positively, with pride. Steel signifies boldness and elegance in the most varied constructions; it does not signify monstrous monumentality. This sculpture is frightening because of its awkward massiveness, untempered by any other attributes. Steel is also a material that, to a great degree, suggests resilience, durability, and resistance to rust. This is especially true of the high-quality steel produced in Bochum. This sculpture, made only of simple steel, is already rusting and disgusting in appearance. Steel is a high-quality material developed from iron and so is not a true raw material. Yet this sculpture gives the impression of raw material . . . extracted from the earth and given no special treatment. If, as its supporters claim, the sculpture is to symbolize coal and steel, it must provide the possibility of positive identification for those concerned, that is, for the citizens of this area, especially the steelworkers. We believe that all of the characteristics mentioned provide no positive challenge and identification. We fear the opposite will occur, that rejection and scorn will not only result initially but will intensify over time. That would be a burden not only for this sculpture but for all self-contained modern art works. Such cannot be the goal of a responsible cultural policy.21 The hypocrisy of the Christian Democrats’ claim to represent the steelworkers’ interests, at a time when the German working class was suffering from the increasingly brutal policies of that party, need hardly be pointed out, and the steelworkers were undeceived in this regard: the Social Democrats retained power in the region.22 What is most important here, however, is the nature of the demand made on public art to provide the workers with symbols to which they can point with pride, with which they can positively identify. Hidden in this demand is the requirement that the artist symbolically reconcile the steelworkers to the brutal working conditions to which they are subjected. Steel, the material that the citizens of the Ruhr district work with daily, is to be used by the artist only to symbolize boldness and elegance, resilience and durability, the unlimited possibilities for subtle treatment and expressive form. It is, in other words, to be disguised, made unrecognizable to those who have produced it. Serra’s work flatly refuses this implicitly authoritarian symbolism, which would Redefining Site Specificity

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convert steel from raw material—although processed, steel is a raw material in the capitalist economic structure23—to a signifier of invincibility. Instead Serra presents the steelworker with the very product of his alienated labor, untransformed into any symbol at all. If the worker is then repelled, heaps scorn on Terminal, it is because he is already alienated from the material; for although he produced those steel plates, or materials like them, he never owned them; the steelworker has no reason whatsoever to take pride in or identify with any steel product. In asking the artist to give the workers a positive symbol, the CDU is really asking the artist to provide a symbolic form of consumption; for the CDU does not, in any case, wish to think of the worker as a worker, but rather as a consumer.24 The Bochum CDU’s goal of a “responsible cultural policy” that would not be a burden for “self-contained modern artworks” parallels official public art policies in the United States that have emerged and expanded over the past twenty years. Taking for granted that art is private self-expression, these policies are concerned with the various possibilities of transferring such an art into the public realm without offending public expectations. In an essay tellingly entitled “Personal Sensibilities in Public Places,” John Beardsley, who worked for the Art in Public Places Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and was commissioned to write a book about it, explains how the artists’ private concerns can be made palatable for the public: An artwork can become significant to its public through the incorporation of content relevant to the local audience, or by the assumption of an identifiable function. Assimilation can also be encouraged through a work’s role in a larger civic improvement program. In the first case, recognizable content or function provides a means by which the public can become engaged with the work, though its style or form might be unfamiliar to them. In the latter, the work’s identity as art is subsumed by a more general public purpose, helping to assure its validity. In both cases, the personal sensibilities of the artist are presented in ways that encourage widespread public empathy.25 One of Beardsley’s prime examples of the empathy solicited through recognizable content involves a public much like that for Terminal: [George] Segal was awarded his commission by the Youngstown Area Arts Council. He visited the city and toured its steel mills, finding the


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open hearth furnaces “staggeringly impressive.” He decided to make steelworkers at an open hearth the subject of his sculpture, and used as models Wayman Paramore and Peter Kolby, two men selected by the steelworkers union from its membership. His commission coincided with a severe economic crisis in Youngstown during which a series of mill shutdowns eventually idled some 10,000 workers. Yet completion of the sculpture became a matter of civic pride. Numerous local businesses and foundations gave money; one of the steel companies donated an unused furnace. Labor unions assisted in fabricating and installing the work. One cannot escape the conclusion that the subject matter was largely responsible for this outpouring of public support. The people of Youngstown sought a monument to their principal industry, even as it collapsed around them. Segal’s Steelmakers is a tribute to their tenacity.26 It is a cynical arts policy indeed that would condone, much less laud, a monument mythologizing work in steel mills when the real historical condition of the steelworkers is that of being forced into the industrial reserve army. Just whose tenacity does this work really pay tribute to? To the steelworkers hopelessly trying to maintain their dignity in the face of joblessness? Or to the society—including the business community, steel companies, and labor unions whose largess contributed to the work—that will go to any length to ensure that those steelworkers will never recognize the nature of the economic forces arrayed against them? Perhaps the CDU in Bochum would find Segal’s Steelmakers insufficient as a symbol of the boldness and elegance of steel—the work is, after all, cast bronze—but it can certainly be said to fulfill their essential demand: that the sculpture reconcile the workers with their brutal conditions by giving them something with which they can positively identify. The fact that their identification is manipulated, that the workers’ pride is only intended to make their slavery more tolerable, is precisely what such a cultural policy is concerted toward.27 Needless to say, such a cultural policy, whether that of the Right in Germany or of the liberal arts establishment in the United States, finds the public sculpture of Richard Serra considerably more problematic. Conservatives in this country, who argue against all federal funding for culture, oppose Serra’s work categorically, confident that when all public commissions are once again exclusively paid for by the private sector, there will be no more room for such “malignant objects” (Serra’s Tilted Arc is illus-

trated in an article of that title).28 The cultural bureaucrats want, however, to appear more tolerant, hoping that “Serra’s sculpture may eventually win a greater measure of acceptance within its community.”29 That a difficult work of art requires time to ingratiate itself with its public was a standard line of defense of Serra’s Tilted Arc during the public hearing of March 1985. Historical precedents of public outrage meeting now-canonical works of modern art became something of a leitmotif. But this deferral to the judgment of history was, in fact, a repudiation of history, a denial of the actual historical moment in which Tilted Arc confronted its public in all its specificity, as well as a denial of Serra’s intransigent rejection of the universal nature of the work of art. For to say that Tilted Arc would withstand the test of time is to reclaim for it an idealist position. The genuine importance of Tilted Arc can best be understood through an analysis of the crisis that it precipitated within established cultural policy. Tilted Arc was built on a site that is public in a very particular sense. It inhabited a plaza flanked by a government office building housing federal bureaucracies and by the United States Court of International Trade. The plaza adjoins Foley Square, the location of New York City’s federal and state courthouses. Tilted Arc was thus situated in the very center of the mechanisms of state power. The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and its plaza are nightmares of urban development, official, anonymous, overscaled, inhuman. The plaza is a bleak, empty area, whose sole function is to shuttle human traffic in and out of the buildings. Located at one corner of the plaza is a fountain that cannot be used, since the wind-tunnel effect of the huge office bloc would drench the entire plaza with water. Serra’s Tilted Arc, a twelve-foot-high steel-plate wall, 120 feet long and tilted slightly toward the office building and the trade courthouses, swept across the center of the plaza, dividing it into two distinct areas. Employing material and form that contrasted radically with both the vulgarized International Style architecture of the federal structures and the Beaux-Arts design of the old Foley Square courthouses, the sculpture imposed a construction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architecture. It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experience that was counterposed against the bland efficiency established by the plaza’s architects. Although Tilted Arc did not disrupt normal traffic patterns—the shortest routes to the streets from the buildings were left clear—it did implant itself within the public’s field of vision. Soliciting, even commanding attention, the sculpture asked the office workers and


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other pedestrians to leave their usual hurried course and follow a different route, gauging the curving planes, volumes, and sight lines that marked this place as the place of sculpture. In reorienting the use of Federal Plaza from a place of traffic control to one of sculpture, Serra once again used sculpture to hold its site hostage, to insist upon the necessity for art to fulfill its own functions rather than those relegated to it by its governing institutions and discourses. For this reason, Tilted Arc was considered an aggressive and egotistical work, with which Serra placed his own aesthetic assumptions above the needs and desires of the people who had to live with his work. But insofar as our society is fundamentally constructed upon the principle of egotism, the needs of each individual coming into conflict with those of all other individuals, Serra’s work did nothing other than present us with the truth of our social condition. The politics of consensus that ensures the smooth functioning of our society is dependent upon the shared belief that all individuals are unique but can exist in harmony with one another by assenting to the benign regulation of the state. The real function of the state, however, is not the defense of the citizen in his or her true individuality, but the defense of private property—the defense, that is, precisely of the conflict between individuals.30 Within this politics of consensus, the artist is expected to play a leading role, offering a unique “private sensibility” in a manner properly universalized so as to ensure feelings of harmony. The reason Serra is accused of egotism, when other artists who put their “private sensibilities in public places” are not, is that his work cannot be seen to reflect his private sensibility in the first place. And, once again, when the work of art refuses to play the prescribed role of falsely reconciling contradictions, it becomes the object of scorn. A public that has been socialized to accept the atomization of individuals and the false dichotomy of private and public spheres of existence cannot bear to be confronted with the reality of its situation. And when the work of public art rejects the terms of consensus politics within the very purview of the state apparatus, the reaction is bound to be censorial. Not surprisingly, the coercive power of the state, disguised as democratic procedure, was soon brought to bear on Tilted Arc. At the show trial staged to justify the work’s removal, the most vociferous opposition to the work came not from the public at large but from representatives of the state, from judges of the courts and heads of federal bureaucracies whose offices are in the Federal Building.31 From the moment Tilted Arc was installed on Federal Plaza in 1981, Chief Judge Edward D. Re of the United States Court of International Trade began the campaign to have it removed.32 Preying upon the people’s

impotence in controlling their degraded social environment in a city where that control is granted only to property owners, Judge Re held out the deceptive promise of pleasant social activities, which he claimed could not take place on the plaza unless the steel wall was removed. With accusations that an elitist art world had foisted its experiments upon them, many office workers signed petitions for Tilted Arc’s removal. But the judge and his fellow civil servants really had a very different view of the public from the beneficent one that saw people gathering to listen to music on their lunch breaks. On the one hand, the public consisted for them of competitive individuals who could be manipulated to fight it out among themselves over the crumbs of social activity dishonestly offered to them. On the other hand, they were the frightening individuals lurking on the other side of the wall, lying in wait for the judge as he left the protection of his chambers and ventured out into the public realm. In one of the many letters written to the GSA complaining of the sculpture, Judge Re made his fears explicit: “By no means of minor importance is the loss of efficient security surveillance. The placement of this wall across the plaza obscures the view of security personnel, who have no way of knowing what is taking place on the other side of the wall.”33 Judge Re’s attitude toward the people was further elaborated during the GSA hearing by one of those security personnel. Her testimony is worth excerpting at some length, since it gives a clear and chilling sense of the state’s current regard for its citizens: My main purpose here is to present you the aspects, from the security angle, which affect us in the execution of our duties here. The Arc is what I consider to be a security hazard or a disadvantage. My main contention is that it presents a blast wall effect. . . . It’s 120 feet long, 12 feet high, and it’s angled in a direction towards both federal buildings, 1 Federal Plaza and 26 Federal Plaza. The front curvature of the design is comparable to devices which are used by bomb experts to vent explosive forces. . . . The purpose of these . . . bomb devices is to vent explosions upward. This one could vent an explosion both upward and in an angle toward both buildings. . . . Most of the time the wall was [sic] closer to the building. It would, of course, take a larger bomb than [those] which have been previously used to destroy enough for their purposes; but it is possible, and lately we are expecting the worst in the federal sector. . . . Most people express their opinions against us in either violent ways or with graffiti and those types of ways. . . . The wall—pardon, Tilted Redefining Site Specificity

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Destruction of Tilted Arc, Federal Plaza, New York 15 March 1989 Photo: Jennifer Kotter

Arc—is used more for graffiti purposes than any of the other walls. . . . Most of the graffiti is done on the other side where we cannot view it. Loitering for illegal purposes is another problem we experience, and we do have the problem with drug dealings which we cannot see from our side of the building. We, by the way, only concern ourselves with the federal side of the building.34 If a public sculpture can have projected upon it such an explicit statement of the contempt in which the public is held by the state, it has served a historical function of great consequence. We now have written into the public record, for anyone who wishes to read it, the fact that the “federal sector” expects only the worst from us, that we are all considered potential loiterers, graffiti scribblers, drug dealers, terrorists. When Tilted Arc is converted, in the paranoid vision of a state security guard, into a “blast wall,” when the radical aesthetics of site-specific sculpture are reinterpreted as the site of political action, public sculpture can be credited with a new level of achievement. That achievement is the redefinition of the site of the work of art as the site of political struggle. Determined to “be vulnerable and deal with the reality of his living situation,” Richard Serra

has found himself again and again confronted with the contradictions of that reality. Unwilling to cover up those contradictions, Serra runs the risk of uncovering the true specificity of the site, which is always a political specificity. Notes

1. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, no. 8 (1965), p. 74. 2. Serra’s actual assertion on this occasion was: “To remove Tilted Arc, therefore, is to destroy it.” See Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, eds., The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991), p. 67. Held 6–8 March 1985, at the Ceremonial Courtroom, International Court of Trade, One Federal Plaza, New York, the hearing on the removal of Tilted Arc took place before a panel consisting of William J. Diamond, Regional Administrator, General Services Administration; Gerald Turetsky, Acting Deputy Regional Administrator, GSA; Paul Chistolini, Public Building Services, GSA; and two outside panelists, Thomas Lewin of the law firm Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett, and Michael Findlay of the auction house of Christie, Manson, and Woods. On 10 April 1985, the panel in a four-to-one vote recommended relocation of Tilted Arc. This recommendation was adopted by Dwight A. Ink, Acting Director of the United States General Services Administration, Washington, D.C., and on 31 May 1985, he announced his decision to relocate the sculpture. 3. Judd, “Specific Objects,” p. 82. 4. Quoted in Carl Andre, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” by Phyllis Tuchman, Artforum 7, no. 10 (June 1970), p. 55. 5. Ibid. 6. Walter Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” trans. Kingsley Shorter, in One-Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 360. 7. Daniel Buren, “Peut-il enseigner l’art?” Galerie des Arts, Paris, September 1968. Translated from the French by Richard Miller. 8. There have been several attempts to remove Serra’s work from public sites. Soon after the decision to remove Tilted Arc was announced, St. Louis City Alderman Timothy Dee introduced a bill to the Board of Alderman that would, if passed, allow city voters to decide whether Twain (1974–1982), a work in downtown St. Louis, should be removed. According to The Riverfront Times (St. Louis), 6–10 September 1985, p. 6A, Dee said: “The problem is the real gap between regular people—my constituents and the overwhelming majority—and the elitist art community, who decide to do something because they’ve all invested in certain artists” (italics added). The most thoroughly documented case is that of the Christian Democratic party of Bochum, West Germany, against Terminal (1977). For this case, see Terminal von Richard Serra: Eine Dokumentation in 7 Kapiteln (Bochum: Museum Bochum, 1980), and my discussion below. In addition, a number of major commissions awarded to Serra have never been built, owing to opposition to the work from architects and city officials. These include works for the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation in Washington, D.C., the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and works for outdoor sites in Madrid; Marl, West Germany; and Peoria, Illinois. Sight Point (1971–1975), commissioned for Wesleyan University campus, was not built there. For a discussion of the difficulties Serra has faced in building his work in public, see Richard Serra and Douglas


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Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture: An Interview,” in Richard Serra: Interviews, Etc. 1970–1980 (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1980), pp. 163–187. 9. In volume II of Capital, Karl Marx divides the total mass of commodities into a twodepartment system for the purposes of explaining reproduction. Department I consists of the means of production: raw materials, machinery, building, etc.; Department II consists of consumer goods. Later Marxists have added to this scheme Department III to designate those goods that do not play a role in the reproduction of the working class since they are intended for consumption only by the capitalist classes themselves. Department III includes luxury goods, art, and weapons. For a discussion of this relation between art and arms, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Verso, 1978), especially chapter 9, “The Permanent Arms Economy and Late Capitalism.” 10. Amy Goldin, “The Esthetic Ghetto: Some Thoughts about Public Art,” Art in America 62, no. 3 (May-June 1974), p. 32. 11. Richard Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road,” in Richard Serra: Recent Sculpture in Europe 1977–1985 (Bochum: Galerie m, 1985), p. 12. 12. Serra and Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture,” p. 170. 13. Ibid., p. 168. 14. Ibid., p. 170 15. Ibid., p. 175. 16. On this subject, see Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” in this volume; see also Richard Serra and Peter Eisenman, “Interview,” Skyline, April 1983, pp. 14–17. 17. Serra and Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture,” p. 175. 18. Ibid., pp. 166, 168. 19. See Annette Michelson’s interview with Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf in this volume, p. 45. 20. In the Michelson interview, Serra discusses at length his experience working in steel mills. Steelmill/Stahlwerk (1970), the film he made with Weyergraf was shot in the mill where the plates of Terminal were fabricated, although the shooting took place during the forging of Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin (1977). 21. Press release, CDU representatives to the Bochum City Council, reproduced in Terminal von Richard Serra, pp. 35–38. 22. From 1982, when the CDU came to power in West Germany, to 1986, when his essay was written, the unemployment rate rose to a postwar record: as of 1985, there were 2.2 million registered unemployed and an estimated 1.3 million unregistered job seekers. Hardest hit were areas such as the Ruhr district, where heavy industries are located. In October 1985, the Federation of German Labor Unions staged a week-long protest against the CDU’s economic policies to coincide with the heated debates on the issue in the Bundestag. In these debates, the full range of the opposition attacked the CDU for contributing to the disintegration of social conditions in Germany. 23. In claiming that steel is not a raw material because it is produced from iron, the CDU attempts to mystify, through an appeal to a natural-versus-man-made distinction, the place of steel within capitalist production. Steel is, of course, a product of Department I, used for producing the means of production; see note 9. 24. “To each capitalist, the total mass of all workers, with the exception of his own workers, appear not as workers but as consumers, possessors of exchange values (wages), money,

which they exchange for his commodity.” Karl Marx, Gundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 419. In the postwar period in Germany, attempts to reconcile the working class to its social conditions has operated precisely on the symbolic level, including language itself. Thus the words Arbeiter (worker) and Arbeitklasse (working class) are no longer used in official discussion, as Germany is now said to be a classless society. In this society, there are only Arbeitnehmer (one who takes work, employee) and Arbeitgeber (one who gives work, employer). The irony of this linguistic reversal is not lost on the workers themselves, who, for their part, know perfectly well that it is the worker who is the giver of work (Arbeitgeber) and the employer who is the taker of work (Arbeitnehmer). In such a climate it comes as no surprise that the rightwing party would see art as another possible form of mystification of social conditions. 25. John Beardsley, “Personal Sensibilities in Public Places,” Artforum 19, no. 10 (June 1981), p. 44. 26. Ibid. 27. Louis Althusser has specified the role of what he calls Ideological State Apparatuses, among which he includes culture, as “the reproduction of the conditions of production.” In order for this reproduction to take place, what must be assured is the workers’ “subjection to the ruling ideology.” Thus one of the functions of the cultural object confronting workers would be that of teaching them how to bear their subjugation. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–186. 28. Douglas Stalker and Clark Glymour, “The Malignant Object: Thoughts on Public Sculpture,” Public Interest, no. 66 (Winter 1982), pp. 3–21. For other neoconservative attacks on public spending for art, see Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Samuel Lipman, “Cultural Policy: Whither America, Whither Government?,” New Criterion 3, no. 3 (November 1984), pp. 7–15. 29. Beardsley, “Personal Sensibilities,” p. 45. 30. On this subject, the central texts are the early writings of Karl Marx on the state and civil society; see especially “On the ‘Jewish Question,’” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 211–241. See also the reinterpretation of the relation between state and civil society and the importance for it of consensus in the work of Antonio Gramsci. 31. To anyone who followed the case closely, the public hearing on Tilted Arc was a mockery. The hearing was presided over, and the four other panelists were selected by, William J. Diamond, Regional Administrator of the General Services Administration, who had publicly asked for the removal of Tilted Arc and circulated petitions and solicited testimonies favoring its removal. And although two-thirds of the people testifying at the hearing favored retaining Tilted Arc on Federal Plaza, Diamond’s panel nevertheless recommended removal to the GSA. For a complete account of the Tilted Arc case, including Serra’s unsuccessful attempts to reverse the GSA decision in court, see The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. 32. See The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, pp. 26–29. 33. Ibid., p. 28. 34. Ibid., p. 117.


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Serpentine, 1996 Weatherproof steel Four conical sections, each 13’2” x 52’ x 2” Length of sculpture: 104’ Collection: Frances and John Bowes, Sonoma, California Photo: Dirk Reinartz

The Un/making of Sculpture Hal Foster

Just as no one perspective can comprehend a given sculpture by Richard Serra, so no one argument can account for his art in general: as befits a practice driven by research, its methods are consistent but its discoveries diverse. So rather than attempt an inclusive reading, I offer a series of notes, less a picturesque stroll through the work than an obsessive circling around its central concept: the making and unmaking of sculpture. What does making sculpture mean to you right now?, Liza Béar asked Serra in 1976. After a long pause, in which he looked back over ten years of mature work, Serra replied: “It means a life-time involvement, that’s what it means. It means to follow the direction of the work I opened up early on for myself and try to make the most abstract moves within that. . . . To work out of my own work, and to build whatever’s necessary so that the work remains open and vital. . . .”1 Much in this characteristically precise statement holds true twentyplus years later. Opened up suggests that the work is carved out of the art of significant precedents (not only sculptors like Constantin Brancusi and painters like Jackson Pollock, but, as we will see, particular architects and engineers as well), which it endeavors both to displace, in order to make a space of its own, and to carry forward through this very carving out. The most abstract moves suggest that this carrying forward brooks no return to the figurative or even the imagistic: pictorial conventions of figureground and Gestalt readings of images in general remain anathema to Serra. To work out of my own work suggests that the work, once opened up, was driven by its own language (an analogy that Serra often uses) more

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than by prior models. But lest this language become involuted, the work must also remain open and vital through building, through the exigencies of materials, projects, sites. Thus the statement implies three dynamics that have governed the work since its opening up, three forces of which it is the fulcrum: engagement with particular precedents; elaboration, through pertinent materials, of an intrinsic language; and encounter with specific sites. In 1986, ten years after this question was first asked, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective, the title of which, “Richard Serra: Sculpture,” was laconic, as if the answer were obvious. But how are we to read the relation represented by the colon? In a title like “Piet Mondrian: Painting,” the colon reads almost as an equation, a relation of immanent analysis: Mondrian refined painting to its essential lines and primary colors in such a way as to reintegrate them in a new totality of harmonious parts that would render painting both autonomous and emblematic of an ideal society of just relations. But this relation was supported by a medium-specific paradigm of modernist art that does not hold for Serra—or for advanced art over the last thirty years. He still asks the ur-modernist question “What is the medium?,” but his responses cannot deliver an ontology of sculpture in modernist fashion. This is not to say that Serra evades the medium, much less that he considers it voided; on the contrary, he is singularly committed to its concept. But this concept has changed, in part through the force of his example.2 Today “sculpture” is not given beforehand but must be forever proposed, tested, reworked, and proposed again. This is a modus operandi of his work, too—indeed, of his significant peers as well. What does making sculpture mean to you right now?

In 1965 Donald Judd could state flatly that “the specific objects” of minimalism were “neither painting nor sculpture.”3 On the one hand sculpture had contracted to the space between an object and a monument (the restrictive coordinates given by Tony Smith for his emblematic cube Die of 1962); on the other hand it had expanded to the point where great expanses could be contemplated as sculpture, or at least as its site (the notorious example, offered by Smith again, was the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike).4 In short, on the one hand, minimalism diminished sculpture to almost nothing; on the other hand, it pointed toward a situational practice with few apparent limits. What does making sculpture mean to you right now?

This opening was abyssal to many artists who became lost in its arbitrary spaces. But for the more astute the stake of minimalism was more precise: a partial shift in focus from object to subject, from ontological questions (of the essence of a medium) to phenomenological conditions (of a particular body in a particular space as the ground of art). This shift inaugurated by minimalism was fundamental for Serra too; indeed he has pushed it further than anyone else within sculpture. Yet he was also critical of minimalism, not only of its closed system of construction but of its odd preoccupation with painting. Although the minimalist object is often misnamed “sculpture,” it developed primarily out of hard-edge painting (as the early career of Judd alone testifies). For Serra, precisely because its unitary forms and serial orderings sought to defeat pictorial conventions of relational composition, they remained too bound by these concerns. Like his peers, he wanted to defeat this pictoriality, especially as it underwrote Gestalt readings of art, which he saw as idealist totalizations that serve to conceal the construction of the work and to suppress the body of the viewer.5 But Serra wanted to defeat this pictoriality completely, and in sculptural terms. What might this mean? In 1966, when Serra “opened up” his work, it meant that minimalism had obviated sculpture more than exceeded it. This was hardly its doing alone; much conceptual, performance, mixed-media, and installation work would do so as well. So how might one proceed differently, sculpturally, to develop the category deconstructively rather than to declare it void triumphally? As is well known, Serra stressed the very terms suppressed in Gestalt readings of art encouraged by dominant models of modernism—terms like materiality, corporeality, temporality—stressed them beyond the point of minimalism. First, in lieu of a logic of medium-specificity, he substituted a logic of materials submitted to a set of procedures.6 Thus the well-known Verb List of 1967–1968 (“to roll, to crease, to fold . . .”) that issued in several kinds of work: sheets of lead rolled, torn, or otherwise manipulated; molten lead splashed along the base of a wall and peeled back in rows; slabs of steel stacked or propped; and so on.7 These processes transformed the traditional object of art, but the results did not defeat pictoriality, as Serra acknowledged in a self-critique of 1970: “A recent problem with the lateral spread of materials, elements on the floor in the visual field, is the inability of this landscape mode to avoid the arrangement qua figure ground: the pictorial convention.”8 Characteristically, rather than What does making sculpture mean to you right now?

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pull back, he pushed forward, and exacerbated the very term, ground, that seemed problematic. This foregrounding of place was signaled by Carl Andre in the mid-1960s with his arrangements of bricks and plates, and confirmed for Serra in 1970 by encounters with the Spiral Jetty of Robert Smithson, the Double Negative of Michael Heizer and, most importantly, certain Zen gardens in Japan. With “the discrete object [thus] dissolved into the sculptural field,”9 two terms emerged with renewed force for Serra: the body of the viewer (the minimalist fixation on the object had obscured the very shift to the subject that it had otherwise inaugurated) and the time of boldily movement in this field—in short, corporeality and temporality.10 After such signal works as Shift (1971–1972) and Spin Out (For Bob Smithson) (1972–1973), Serra was prepared, in 1973, to describe “the sculptural experience” in terms of a “topology of [a] place” demarcated “through locomotion,” a “dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape.”11 According to this parallactic model, Yve-Alain Bois has argued, sculpture frames and reframes subject and site in tandem, and it guided Serra after his breakthrough of 1970—not only in works set in a landscape to reveal its topology (from Shift to Sea Level [1988–1996]), but also in pieces set in an urban context to reframe its structures (from Sight Point [1974–1975] to Exchange [1996]), as well as in works set in an art space to refocus its parameters (from Strike: To Roberta and Rudy [1970–1971] to Chamber [1988]). Place is fundamental, of course, but, as Rosalind Krauss has argued, site-specificity is not the object here so much as the medium, the medium of “the body-in-destination,” so in this respect the body remains primary.12 Thus emerged a further formulation of sculpture—as a relay between site and subject that (re)defines the topology of a place through the motivation of a viewer. By 1976, then, the work answered as follows. The emphasis on making—on the verb, the sculptural effect, rather than the noun, the categorical essence—is correct. This making foregrounded materials like lead and steel, which are inflected by pertinent procedures into particular structures. This is the first principle of sculpture for Serra, and it might be called constructivist, for it focuses, as did Russian constructivism, on the expressive development of structures out of the effective treatment of materials (which the constructivists called construction and faktura respectively). The second principle for Serra, which might be called phenomenological, is that sculpture exists in primary re-

What does making sculpture mean to you right now?

lation to the body, not as its representation but as its activation, in all its senses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale. The third principle, which might be called situational, is that sculpture engages the particularity of place, not the abstraction of space, which it “redefines” immanently rather than “re-presents” transcendentally.13 Together, then, these principles define sculpture as a structuring of materials in order to motivate a body and to demarcate a place: not a fixed category of autonomous objects but a specific relay between subject and site that frames the one in terms of the other, and transforms both at once. This provisional definition suggests a partial typology of work: landscape markings, urban framings, and gallery interventions. These modes continue; recent examples of each include Afangar (1990), set on an Iceland island, Torque (1992), at a German university, and Sub-tend 60 Degree (1988), in a Dutch museum. Yet Serra has expanded this typology too. On the one hand he returns to past modes of work like the “props” to reconnect with his basic syntax of “pointload, balance, counter-balance and leverage.”14 On the other hand he elaborates current modes like the “arcs” in new ways. Serra first tilted the arcs, then doubled and trebled them, then waved them so as to form a new type, the serpentine “ribbons.” These ribbons can bow in and/or out in such a way as to suggest corridors and/or enclosures; indeed the extraordinary Torqued Ellipses (1997) suggest both passages and envelopings. So, too, as if to counterpoint these spatial manipulations, Serra elaborates other types, such as the “rounds” and “blocks” which, rather than frame space, “obliterate” it through mass.15 This is what it is to develop a sculptural language. Yet a paradox remains: Serra insists that his work is strictly sculptural, while his best critics regard it as a deconstruction of sculpture.16 Yet this paradox might be the point, for with Serra sculpture becomes its deconstruction, its making becomes its unmaking. For sculpture to harden into a thing-category would be for sculpture to become monumental again—for its structure to be fetishized, its viewer frozen, its site forgotten, again. In this light to deconstruct sculpture is to serve its “internal necessity”; to extend sculpture in relation to process, embodiment, and site is to remain within it. This paradox qua sculpture is focused in the problem of site. “The biggest break in the history of sculpture in the twentieth century,” Serra has remarked, “occurred when the pedestal was removed,” which he reads as a shift from the memorial space of the monument to “the behavioral What does making sculpture mean to you right now?


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space of the viewer.”17 Yet as a dialectical event this break opened up another trajectory as well: with its pedestal removed, sculpture was free not only to descend into the materialist world of “behavioral space” but also to ascend into an idealist world beyond any specific site. Consider how Brancusi, the most significant prewar sculptor for Serra and peers, developed this dialectic. With his ambition to convey near-Platonic ideas—for example, the idea of flight in the ascendant arc of Bird in Space (1923)— his work is an epitome of idealist sculpture. At the same time it celebrates sheer material; his bronzes are often polished to the point where they reflect specific contexts as well. Brancusi also articulated this dialectic in the particular terms of the pedestal: some works absorb the base of the sculpture into the body, as it were, with the effect that they become siteless, while other works appear to be nothing but base, nothing but grounded support (e.g., Caryatid [1914]).18 In this way Brancusi was as committed to the idealist space of the studio (he bequeathed his own studio, as his ultimate work, to France) as he was to the specific siting of abstract sculpture (as in his compound in Tirgu Jiu, Romania). Now, as we know, dominant accounts of modernism privileged the idealist side of this dialectic, the hypostasis of sculpture as pure form. In effect Serra and peers developed its materialist side—sculpture plunged into its support and regrounded in its site—as a critical counter, which is one reason why this collective work is a crux between modernist and postmodernist art.19 Perhaps the contradiction between idealist and materialist impulses exists not only in modernist sculpture but in modern society as a whole. Certainly it exists between sculpture and society—between the artisanal, individualistic basis of traditional work on the one hand (plaster, marble, bronze, or wood, modeled, carved, cast, or cut) and the technological, collective basis of industrial production on the other. In industrial society, Benjamin Buchloh has argued, these old paradigms of sculpture, which sought to be eternal, could only become archaic, even atavistic, and they were “definitely abolished [as valid models] by 1913” with the advent of the first readymade of Duchamp and the first construction of Tatlin.20 These new materialist paradigms repositioned sculpture subversively in terms of epistemological inquiry (the readymade) and architectural intervention (the construction), with the effect of “the eventual dissolution of its own discourse as sculpture.”21 For this reason Western art institutions, predicated on the old idealist models, mostly repressed these new materialist paradigms. Nonetheless, the contradiction between artisanal sculpture and industrial society did not disappear; on the contrary, it persisted in the

very practices that sought to resolve this contradiction mythically—to mediate between individual craft and collective industry through various versions of welded sculpture, found objects, and assemblage (Buchloh cites Julio Gonzalez, David Smith, John Chamberlain, and Anthony Caro in particular—figures whom Serra has critiqued to different degrees as well).22 In the 1960s, however, artists such as Judd and Flavin, Andre and Serra both recovered and related the repressed models of the readymade and the construction. And they did so in ways that served not only to deconstruct the idealist presuppositions of most autonomous sculpture but also to demystify the quasi-materialist compromises of most welded sculpture, found objects, and assemblage—“literally to ‘decompose’” these mythical models through industrial materials, processes, and sites.23 Again, Serra and peers also pushed the situational aspect of sculpture after its break with the pedestal to the point where this break, which was only announced in 1913 with the readymade and the construction, became actual by 1970 with new site-specific practices. But in what sense did these practices remain “sculpture”? Serra agrees with Buchloh that the initial project was to demystify modernist models, to defetishize them along constructivist lines. “In all my work,” he wrote in an important text of 1985, “the construction process is revealed. Material, formal, contextual decisions are self-evident. The fact that the technological process is revealed depersonalizes and demythologizes the idealization of the sculptor’s craft.”24 But “sculpture,” even “craft,” remain in this statement. For Buchloh this categorical insistence is to mythify the constructivist demystification of sculpture as sculpture.25 For Serra this insistence is not only logical but necessary—part of a search for a sculptural basis in engineered construction, in the constructivist notion of the tectonic. Of course a basis for sculpture would be sought only if it is felt to be lacking. “The origin of sculpture is lost in the mists of time,” Baudelaire wrote in a famous expression of this lack; “thus it is a Carib art.”26 Here, in a short section of The Salon of 1846 titled “Why Sculpture is Tiresome,” Baudelaire repeats some tiresome complaints about sculpture: that it is too primitive, “much closer to nature” than painting, and too ambiguous, more various than painting because, as an object in the round, “it exhibits too many surfaces at once.”27 These criticisms adhere to the idealism not only of a Hegel, whose hierarchy of the arts positioned sculpture below painting on What does making sculpture mean to you right now?


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account of its relative materiality, but also of a Diderot, whose celebration of the tableau privileged the putative instantaneity of the singular surface of painting over the implicit duration of the “many surfaces” of sculpture. As I have argued, Serra and peers sought to defeat these idealisms once and for all. But what of the provocative remark about “lost origin” and “Carib art”? By “Carib” Baudelaire means that sculpture is primitive, impure, hybrid, fetishistic (he goes on to discuss fetishes in this section of The Salon). Now in his time the fetish was understood as an almost formless object not worthy of the cult worship devoted to it, and in this respect it served as a discursive token of the lowest registers of art and religion alike. Thus the “lost origin” of sculpture: Baudelaire suggests that its fetishistic beginnings do not provide sculpture with an adequate basis to develop into a proper art.28 Obviously Serra does not agree with Baudelaire—not exactly, anyway. But he does seek a principle that might stand as the “lost origin” of sculpture, and he uses its “Carib” status to critical advantage in doing so. What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Serra has already suggested one definition of sculpture: that it motivate a body and frame a place in a parallactic relay between the two. But he also positions sculpture between two other terms: opposed to painting on the one hand, and critical of architecture on the other. In The Salon of 1846 Baudelaire called sculpture a “complementary art,” “a humble associate of painting and architecture.” This, too, is in keeping with the idealist hierarchy of Hegel, which ascends from architecture through sculpture to painting (and on to music and poetry).29 In effect Serra uses the middle term of this old hierarchy to pressure the adjacent terms. More precisely, he employs the relative materiality of sculpture—its ability to activate the body—to critique painting, and the relative autonomy of sculpture—its ability to analyze structure—to critique architecture. In so doing he proposes a further principle of sculpture, one that is not medium-specific but mediumdifferential, and that turns its “Carib” vice—as impure and hybrid—into a critical virtue.30 Serra approaches a differential understanding of sculpture through a philosophical point of procedure drawn from Bertrand Russell: “every language has a structure about which nothing critical in that language can be said”; only a second language with a different structure can perform this critique.31 Serra adapted this principle to think the relation of his drawings and films to his sculpture, but it may also be the relation of his sculpture

to painting and architecture in general. He insists on the absolute status of sculpture as a language of its own; in the above statement he intends “structure” in a categorical way. But his work suggests that “structure” here is also differential, that his sculpture partakes of the other languages of painting and architecture in the very articulation of its difference. Thus even as his sculpture opposes painting in the guise of figure-ground conventions, it also partakes of the pictorial in the sense of the picturesque.32 And even as it critiques architecture in the guise of scenographic kitsch, it also partakes of the architectural in the sense of the tectonic. What does making sculpture mean to you right now? I have touched on the op-

position to painting, so I will focus on the critique of architecture here. Whatever its own restrictions, sculpture can intervene critically in architecture because its language is not as compromised by capitalist rationalization and bureaucratic regulation. But Serra suggests more: that sculpture can recover a neglected principle in architecture, recover it as a “lost origin” for sculpture. Often his sculpture “works in contradiction” to the architecture of its sites.33 This can be aggressive (it does not aid its destroyers to note that Tilted Arc challenged the awful architecture of the Federal Plaza in New York). But it can also be subtle, complementary, even reciprocal, when sculpture and architecture frame one another. There are pieces (often arcs) that primarily frame, such as Trunk (1987), first installed in a baroque courtyard in Münster; there are pieces (often blocks) that are primarily framed, such as Weight and Measure (1992), first installed in the neoclassical hall of the Tate Gallery in London; and there are pieces that do both, such as Octagon for Saint Eloi (1991), which stands in a complex relation to the Burgundian church behind it. Sometimes in such historical settings there is even a reversal: the sculpture seems to foreground the architecture, with the former a foil for the latter (the two austere blocks of Marguerite and Philibert [1985], for example, throw into relief the elaborate vaulting of the sixteenth-century cloisters in which they are set). For the most part, however, to contradict the architecture is to critique it, and this critique is of two kinds at least. The first critique is procedural, to do with basic modes of architectural drafting: the elevation (the structure of the building drawn en face) and the plan (the array of its spaces drawn from above). As Bois has remarked, Serra often destroys, “in the very elevations, the identity of the plan,” and vice versa, with the result that neither presentation (in front or from above), neither view (from


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Weight and Measure, 1992 Forged weatherproof steel Two blocks: 5’ x 9’ 1⁄2” x 3’5”; 5’8” x 9’1⁄2” x 3’5” Installed: Tate Gallery, London Photo: Werner Hannappel

outside or inside), will deliver the other, let alone the sculpture as a whole.34 This impediment is intended: it slows down the becoming-image of the work in a way that reasserts the rights of the body against the abstract objectivity and panoptical mastery of architectual concept and design. The second critique of architecture is polemical, to do with the superficiality of its postmodern incarnations. There are two primary targets here: the privileging of scenography over structure (“most architects,” Serra remarked in 1983, in the postmodern heyday, “are not concerned with space, but rather with the skin, the surface”) and the masking of consumerism as historicism (“symbolical values have become synonymous with advertisements,” he commented in 1984).35 Thus his stress on the tectonic has double force: it addresses the historical absence of the tectonic in sculpture—indeed it proposes the tectonic as a “lost origin”—and it critiques the contemporary atrophy of the tectonic in architecture.

The tectonic may be a crucial term in the constructivist lexicon, but it is also advanced in architectural discourse today, especially by Kenneth Frampton. His argument is polemical, too: like Serra, Frampton assails the scenographic kitsch of much postmodern architecture, and he insists on the bodily and the tectonic to protest the ideologies of the virtual and the simulacral in capitalist exchange today.36 But his argument is also ontological: “the structural unit,” Frampton states, is “the irreducible essence of architectural form.”37 He goes so far as to project an origin myth of architecture (along the lines of old origin myths, such as the primitive hut, as advanced by Abbé Laugier in the service of neoclassical architecture). For Frampton, architecture is founded in the apposition of a tectonic frame (exemplified in wood construction) and a compressive mass (exemplified in brick construction). “The very essence of architecture,” then, is “the generic joint,” and this “fundamental syntactical transition from the stereotomic base to the tectonic frame” is “a point of ontological condensation.”38 According to Frampton, this apposition of mass and frame is not only material (brick/wood) and “gravitational” (laden/light) but also “cosmological” (earth/sky), with “ontological consequences” that are transcultural in value.39 Much here is resonant for a reading of Serra. The joint is crucial in his work too; often left bare, not fixed, it is the intersection where structure reveals production most clearly—and points to the demystification of other sculptural modes as well. Louis Kahn once remarked that ornament is the adoration of the joint; for Serra “any kind of joint—as necessary as it might be for functional reasons—is always a kind of ornament,” and he “adores” the joint precisely through a refusal to ornament it redundantly.40 So, too, the coordination of mass and frame in Frampton, which occurs paradigmatically at the joint, may correspond to the coordination of “weight and measure” in Serra; certainly the relation of load and support is fundamental to his work—his lead and steel props in particular subsume the tectonics of wood and the stereotomics of brick. But above all Serra joins Frampton in the call for the tectonic. This too is most apparent in the props, to which he returned in the late 1980s as if to counter, by simple example, the superficial shoddiness of much postmodern construction. Again, the props demonstrate his “building principles” of “pointload, balance, counter-balance, and leverage.” But other works, especially of the late 1980s, declare these principles as well—works such as Gate (1987), two T’s of steel bars on either side of a gallery beam (they appear almost to support the ceiling); Timber (1988), a T of steel plates also set under a What does making sculpture mean to you right now?


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gallery ceiling; T-Junction (1988), another T of steel bars, here set short of the gallery ceiling, in which the horizontal element is extended; and finally Maillart (1988), in which this horizontal element is extended even further, supported by two bars, in a structure that suggests a bridge (as does the titular reference to the great Swiss engineer Robert Maillart). Yet between Frampton and Serra there remains this obvious difference: Frampton claims the tectonic for architecture, Serra for sculpture. How to decide between the two? But perhaps there is no need; perhaps architecture and sculpture have a common ground in the tectonic; perhaps in an industrial age they share an originary principle in engineered construction.41 Serra is forthright about his favoring of engineering; his statement from 1985 bears down on this point in particular: The history of welded steel sculpture in this century—Gonzalez, Picasso, David Smith—has had little or no influence on my work. Most traditional sculpture until the mid-century was part-relation-towhole. That is, the steel was collaged pictorially and compositionally together. Most of the welding was a way of gluing and adjusting parts which through their internal structure were not self-supporting. An even more archaic practice was continued: that of forming through carving and casting, of rendering hollow bronze figures. To deal with steel as a building material in terms of mass, weight, counterbalance, load-bearing capacity, point load has been totally divorced from the history of sculpture, whereas it determines the history of technology and industrial building. It allowed for the biggest progress in the construction of towers, bridges, tunnels, etc. The models I have looked to have been those who explored the potential of steel as a building material: Eiffel, Roebling, Maillart, Mies van der Rohe. Since I chose to build in steel it was a necessity to know who had dealt with the material in the most significant, the most inventive, the most economic way.42 Serra offers much to develop here, as he does in related accounts of his early formation, some details of which are telling: his father was a pipe fitter in a San Francisco shipyard; as a young man Serra worked in various Bay Area steel mills; he was particularly impressed by the Golden Gate, Bay, and Brooklyn Bridges (he once punned that this predilection is gender-based: “I think, if it comes down to little girls liking silk and little boys liking corduroy, that little boys like bridges”);43 and so on. Here, despite

the predominance of European figures in his tectonic pantheon, a distinctly American mythos is at work: long before Duchamp nominated plumbing and bridges as the great American contributions to civilization, Walt Whitman had sung the praises of structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, as would Hart Crane soon after, and Serra participates in this American ethos of building as analogue of self-building.44 All this is relevant, but it is beside my main point here, which is that the very insistence on the tectonic, on engineered construction, in Serra as in Frampton, speaks to its atrophy, even its loss, today. In this respect a different mythos is also in play: the story of a “dissociation of sensibility” between architecture and engineering on the one hand and sculpture and engineering on the other. The first Fall is quasi-historical (sometimes it is dated, emblematically at least, to the foundation in 1795 of the French Ecole Polytechnique, which divided training between these fields); but the second Fall never occurred, because sculpture and engineering were never united in the first place (Serra: “steel as a building material . . . has been totally divorced from the history of sculpture, whereas it determines the history of . . . industrial building”). So, unlike Frampton, who sometimes dreams of a reassociation of architecture and engineering, Serra has nothing to redeem, only an opportunity to exploit, as his datum is the separation of sculpture from engineering. Thus he is free to rework sculpture vis-à-vis engineering so as to render it pertinent to an industrial age. This reorientation runs throughout his work, but it is programmatic in a piece like Maillart Extended (1988), a post and lintel of steel bars that extends the pedestrian walkway across the Grandfey Viaduct designed by Maillart in Switzerland in a sculptural way that reveals its structural logic.45 There is a risk here, however; it is the one foreseen by Buchloh: Serra might demystify sculpture as artisanal craft, only to remystify it as industrial structure. In effect this is to turn on Serra his own critique of welded sculpture (that it is a compromise-formation between art and industry), and to suggest that his productivist aesthetic, now outmoded, conceals more than reveals the contemporary relation between art practice and productive mode. But his productivist aesthetic did not seem outmoded when Serra emerged in the mid-1960s (again, Russian constructivism was recovered from relative oblivion only by this generation). “We,” he once remarked of a group including Andre and Robert Morris, “came from a postwar, post-Depression background, where kids grew up and worked in the industrial centers of the country.”46 As we know, they brought this industrial frame of reference to art, where it transformed the parameters


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Maillart Extended, 1988 Forged weatherproof steel Two posts, each 12’ x 1’ x 1’ Two lintels, each 24’ x 1’ x 1’ Site: Grandfey-Viadukt, railroad and pedestrian bridge connecting Fribourg and Bern, Switzerland Photo: Werner Hannappel

Hal Foster

of material and process, siting and viewing (the expanding of the gallery space vis-à-vis the loft studio, the opening to distant landscapes, the encounter with urban architecture, and so on). Obviously much has changed over the last thirty years; we are often told that our economy has shifted to a postindustrial order of consumption, information, and service. Yet if this is so, the change alters the relative position occupied by Serra as well.47 Rather than fetishistic, then, his commitment to industrial structure can be seen as resistant—not only to the pervasive decay of the tectonic in sculpture and architecture, but also to its putative outmoding in a postindustrial order of digital design.48 In other words, if the industrial model of the tectonic is in part outmoded, it might be strategic, for reasons of historical consciousness, to reassert its claims today; this new state might even endow it with new critical energies.49 What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Over the last decade Serra has pushed the tectonic to expressive ends, two of which are especially significant. Neither could be expected, for each appears as a partial reversal, or a dialectical transformation, of his prior concerns. First, there are works, such as The Drowned and the Saved (1992) and Gravity (1993), the first initially in the Stommeln Synagogue in Germany, the second permanently in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., that develop the “ontological consequences” of the tectonic in a way that evokes spiritual conditions—not in opposition to secular conditions (of sculpture, body, and site) but by means of them. In such works the spiritual is not figured (this taboo remains in place) but evoked; and, though the evocation is not monumental (this taboo is also secure), it is somehow commemorative. This commemoration is expressed in “weight and measure” alone; rather than refer elsewhere, the memorial seems immanent to the structure.50 Second, there are works, such as the Torqued Ellipses, in which structure, in pace with engineering, has become more complicated, to the point of a new subject-effect: these works are so physically intense that they become psychologically intense, too; here phenomenology becomes almost perverse. Like the commemorative turn, this psychological development is also a surprise, given the (post)minimalist avoidance of private spaces of meaning.51 Yet, paradoxically enough, this psychological dimension is not necessarily private. I want to comment on both these developments, and then to conclude with a brief remark on site-specificity today.


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In the West, Rosalind Krauss has argued, the logic of the monument has governed most traditional sculpture: “it sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.”52 As we have seen, modernist sculpture broke with this logic, as signalled for Serra by its break with the pedestal. Again, this was a dialectical event that opened sculpture to the possibilities of autonomous sitelessness and abstract site-specificity alike. In recent works Serra suggests a further transformation of these terms: a sculptural paradigm that is neither siteless (in the modernist sense) nor site-specific (in the postmodernist sense) but both autonomous and grounded in other ways. This direction became apparent in the early 1990s with works set before a French church (Octagon for Saint Eloi), within a German synagogue (The Drowned and the Saved), and at the Washington Holocaust museum (Gravity). These sites are not strictly private or public but potentially intimate and communal nonetheless. The Drowned and the Saved suggests a commemoration of the Holocaust by place as well as by title (which alludes to a book by the great memoirist of the Shoah, Primo Levi). This subject is not figured but evoked through structure alone, two L-beams (the horizontal longer than the vertical) that support one another through abutment: a bridge form. Serra once termed this form a “psychological icon”;53 it is an icon of spanning and passing, and both kinds of movement are intimated here. There are those who span the bridge, who pass over it, the saved, and those who do not span the bridge, who pass under it, the drowned. These two passages, these two fates, are opposed, but they come together as the two beams come together, in support. Here support is not only equal to load; it is one with it: the L-beams are mutual. In this way the tectonic principle first articulated for the props in 1970—“as forces tend toward equilibrium the weight in part is negated”—takes on a spiritual significance.54 For in this support is a reciprocity that suggests a resolution of the drowned and the saved, if not a redemption. But the “grace” here is immanent, not transcendental; it depends on the “gravity” of the structure, to which it is equal and opposite. Like the Holocaust, both exist in our space-time, in history, not beyond it. If The Drowned and the Saved foregrounds “measure,” Gravity foregrounds “weight,” which takes on a spiritual significance too.55 Gravity is a massive plane that steps down from the Hall of Witnesses of the Holocaust museum to the floor below; thus the psychological icon here is not a bridge but a stairway, which has “ontological consequences” of its own. What does making sculpture mean to you right now?

The Drowned and the Saved, 1992 Forged weatherproof steel Two right-angle bars, each 4’ 81⁄4” x 5’1” x 133⁄4” Collection: Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum, Cologne Sites: Synagogue Stommeln, Pulheim, Germany (shown) and ruin of sacristy of Sankt Kolumba, Cologne Photo: Werner Hannappel

Does this stepped plane intimate descent or ascent? Does it express gravity or its counter? For, though movement is implied by the steps, it is also stilled by the plane (there is another icon in play: the memorial wall) in such a way that oppositions of ascent and descent, of grace and gravity almost seem undone, even overcome. Works like Gravity and The Drowned and the Saved shift, at least in part, from a parallax of subject and site to an arresting of the viewer before the work. This arresting can be felt negatively, with Gravity seen as a wall and The Drowned and the Saved as a bar— as so many blockages evocative of a traumatic reality that cannot be symbolized, made to make sense. Or this arresting can be felt positively, as an “ontological condensation,” a manifestation of the copresence of the


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Gravity, 1993 Weatherproof steel Slab: 12’ x 12’ x 10” Collection: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo: Dirk Reinartz

sacral and the secular.56 Like the arresting of the viewer, the abstraction of the work, which here seems to follow spiritual as well as aesthetic principles, is also effective in its ambiguity.57 Is this refusal of representation a sign of impossibility, of melancholic fixation on a traumatic past, or is it a sign of possibility, of a mournful working-through of this past that is also a holding-open to a different future? In either case the memorial is immanent, and in a double sense—immanent in structure and immanent in history. The Holocaust is commemorated, but not raised to the oppressive status of the sublime or the divine.58

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Weight

and equilibrium, gravity and grace, have effects that are psychological as well as bodily and spiritual. In 1988 Serra recalled a childhood memory of a ship launching (at the yard where his father worked): It was a moment of tremendous anxiety as the oiler en route rattled, swayed, tipped, and bounced into the sea, half submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance. . . . The ship went through a transformation from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyant structure, free, afloat, and adrift. My awe and wonder at that moment remained. All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory which has become a recurring dream.59

One need not turn to a psychoanalysis of screen memories and primal fantasies to register the psychological impact of this event. Perhaps this dimension began to surface in his work in the late 1980s as well; perhaps, too, it lay latent within it before. As I noted, minimalism conceived the body of the viewer in roughly phenomenological terms—as “preobjective,” abstract, not disturbed by an unconscious. Feminist art in turn elaborated this body critically: it agreed that no viewer exists without a body but added that no body exists without an unconscious. More recently artists influenced by feminism (e.g., Mona Hatoum) have looked to a minimalist idiom to draw out its psychological implications—which suggests they were there all along. From the beginning Serra and peers—Smithson, Nauman, Hesse above all—were ambivalent about the rationalism of minimalism. On the one hand their project was also rational: to foreground process in order to demystify the viewer about the making of sculpture. On the other hand this process suggested an erotics that implicated the anxious and the perverse as well.60 In recent works like the Torqued Ellipses these two effects are folded into one another: they appear rational and perverse at once. (My Curves Are Not Mad runs the title of double tilted arcs from 1987, at the beginning of this development: one both accepts the denial—the curves are rational—and reads it, à la Freud, as an admission—they are also mad/dening.) In the Ellipses the rational aspect—to manifest production and structure—remains, but the perverse aspect—to disconnect elevation and plan, to turn inside out and vice versa—is exacerbated to the point where one seems to experience different sculptures, indeed different bodies, at almost every step (Serra calls this “thinking on your feet”). The


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Double Torqued Ellipse, 1997 Weatherproof steel Outer ellipse: 13’1” x 33’6” x 27’1” Inner ellipse: 13’1” x 25’11” x 20’11” Plate thickness: 2” Collection: Dia Center for the Arts, New York. (Gift of Leonard and Louise Riggio) Photo: Dirk Reinartz

effect is baroque: a simultaneous sense of a subjective deforming of space and a spatial overwhelming of the subject. Why baroque? Like classical architecture, the minimalist object appears objective: however engaged by the object, the subject remains external to it. But like baroque architecture, the Ellipses put the subject in play within the space in a way that seems to derange its rational structure. And, again, the result is an extraordinary chiasmus: the subject feels overwhelmed by the space even as he or she seems to overwhelm it—as if the space were a projection of the body, of bodily fantasies.61 “The generation of the 1960s made an art of the human subject turned inside out,” Krauss has argued, “a function of space-at-large.”62 This is still the case, but the opposite is true as well: torqued by the Ellipses, the viewer is inside and outside at once, so that the subject-turned-insideout now also seems to be space-turned-outside-in, made a function of the subject. In this way, just as the rational and the perverse are forced to-

gether, so private and public seem confused well. These confusions could be traumatic (trauma means wound, the pathological point of confusion between inside and outside), but the effect is more oceanic than anxious, more maternal than maddening. In any case a psychological dimension is opened here—and a surrealist sense of spatiality as well.63 This, too, could not be expected, for, as we have seen, Serra has long plied the constructivist line of modernism, which is opposite to the surrealist trajectory. Yet, as he has developed this line, he has also transformed it to the point where, here at least, it converges with its other.64 What does making sculpture mean to you right now? This convergence of opposed trajectories in modernism suggests the semi-autonomy of artistic development won by Serra in his practice. Again, this practice deconstructs sculpture vis-à-vis its site, but in a way in which unmaking is not opposed to making, or a commitment to site-specificity to the category of sculpture.65 Indeed, the semi-autonomy of the work is crucial to its sitespecificity—as it must be if site-specificity is to be site-critical as well. This point—that semi-autonomy is the guarantee of site-criticality, not its opposite—is often lost in recent developments of site-oriented and projectbased practices today, which threaten to dissolve artistic practice into sociological or anthropological fieldwork. Serra has always stressed the “internal necessity” of sculpture, always insisted on the “uselessness” of art in general. Here this necessity, that uselessness, do not void the political criticality of art; Serra shows that they can also underwrite it. This lesson is important to learn again today. Notes

1. Richard Serra, “Sight Point ’71–’75/Delineator ’74–’76,” interview by Liza Béar, in Richard Serra, Writings Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 35. 2. In other words, even as Serra is committed to “the internal necessity” of (his) sculpture—another ur-modernist formulation—it has driven him to transform the medium beyond modernist recognition. See Serra, interview by Peter Eisenman, in ibid., pp. 141–42. (First published in Skyline, 1983.) 3. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975), p. 184. 4. See Samuel Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum (December 1966). On these transformations see “The Crux of Minimalism” in my The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 5. For artists from Judd to Serra, pictorial conventions of figure-ground underwrote a model of art that is not only implicitly representational but also analogous to a private


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interiority of artistic conception that they wanted to bracket (the classic text on this point is Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” Artforum 12, no. 3 [November 1973]). For this generation, meaning is public, performative, a matter of open research. 6. The logic of medium-specificity was often confirmed in reactions against it and/or obviations of it. 7. See Serra, Writings Interviews, pp. 3–4. This is the first text included in that volume, which suggests its importance to Serra. On this logic of materials in the late 1960s Serra commented in 1980: “What was interesting about this group [he mentions Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Michael Heizer, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, and Michael Snow] was that we did not have any shared stylistic premises, but what was also true was that everybody was investigating the logic of material and its potential for personal extension—be it sound, lead, film, body, whatever” (interview by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, in ibid., p. 112). 8. Richard Serra, “Play It Again, Sam,” in ibid., p. 7. For Serra, the line of painting that minimalism diverted into object-making passed through Newman more than Pollock. Serra claimed a lineage from Pollock, but a different one from “the legacy of Pollock” claimed by Kaprow (“the mystique of loosening up remains no more than a justification for Allan Kaprow”). 9. Richard Serra, “Rigging,” in ibid., p. 98. 10. On the first, “phenomenological,” move, see Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra, a Translation,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); on the second, “picturesque” or “parallactic,” move, see Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara” (1983; reprinted in this volume). 11. Krauss, “Richard Serra, a Translation,” p. 15. 12. Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra/Sculpture,” in Richard Serra: Props (Duisberg: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, 1994), p. 102. This essay was originally published in Richard Serra: Sculpture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986) and is reprinted in this volume. 13. Serra, quoted in Bois, “Picturesque Stroll,” p. 67 in this volume. 14. Serra, interview by Liza Béar, in Writings Interviews, p. 45. 15. “Interview with Richard Serra,” in Torqued Ellipses (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997), p. 26. I do not discuss these different types at length as there are catalogues devoted to most of them. 16. “Despite what he says about it,” Bois remarked in 1984, “all of Serra’s work is based on the deconstruction of such a notion as ‘sculpture itself’” (Bois, “Picturesque Stroll,” p. 62 in this volume). 17. Serra, interview by Eisenman, in Writings Interviews, p. 141. 18. On the becoming-siteless of sculpture in Brancusi, see Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983). 19. See “The Crux of Minimalism” in my The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 20. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Sculpture,” in Chantal Pontbriand, ed., Performance, Text(e)s & Documents (Montreal: Parachute, 1981), p. 55. 21. Ibid., p. 56. Serra might agree—up to the last point. 22. This critique of modernist sculpture as a compromise-formation between art and industry is anticipated, in elliptical form, by this note of Walter Benjamin in “Paris, Capital of

the Nineteenth Century” (1935): “Excursus on art nouveau. . . . The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears its goal. Individualism is its theory. . . . The real meaning of art nouveau is not expressed in this ideology. It represents art’s last attempt to escape from its ivory tower, which is beseiged by technology. Art nouveau mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness. They find their expression in mediumistic line-language, in the flower of naked, vegetal nature confronting a technically armed environment. The new elements of iron building, girder forms, preoccupy art nouveau. In ornamentation it strives to win back these forms for art. Concrete offers it the prospect of new plastic posssibilities in architecture. About this time the real center of gravity of living space is transferred to the office. The derealized individual creates a place for himself in the private home. Art nouveau is summed up by The Master Builder—the attempt by the individual to do battle with technology on the basis of this inwardness leads to his downfall” (Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978], pp. 154–155). 23. Buchloh, “Michael Asher,” p. 59. Serra opted for Tatlin, as it were, more than for Duchamp—for the un/making of sculpture, say, more than for its un/naming. He was wary of the emphasis in the readymade on consumption, at least in its neo-avant-garde reception. Indeed, his credo remains productivist—“not a manipulator of a ‘found’ industrial product, not a consumer” (Serra, p. 168). 24. Serra, p. 169. The text in question is titled “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road.” 25. See Buchloh, “Michael Asher,” p. 59. 26. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 119. 27. Ibid., pp. 119–20. 28. This is how Michael Fried glosses this passage in his provocative essay “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet”: “I take this to mean that having irrevocably lost contact with its origins, the art of sculpture is unable to mobilize its past at all and so will forever lack a viable present” (Critical Inquiry [March 1984], p. 521). 29. See Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1820s). 30. In other words, Serra and peers propose first a reversal of the old Hegelian hierarchy (as with the constructivists, the critique of painting pushes them toward architecture) and then a release from it, even an undoing of it. 31. Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road,” in Writings Interviews, p. 146. He returns to this principle at several points in the book. 32. As Bois noted in 1983 (in the essay reprinted in this volume), Serra betrays an ambivalence regarding the picturesque as it suggests a static, optical imaging of a site as well as a peripatetic, parallactic framing. He also seems to have regarded it as a discursive field already occupied by Smithson. 33. Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road,” in Writings Interviews, p. 171. 34. Bois, “Picturesque Stroll,” p. 73. And no one photograph will deliver the sculpture either, which is why a diagram is often required to comprehend the layout of a piece. 35. Serra, interview by Alfred Pacquement, p. 163; interview by Eisenman, p. 142; in Writings Interviews. 36. See Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel à l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” Architectural Design 60, nos. 3–4 (1990), reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture Theory 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). Frampton


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develops his position in his masterly Studies in Tectonic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). In particular Frampton bemoans “the universal triumph of Robert Venturi’s decorated shed . . . in which shelter is packaged like a giant commodity” (in Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda, p. 518). Just as some architects were seduced by the blandishments of the pop-commodity, so some are seduced today by the blandishments of the informationcommodity. 37. Frampton, “Rappel à l’ordre,” p. 519. “We intend,” Frampton continues, “not only the structural component in se but also the formal amplification of its presence in relation to the assembly of which it is a part” (p. 520). It may seem obvious that construction is fundamental to architecture—but it was not, say, to the Le Corbusier of Vers une architecture (1922), who nominated surface, volume, and plane. Moreover, the tectonic is not, as it may sound, a technocratic notion; on the contrary, Frampton insists on the “poetic manifestation of structure in the original Greek sense of poesis as an act of making and revealing” (p. 519). 38. Ibid., p. 522. “Stereotomic,” Frampton tells us, is derived from the Greek for solid (stereotos) and cutting (-tomia). The joint, he also reminds us, was primordial for Gottfried Semper as well. 39. Ibid. To say that this apposition is universal is not to say that it is uniform: for Frampton cultural differences are marked in the different inflections given the joint. 40. Serra, “Notes on Drawings,” in Writings Interviews, p. 180. In a sense Serra goes beyond Adolf Loos: not only is ornament a crime but imaging is taboo. And here he participates in an important iconoclastic (sometimes Protestant, sometimes Judaic) genealogy within modernism that gathers disparate practitioners such as Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mondrian as well as theorists such as Greenberg and Fried. 41. Perhaps this sharing is also primordial. As Frampton tells us, tekton means, etymologically, carpenter or builder, a vocation that may lie between architecture and sculpture—or underneath them. 42. Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road,” in Writings Interviews, p. 169. 43. See Annette Michelson’s interview, “The Films of Richard Serra,” in this volume, p. 31. 44. In the struggle over Tilted Arc, Serra laid claim to what counts as American, in opposition to federal officials who spoke in its name. And in work after Tilted Arc he referred to literary figures (from Herman Melville, cited in Call Me Ishmael [1986], to Charles Olson, cited in Olson [1986]) central to this American tradition of making as self-making. 45. Or, more precisely, reveals the inconsistencies in its structural logic, as Serra suggests in the descriptive text for this piece in the catalogue in which the present text first appeared. 46. Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” in this volume, p. 27. 47. The constructivists worked in anticipation of a new industrial communist order. Serra emerged amidst the rusting of an old industrial capitalist order—and works today amidst the vaunting of a new postindustrial ultra-capitalist order. His position, then, is not as a futurist celebrant of the industrial tectonic but as an interested investigator of its structures. “We cannot repeal the industrial revolution, which is the cause of the urban glut,” he stated in 1986, again in the postmodern heyday. “We can only work with the junk pile” (p. 175). For Buchloh in 1981 this position appeared ideological; in figures like David Smith and John Chamberlain he saw “the image of the proletarian producer” combined “with that of the melancholic stroller in the junk yards of capitalist technology” (Buchloh, “Michael Asher,” p. 58). But again our situation has changed—in a way that appears to subsume the

old opposition, made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss, between engineer and bricoleur, or proletarian producer and melancholic stroller. 48. To assist in the design of the Torqued Ellipses Serra employed the CATIA program used by the office of Frank Gehry to assist in the design of the Bilbao Guggenheim, but the Ellipses provide an instructive contrast, “the total opposite of the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is built like a traditional nineteenth-century sculpture” (interview of Serra in Torqued Ellipses, p. 27). Indeed, Bilbao is more titanic than tectonic, more spectacular than structural. 49. By this last phrase I mean to evoke the Benjamin of “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Intelligentsia” (1929), who suggested that the surrealists were “the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them” (Reflections, p. 181). 50. In this sense the principle stated in 1980—they “do not relate to the history of monuments. They do not memorialize anything. They relate to sculpture and nothing more” (“Richard Serra’s Urban Sculpture,” interview by Douglas Crimp, in Writings Interviews, p. 135)—is adapted but not violated. Rather than a disguised return to the monumental, there is an innovative recovery of the commemorative (this is one way to understand the enigmatic statement that “my sculpture [is] related to an old use of space”). Whereas the monument usually serves the authority of the state, the memorial sometimes bespeaks a different kind of collective remembering and marking. 51. See note 5. 52. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster, ed., The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983). 53. Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra,” in this volume, p. 31. 54. Serra, “Play It Again, Sam,” in Writings Interviews, p. 7. 55. In a 1988 meditation titled “Weight,” Serra writes of “the weight of history” threatened by “the flicker of the image,” by the dissolution of memory in media, which he seeks to counter through an evocation of “the weight of experience” (Serra, Writings Interviews, p. 185). 56. There is a “presentness” here, but in the sense less of Fried in “Art and Objecthood” than of Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940): “Thinking involves not only a flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Benjamin, Illuminations [New York: Schocken Books, 1969], pp. 262–263). 57. This refusal of representation is political, too—a refusal of populist gestures, a refusal to represent a public that does not exist as figurative public sculpture so often projects it to exist, a refusal performed, to obvious resentment, by Tilted Arc among other pieces. 58. This seems to me a real danger, for often today experience and spirituality alike are set in the register of trauma, with the Shoah turned into the paragon of History or a revelation of Spirit. Gravity commemorates the Holocaust but does not sublimate it into a religion. 59. Serra, “Weight,” in Writings Interviews, p. 184.


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60. Serra, interview by Lamarche-Vadel, in ibid., pp. 112–114. 61. Serra, too, uses this term (see interview in Torqued Ellipses), but in a different way, for the baroque subject was often a subject overwhelmed by spectacle, a subject placed in “awe and wonder” for purposes of religious-political manipulation. 62. Krauss, “Richard Serra/Sculpture,” p. 56. 63. This spatiality is best evoked by Tristan Tzara in this text of 1933: “The dwelling place symbolizes prenatal comfort. When it is understood that comfort resides in the half-light of the soft tactile depths of the one and only possible hygiene, that of prenatal desires—then circular, spherical, and irregular houses will be built again, which man kept from cave to cradle and to tomb in his vision of an intrauterine life and which the aesthetics of castration, called modern, ignore.” See The Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean (New York: Viking, 1980), pp. 337–338. 64. A convergence of surrealism and constructivism was also projected in an earlier moment of the postwar neo-avant-garde—explicitly in the Imaginist Bauhaus of Asger Jorn, implicitly in situationism. 65. Peter Eisenman captures this relation in a 1983 conversation with Serra: “You are interested in self-referentiality, but not in a modernist sense. . . . The context invariably returns the work to its sculptural necessities. The work may be critical of the context, but it always returns to sculpture as sculpture” (Serra, Writings Interviews, p. 150).

Index of Names

Page numbers in boldface indicate illustrations. Afangar, 179 Albers, Josef, 53, 105 Althusser, Louis, 173n27 Andre, Carl, 4, 6, 7, 26, 103, 107, 109, 151, 153, 178, 181, 187 Lever, 107 Lost Ladder, 6 Spill (Scatter Piece), 7 Anthology Film Archives, 21, 26, 53, 117 Artforum, 34 Art in Public Places Program (NEA), 165 Asher, Michael, 152 Baker, Kenneth, 17 Base Plate Measure, 32 Baudelaire, Charles, 181–182 Béar, Liza, 1, 17, 175 Beardsley, John, 165–166 Beaubourg. See Centre Georges Pompidou Beckett, Samuel, 18, 125 Bell, Clive, 143n3 Bellamy, Richard, 26 Benjamin, Walter, 78, 196–197n22, 199nn49,56 Berlin Block for Checkpoint Charlie, 64 Berswordt-Wallrabe, Alexander von, 44 Birdwhistell, Ray L., 34 Bochum (Germany), 44, 162–165 Boice, Bruce, 37

Bois, Yve-Alain, 178, 183 Boomerang, 34, 111–112 Boullée, Etienne-Louis, 80, 85 Brakhage, Stan, 23 Mothlight, 25 Brancusi, Constantin, 6, 104, 109, 111, 125, 175, 180 Beginning of the World, 109, 111 Bird in Space, 180 Caryatid, 180 Endless Column, 109 Gate of the Kiss, 109 The Kiss, 109 Torso of a Young Man, 14 Brown, Capability, 79 Buchloh, Benjamin, 24, 180, 181, 187 Buren, Daniel, 151–153 Burke, Edmund, 87 Cage, John, 5 Calder, Alexander, 64 Candle Piece, 5–7, 6 Caro, Anthony, 181 Castelli, Leo, 37, 38 Castelli, Leo, Gallery, 105, 125, 147–148, 155–156 Casting, 26, 105, 106, 107 Cavell, Stanley, 143n3 Centre Georges Pompidou, 62, 64, 74–75, 87–91 Chamber, 178 Chamberlain, John, 181 Chambers, William, 75

202

Choisy, Auguste, 80, 95n78 Circuit, 115, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 131, 154 Clara-Clara, 62, 74–75, 87–91, 88–89, 136, 143 Collins, Peter, 67–68, 70, 71, 91 Color Aid, 14 Conner, Bruce, 21, 22 Cornell, Joseph, 3 Crane, Hart, 187 Cunningham, Merce, 5 Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure, 8, 118, 118–119 Dean, Laure, 18n5 De Kooning, Willem, 112 Delineator, 115, 123–124, 124, 155 De Maria, Walter, 103 De Quincey, Thomas, 77 Deren, Maya, 23 Diderot, Denis, 182 Different and Different Again, 133 Documenta, 44, 162 Double Torqued Ellipse, 194 Dovshenko, Aleksandr, 117 Drowned and the Saved, The, 189–192, 191 Duchamp, Marcel, 13, 180, 187, 197n23 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 80 Ecole Polytechnique, 187 Eiffel, Gustave, 186 Eisenman, Peter, 78 Eisenstein, Sergei, 26–27, 56, 76–78, 117 October, 27, 76–77, 133 Strike, 53–55 Elevator, 155 Equal, 107 Etlin, Richard, 93n41 Exchange, 178 Federal Plaza (New York), 148–151, 167–170, 183 Fiore, Robert, 32, 37 5:30, 107 Flavin, Dan, 153, 181 Frame, 5, 14, 31, 31–33 Frampton, Hollis, 2, 22, 23, 34 Frampton, Kenneth, 185–187, 198nn36–39

Index

Fried, Michael, 82–83, 86–87, 143n3, 197n28 Friedberg, M. Paul, 57n10 Gabo, Naum, 2 Galerie m, 44 Gate, 185 Gehr, Ernie, 24 Gehry, Frank, 199n48 General Services Administration, 148, 169, 173n31 Giacometti, Alberto, 125–127, 130, 135 Giedion, Sigfried, 71 Gilpin, William, 87 Girardin, René-Louis, marquis de, 63 Glaser, Bruce, 16 Glass, Philip, 5, 16, 23, 24, 26, 103, 125 Godard, Jean-Luc, 102 Two or Three Things I Know about Her, 140 Gonzalez, Julio, 181, 186 Graham, Dan, 4, 9–10, 13–14, 15 Gravity, 189, 190–192, 192 Gray, Spalding, 37 Greenberg, Clement, 83, 92n19 Gregor, Ulrich, 49 Haacke, Hans, 151 Hand Catching Lead, 5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 24, 77, 78, 102–104, 108, 138 Hands Lead Fulcrum, 5 Hands Scraping, 2, 5, 13, 17, 24 Hands Tied, 5, 13, 17 Harries, Karsten, 96n97 Hatoum, Mona, 193 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 181, 182 Heizer, Michael Double Negative, 158, 178 Hess, Thomas B., 113 Hesse, Eva, 103, 193 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 83 Holt, Nancy, 111 House of Cards. See One Ton Prop (House of Cards) Hovagymyan, Gerry, 38 Hume, David, 62 Inverted House of Cards, 107 Ivens, Joris, 55

Johns, Jasper, 114 Jonas, Joan, 5, 26, 34, 37, 82, 117, 128, 130 Judd, Donald, 4, 7, 103, 109, 112, 113, 130, 148, 153, 176, 181 Kafka, Franz, 18 Kahn, Louis, 185 Kames, Henry, 70(n46) Kant, Immanuel, 83–86, 87 Kaprow, Allan, 196n8 Kienholz, Edward, 105 Krauss, Rosalind, 10–11, 14, 18, 61, 76, 178, 190, 194 Kuleshov, Lev, 2, 76, 78, 117 Landow, George, 24, 25 La Palmera, 136 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 185 Le Corbusier, 80–82, 89, 91 Villa Savoye, 80–81, 91 Léger, Fernand, 13 Ballet mécanique, 2, 27 Leider, Philip, 17, 34 Leroy, Julien David, 68–69, 80, 85 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 101 Levi, Primo, 190 Lew, Jeffrey, 38 LeWitt, Sol, 103 Open Modular Cubes, 10 Lindsay, Jerome, 57n10 Lo Giudice Gallery, 153 Long Beach Word Location, 5, 18n5 Lorrain, Claude, 62 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 115 Mach, Ernst, 14 Maillart, Robert, 186, 187 Maillart, 186 Maillart Extended, 187, 188 Malevich, Kazimir, 123 Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 64 Mangolte, Babette, 37 Man Ray, 3 Marey, Jules, 13 Marguerite and Philibert, 183 Marilyn Monroe — Greta Garbo, 155 Marx, Karl, 172n9, 173n30 Matisse, Henri, 99–100 McLuhan, Marshall, 4

Index

Mekas, Jonas, 23, 117 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 61, 126–128, 130, 131, 135 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 64, 186 Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 44, 64 Moholy-Nagy, László, 3, 14 Light Display, Black and White and Gray, 3 Light/Space Modulator, 3 Mondrian, Piet, 64, 123, 176 Monk, Meredith, 5 Moore, Henry, 64 More, Hannah, 79 Morris, Robert, 5, 26, 96n97, 130, 147, 187 Mosser, Monique, 75 Musée National d’Art Moderne, 104. See also Centre Georges Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, New York, 176 My Curves Are Not Mad, 193 Nauman, Bruce, 3, 4, 18n5, 193 Flour Arrangements on the Floor, 7 New Jersey Turnpike, 176 Newman, Barnett, 127, 196n8 Noguchi, Isamu, 64 Obenhaus, Mark, 37 Octagon for Saint Eloi, 183, 190 Oldenburg, Claes, 3, 4 Nekropolis, 3 “Soft Objects,” 3 Store Days, 3 Olmi, Ermanno, 22 One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 25–26, 107–108, 108, 112, 114–115, 124 Open Field Vertical/Horizontal Elevations, 82 Pasadena Museum, 119 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 147 Patton, George, 57n10 Paul Revere, 34, 37 Paxton, Steve, 18n5 Pei, I. M., 89, 96n102 Pevsner, Antoine, 2 Picasso, Pablo, 99, 186 Piranesi, Giambattista, 71–74, 72, 73, 75–78, 91 Plumb Run: Equal Elevations, 136, 137

203

204

Pollock, Jackson, 7, 15, 99, 100, 101, 112, 127, 175, 196n8 Price, Uvedale, 69–70, 75, 87 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 37–38 Prop, 107, 110 Proust, Marcel, 141–142 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 117 Pulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation, 136 Railroad Turnbridge, 24, 27–31, 28–29, 133–135, 140 Rainer, Yvonne, 5, 13, 16, 24, 26, 38–39, 56 Hand Movie, 21 Rauschenberg, Robert, 5, 6, 92n19, 105, 114 Re, Edward D., 168–169 Reich, Steve, 5, 23, 24, 103, 114 Pendulum Music, 5, 18n5 Repton, Humphry, 70 Rice, Ron, 21 Riley, Terry, 24 Rodin, Auguste, 2, 14, 76 Roebling, John Augustus, 186 Rosa, Salvatore, 62 Rose, Barbara, 3 Rosenberg, Harold, 113 Russell, Bertrand, 182 St. John’s Rotary Arc, 60, 66, 67, 69, 76, 78, 86, 136, 138–140, 142 Saint-Pol-Roux, 100 Samaras, Lucas, 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 127, 129–130 Sawing: Base Plate Measure (Twelve Fir Trees), 119 Scatter Piece, 7, 8, 11 Schechner, Richard, 37, 38 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 95n78 Schleyer, Hans-Martin, 50 Schoolman, Carlotta, 36 Scully, Vincent, 71, 91 Sea Level, 178 Segal, George Steelmakers, 165–166 Serpentine, 174 Shapiro, Joel, 30, 38 Sharits, Paul, 24, 34 Shift, 59, 60, 74, 76, 82, 84–85, 115, 128–133, 134, 136, 158, 178

Index

Sight Point, 65, 66, 66, 74, 78, 161, 171n8, 178 Skullcracker Series, 76, 115–117, 116 Sleight of Hand, 8 Slice, 155–157, 156–157 Smith, David, 181, 186 Smith, Jack, 21, 22 Smith, Tony, 83, 112, 176 Die, 176 Smithson, Robert, 34, 59–61, 62, 69, 79, 86, 87, 103, 107, 117, 125, 152, 193 Spiral Jetty, 59, 60, 125, 136–138, 158, 178 Snow, Michael, 18n5, 22–23, 24–25, 28, 34, 103 Back and Forth, 22, 24, 26 Wavelength, 22–23, 24, 26, 134 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain Sainte-Geneviève, 68, 96n102 Span, 155 Spin Out (For Bob Smithson), 58, 62, 66, 74, 83, 86, 136, 178 Splashing, 7, 11, 146, 148, 149, 152 Splash Piece: Casting, 8, 12, 12 Stacked Steel Slabs, 115–117, 116, 124 Steelmill/Stahlwerk, 35, 38–44, 39, 45–56 Steinberg, Leo, 92n19 Stella, Frank, 16, 103, 109, 113 Step, 155 Still, Clyfford, 127 Strike: To Roberta and Rudy, 119–120, 120, 121, 131, 153–154, 178 Sub-tend 60 Degree, 179 Tafuri, Manfredo, 91 Tatlin, Vladimir, 180, 197n23 Tearing Lead from 1:00 to 1:47, 105, 107 Television Delivers People, 34–36, 37 Terminal, 44, 73–74, 78, 80, 162–165, 164, 171n8 Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, 8, 10, 105 Tilted Arc, 136, 140, 142, 148–151, 150, 166–170, 170, 183 Timber, 185 T-Junction, 186 To Encircle Base Plate Hexagon, Right Angles Inverted, 158–159, 160 Torque, 179 Torqued Ellipses, 179, 189, 193–194, 194

Trunk, 183 Twain, 171n8 Twins: To Tony and Mary Edna, 119, 121–123, 122, 124, 126, 131, 133, 155 2-2-1, 107, 108, 115 Tzara, Tristan, 200n63 Venturi and Rauch, 57n10 Verb List, 7–8, 8–9, 101, 102, 105, 118, 177 Vertov, Dziga, 2, 26, 27, 56, 117 Enthusiasm, 54–55, 133 Vogt-Göknil, Ulya, 72, 73, 73, 76 Wall to Wall, 155 Warhol, Andy, 22, 26 Chelsea Girls, 21 Waxing Arcs, 155 Weight and Measure, 183, 184 Weiner, Lawrence, 152 Wesleyan University, 161 Weyergraf, Clara, 38, 40, 41, 42–56, 73 Whitman, Walt, 187 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 114 Zille, Heinrich, 53

Index

205

Richard Serra (October Files)

James Coleman (October Files)

Robert Rauschenberg (October Files)

Andy Warhol (October Files)

Case Files: Neuroscience (Case Files)

October

October)

October)

JAR files

Spellman Files

Fish Files

Case Files Emergency Medicine (LANGE Case Files)

Case Files: Microbiology (Case Files), 2nd edition

Spellman Files

Case Files: Neurology (Lange Case Files Series)

Case Files Pathology Lange Case Files

Necro Files

Case Files Anesthesiology (LANGE Case Files)

Richard Nixon

Richard III

Richard Carvel

I, Richard

Richard Brister

Richard Preston

I, Richard

I, Richard

I, Richard

Richard Rorty

Richard II

October Skies

Richard Serra (October Files)

James Coleman (October Files)

Robert Rauschenberg (October Files)

Andy Warhol (October Files)

Case Files: Neuroscience (Case Files)

October

October)

October)

JAR files

Spellman Files

Fish Files

Case Files Emergency Medicine (LANGE Case Files)

Case Files: Microbiology (Case Files), 2nd edition

Spellman Files

Case Files: Neurology (Lange Case Files Series)

Case Files Pathology Lange Case Files

Necro Files

Case Files Anesthesiology (LANGE Case Files)

Richard Nixon

Richard III

Richard Carvel

I, Richard

Richard Brister

Richard Preston

I, Richard

I, Richard

I, Richard

Richard Rorty

Richard II

October Skies

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