Hal Foster Richard Serra October Files 2000

RICHARD SERRA

Hal FosterGordon 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 PressCambridge, MassachusettsLondon, England

© 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec-tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storageand 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 2000730′.92—dc21

00-037237

Series Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

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

Richard Serra (1978) 1

Annette Michelson The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview

(1979) 21

Yve-Alain Bois A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara

(1983) 59

Rosalind Krauss Richard Serra: Sculpture (1986) 99

Douglas Crimp Redefining Site Specificity (1986) 147

Hal Foster The Un/making of Sculpture (1998) 175

Index of Names 201

Contents

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar pe-riod that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art insignificant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is seri-ous, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the de-velopment of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the criticaldiscourse 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 itsown right, on its own terms and with its own implications. To this end wefeature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elabo-rate different methods of criticism in order to elucidate different aspects ofthe art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one other as theydo so, but they are also as sensitive as the art to political context and his-torical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal prac-tices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to theamnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time.

The Editors of OCTOBER

Series Preface

“Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra” by BenjaminH. D. Buchloh first appeared in Richard Serra: Works ’66–’77 (Tübingen:Kunsthalle, 1978). “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview” by An-nette Michelson was originally published in October 10 (Fall 1979). “A Pic-turesque Stroll around Clara-Clara” by Yve-Alain Bois was first publishedas “Promenade pittoresque autour de Clara-Clara” in Richard Serra (Paris:Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983); the English translation by John Shep-ley appeared in October 29 (Summer 1984). “Richard Serra: Sculpture” byRosalind Krauss and “Redefining Site Specificity” by Douglas Crimpwere originally published in Richard Serra: Sculpture (New York: The Mu-seum of Modern Art, 1986). “The Un/making of Sculpture” by Hal Fos-ter first appeared in Richard Serra: Sculpture 1985–1998 (Los Angeles: TheMuseum of Contemporary Art, 1998).

The editors wish to thank Gary Peters, Trina McKeever, and MatthewAbbate for their assistance and expertise.

Acknowledgments

RICHARD SERRA

Hands Scraping, 196816mm filmBlack and white4 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 peopleabout is the relation of physical facts. And I think an artwork is notmerely 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 rolethat the classical categories of media used to afford it. Artistic practice nowseems historically convincing only when it raises doubts not only about it-self as art but also about its allocation of specialized roles, methods of pro-duction, and conventional materials. Without exception, real progress hasoccurred only when a fundamental transformation has been made in theprocedures rather than merely the forms of a particular tradition in art. Ifa work ceases to be painting or sculpture, one must focus on what it is be-ginning to be.

Richard Serra’s films meet these criteria of transcending the tradi-tional terms of a métier, for they cannot be included in the specific tra-dition of any single medium. They are neither purely sculptural, if thisimplies the acceptance of certain conventions regarding materials and pro-cedures, nor do they unequivocally obey the specific formal principles offilm, a hybrid form combining narrative elements with a photographicimage language. Being “sculptural films,” they also differ from the gen-eral run of films by artists who, until the mid-1960s, had almost withoutexception either adopted the traditional criteria of a more literary filmlanguage or translated their own artistic approaches literally into film

language (though this, of course, does not apply to those artists, such asHollis Frampton, who had renounced the traditional plastic arts in favorof filmmaking). The phenomenon of the sculptural film is thus relativelyundefined. It does not necessarily imply more than the fact that the authoris a sculptor whose work can be seen to belong to the modern traditionsince Rodin, and that the approach in his films is specifically “sculp-tural”—i.e., that they are clearly different from the filmic or painterlypractices that we observe in other artists’ films.

To take but one example, for all the essentially sculptural concernwith the movement of bodies in space that its title implies, Fernand Léger’sfamous Ballet mécanique (1924) could be described as a cubist film em-ploying the resources of cinema to translate a painterly analysis into a syn-thesis of collage, painting, and narrative filmic techniques. In so doing,Léger failed to perceive the inherent potential of film for a project thatwould have paralleled the then-incipient dissolution of the concept ofsculpture. This dissolution was articulated in concrete terms in an inte-gration of positive and negative spatial elements, as well as a gradual open-ing of the solid continuity of closed sculptural bodies to the surroundingarchitectural space, as put programmatically by Naum Gabo and AntoinePevsner in their “Realistic Manifesto” of 1920:

Space and Time are reborn to us today. Space and Time are the onlyforms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed. . . . Therealization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of Space andTime is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art. . . . We renouncevolume as a pictorial and plastic form of space; one cannot measure liq-uids in yards: look at our space . . . what is it, if not continuous depth.1

Even though the revolutionary technical possibilities of film (themedium was then just coming into its own) strike one as eminently suitedto that kind of sculptural aesthetics, other factors prevented the creationof a specifically sculptural film tradition. The truly revolutionary filmartists of the period, such as Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov, saw the pur-pose and promise of the new medium not primarily in aesthetic (let alonein sculptural) terms but in its potential as an instrument for the politicalenlightenment of the masses. This in turn led them to see the capacity fordocumentary reproduction of real space-time events as the characteristicpossibility of film. On the other hand, in the West the Dadaists and theirsurrealist successors were profoundly retro- and introspective artists. As

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh2

furtive types and melancholics, they were chiefly attracted to the magicaland evocative qualities of the new medium (if they used it at all) whose lit-erary aspect approached their traditional artistic notions. The films of ManRay and Joseph Cornell, those two American artists whose sculpturalworks had exercised considerable influence on the evolution of Americansculpture, are clearly not to be seen as sculptural films but as filmic equiv-alents of the painterly juxtapositions of objects that they had developed asformal principles in collage and assemblage.

The impressive extent to which the influence of these traditionalfilmic procedures—a narrative convention on the one hand, a represen-tational and illustrative function determined by plastic and painterly con-siderations on the other—continued to affect post-surrealist film can begauged from Claes Oldenburg’s films, such as Store Days (1962) andNekropolis (1962). Oldenburg must be seen as a figure of central impor-tance to Serra’s concept of sculpture, for he had taken the reduction ofplastic phenomena to its natural origin: the system of coordinates formedby gravity and the temporal-spatial continuum where gradual processesinvolving masses and relative forces become plastic events, as seen in his“Soft Objects.” Serra’s (but also Bruce Nauman’s) early works were ba-sically arrived at by eliminating the representational object relation ofOldenburg’s sculpture in favor of an immediate implementation anddemonstration of these fundamental plastic phenomena.

One historic precursor did, however, meet the criteria of a specificallysculptural film: Moholy-Nagy’s Light Display, Black and White and Gray(1928–1930). Exploiting the technical possibilities offered by a speciallydesigned functional sculpture, the Light/Space Modulator (1921–1930), thisfilm gave an immediate representation of plastic phenomenon as process,and so dismissed the ossified conception of sculpture as a clearly definedmass in space in favor of a visualization of the continuum that involves thewhole of space in the plastic definition. As Barbara Rose wrote in 1971:

The films of the Hungarian Constructivist Moholy-Nagy and theAmerican Dadaist Man Ray have special relevance as historical prece-dents for the current cinematic activity on the part of painters andsculptors. Their films were a response to certain contradictions in-herent in the very aims and ideologies of the modernist movementsthemselves, and thus provide a locus for studying a crisis withinthe plastic arts which reasserts itself today. . . . In this context, artistsquestioned as they are questioning today the social relevance of the

Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra 3

traditional arts, as well as their ability to sustain a level of innovationequal 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” mediumof film, this was not only out of reflection upon the inadequacy of certaintraditional forms of artistic production. It was also because of a politicallymotivated desire to see the art work divorced from its predeterminedcharacter as a unique original with guaranteed commodity value, and todevelop forms of production more in keeping with the available means ofproduction and the public character of the art work. It is easy to see—especially now that McLuhanite optimism has been exposed as a sham andthe general euphoria concerning media has evaporated—that another im-portant element was involved in this transition from a traditional plasticmedium to film and video. This is the insight that the new understandingof the nature of sculpture would translate most readily into the medium offilm, which by its very definition permits the reproduction of the space-time continuum. It is therefore hardly surprising that this use of film andvideo evolved only in the generation of the post-minimalist artists. For thetransformation and expansion of plastic thought brought about by artistssuch as Carl Andre and Donald Judd—though consequential as an attackon traditional forms of sculptural discourse and influential as a prerequi-site, together with Oldenburg’s work, to Serra’s sculptural conception—certainly did not include the dimension of process. Minimalism involvedan analysis of the very principles that constitute plastic phenomena, andsuch procedures of plastic production as alternating positive and negativespatial segments, casting materials in molds, setting up masses against grav-ity, and weighting and balancing them in the space-time continuum. Itwas the recognition of these principles and the need to render them in vi-sual terms that required the introduction of filmic means into sculpturaldiscourse. What distinguishes Serra’s films is that, in arriving at a new def-inition of plastic phenomena through the necessary use of film, theydemonstrate their own necessity as films.

In this context it is also not surprising that it was the generation of thepost-minimalist artists who in the mid-1960s developed the relations be-tween plastic spatial arts and musical or choreographic temporal arts.There was a great deal of mutual influence between musicians and dancerson the one hand and visual artists on the other. This led to collaborationon numerous projects that ended up being collectively and somewhat am-


biguously labeled “performance,” a term that implied at the time, in con-tradistinction to its more recent theatrical usage, an amalgam of static plas-tic and temporal arts. Yvonne Rainer’s essay “The Mind Is a Muscle (AQuasi Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies in the Quantitatively Min-imal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A)” (1966),whose very title suggests a combination of plastic and temporal arts, a syn-thesis of physiological and mental practice, could be regarded as a pro-grammatic exposition of this development that was a logical sequel to theminimalist period.3 The collaborations between Rainer and Robert Mor-ris, Nauman and Meredith Monk, or Serra and Joan Jonas would also haveto be considered in this context. At the same time visual artists and musi-cians also evolved new forms of collaborative work. Whereas the tradi-tional approach, as illustrated in the collaboration of John Cage, MerceCunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, had aimed to integrate thevarious performing arts in some sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, the new formswere based on an awareness of the objective correspondences between theinvestigations in the plastic and the temporal arts. His friendship with mu-sicians Steve Reich and Philip Glass stimulated Serra; and in discussing theparallels between plastic art and music, Reich made clear this collabora-tion’s departure from the seemingly related tradition: “The analogy I sawwith Serra’s sculpture, his propped lead sheets and pole pieces (that were,among other things, demonstrations of physical facts about the nature oflead), was that his works and mine are both more about materials andprocess than they are about psychology.”4

Serra twice participated in the performance of Reich’s Pendulum Mu-sic (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 withGlass, who in turn was involved in the production of Serra’s early films. Itcan be assumed that the decision to work with “processes” rather thanpsychology, 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 whatmakes the piece interesting: there’s more in it than I put in it. That’s thejoy of working with processes. If you follow your personal taste, you getyour taste back. But if you follow a musical process you get your taste plusa few surprises that may educate you to make some other music.”6

Candle Piece (1968) is one of Serra’s earliest process sculptures, and itis probably no coincidence that it belonged for a long time to Reich. Herethe introduction of process into sculpture is all the more striking, as it still


seems embedded in an almost unconscious post-surrealist arbitrary juxta-position of heterogeneous objects, a combine or assemblage approach thatevidences the impression Rauschenberg’s work had left on Serra. At thesame time the piece affords us insight into the early forms of Serra’s inves-tigation of minimalist sculpture. Candle Piece resembles Andre’s earlyBrancusi paraphrases, such as Last Ladder (1959), as if Serra had turned itfrom the vertical to the horizontal and “enlightened” the sculpture. Theserial disposition of positive and negative spatial segments combined withthe row of candles transforms the piece—when it is lit—into an elemen-tary minimalist object that implements an elementary process. Althoughobject and process are still disparate elements, Candle Piece can be seen asan early precursor of the later process sculptures, and even more so of thefilms 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-


Candle Piece, 1968Mixed media1’2” x 4” x 8’8”Collection: Steve Reich, New YorkPhoto: Peter Moore

rial principle that had so largely informed minimalist sculpture, his oper-ation goes beyond the merely formal dimension of series in that it em-bodies a process of change. On the other hand, minimalist sculpture hadalready taken series and process to the threshold of this transition. A Fi-bonacci series employed as a compositional principle in one of Judd’s pro-gressions, for example, could be seen as a frozen process. But even Andre’sSpill (Scatter Piece) (1966), the first minimalist work to introduce an actualprocess into sculpture, was essentially determined by traditional concep-tions of space and material, though its formal disposition was redefinedeach time the elements were scattered, thus directly integrating the pro-cess of its execution into the plastic appearance of the sculpture. ThoughSpill had introduced into sculpture Pollock’s principle of confronting theviewer with a de-differentiated field in its all-over structure, this piece wasto the same extent defined in a traditional way by the identical cubicelements that composed the field. This becomes more evident in com-parison with the first true process sculptures, such as Nauman’s FlourArrangements on the Floor (1966), Serra’s Scatter Piece (1967), and, above all,his Splashing (1968) and the subsequent “castings.” Such manipulation ofplastic materials has probably done more than anything else to erode thetraditional idea of the closed sculptural body and to substitute a spatial fieldfor it, in the same way that the sculptural object as a body in space dis-solved and was replaced by the visualization of the production process andthe sheer presence of sculptural materiality. The fact that science hasshown matter to consist of molecules and processes, and the extent towhich this has become general knowledge, seem to have gone a long waytoward discouraging the conventional representation of matter in geo-metrically defined masses.

The manifestation of process in sculpture around 1966 was thus basedboth on the discovery and representation of the forces that constitutesculpture, and on a more precise understanding of the properties of mat-ter itself, an understanding that may have come about in part through An-dre’s prior reflection on the specificity of materials. Another aspect ofprocess is revealed in the explicit observation of the procedures involvedin the production of sculpture, such as those listed systematically in Ser-ra’s Verb List (1967–1968), which he himself referred to as “actions to re-late 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 cata-logue of possible manipulations of sculptural material. In each case one ac-tivity determined the form and appearance of the sculpture: the casting of


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 Feetof Lead Rolled Up, 1968; Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure, 1969; ScatterPiece, 1967; Sleight of Hand, 1967).

Such a systematic differentiation is performed on all the various ele-ments that go into the making of sculpture—subjective activity and deci-sion, physical work, objective materials and their specific properties,


Verb List, 1967–1968

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


The works are described by a simple verb action performed on the ma-terial 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 thematerial place where it is present). The viewer’s time field is as muchpart of the process (reading) as the artist’s former relation to the samematerial 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 pointsto another essential aspect of the change in the conception of sculpture asarticulated in Serra’s work (especially his films) in contrast to, and logicallybased on, minimalist sculpture. The spatial conception of the minimalistartists had always been based ultimately on a post-cubist representation ofspace in a grid system. Sol LeWitt’s Open Modular Cubes (1966) remainedthe only work that brought this conception of space to its logical conclu-sion and transcended it. In discussing Serra’s sculpture and the conceptionof space expressed in it, Rosalind Krauss notes that they are clearly op-


Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, 1968Cast lead5” diameter; 2’ length (approx.)Collection: Horace Solomon, New York Photo: Peter Moore

posed to the minimalist conception of space, which positioned bothviewer and sculpture like chess figures in a geometrically defined field,one moving around the other:

The distinction between Serra’s sculpture and that of Minimalismcomes in part out of Serra’s rejection of the a priori geometries of thegrid. For the grid is an abstract tool describing a space which alwaysbegins at a point just in front of the person who views it. The dioramaof analytic sensibility, the grid, forever leaves the viewer outside look-ing in.10

With his Splashing (1968) deliberately inserted in the right angle be-tween wall and floor, Serra had made a point of visually canceling thatangle and thus dissolving the architecturally defined “artificial” cubicspace by eliminating its demarcation lines. At the same time, process


Scatter Piece, 1967Rubber latex25’ x 25’Collection: Donald Judd, Marfa, TexasPhoto: Peter Moore

sculptures such as Splash Piece: Casting, by virtue of the evident presenceof a material procedure, had not only dissolved the traditional mode of ap-pearance of a rigidly defined (geometrical) body; they had also emanci-pated its shape (i.e, that which is separate from space) from the cleardivision of the figure-ground relation. By decentralizing the viewer’s vi-sual field in an amorphous all-over structure, in a de-differentiated distri-bution of sculptural masses, sculpture as “container of space” and space as“container of the container of space” were transcended in the discovery ofa spatial continuum that is experienced by the viewer both physiologicallyand phenomenologically as a mode of transition to the temporal contin-uum. The transition from spatial to temporal field is no more than a log-ical continuation of the systematic analysis of the relations betweenperceiving subject and sculptural object that had been initiated in mini-malist sculpture.


Splash Piece: Casting, 1969–1971Lead1’7” x 9’ x 14’11”Collection: San Francisco Museum ofModern Art, gift of Jasper Johns,New YorkPhoto: Peter Moore

If the temporal field as a mode of experience is linked in this way withthe spatial field of perception—and once this is recognized to be constitu-tive both of the plastic phenomenon and of its perception—the technicalformal necessity of the step from process sculpture to sculptural film be-comes evident, since the perception of a spatial-temporal field is the verymode of film, and the viewer’s simultaneous observation can be seen to beuniquely appropriate to its continuity. Therefore it can be hypothesizedthat sculptural reflection reaches its most advanced position precisely at thepoint where sculpture as a concrete phenomenon is transcended and trans-formed into sculptural film, in works such as Serra’s early films Hand Catch-ing Lead, Hands Scraping, and Hands Tied (1968). No longer sculpture orfilm, these works induce the viewer to perceive active physiological andpsychological identity in more modes than the traditions of these two cat-egories permit, or as Serra put it in describing one particular film project:“As a telecommunication tool, it informs the viewer in an area of kinesicsabstraction. The interacting, sequential flow of a complex kinemorphicconstruction (film) reveals a communication system derived from bodymotion.”11 At the same time this step—the dematerialization of sculp-ture—was historically due. It resulted necessarily from the sum total of allthose apparently divergent concerns and intentions in the plastic art of themid-1960s such as stated, for example, in Rainer’s programmatic essay: ob-jectivation of cognition, de-individualization, non-psychological forms ofrepresentation, dissolution of the traditional manufacture of the art workand destruction of its commodity status, and general dissemination and ac-cessibility of the work through its reproducibility by technical means.

The media of film and (to an even greater degree) video were usefulinstruments in this transformation, and at first it seemed as if they wouldaltogether replace traditional sculptural means. This shift in the materialuse of aesthetic and formal-technical resources, in some respects botha cause and an effect of a concept of art radically changed since 1965, hasbeen analyzed with regard to its historical necessity by Graham, who him-self pioneered this development in the sculptural use of technical media:

Ironically it wasn’t the new medium of cinema which devolved fromEdison’s invention, but the steps along its path—the analysis ofmotion—which first “moved” artists. Marey’s work is recalled bythe Futurists and most notably by Marcel Duchamp’s paintings, cul-minating in Nude Descending a Staircase, whose overlapping time-space was directly modeled after Marey’s superimposed series. Léger,


Moholy-Nagy and others did utilize the motion picture (also Du-champ at a later date), but only as an available tool and not in termsof its structural underpinnings. It wasn’t until recently with the“Minimalist” reduction of the medium to its structural support in it-self considered as an “object” that photography could find its ownsubject matter.12

Serra’s films occupy a central position in this evolution, and it is sig-nificant that Krauss begins the last chapter of her history of modern sculp-ture, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), with a detailed description of hisfirst film, Hand Catching Lead (1968). (At the end of the chapter, in anotheranalysis of the main characteristics of this film, she compares it to Rodin’sBalzac and Brancusi’s Torso of a Young Man, thus placing it in a series of keyworks in twentieth-century sculpture.) This appropriate judgment mighteasily lead to the conclusion that contemporary sculpture reached its cli-max in sculptural film, and that Serra’s process-sculptural films occupiedan eminent position in his oeuvre, transforming our conception of sculp-ture into the historically adequate form that transcends the traditional un-derstanding 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 proce-dures, which change substantially the methods of sculptural reflection andhave farther-reaching implications than a strictly formalist analysis likeKrauss’s might reveal.13 One of the procedures is fragmentation, also ap-plied in such later films as Frame (1969) and Color Aid (1971); the other isthe real-time process of a task-oriented performance, which defines thefilms dramaturgically and limits them temporally.

The principle of fragmentation results necessarily from Serra’s moregeneral procedure of analyzing the elementary constituents of a plasticphenomenon. On the one hand, the reduction of the cinematographicsegment, showing, for example, only the hand and arm of a person as theveritable “actors” of the film, points to the essential element of the pro-cess to be visually represented. On the other hand, defining the segmentaccording to Ernst Mach’s diagram of the visual field, it delimits the sub-ject’s boundaries of self-perception. Therefore no subject-object relation-ship is established between viewer and actor; the viewer experiences thebodily activity in an optical frame that remains within the limits of his ownself-perception, which seems extended by the filmic image. Fragmenta-tion 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 therepresentation of a sequence of actions, reducing it to a self-referentialactivity, a self-evident representative function without any “meaning”whatsoever.

This is how Serra, for the first time in the filmic representation ofbody movements and actions, succeeds in applying a formal principle,originally developed in Pollock’s painting, which he had already in-troduced into sculpture: to change the perception of the images of thehuman body itself through a de-differentiation of the visual field, theabandonment of central perspective or fixed focus in favor of an all-overstructure. In traditional drama or film the gaze had always been orientedby an anthropomorphic hierarchy, the head or the physiognomic expres-sion being the focus of perception, and ultimately all hierarchical compo-sitions were derived from this order. The objectification of action inSerra’s early films necessarily results in an enhanced self-perception of theviewing subject, who no longer experiences the filmic process in illu-sionist identification with the actor but begins to see it as an objectiveprocess involving the transformation of bodily energy into movement andwork. A lucid description of this process was again given by Graham, who,since 1969, has made the change in perceptions of body representation acentral concern in his own work in film, video, and performance, con-tributing substantially to this development:

Phenomenologically, the camera’s representation and the spectator’sview is the meeting point between the elements of visual conscious-ness, if consciousness is partly external (situated in the object / situ-ated in what is seen), partly internal (situated in the eye or camera) andpartly cybernetic or interpretive (situated in the central nervous sys-tem or the process of attention which, with a body’s muscle/skeletalsystems, achieves the orientation in world). . . . The process of phys-iological orientation—attention—of the performer(s) is correlated tothe spectator’s process of attention.14

Such an objective presentation of an action reduces the representa-tion to the performance of the task to be completed and to the time spanneeded to complete this task, during which a certain quantity of motionand energy is exhibited. Analogous to the objectification of temporalrepresentation, this reduction of action to the performance of a task


determined by the physcial laws governing time, space, and energy can beseen to result from formal reflections previously developed in painting andsculpture. As early as 1964 Frank Stella, in his notorious interview withBruce Glaser, had stated his maxim “What you see is what you see,” whichimplied a commitment to identity between the signifier and the signifiedin painting. Subsequently this principle was applied to sculpture in mini-malism. Finally, the same demand can be recognized in Serra’s reductionof dramatic action to a self-contained performance of a task. In fact a state-ment by Serra concerning the need to see action and meaning as an inte-gral entity comes close to Stella’s: “It’s how we do what we do that confersmeaning on what we’ve done.”15

Serra’s only public performance of one of these self-evident se-quences of action and motion demonstrated this principle even morestrikingly. Off-stage he had friends spin him round until he became dizzyand was about to lose his balance and fall. At this precise moment he waspushed on stage, and it became the task of his performance to overcomehis dizziness and regain his balance.

In “A Quasi Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies,” Rainer hadelaborated the parallels between the painterly and plastic arts and the tem-poral arts of dance and performance, and she had seen the need for an ex-act correspondence between the formal criteria of the new sculpturalconceptions and those of the temporal arts. She stipulated that “neutralperformance” corresponds to the “non-referential forms” in painting andsculpture after Stella; that “repetition of discrete events,” of self-containedevents or sequences of action, corresponds to the “uninterrupted surface,”or wholeness, of visual form and visual field in minimalism; and that “taskor task-like activity” in the temporal arts corresponds to “literalness,” theidentity in minimalist sculpture of the signifier and the signified.16

All these principles were introduced with great precision in Serra’searly films, as if he had applied to sculptural film the catalogue of aestheticnorms of the new temporal art as defined by Rainer. It would be diffi-cult to conceive of anything that could surpass these films as a synthesis ofplastic-spatial-static and mimetic-temporal-dynamic conceptions of art, asan analytically transparent integration of all the elements that combine toform the appearance and perception of these phenomena. In Hand Catch-ing Lead the sculptural material (lead pieces dropped from above into thevisual field of the camera by Philip Glass) is missed, caught, held, or de-formed by Serra’s hand according to the laws of chance. In that the fallingpieces imitate the downward movement of the film print in passing


through the projector, the visualization of the gravity of the falling metalcorresponds to the materiality of the filmic medium. In contrast to Serra’sprocess sculptures, his films are thus characterized by a greater identity oftheir 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 whichprocess and appearance are thoroughly fused). The confrontation of man-ual (subjective) labor power with (objective) matter and physical laws de-termines the early films. But the proportions in which these variouselements and forces become effective differ from film to film. If the man-ual part is relatively insignificant in Hand Catching Lead, if the interventionby the subject in the objective laws of physical necessity begins to appearabsurd and arbitrary, the proportions are reversed in Hands Tied, where thesubjective capacity for work is the dominant function in the solution ofthe sculptural task. These forces themselves—the hands freeing them-selves from the fetters—become plastic phenomena in the same way thatthe protagonists succeed in freeing themselves from the traditional lawsthat conditioned and created sculpture: employing sculptural materialby means of force or inertia in such a manner as to obtain a space-encompassing volume or body of stretched material.

To the extent that Serra’s early films and sculptures succeeded inshowing, by means of fragmentation and reduction, the self-evident pro-cedures of the sculptural as its true meaning, they have provoked prob-lematic metaphorical interpretations. It is as if real processes, sequences ofactions that refer only to themselves, and sculptural phenomena that aregoverned simply by the exigencies of physical laws and material proper-ties were so intensely present as to be unacceptable to human perception,which would therefore attempt to protect itself through the projection ofmetaphorical meanings. Thus Liza Béar, for example, on Serra’s films: “Asin Hand Catching Lead and Hands Scraping, the hands become the per-formers and acquire a physical expressiveness of their own which is akinto that of the thief in Bresson’s Pickpocket.”17 Kenneth Baker succumbseven more readily to the temptation of a metaphorical reading: “As con-structions, Serra’s pieces were metaphors for the condition of the con-structions we put upon what happens.”18 Philip Leider, who seems to haverecognized the problem from the outset, avoids it so dramatically thathe almost ends up falling into it nonetheless: “The process and the workare one, the art and its making both delivered with complete clarity. It is


difficult to account for the energy that is released when the mystery of themaking is dispelled, but one feels it.”19

The transition from identical plastic reality to the level of metaphorcan be perceived even in Krauss’s description:

Richard Serra’s sculpture is about sculpture: about the weight, the ex-tension, the density and the opacity of matter, and about the promiseof the sculptural project to break through that opacity with systemswhich will make the work’s structure both transparent to itself and tothe viewer who looks on from outside. . . . Again and again, Serra’ssculpture makes a viewer realize that the hidden meanings he readsinto the corporate body of the world are his own projections and thatthe interiority he had thought belonged to the sculpture is in fact hisown interiority—the manifestation from the still point of his point ofview.20

Paradoxically, it is the more objective visual or linguistic forms that,by virtue of their hermetic identity, seem to trigger this projective mech-anism. One has only to recall how the language processes in Kafka’s orBeckett’s work, in describing nothing but their own linguistic structure,have provoked a host of projections. On the other hand, Serra himself, inthe statement quoted at the beginning of this essay, points out that the artwork does not consist merely in a correct prediction of all the relations onecan 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 andMoholy-Nagy,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971), p. 68.

3. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–1973 (New York and Halifax: The Press of the Nova Sco-tia 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 fa-mous Pendulum Music: once in 1968 with Bruce Nauman and Michael Snow, another timewith Laure Dean and Steve Paxton—a combination of artists, filmmakers, musicians, anddancers that illuminates very clearly this phase in the transition between the traditional cat-egories. 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 1969with 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 inModern 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 (November1977), 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.


Hand Catching Lead, 196816mm filmBlack and white30 minutes, 30 seconds

The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview

Annette Michelson

ANNETTE MICHELSON: How and when did you come to filmmaking?

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

AM: I’m not sure I do.

RS: This is a film that Yvonne made very early, of a finger exercise, whereshe puts one hand in front of the camera and manipulates her fingers, handstraight 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 yearlater.1 The same week I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. At that point, I wasbuilding sculpture using material for the sake of its manipulative possibil-ities. Seeing Chelsea Girls and Yvonne’s hand film, I felt that making filmwas open to me. Up to that point, I’d felt a deference for film, and maybeI was a little bit frightened of it; I wouldn’t have picked up a camera. Thatmust have been in ’67, and then we started to shoot film in ’68.

AM: Anthology didn’t open, I think, until 1970. But I do rememberthat from the time it opened, particularly in its early years, you were theone New York artist whom I saw most frequently looking at the films inrepertoire.

RS: I would also go to the Cinémathèque in Europe.

AM: When was that?

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

AM: Let’s go back to Jack Smith and Bruce Conner and so on. What wasit in those films . . .

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

AM: Yes, for you.

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

AM: It is my feeling, though, that your experience of those films is fairlysingular in comparison with that of a number of other artists of your gen-eration. I don’t think that a great many other artists involved just then inpictorial and sculptural enterprise were particularly struck by those films.

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

AM: Yes, I think from time to time we would talk about the Russian filmsin particular. I think that in the late ’60s, or perhaps around 1970, how-ever, you were directly involved with a number of people who were ac-tive in filmmaking. I’m not speaking so much of Conner and Warhol; Iam thinking of Michael Snow, possibly Hollis Frampton. Did you knowFrampton?

RS: I knew Hollis, but through Michael Snow; I knew Michael verywell. I knew him when he was working on Wavelength and when therushes were coming back from Back and Forth; I saw the rushes before heput 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,

Annette Michelson22

and I became one of the in-the-neighborhood audience for his films. Hewas the only filmmaker I knew who was working in New York, and hewas just emerging. When I went to Europe for the second trip, in 1969, Itook Wavelength with me and showed it at various places. Michael thoughtthat would be interesting for me to do, and so I showed it at the StedelijkMuseum in Amsterdam, where it stopped the house. They knocked overthe projector. I showed it in Cologne and Düsseldorf. In a period of a yearand a half, I showed Wavelength twelve times, not because I thought I wasMichael Snow’s promoter, but because I really wanted to see the filmagain and again, and because I thought it was an important film. If therewas going to be an audience for contemporary work—at the time PhilGlass was playing concerts in Europe and I was putting up sculpture inEurope—then they might as well understand what was happening in film,and as far as I was concerned, Wavelength was the most interesting thingthat was happening.

AM: 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 atime of . . . partial coalescence. To someone like me, involved with thehistory of independent filmmaking in this country over the past fifteenyears or so, it is evident that the relationship of pictorial and sculptural en-terprise to film is extremely important; that is, film has been nourished bythat enterprise. It is, for example, very difficult to understand earlier worksuch as [Stan] Brakhage’s and [Maya] Deren’s without some kind of refer-ence to the painting and sculpture of the mid- and late ’60s. It was a timeof considerable interaction.

RS: I read Mekas’s interview with Brakhage,2 and I think it was broughtout there that Brakhage had a relation to the abstract expressionists. Andsomeone like Snow or Frampton has a relationship to another kind of aes-thetic that was developing within the larger framework of art. It is easy todeduce certain influences and to make assumptions about why peopleformulate a particular language at a particular time, but I think that kindof reasoning can only be taken so far.

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 thinkone does see is a certain number of presuppositions and formal strategieswhich are shared at a given moment. Last week there was a festival of newmusic at the Kitchen;3 there were a number of people from Europe in town

The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview 23

for it, and I gathered them together to show them some films. These arepeople who have been listening to Glass, Reich, Terry Riley, a lot of post-Cage American music. I showed them three or four of your films, HandCatching Lead, Railroad Turnbridge, and the one about gathering up . . .

RS: Hands Scraping, which was actually made with Glass.

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

RS: Yes, I know it.

AM: I showed them a film by George Landow . . .

RS: Which one?

AM: Institutional Quality.

RS: That’s beautiful.

AM: Yes, it’s marvelous. And I also screened Wavelength, which some ofthem had never seen. What fascinated them was that, in that period be-tween about 1966 and 1971, our concerns in music seem to be related towhat had been happening in film. Well, obviously this is a very approxi-mate kind of perception, but it’s not totally erroneous. I think that thereare a certain number of concerns and presuppositions which do animatethose films and the American music with which those Europeans havebeen involved. But as far as your own filmmaking is concerned, you’vecited Yvonne’s films as a very immediate example.

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

AM: I want to ask you about your view of Snow’s films for the followingreason: I’ve been looking at this essay on your work by BenjaminBuchloh,4 which I find interesting. He is concerned with the relationshipof your films to sculpture, and not just to your sculpture, but to the proj-ect of epitomizing sculpture at a time when the discrete sculptural objectseems to have dissolved into the sculptural field, a field which is experi-enced in time. Now, the films of Snow are often sensed as sculptural; thatis, they are presented in terms of pictorial and sculptural strategies. Snowhimself 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

Annette Michelson24

which Wavelength, for example, is about procession and depth. Did thataspect of Snow’s films strike you when you were looking at them?

RS: No. I simply thought that Snow was a complex and interesting artistwith a high ability to entertain contradiction within a very limited strat-egy. As soon as the term “sculptural film” comes up, I get very confusedabout what I understand sculpture to be and what I understand film to be.When someone uses a slow dolly with a camera, or progressively movesinto a foreshortened space, it still seems to me that you are dealing with anillusion on a flat plane which you can’t enter into. The way it is under-stood denies the progressive movement of your body in time. It’s from afixed viewpoint. It takes into consideration the very flatness of the screen.I’ve always thought that the basic assumptions of film could never besculptural in any way, and to beg the analogy between what is assumed tobe sculptural in sculpture and what is assumed to be sculptural in film isnot really to understand the potential of what sculpture is and always hasbeen. 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, lan-guages in different material manifestations. But to say that an experienceof sculpture can be similar to or influenced by the illusion in film—I’vealways thought that was nonsense.

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

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

AM: Well, the question then remains, and maybe it is even sharpened andintensified, as to the nature of the impulse to make film. Given that yoursculptural pursuits were developing very rapidly, very intensively, that filmfor you represents a discrete and separate mode.

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


Glass and I were standing it up in my loft and we were worried about thepossibility that it would collapse, and so there was a lot of dollying aroundand leaning plates and poles with linchpin accuracy. A great deal of con-centration was needed just to assemble the pieces. Someone wanted tomake a film of our doing that, but I thought that such a film couldn’t beanything other than an illustration or depiction. I thought that if I was go-ing to deal with some sort of filmic analogy—I was using lead to constructthose pieces—that I could probably do that just by using my hand as a de-vice. That, coupled with having seen Yvonne’s films, and Warhol’s greatfreedom to pick up the camera the way he did, with the detachment thathe had, made it seem possible, made it seem like something I could reallyentertain. I hadn’t shown any work publicly in New York at that time. Ithink I had just shown some pieces with Richard Bellamy,5 and there wasgoing to be a museum show at the Whitney called “Anti-Illusion.”6 Sowhen I first presented work there, I did the House of Cards and the splashpiece [Casting]. At the same exhibition I presented the hand films, and Ithink Snow presented Wavelength or Back and Forth or both.

AM: Back and Forth had its premiere at the Whitney. I remember seeingit there.

RS: At that time I was very interested in dance. I had just got to knowJoan Jonas and I was seeing her every day. She had a particular relationshipto film that differed from mine. We decided that we both wanted to con-tinue, and Anthology provided a place for us both to grow together.

AM: Just one more question about the films you were looking at, andthen we can start talking about your films. The films that you talked to meabout most, and were most enthusiastic about, were those I think youknew I was working on at that time, the Soviet films. It seemed to me thatyou were discovering, or perhaps rediscovering, the films of the immedi-ately postrevolutionary period, that is to say, 1924 to 1929, early Eisen-stein and Vertov. Is that so?

RS: That is so. I think that sometimes films connect with experiencesyou’ve had and you are able to make a leap into the filmmaker’s imagina-tion. 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 genera-tion of American artists who had grown up that way. Andre had workedthe railroad and Morris had worked steel mills, or railroads. So we camefrom a postwar, post-Depression background, where kids grew up and

Annette Michelson26

worked in the industrial centers of the country. The first films I saw thatconnected with that working experience were Eisenstein’s films. Thathadn’t happened before. I thought that for all of their disjunction andcutting, and all of the beauty of the black and white, they were also por-traying a human condition that I had some knowledge of, although Iwasn’t totally aware; I just joined the union, paid my dues, and made mymoney like everyone else. But I thought, “Oh, someone has found a wayto construct an illusion to influence our understanding of what thosepeople do and what that condition is.” I thought it was fascinating.

AM: 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 theWorld; Stride Forward, Soviet?

RS: No, I haven’t seen those.

AM: Those are the films which are most involved with the actual indus-trialization of the Soviet Union in the period following the revolution andshould be extraordinary for someone like you. But obviously, when onesees Railroad Turnbridge, one also feels that it was made by someone whomust have been very struck by that extremely important sequence inEisenstein’s October of the lifting of the bridge, in which the bridge is ana-lyzed and described in detail.

RS: That has been mentioned before. Either that or Léger’s Ballet mé-canique. It always seemed to me that Léger was involved with quick-cutcollage that was akin to his cubism, and that he could throw in anythingfrom lipstick to wine bottles, intercut with someone swinging back andforth on a . . .

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 forMichael Snow. It has to do with the long take.

AM: Those of us who know Michael’s work well are aware of that, but Ithink that fewer people today are aware of the fact that you had seen andconsidered the Soviet films of the 1920s.

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


never thought about the Russians; I thought about the Russians in cuttingthe film, and I wanted to avoid that relationship, and for that reason wedropped many shots.

AM: You have just raised a very interesting question having to do withthe 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 revolvingwithin it. For me, it is fascinating in that it seems to be very much in-volved with the basic strategies which were laid out in the early ’60s. Butit seems as well to synthesize—quite remarkably, I think—a great dealmore in film culture than just the local concerns of American filmmak-ers in the ’60s.

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

Annette Michelson28

Railroad Turnbridge, 197616mm filmBlack and white19 minutes

moving and what is holding still. Is the camera moving and the bridgeholding still or vice versa? That is contained within the framing structureof the material of the bridge itself, right down to its internal functioningelement—the gear. We put the gear in the center so that everything thatcame forward would be understood as being propelled by that gear, andeverything that came after it was also understood in relation to it. I thinkthe logic of the film, the way it was constructed, probably owes a greatdeal to the filmmaking of the late ’60s and early ’70s. But the content ofthe film has to do with the transition, between 1905–1906 and 1925,from welded iron construction to riveting; and as soon as they began riv-eting, they built extraordinary steel structures, epitomized by the bridgeswe have in this country. Those bridges were built during a ten- or twelve-year period, and they are the most obvious representatives that we haveof indigenous, unpretentious American building. They are built for effi-ciency and support and for nothing else. You don’t have to understandwhat sculpture has been in this country to have a love affair with Amer-ican bridges. You grow up in complete wonder at them, especially in thiscity, with Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge. I grew up in California, and I’vebeen 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 simplya steel artifact spanning two points; it begins to assume symbolic conno-tations. I think if you investigate the notion of a bridge, even if you are asculptor and you are particularly interested in a structural analysis of thebridge, you are also investigating an important psychological icon. Rail-road Turnbridge took a year to shoot; I went out to Portland six times. Ididn’t go out and shoot a bridge because I thought it was an interestingindustrial object, or an indigenous American relic. I think there was re-ally a need to investigate what “bridgeness” meant to me. I found some-thing else very curious at that time. Joel Shapiro started to carve littlebridges out of balsa wood, maybe even a couple of years before. Whenhe did that, I asked him where it was coming from and he said it wascoming from dream imagery. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do find thatat certain points something in one’s experience prompts the need tomaterialize something. When I first saw that bridge over the WillametteRiver, I went out onto it and passed the bridge tender. I asked him if hewould turn it around for me, and he did. He just gave me a ride on thebridge, and at that moment I thought, “Oh, I just have to look at this inanother way. There has to be some other way to grasp this, since it is all

Annette Michelson30

happening too fast.” So I immediately went and got a camera, and the firstshot I took became the first shot of the film. When the rushes came backtwo 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 seethrough the lens is very close to a film image—I thought that that in it-self was sufficient cause to continue.

AM: One central aspect of this film is the manner in which it amplifiesthe strategy of framing in a much earlier work of yours. You made a filmin the early ’70s called Frame . . .

RS: In ’69. It took me several years between Frame and Railroad Turn-bridge to put my eye behind the camera, to understand that I could put theframe between my eye and what I was experiencing. At the time that Imade Frame, I was curious about what the parameters were for the personwho was looking through the camera, as distinct from those of the subjectwho was being filmed, and how each of those viewpoints was contradic-tory (if the film was edited) to what the person viewing the film sees.


Frame, 196916mm filmBlack and whiteSound22 minutes

Watching something happen as it is happening while being aware that it isgoing to end up as another structure defined by the frame of the cameraseemed reason enough to use the frame as a device to determine the en-tire making of the film. I found the illusion of measurements to be veryinteresting for the contradictions it posted in relation to the illusion offilm. At that time I was also making a sculpture called Base Plate Measurein which I was using measurement, and it didn’t seem to be very difficultto 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 aboutthe increment of measurement.

AM: Here is a description of the film from the Castelli-Sonnabend filmcatalogue.

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 be-tween what is seen by the cameraman looking through the lens and whatis 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 andmathematical formulation (in this instance measuring) to things rather thanthe other way around. The size, scale and three-dimensional ambiguity offilm and photographs is usually accepted as one kind of interpretation ofreality. These media fundamentally contradict the perception of the thingto which they allude. Objective physical measurement of real and physicaldepth, coupled with the apparent measurement of film depth, points to thebasic contradiction posed in the perception of film or photo. The device ofa ruler which functions as a stabilizing or compensating system in the filmis 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 perceivedto be untrue from the camera viewpoint. In the second, the camera isplaced 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 factthe angle of the camera to the wall which is being measured.” I’m not sureI understand that. “Thus at the end of the sequence the measurementsspell out a trapezoid.) In the third, the rectilinear window frame is mea-sured as a rectangle but perceived as a trapezoid. In the fourth, the film im-

Annette Michelson32

age of the window is measured as a trapezoid but perceived as a rectangle(the reverse of the second image).”7

RS: Which point didn’t you understand? The camera had dollied to theside and was at an angle to the wall.

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 theframe 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 ofthe rectangle is a different dimension. That means that he is measuring atrapezoid. I didn’t even realize that while doing it until after I was asked topull the board away and compute the figures. When I computed the fig-ures I thought, “Oh, this leg is longer than that leg by a great degree.” Infact 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 illusionof film, there isn’t any real space. And I think that probably my need todemonstrate that was the need to make the distinction from sculpture evenclearer to me. At the time I probably didn’t realize it, but it has sinceseemed to be one of the reasons for doing the film. I’ve had my sculpturedown to a tape measure, a snap line, and maybe a level for about the lastfour or five years; I’ve reduced my tools to just what’s needed. But mea-surement has always been integral. The necessity of being precise aboutmeasurement has always been in the work at least in certain pieces. Eventhough I consider measurement as a sort of metaphysical necessity, I don’tpay 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 inmeasurement totally. It’s a real imposition that I use.

AM: But in this film you were implying a strategy of measurement tomake a demonstration about the nature of film, about the fact that depthis not there.

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


whatever space you are in), which is why I think there is no possibility forthe frame to be thought of as sculptural. It denies the possibility of expe-riencing the actual physical space that is sculptural.

AM: In 1971, I was invited by Phil Leider, who was just about to leaveArtforum, to do a special film issue of that magazine. It provided the firstopportunity to introduce a large audience to developments that seemed tome to be of prime importance in independent American filmmaking. Myemphasis 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 wasconcerned with those who had put all their energy into it and were radi-cally 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 offundamental importance, and whom I asked for texts for that issue. Onewas Robert Smithson, and the other was you. The text you published wasdescriptive of Paul Revere. I’d like you to describe what that project meantfor you at that time.

RS: I had been living with Joan Jonas for several years and was involvedwith her work in performance. I had found the Paul Revere script in Bird-whistell,8 that’s where it comes from. I had read Birdwhistell in relation toJoan’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 developmentof what one might call the performing cut; she used cinematic devices astransitions from one scene to another within her performance structure.

We made the film together. To me it represents a sketch of the possi-bilities of using theatrical devices within a specific language framework. Ithink the films and tapes that were more successful in that respect werethose which, instead of imposing a script, originated out of a loosely de-fined scheme. For example, there is a videotape called Boomerang, donelater with Nancy Holt, in which she is asked to respond to her own wordswhich she hears through a feedback system. In a very detailed and clearway, she states what is happening to her as it is happening: her relation toherself as subject. Boomerang has proved more interesting in the long runthan Paul Revere, which is more analogous to theater. I think the othertape which is more successful, where I did work directly from a script, butwhich doesn’t have that analogy to theater, is the one called TelevisionDelivers People. There we decided to use language together with Muzakto say something definite about the different natures of video and TV,

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and why artists find themselves in a dilemma when dealing with broadcasttelevision.

AM: I should perhaps explain that Television Delivers People is a text whichunrolls, to the accompaniment of Muzak, on the screen before the spec-tators.

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

AM: 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. Televi-sion Delivers People was made when?

RS: 1973.

AM: I was struck by the way in which you had revived, in a very differ-ent and interesting way, for the steel mill film, the notion of a central mes-sage that unrolls before the spectator together with a sound track which isdisjunctive from the text. Here is the beginning of the text of TelevisionDelivers People . . .

RS: I like the text very much.

AM: “The product of television, commercial television, is the audience.Television delivers people to an advertiser. There is no such thing as massmedia in the United States except for television. Mass media means that amedium can deliver masses of people. Commercial television deliverstwenty million people a minute. In commercial broadcasting the viewerpays for the privilege of having himself sold. It is the consumer who is con-sumed. 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


programming. You are the end product. You are the end product deliv-ered en masse to the advertiser. You are the product of TV.”

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

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

RS: There had been a meeting in New York of people from NYU, Co-lumbia, National Broadcasting, and they all presented papers. The paperswere printed in various journals and I cut them up and put them togetherto form a script. Then I went with Carlotta Schoolman to Channel 13[WNET, New York] where we got a character generator. I figured howmuch space I would want between each sentence. I asked the people atChannel 13 what color would be most effective for a readout, and theysaid yellow and blue. We sat down in the morning with four cans of beerand made it.

When it first went on the air—it was put on briefly as a sign-off inAmarillo, Texas—the reaction to it prompted me to send it to the gov-ernment for censorship verification. It was passed for television under ananti-advertisement provision. That means that if there are advertisements,there can be anti-advertisements: equal time. And this year it was shownin Chicago.

AM: What kinds of reactions did you get?

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

AM: So this was made in ’73.

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

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AM: I began by asking you about your early work, and Paul Revere in par-ticular, because it seemed to me that the role of information communica-tion through a very concise and conventional form of signaling wasextremely important and extremely interesting. I therefore asked youabout that film with the intention of establishing a relation between it andanother videotape called Prisoner’s Dilemma. When we began to talk aboutPaul Revere, you explained how it came out of certain concerns with per-formance, and with Joan Jonas’s work in particular, and you went on tosay that you felt that other tapes had been more interesting and more suc-cessful 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 yourwork, most concerned with social issues. They seem to have a particularstatus within your work that has to do with document, that has to do withengagement with specific concrete social issues in a way which is less elab-orately mediated by formal concerns than your other work.

RS: That’s absolutely true.

AM: Could we talk about Prisoner’s Dilemma as part of that spectrum?

RS: 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 audiencewatching the monitors on one side and the TV crew, the special-effectsgenerator, the participants, and me on the other. The audience could hearwhat was going on through the paper, but could see it only on the mon-itors. It was my way of switching multiple cameras—I had three cam-eras—of being able to direct in a way that was similar to putting togethershows for live television. The effect was probably more exhilarating forthe live audience than for those who see the resulting tape. I was fortu-nate enough to work with very good people—Spalding Gray, RichardSchechner, Babette Mangolte, Robert Fiore, Mark Obenhaus. That wasa very tight crew; and, for my own needs, I thought that there was some-thing interesting about putting Bruce Boice, who was a critic at that time,opposite Leo Castelli, who epitomized the art dealer. To have them bothin the cellar of a warehouse building with the audience wondering whattheir fate was going to be satisfied something that I suspect I needed towork out about art dealers and critics. Actually, it angered some people.Towards the close of the performance, they tore down the paper and de-manded Castelli’s release, which I thought was curious.


I think at certain times you feel the need to extend yourself in vari-ous ways, but you never get too far out of your own backyard. Right af-ter that I found that I was much more interested in the disciplines thathad always been closer to me and more self-reflexive. Now the tape looksdated to me. I saw it in Berkeley six months ago, and to see Schechnerand Spalding and Joel Shapiro (who is also in it) and Gerry Hovagymyanand Jeffrey Lew—to see those people at that time in their lives, and to seeLeo [Castelli] at that age, is something of a document of what my life wasthen. It is nice for me to have, but I don’t know if it has a broader rele-vance. I think that, in order to be relevant, those works which you referto as dealing with social issues have to speak not of a personal repressivesituation, but of a collective repressive situation. In showing the steel millfilm in New York I found that everyone wants to beg the comparison be-tween what they call agit-prop or social documentary and my earlierfilms. In Germany the response to the film had nothing to do with myearlier work. The audience responded directly to the problems of indus-trial repression.

When the film was shown in Oberhausen, it was shown on the sameday as a pro-union film. As a result, my film elicited hostility, but also sup-port. The film is being shown continually in Germany now, not as a filmthat is solely about the issues of art, but rather to speak of the steel situa-tion in a country that hadn’t had a steel strike for fifty years, until this filmwas made. Not that one fostered the other, but it is true that I was awareof a condition that needed alleviation. It could be that the response thatpeople are having in Germany to the film has to do with their knowingthat it was made right before the steel strike that nearly crippled the coun-try. You can imagine what a prolonged steel strike would do to this coun-try right now. It would break the back of the country.

At this point Clara Weyergraf, who made Steelmill/Stahlwerk with Serra,joined the conversation.

AM: A few minutes ago you were asking me about the film by Yvonnein which I’m working, and I was telling you that it was a convergence ofthings, that it comes very largely out of her experience of politicization inGermany. It’s a special kind of politicization that takes place on a particu-lar level, and I think that the film’s structure epitomizes the difficulty ofthat politicization; the film is the work of someone at a stage where polit-ical synthesis is not yet possible. It attempts to establish a relationship be-

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tween personal situations of a traumatic nature, mediated through the psy-choanalytic process, and public issues of violence, repression, and politicalterrorism.

After the retreat of most artists of your and Yvonne’s generation fol-lowing a brief encounter with politicization in the late ’60s, it is interest-ing to see both of you working in modes which involve an extension ofconcerns to very large political areas. It is also interesting that this shouldcome out of an experience of working in Germany. I thought we mightbegin by talking about that. In what way did your experience in Germanyact as a kind of precipitant or catalyst for this direction?

RS: I didn’t go to Germany with a particular political attitude, nor did Iplan to address issues other than the usual material ones, such as getting asupport situation together, cross-referencing it with the workers, andfinding a place for the piece. In this instance there was support from the


Steelmill/Stahlwerk, 1979In collaboration with Clara Weyergraf16mm filmBlack and whiteSound29 minutes

National Gallery in Berlin. I worked briefly in Thyssen, which is a mill inthe Ruhr valley. The working conditions in this mill were obviously op-pressive. I think that there are always internal and external contradictionsinvolved in work, and I always try to determine how to continue to workand not exclude those contradictions.

AM: That may be; but, Richard, the conditions of the workers in the steelmill, which is very largely the subject of your most recent film, are con-ditions which prevail everywhere. You have a long-standing personalknowledge of the experience of the worker in that industrial situation.How did it come to be that suddenly, to outside appearances, you becameinvolved in the way you did, making this film instead of, say, a film aboutworking experience in the decade previous to ours?

RS: You mean there are always contradictions, and there is never a pos-sibility of excluding them, so why in this situation did I find it necessaryto become involved with the nature of the oppression and the contradic-tion?

AM: That’s right. Particularly since you had the experience. You work invery particular circumstances, on a very particular scale, in a very particu-lar way. One can understand why a number of other painters or sculptorswould not normally encounter in their work the kind of structures thatengender those contradictions. But you had.

RS: I think that I really wanted to demythologize for myself an ideal thatI had about the working class. As a kid I worked steel mills. I worked whenI was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-four, twenty-five. And itcould have something to do, on a very personal level, with the fact thatmy father, who was a factory worker all of his life, had cancer and was dy-ing. So I began to think about his relationship to his work in order to un-derstand 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, be-fore you go into the factory and work on your sculpture, why don’t youfind out who those people are, what they are about, and what their situ-ation might be.” So, before I started working, I accustomed myself to theplace for four or five days, and what I found was that they didn’t identifywith the function of their labor, with the product they were making, orthe function of the end product. In effect, it was as though they wereautomatons which were being worn down. The situation seemed quitehopeless, very repressive.

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But still, if you ask me why I decided at this point in my life to in-vestigate the fact that these people’s efforts were going into building mywork . . . Certainly when you go to a steel supplier in America, you don’ttrace the product back to its origins, to where that steel was poured inAkron. You simply accept the fact that labor has afforded you a productthat you can then remanipulate and offer to another class for another kindof consumption. Here I had an interest in following the product from itsinception, through the making, pouring, and forming of the material, andin observing the workers’ relation to all of those steps. The source of theneed to do that is very hard to define. I didn’t think of making a politicalpoint of it. It just seemed apparent to me that all of the luxuries or com-modities that one class has are produced by the oppression of the class be-low it. We form notions of what we think a class is, what’s right for thatclass, without ever really investigating the working experience of thatclass. Having worked in steel mills in America, and having some admira-tion 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 situationthat probably hasn’t changed for two or three centuries.

It’s hot. It’s like an enormous cavern, tremendously loud. I was thereat one time for three days straight, and on the fourth day I could hardlyhear. I was coming back on the plane and I actually could not hear whatthey were saying on the airplane. The men themselves know that theycan’t do it for too long at a time. They have no sense of self-esteem. Theyare 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 ex-plaining to the class that is in the film what they are doing in a way that isbeneficial to the union, or the administration, or the power that is fund-ing the film. So most documentaries flagrantly support the status quo,thereby keeping the worker oppressed, or they function as advertisementsfor the class that wants to sell the products to the class that is dying mak-ing them. The workers do not identify with what they are making, andmoreover have naive good will and good-heartedness about being goodworkers that is tragic, absolutely tragic. I thought that this needed to bevoiced and that the only people who could voice it were the workersthemselves. Clara decided to interview the workers and I felt at that pointthat I had been there long enough to establish a working situation thatwould not interfere with or compromise the workers. If they took a half-hour off to answer questions, that would at least give them a half-hour ofleisure. They chose not to be identified, probably for fear of retaliation.


AM: 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 fac-tory, its market orientation, how large a factory it is, how many workers itemploys, etc. We are talking about a steel factory which is located where?

RS: Hattingen.

AM: And this is in the Ruhr valley?

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

RS: There are steel villages in the interior of the valley.

AM: And these are what we would call company towns, in which the en-tire village . . .

RS: Absolutely, yes.

CW: Everyone has something to do with the company.

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

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

AM: What is the production of this factory? How large is it? How manyworkers, would you say?

CW: A couple of thousand workers.

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

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 shootingof the film; and during the second shooting it wasn’t there anymore; theyimmediately got it off. But it was in the first tracking shot.

In the forging mill the material is only compressed; the final toolingof the product is not explicit, so the worker has no way of knowing whathe is making. It’s done very primitively. It is forming a large-scale turbine

Annette Michelson42

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, toSouth America, some for bridges, some for dams, some for reactors, whoknows what. But these turbines are hand-tooled, and the fact that Ger-many can hand-tool efficiently on a large scale is in part a function of herlabor force’s being kept in the position of not quite knowing what they aredoing, of being paid well to enslave themselves.

AM: What do you mean “not knowing what they are doing?” I mean it’shand-finishing, which presumably is a highly skilled . . .

RS: You can have a 650-ton block of steel, molten hot, and it would beformed with a jet of oxygen from a machine on the end of something thatlooks like a forklift. It is comparable to turning a wooden leg on a lathe,only here it is compressed material and everything is overemphasized. Butthe 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. Theyonly know that it has to be cut a certain way at a certain point. Theyhandle five or six in one afternoon, because you can keep them hot foronly so long, and if you heat them up to 1,280 degrees, you can only keepthem that way for maybe two hours. There is a bank of six or seven ovenswhere they are coming in and going out. So the workers don’t really paymuch attention to what they are actually making.

AM: In other words, what you are describing is a classic instance of alien-ation of the worker in relation to his work through a system of division oflabor, which is probably intensified by the extremely difficult physicalcondition of this work.

RS: I think you are right. The division of labor is what reinforces thatalienation.

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

CW: It is the cause.

AM: 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 auto-mobile factory might not. These are extreme physical conditions involv-ing specific health hazards—growing insensitivity to sound and soon—which intensify the process of alienation.


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

AM: Tell me how you came to work there.

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

AM: So it was installed in the large town nearest to where it was manu-factured.

RS: That was my choice. Actually it was my preference the first day I gotthere. The piece could have gone to Kassel or to Cologne, next to thechurch. It would have given it some sort of picture-postcard, tourist visi-bility. I thought it would be best to go right back to the situation where itwas made. Most of the workers go in and out of that train depot, and Iwanted very much to put it up there.

When we did the piece for Documenta, the work was not so ex-treme. We just had to order, cut, and tool the plates. I saw the forge whileI was there, and I’d never seen a machine like that. The forge was prob-ably sixty to seventy feet high. And I had never seen anyone singly hand-tool a forty- or fifty-ton block of steel. In the interim I was asked to goto the National Gallery in Berlin and propose a piece for them. I saw thatthe Mies van der Rohe deck was already a rectilinear construction, inte-rior to the building, a square within a square, so it didn’t seem possible forme to build still another construction on that construction. I didn’t wantto add another fabrication, yet I wanted to make something that in itsown right would hold its volume and its weight and specify a certaingravity; so I decided to sink one edge of the cube three inches into thecement deck. In the forging process I wanted to get the edge of the cubedown to ten millimeters, so that it didn’t look like a sugar cube, so I wentto the factory with a proposal. They had never made an exact cube be-fore, although they had made things that approximate cubes. They wereable to get down to five millimeters on the edge, but, besides making it

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more precise than usual, their labor was absolutely no different from whatthey do every day.

AM: You said, as you began to answer my first question, something thatamazed me—that you had entered the situation with no intentions otherthan to document it, with no particular presuppositions except one,which you mentioned: the expectation of finding the healthy, happy,heroic German worker.

RS: Something else happened to me which I should mention here. I hadjust come out of a situation in this country in which the government hadasked me to build a piece for Pennsylvania Avenue.10 I found that greedwas unaccountable to anything but a desire to preserve one’s job, that thepower that had run amok in this country was horrendous—I’m not surewhether that situation politicized me, but it made me think about whomade what, how and where it was placed, and what all the contradictionswere. And I felt that I was being sacrificed to a power structure in thiscountry that has had no use for anything we would call art. I was very an-gered by it. This government operates in a way which is all about its owninternal consumption. Everything is for sale in this country, and thatmakes a horrendous condition for the artist when he confronts his relationto the government.

I went to Germany thinking about my relation to my work in Amer-ica, and what it was to be in Germany. I wanted to take a more explicitlook at where I stood in relation to a museum commission for a piecewhich people kill themselves to make. I think the situation in this coun-try is more covert in some way, more hidden, probably just as horrendous,just more hidden.

AM: Well, Richard, it may be more hidden to you, but is it more hiddento the steel worker in Pittsburgh than it is to the German worker in theRuhr 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 Ger-man steel mill?

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


propagandized to the working class in this country is an example of ourmore covert repression. Popular films like The Deerhunter, which showssteel mills, or Norma Rae, foster a false, soap-opera identification with he-roes and heroines of the working class. And when workers see those filmsthey are persuaded by a kind of weekend indoctrination. I think it’s morecovert, whereas the misery is quite explicit in Germany. There is more ofa sell-out here.

CW: We talked to a black guy in the elevator, and we got three or fourstraightforward sentences which absolutely described his relationship to hiswork. I guess that every worker you talk to here in America gives you moreor less the same answers you get from German workers. If you really con-front the situation of the American steel mill, I’m pretty sure that it is nodifferent from the German steel mill. I just think that you happened to havehad a personal experience in a German steel mill. It was a learning processthat everybody went through while this piece was being forged.

I remember that the first time we went to the mill something mademe very angry, and that was the fact that you projected your fascinationwith your work onto the workers. You kept telling me that they were to-tally into their jobs, that they did their jobs in a fantastic way, and that theyreally seemed to like doing their jobs. I just couldn’t believe it. I had neverworked in a mill, but I had worked in other factories, and I just couldn’tbelieve that there was joyful labor done there. It was at that time that wehad a lot of discussions and began to do the film. We knew we wanted todocument something, but for a long time nobody was very clear aboutwhere it would end. I think we finally figured out how the film wouldhave 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.

AM: What did you see there?

CW: The gallery wanted to document the making of the piece, and theybrought in a German camera team, who did a lot of shooting. We lookedat 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 every-thing with a camera. They looked like what the cameraman wanted themto look like—heroes, big, happy German workmen.

Then we began to discuss the purpose of the film and decided that theshooting had to be different too. So it was a long process. For months I

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didn’t think that I was going to work on the film. We didn’t go into themill with a very clearly defined purpose; the purpose developed while wewere working, quite slowly.

RS: Also, initially the solidarity the workers must have in order to surviveis something I felt a certain regard for. You can walk in and say, “My, don’tthese people work hard together,” without going a step further and say-ing, “they have to work that way together in order to survive and it doesn’tchange the fact that they are doing this every day and the conditions arehorrible.” But initially one is impressed with their ability to move that ef-ficiently with that much tonnage, every day, confronting those conditions.I was very impressed with it. I think anyone would be. I’ve worked a lotof 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, andI guess I was taken in with that. In the course of my being there, my ro-mantic notion of the worker—who he is, what he does, and why he doeswhat he does—was totally . . .

CW: I don’t think you can say that that is a romantic notion. I think it’s anotion that is based on projection. You are an artist, and you are one ofthe 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 chosento do what you are doing. I think for you and for a lot of other artists it isvery hard to imagine that at least 75 percent of the people living in this so-ciety are living a totally different life, that they are really the Other. Theyhave a completely different relationship to their work. That is somethingthat we only learn about theoretically. We read about their lives.

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

CW: That’s right.

AM: There is a question related to what Clara has said, and which returnsto one I asked before. When you were working in the steel mill in yourteens, did it not occur to you that your coworkers were not involved in anidentificatory relationship to their work? That they too were involvedwith piecework? That they too were involved in a process determined bythe division of labor, in the course of which their relation to what is pro-duced in the end, to the whole product, is attenuated? Did you not feelthat?


RS: My first experience of that was when we were building the Crown-Zellerbach Building in San Francisco. We were building it at BethlehemSteel. I was on a bucker, which is the other end of a rivet gang; the hotrivet would be thrown up and we’d catch it and put it in a hole, and whatthey call the buck, or the bull, would compress the rivet on the other endto make its head. At the end of the day they would go around with a ball-peen hammer and hit the heads and listen to the sound to determine ifthere are any that are put in wrong or are otherwise defective. If so, youhave to spend about an hour taking them out. We were getting somepiecemeal over the clock, so the older workers would say, “Okay, you canmake a dime a rivet for an hour, and after that just put in a couple of coldrivets, and we’ll sit out a couple of hours.” That was my first glimpse ofthe fact that the people who had to be there all the time, who weren’t justtemporarily employed, needed to react in some way to a condition whichenslaved them to the clock. But I would come and go, and I felt I hadnothing at stake. Also I found that the steel mills in this country hired for-eign workers—Irish, Italians—right off the boat. That’s probably still true.

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

CW: Not only cheaply. In Germany, the worst jobs in the factory are al-ways done by the foreign workers. There are jobs that German workerssimply would not do, and these are exactly the jobs that are done by theworkers who don’t speak the language, or who come from countries thatare extremely underdeveloped, not Italians, but the Turkish workers, forexample.

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 laborforce. You just accept the plantation system. I used to summer in a placecalled Oxnard, California, where I picked beans with Mexicans. I sawthose conditions there, but I don’t think that when you are that young you

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understand it. You don’t think about the fact that you are in a class systemin which foreign workers are brought in and oppressed in the most hor-rible ways. In California, but for Cesar Chavez, it still goes on every day.

AM: You were saying before that when you began to work in the mill inthe Ruhr valley you had just had a difficult and very negative experiencein Washington, that in a way the experience in Germany seemed perhapsto have been conditioned by that.

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

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

RS: Did I say that?

AM: That is a very interesting phrase.

RS: What is the role of the artist?

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

RS: The function for us so far has been educational, and I think probablyits extension will be to provoke dialogue from the audiences that see it.Also, Ulrich Gregor of Kino Arsenal Berlin has decided to distribute it inseveral ways. One was to distribute it with other films of mine; but thenalso independently, as a film that could go to teaching institutions forworkers, which I find very encouraging. The Kommunale Kinos in vari-ous cities, Frankfurt, Munich . . . want us to travel with the film and speakabout it.


When the film was shown in Oberhausen, it provoked heated discus-sion in the news media. The media referred to what they considered to beour indifference, which was in fact our not identifying with the people inthe film. That made them feel that we were dehumanizing the people inthe mill. If you show someone attached to a machine without showingwhat he’s making, or why he’s making what he’s making, one might thinkthat 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 ofpeople attached to machines, day in and day out. That seems to be theclear way of looking at it, and the alternative way of looking at it—by say-ing, for example, “These people have their lunch breaks and they havetheir children and their gardens”—is simply false. That is not what you seewhen you are there. You see people serving machines. You see them frag-mented, and you see the machines fragmented.

AM: This leads us to some considerations that are specific to the film.

RS: The distancing of the shots: that is what I was talking about.

AM: In the first part of the film you hear the voices of the workers butyou don’t see them; you see in print what they are saying in response toClara’s questions. I realize that it is conditioned in part by the double au-dience for which this film is made, but what it does is focus what is beingsaid; one hears, if one understands the German, and one reads at the sametime, thereby attending very strongly to what is being said, and the dis-junction between the printed titles and the screen image and the soundmakes one focus on what is being said.

Then in the second part of the film one is introduced into that soundenvironment, which is so extraordinary. So there is a necessary disjunc-tion, one that is simply inscribed within that situation, between any oneworker and what he says, because you cannot hear him anyway, any morethan his comrades hear him. They communicate, as you said, by whistlesand signals, so there is a primary distance or disjunction that is inscribedin the film.

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

Annette Michelson50

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 theircondition, and I think that became the biggest problem of the film, howto retain the clarity of the disjunction and yet achieve the impact of the in-formation we wanted to put across.

When we got to the cutting of the film, I wanted to give a very def-inite sense of place, similar to that in the bridge film, to track the place oneor two times and then to locate the working process. If you follow the cut-ting 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 itacross to the other side, and they name it, and that’s the end. The cuttingwas done in a linear way to approximate what was done in the mill on agiven day. However, the images are put together so that, had you neverbeen in the mill, you would never know that these juxtapositions were, ineffect, following the operation of the shop. In the same way, if you hadn’tbeen on the turnbridge—you see it open, a boat goes by, it closes, a traingoes over it—you might not understand that that follows the linear oper-ation of the bridge. You might just think that those are random shots. Sothere was a coherent plan for the sequence of images, from which imageshad to be excluded, to keep the logic of the place consistent. I don’t thinkthat anyone who hasn’t been to the mill follows it, but I’ve found thatpeople who come from working backgrounds understand it immediately.They have no problem knowing where they are in relationship to theplace, 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 onlyas 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 im-age, or each development in each image. We tried not to run them to-gether to make a relationship in which one image would be predicated onanother, 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 explana-tions and illustrations. The text and image separation prompted the needin the viewer to connect the two parts of the film, to dig out the ideas forhimself, out of his own inner necessity, and derive meaning from theseconnections.


CW: Also, the purpose of the cut is to function as a metaphor for alien-ation, so that you don’t abstract a false linearity. We tried to get the mes-sage across that the different working processes that you see, for theworkers who are doing them, don’t really follow one another and fit to-gether and achieve the notion of a whole.

RS: When people see the film, one of the first things they say is, “Howis it that I didn’t understand what the people were doing?” People whohave not been around industry want to make a story out of it, want to haveit 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 ongo-ing. I think that of the nineteen shots, probably seventeen—that is, not in-cluding the two tracking shots—have men working in them. We excludedshots 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 eachshot the manifestation of that is divorced from any identification withthem. That came about for two reasons: One, from having seen the TVcameraman overglamorizing them; and two, just my predilection inshooting. I think I wouldn’t have shot it that way if I had not seen the ear-lier cameraman’s footage, but once I began to shoot the film, once I gotthe distance of the camera that I needed to maintain, the film came quitereadily. The ratio of shooting to image went probably from 6:1 downto 4:1.

I think I got closer to the working process in shooting the film. I wentback to shoot several times, and I would stay there all day and shoot maybefour 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. Itmight even come down to a detail in a shot which allows you to see thelarger framework. I don’t think you can understand that detail unless youhave a distance with the camera. It’s hard to understand detail if you are inreally close. If you are doing something very personal, I guess you canhandle detail in that way.

When I was in Germany I looked through a lot of old German pho-tographs by Heinrich Zille. I think that may have a lot to do with the waythis film was shot. Do you know Zille’s photographs?

AM: No, tell me about them.

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

AM: Especially at the beginning of the century.

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

AM: Why did you use black and white?

RS: I am really interested in black and white. When I shot the turnbridgefilm, almost every day the sun was obscured by the fog; there were noshadows. So there was a flattening and compressing of space. In the steelmill, I realized that all the large blocks would be the light source of thefilm. And that light source, as it moves, makes for a very strong black-and-white contrast. An internal light source was something I really wanted toexplore. I think color distracts from the way light structures and restruc-tures form. Also, when something is 1,280 degrees, it is white hot, notred, and I wanted the whiteness of it as a light source and a volume in theframe. I am not sure about color, about color stops, about what I think ofcolor, the illusion of color. I’ve never been able to deal with it. Maybe Isee the world more clearly in black and white. Some people see the worldin 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 ofblack and white, certainly in regard to drawing.

AM: 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 atAnthology, your telling me that Strike [Eisenstein, 1924] was a very goodfilm.

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

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


detail, in some depth. And then I remember your having telephoned mefrom California one night and telling me that you’d just read a piece I’dwritten on Vertov and that you’d liked it. Vertov’s Enthusiasm is a film thatI 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 andcoal—coal mining, by the way, is a job done under conditions as bad as orworse than those of the steel mill. But there is a way in which it is almostimpossible for someone at this point in the century to make a film aboutthe 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 incredibletension under which that kind of work has to be done. But the two So-viet films you looked at, and particularly the Vertov, are films which hero-icize that productive process. Do you look at those films differently, nowthat you have made your film?

RS: I haven’t seen those films since I’ve made my film, but I’m sure Iwould look at them differently. I might even find them reactionary. Imight admire their form, their cutting, their energy, but I might find thecontent reactionary. I might find suspect the idealistic narrative about theheroic worker even though it’s in the service of the revolution.

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

RS: Yes, I think so.

AM: Would you not think, however, that to have been a worker in aSoviet steel mill in the 1920s, even under very difficult conditions, mighthave been very different from being one in Helmut Schmidt’s Ruhrvalley?

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

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

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be reactionary films, but made at that time they were quite realistic, be-cause there was a lot of genuine hope for the working class. Those film-makers didn’t invent it, and at that time they didn’t illustrate the partyideology. They dealt with something which was really there. There wereprospects for the working class which, though they may be lost now, atthat time affected not only the working class, but also many Soviet artists.Artists who had been preoccupied with formalistic concerns before therevolution responded to that atmosphere of hope. I don’t think they werereactionary at all. You have to see them as films made in a certain situationat a certain time. I think it was a very great time.

RS: If you come back to what you asked—“Is there something in the na-ture of the work itself?”—no matter how you serve it up, for whateverhope or idealism, if you’re using it to enforce those references, they maybe a falsification.

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

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

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

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

AM: Not in that steel mill, but in Russian steel mills things changed.

RS: How much did they change?

CW: I think things changed for a while. They changed in China for awhile, too. I saw that film that was shot in a steel mill in China recentlyby . . .

AM: Joris Ivens.

RS: . . . and I thought it was theatrical propaganda to have the perfor-mance in the steel mill. It seemed so artificial, so heavy-handed. That’s aparty-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


the conditions are hopeless, even though the political ideology haschanged. It may come down to the politics of the filmmaker. Yvonne[Rainer] saw my film and found it interesting because it overlapped vari-ous areas of filmmaking—social document, agit-prop, various artistic con-ventions. And in being a hybrid, she said, it pointed to various ways ofdealing with various circumstances.

I think probably in Vertov and Eisenstein there is a point of viewwhich can never really coincide with the reality of the situation. They’retaking a point of view about a particular subject to serve other ends. En-thusiasm does it; I guess our film does it also. To what degree are we in-volved with making propaganda? And how conscious are we of it?

AM: That’s not a question I would ask, because I take it for granted thatideology is inscribed in the work of art.

Notes

1. Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1968) was shown as part of the final version of The MindIs a Muscle at the Anderson Theater, New York. The second Rainer film mentioned bySerra is Line (1969), which was shown, independent of any performance, at an exhibitionorganized by Hollis Frampton for the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. The third film isRhode Island Red (1968), which was shown as a part of Rose Fractions at the Billy Rose The-ater, New York.

2. Serra is referring to the exchange between Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage that tookplace at Millennium, New York, on 4 November 1977, an edited transcript of which waspublished together with commentary by Mekas as “Brakhage and the Structuralists” (NewYork, Soho Weekly News, 24 November 1977). An exchange of letters between Brakhageand Mekas about the published transcript appeared in the Soho Weekly News, 8 December1977; a further exchange of private letters between Brakhage and Mekas is on deposit at theAnthology Film Archives, New York.

3. New Music, New York: A Festival of Composers and Their Music at the Kitchen Cen-ter, 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 JamesMonte 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 Develop-ment Corporation in which it was intended that he collaborate with the architects Venturi

Annette Michelson56

and Rauch with George Patton, Jerome Lindsay, and the landscape architect M. Paul Fried-berg, for the improvement of the western end of Pennsylvania Avenue. When it becameclear that Serra’s and Venturi’s plans were incompatible, the PADC withdrew Serra’s com-mission. The Venturi and Rauch scheme for the plaza was to have included two pylon struc-tures to frame the portico of the Treasury Building. Serra was quoted in the New York Timesabout the failed commission: “It’s not the nature of my work to reassert ideological valuesof the government. The value of my art isn’t other value—it’s contained within the struc-ture of the work. Nor do I feel there is any need to ‘frame’ the Treasury Building—thenotion is a reactionary and rhetorical device. The pylon concept is an attempt to direct theviewer’s eye toward the symbolic function of government in a way that’s dictatorial, thatplays with human needs and historical values.” (Quoted in Grace Glueck, “A Tale of TwoPylons,” New York Times, 7 April 1978, sec. C, p. 20.)

11. Hans-Martin Schleyer, 62, West German industrialist and government advisor, waskidnapped on 5 September 1977 by terrorists associated with the Baader-Meinhof groupwho demanded the release of eleven prisoners. He was executed on 18 Ocotober.


Spin Out (For Bob Smithson),1972–1973Weatherproof steelThree 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 pic-turesque quality, and I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.”1 This in-comprehension is quite comprehensible, at least if one sticks to earlydefinitions of the picturesque, all of which go back to the etymologicalorigin of this word, that is to say, the sphere of painting. For the pictorialis one of the qualities that Serra would like to banish completely from hissculpture. In speaking of his first “prop” pieces, he criticizes them for re-taining pictorial concerns (the use of the wall as background), since sucha reminder detracts from their meaning (which is prescribed by the waythey are made).2 In speaking of the numerous works created by laying outmaterials on the floor, works that appeared in the late 1960s as a criticismof minimalism, in which he himself had participated, Serra severely judgestheir debt to painting: “Lateral extension in this case allows sculpture tobe viewed pictorially—that is, as if the floor were the canvas plane. It is nocoincidence 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 animage shot from a helicopter. When you actually see the work, it hasnone of that purely graphic character. . . . But if you reduce sculptureto the flat plane of the photograph . . . you’re denying the temporalexperience of the work. You’re not only reducing the sculpture to adifferent scale for the purposes of consumption, but you’re denyingthe real content of the work.4

Far be it from Serra, of course, to suggest that Smithson had approved sucha reduction of his work to the planimetric surface of a snapshot (we knowthat he found the movie camera, because it involves motion, to be a moresuitable means for conveying the Spiral Jetty), but this animosity towardaerial photography plunges us into the very heart of the experience of thepicturesque. Why this animosity? Because aerial photography produces a“Gestalt reading” of the operation, and reconstructs the work as the in-different realization of a compositional a priori. (Serra goes so far as to saythat it is a kind of professional distortion peculiar to photography: “Mostphotographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is highimage content for an easy Gestalt reading.”)5 Now, all of Serra’s oeuvre sig-nals a desire to escape from the theory of “good form” (and from the op-position, on which it plays, between figure and background). Notice whathe says about St. John’s Rotary Arc: no one who circumnavigates this sculp-ture, whether on foot or by car, “can ascribe the multiplicity of views toa Gestalt reading of the Arc. Its form remains ambiguous, indeterminable,unknowable as an entity.”6 The multiplicity of views is what is destroyedby aerial photography (a theological point of view par excellence), and themultiplicity of views is the question opened by the picturesque, its knotof contradiction.

“I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He wasn’t talking about theform of the work. But I guess he meant that one experienced the landscapeas picturesque through the work.”7 Serra’s interpretation of Smithson’s re-marks is based on one of the commonplaces of the theory of the pictur-esque garden: not to force nature, but to reveal the “capacities” of the site,while magnifying their variety and singularity. This is exactly what Serradoes: “The site is redefined, not re-presented. . . . The placement of allstructural elements in the open field draws the viewer’s attention to the to-pography 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 thesculpture, the formless nature of the terrain: the sculptures “point to the in-determinacy of the landscape. The sculptural elements act as barometers forreading the landscape.”9 Or again: “The dialectic of walking and lookinginto 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, eversince he took an interest—starting with a trip to Japan where for six weekshe admired the Zen gardens of Myoshin-ji—in deambulatory space and

Yve-Alain Bois60

peripatetic vision. All of Serra’s sculpture, meaning not only his landscapesculptures, but also the sculptures erected in an urban setting and those heexecutes in an architectural interior. Indeed, although Serra himself makesa very clear distinction between these three types of sculpture—noting,for example, that while in his urban works the internal structure respondsto external conditions, as in his landscape works, “ultimately the attentionis refocused on the sculpture itself ”11—all his work is based on the de-struction of notions of identity and causality, and all of it can be read as anextension of what Smithson says about the picturesque:

The picturesque, far from being an inner movement of the mind, isbased on real land; it precedes the mind in its material external exis-tence. We cannot take a one-sided view of the landscape within thisdialectic. A park can no longer be seen as a “thing-in-itself,” butrather as a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physicalregion—the park becomes a “thing-for-us.”12

Despite what he says about it, all of Serra’s work is based on the de-construction of such a notion as “sculpture itself.” This is how RosalindKrauss describes the relations between Serra’s oeuvre and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception;13 in order to describe in a different waythe “identity crisis” operating in Serra’s sculpture, I should like to stick tothe notion of the picturesque, which, I might add, could only have beendeveloped (in the eighteenth century, in England) after the critique ofthe relation of causality formulated by Hume, that forefather of modernphenomenology.

What does Smithson say? That the picturesque park is not the tran-scription on the land of a compositional pattern previously fixed in themind, that its effects cannot be determined a priori, that it presupposes astroller, someone who trusts more in the real movement of his legs thanin the fictive movement of his gaze. This notion would seem to contra-dict the pictorial origin of the picturesque, as set forth by a large numberof theoretical and practical treatises (the garden conceived as a picture seenfrom the house or as a sequence of small views—pauses—arranged alongthe path where one strolls). Even further, it implies a fundamental breakwith pictorialism, most often unbeknown to its theoreticians, and in myopinion Serra’s art, more than two centuries later, furnishes the most strik-ing manifestation of this break.

How does Serra work?

A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara 61

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 architecturalenclosure. Some works are realized from their inception to theircompletion totally at the site. Other pieces are worked out in the stu-dio. Having a definite notion of the actual site, I experiment withsteel models in a large sandbox. The sand, functioning as a groundplane or as a surrogate elevation, enables me to shift the building ele-ments so as to understand their sculptural capacity. The buildingmethod is based on hand manipulation. A continuous hands-on pro-cedure 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 workfrom an a priori concept or image.”15

In short, Serra does not start with a plan, he does not draw on a sheet ofpaper the geometric figure to be delineated by the aerial view of his sculp-ture. This does not mean that there are no drawings: they are done later(the Kröller-Müller museum owns a very “pictorial” drawing done bySerra from Spin Out, after Spin Out had been executed). This does notmean that there are no plans: these are the business of the engineers andof the firm that will carry out the material execution of the sculpture; theyare the translation, a posteriori and into their own codes, of the elevationprojected by Serra: “When you are building a 100-ton piece [the approx-imate weight of the piece commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompi-dou that was to become Clara-Clara], you have to meet codes.”16 Serradoes not start from the plan, but rather from the elevation: “Even in pieceslow to the ground, I am interested in the specificity of elevation.”17 Nowthis is precisely where Serra comes together with the theory of the pic-turesque and where in a certain sense his work is closer to it than Smith-son’s (whose drawings are often ground plans of his sculptures). For thepicturesque is above all a struggle against the reduction “of all terrains tothe flatness of a sheet of paper.”18

It may seem trite to say that a fundamental shift (from plan to eleva-tion) should appear in an art of gardens based, at least in the beginning, onthe imitation of the painting of Claude Lorrain or Salvatore Rosa. Indeed,painting, at least until recently, has never confronted the spectator as a hor-izontal plane (one might suppose that an art wishing to imitate painting,the verticality of painting, would stress the elevation).19 It was not, how-ever, something that happened by itself, and one finds it expressed only

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rather late in the theory of picturesque gardens. It was the Marquis de Gi-rardin, patron of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first formulated it directly:“What has hitherto most retarded the progress of taste, in buildings as wellas in gardens, is the bad practice of catching the effect of the picture in theground plan instead of catching the ground plan in the effect of the pic-ture.”20 The artificial arrangements of French gardens are condemned be-cause they produce the effect “of a geometric plan, a dessert tray, or a sheetof cut-outs,”21 as is symmetry because it “is probably born of laziness andvanity. 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 hasbeen satisfied to work only on paper, which tolerates everything, in orderto spare oneself the trouble of seeing and carefully contriving on the ter-rain, which tolerates only what suits it.”22

But the point is that Girardin is not content with these declarations ofintention: he advises apprentice landscape gardeners to place on the siteitself full-sized models of the various elements that they wish to include init, “poles stretched with white cloth” for the masses of plants and facadesof buildings, and white cloth spread on the ground to represent surfacesof water, “according to the outlines, extent, and position needed to pro-duce the same effect in nature as in your picture.”23 In speaking of the ar-chitecture of constructions (but this also applies to the other elements),Girardin adds: “In this way, long before building, you will be able to con-trive and guarantee the success of your constructions in relation to the var-ious points where they ought to appear, and in relation to their form, theirelevation . . . ; by this means you will be able to take into consideration alltheir relations and their harmony with the surrounding objects.”24

Of course, there is no question here of reducing Serra’s art to the con-trivances of an eighteenth-century gentleman farmer, since Girardin’swhole vocabulary shows that he clung to a scenographic view of the roleof the landscape gardener (for him, groves of trees are stage flats, the sur-rounding countryside a backdrop). And, of course, no work by Serra seeksto create a picture (the idea of representation is foreign to him). But eventhough Girardin is content with a pictorial conception of the picturesque(his book is entitled De la composition des paysages), and even though theelevation of Girardin’s constructions actually remains an illusion, hisrecommendation to use full-sized models testifies to a very early un-derstanding of what distinguishes size from scale, and this distinctionlies at the heart of Serra’s interest in the “specificity of elevation.”


We have long been aware of Serra’s aversion to the monumentalworks of most contemporary sculptors, as well as his wish to make a sharpdistinction between his own work and the production of monuments:“When we look at these pieces, are we asked to give any credence to thenotion of a monument? They do not relate to the history of monuments.They do not memorialize anything.”25 Finally, we know he is irritated byarchitects who take only a utilitarian interest in sculpture (to adorn theirbuildings, to add something soulful to their central banks and multina-tional headquarters). Serra calls this mediocre urban art, which has invadedour old as well as our modern cities, “piazza art.” That he has no fondnessfor architects is certainly his right: he has often had a bone to pick withthem, including one of the Beaubourg architects who suppressed hiswork.26 But the chief reproach he directs at them deserves to be noted, forit is the same one that he directs at other creators of monuments, whetherthey 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 im-posing: they are small models enlarged. “Architects suffer from the samestudio syndrome. They work out of their offices, terrace the landscape andplace their building into the carved-out site. As a result the studio-designed then site-adjusted buildings look like blown-up cardboard mod-els.”27 One can imagine the laughter and disdain of architects for a sculptorwho presumes to tell them that they should make full-sized models oftheir buildings. There was a time when Mondrian, who cared much morefor the process than for the plan, wondered how architects could avoid do-ing so (“how can they solve each new problem a priori?”).28 One more dif-ference between our period and Mondrian’s lies in the fact that such aproposition would not then have seemed incongruous, and that it waseven carried out directly by architects: in 1912, Mies van der Rohe, onthe site chosen in The Hague, built a full-sized model (in wood and can-vas) from his designs for a large villa for Mme. Kröller-Müller; and in Parisin 1922, before Mondrian’s very eyes a few months after he had writtenhis text, Mallet-Stevens took the opportunity to erect at the Salon d’Au-tomne at full scale a design for an “Aero-Club Pavilion.” One can only saythat Serra’s sculpture is, among other things, a reminder to architects (a“rappel à MM. les architectes,” in Le Corbusier’s words) of some forgot-ten truths.

The relationship between architecture and Serra’s sculpture is one ofconflict: he says of his Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin, placed in Mies vander Rohe’s Nationalgalerie in Berlin, that it was all done “so that it would

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contradict the architecture.”29 Furthermore, ever since his first writings,he has insisted on the need to distinguish sculptural problems from archi-tectural ones.30 And when, having enumerated different qualities of spaceoperating in a number of his sculptures, he is asked where he has found“these concepts of space” (perceptive, behaviorist, psychological, cog-nitive, etc.), Serra replies: “They were the result of working throughvarious sculptural problems. Some of my concerns may be related toarchitectonic principles—geometry, engineering, the use of light to de-fine a volume—but the pieces themselves have no utilitarian or pragmaticvalue.”31 In this sentence I read a denial. Not only because architecture—fortunately—does not always limit itself to its “utilitarian or pragmaticvalue,” but especially because the architectonic principles to which Serrarefers have nothing, or very little, to do with his work. He even acknowl-edges his surprise, a few pages earlier in this same interview, at the roleplayed by light inside Sight Point in Amsterdam.32 Serra, therefore, doesnot wish to be mistaken for an architect. Which does not keep his sculp-ture from being a lesson in architecture, or a criticism of architecture—something that he ended by admitting when an architect, to be exact, puthim on the defensive:

When sculpture . . . leaves the gallery or museum to occupy the samespace and place as architecture, when it redefines the space and placein terms of sculptural necessities, architects become annoyed. Notonly is their concept of space being changed, but for the most part itis being criticized. The criticism can come into effect only when ar-chitectural scale, methods, materials and procedures are being used.Comparisons are provoked. Every language has a structure aboutwhich nothing critical in that language can be said. To criticize a lan-guage, there must be a second language available dealing with thestructure of the first but possessing a new structure.33

This is exactly the position in which Serra’s sculpture finds itself in thepresence of modern architecture: the former maintains a connection thatallows it to criticize the latter. Both have a common denominator that al-lows them to communicate. What is this common element? Serra doesn’tsay, although all his remarks about his work speak of it implicitly: this el-ement is the play of parallax. Parallax, from Greek parallaxis, “change”:“the apparent change in the position of an object resulting from thechange in the . . . position from which it is viewed” (Webster’s New World


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

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Sight Point, 1971–1975Weatherproof steelThree plates, each 40’ x 10’ x 21⁄2”Collection: Stedelijk Museum,AmsterdamPhoto: Claes Oldenburg

flattened to the point of becoming a barely rounded wall, until this regu-larity is suddenly broken and in some way turned inside out like a glovewhen the spectator ascends a flight of steps.36 Other examples could begiven; I prefer for the moment to go back to architecture.

In Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, Peter Collins sees the new in-terest in parallax, in the middle of the eighteenth century, as one of theprime sources for the establishment of modern architectural space. Peoplewere interested at first in the illusionistic effects of parallax—hence theproliferation of large mirrors in Rococo salons—and later in architecturaleffects themselves: these effects did not occur frequently in existing archi-tecture. “Before the mid-eighteenth century, the interior of a buildingwas 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 thereasons why ruins became so popular in that period. Robert Wood,


St. John’s Rotary Arc, 1980Weatherproof steel12’ x 200’ x 21⁄2”Installed: Holland Tunnel exit,New YorkPhoto: Gwen Thomas

when visiting the ruins of Palmyra in 1751, was as much impressed bytheir aesthetic as by their archaeological qualities, and remarked that“so great a number of Corinthian columns, mixed with so little wallor solid building, afforded a most romantic variety of prospect.” . . .The fondness at this time for multiplying free-standing Classicalcolonnades inside buildings, as well as outside buildings, may also beexplained by the new delight in parallax. Boullée’s most grandioseprojects were to show many variations on this theme, but it had beenexploited as early as 1757 by Soufflot in his great church of Ste.Geneviève. . . . Soufflot had noticed that in the cathedral of Notre-Dame, “the spectator, as he advances, and as he moves away, distin-guishes in the distance a thousand objects, at one moment found, atanother lost again, offering him delightful spectacles.”38 He thereforeattempted to produce the same effect inside of Ste. Geneviève.39

And in a text that Peter Collins mentions without quoting, the suc-cessor of Soufflot as master builder at the church of Sainte-Geneviève wasto say that the chief object of that architect “in building his church, wasto combine in one of the most beautiful forms the lightness of construc-tion of Gothic buildings with the purity and magnificence of Greekarchitecture.”40

At first sight the interest of a neoclassical architect in Gothic buildingswould seem impossibly remote from our subject. The very strangeness ofthis interest, however, leads directly to it, since, as Collins notes, it is theresult of the new taste for parallax that develops in this period. Collins’s in-tuition is confirmed by a supplementary element: on 6 September 1764,on the occasion of the laying of the first stone for Sainte-Geneviève, JulienDavid Leroy, famous for Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, awork he had published in 1758 and which marked the beginning of theGreek revival, presented a small pamphlet to the king. Now this littlebook, which ends with a panegyric on Soufflot’s future church, is prob-ably the first architectural treatise that “relies on an experimental knowl-edge of movement in space—that metaphysical part of architecture, as Leroycalls it in his letters.”41 The hymn to the varied effects produced by a peri-style is even more vibrant in this pamphlet than in his book on ruins,where Leroy had already addressed the question. But I would rather quotea less effusive passage of the book in which Leroy, in order to explain hisrejection of pilasters and engaged columns, then a great subject of debateamong French architectural theoreticians, brings up the art of gardens. Hisdemonstration is very simple:

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If you walk in a garden, at some distance from & along a row of reg-ularly planted trees, all of whose trunks touch a wall pierced with ar-cades [as engaged columns do], the position of the trees with respectto these arcades will only seem to you to change very imperceptibly,& your soul will experience no new sensation. . . . But if this row oftrees stands away from the wall [like a peristyle], while you walk inthe same way as before, you will enjoy a new spectacle, because thedifferent spaces in the wall will seem successively to be blocked up bythe trees with every step you take.

And Leroy’s description becomes surprisingly precise—as precise asthe 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, anda moment later cut them unequally, or leave them entirely exposed &conceal only their intervals; finally, if you approach or move awayfrom these trees, the wall will seem to you to rise up to where theirbranches begin, or cut their trunks at very different heights.

In short, despite the regular arrangement in both cases of tree andwall,

the first of the decorations will seem immobile, while the other, onthe contrary, being in some way enlivened by the movement of thespectator, will show him a series of much varied views, which will re-sult from the endless combination that he obtains of the simple ob-jects that produce these views.42

Of course, the garden described by Leroy has nothing picturesqueabout it; what is picturesque is the importance accorded to the movementof the spectator, since it corresponds to that fundamental rule that UvedalePrice, one of the theoreticians cited by Smithson, called “intricacy.” In-deed, for Price, the first so-called English gardens were not picturesqueenough, 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 con-nected and blended with it that one can hardly exist without theother. According to the idea I have formed of it, [Price adds] intricacy


in landscape might be defined as that disposition of objects which, bya partial and uncertain concealment, excites and nourishes curiosity.43

To be sure, as Collins points out, theoreticians of the picturesque havenever been able to extricate themselves from a veritable malaise engen-dered by a contradiction in their theory, by their stubborn determinationto treat the scenic garden (promenade, temporal experience) and land-scape painting as though they were one and the same thing.44 Some ofthose theoreticians, however, were aware of this contradiction, and it evenbecame a stumbling block in their polemics. See Repton, responding toPrice: “The spot from whence this view is taken is in a fixed state to thepainter, but the gardener surveys his scenery in motion.”45 Now it was thediscovery of the play of parallax that made them specify the terms of thecontradiction (static optical view/peripatetic view). Furthermore, it is inconnection with architecture, the perception of architecture, that it ap-pears in their texts:

Avoid a straight avenue directed upon a dwelling-house; better for anoblique approach is a waving line. . . . In a direct approach, the firstappearance is continued to the end. . . . In an oblique approach, theinterposed objects put the house seemingly in motion: it moves withthe passenger . . . [and] seen successively in different directions, [it] as-sumes at each step a new figure.46

In short, despite the “pictorial” bias, it is necessary to break the as-surance of the organ of vision, to eliminate the presumption of “Gestalt,”and to recall to the spectator’s body its indolence and weight, its materialexistence: “The foot should never travel to [the object] by the same pathwhich the eye has traveled over before. Lose the object, and draw nighobliquely.”47 This is the great innovation contained in embryo in the pic-turesque garden:

The Classical notion of design, whether in gardens or buildings, re-garded the totality of such schemes as forming a single unified andimmediately intelligible composition, of which the elements weresubdivisions constituting smaller but still harmoniously related parts;[the picturesque garden was], on the contrary, designed in accordancewith a diametrically opposite intention, for here the overall conceptwas carefully hidden.48

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Now if I said before that Serra’s sculpture was a “reminder to archi-tects,” it is precisely because modern architecture was born of this rupture(analyzed by Collins in connection with gardens)—a rupture that archi-tects themselves, perhaps under the influence of certain theoreticians,have almost completely repressed. In his short book on modern architec-ture, Vincent Scully raises at the outset (but one swallow doesn’t make asummer) 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 wecan no longer identify the architecture as an image of the modernworld.”49 And this point of rupture is situated in the middle of the eigh-teenth century (it is surely not by chance that it exactly coincides with thewar conducted by the English garden against the symmetry of the gardenà la française): taking issue with Sigfried Giedion, Scully shows that baroquespace (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 itsnegation. In the baroque,

order is absolutely firm, but against it an illusion of freedom isplayed. . . . It is therefore an architecture that is intended to encloseand shelter human beings in a psychic sense, to order them absolutelyso that they can always find a known conclusion at the end of anyjourney, but finally to let them play at freedom and action all thewhile. Everything works out; the play seems tumultuous but nobodygets hurt and everyone wins. It is . . . a maternal architecture, and cre-ates a world with which, today, only children, if they are lucky, couldidentify.50

Who brought about the rupture? asks Scully. It was Piranesi in hisCarceri:

In them, the symmetry, hierarchy, climax, and emotional release ofBaroque architectural space . . . were cast aside in favor of a complexspatial wandering, in which the objectives of the journey were not re-vealed and therefore could not be known.51

Although one of the sources of the picturesque, Piranesi’s art participatesin the rupture that goes well beyond the picturesque that succeeds it. Andif Serra, because of the connotations of delicacy attached to this term pic-turesque, balked at its use to characterize his sculpture, I would say that in


a certain sense he was right, for his art is the first response in sculpturalspace to the questions raised about representational space more than twocenturies ago by Piranesi.

The first point in common between the Venetian’s engravings andSerra’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 asUlya Vogt-Göknil has remarked, they are always multiple and either runparallel or mutually exclude each other.53 Serra: “The work is not goal-oriented.”54 Or again, “the center, or the question of centering, is dislo-cated from the physical center of the work and found in a movingcenter.”55 Or finally: “The expanse of the work allows one to perceive andlocate a multiplicity of centers.”56

Another feature in common, which, as we have seen, was containedin embryo in the picturesque: both Piranesi’s work and Serra’s are basedon the abolition of the prerogative of the plan. Let us dwell for a momenton the famous Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, and look at plate 11 ofthat work, entitled Gruppo di Scale ornato di magnifica Architettura, le qualistanno disposte in modo che condocano a varii piani, e specialmente ad una Ro-tonda che serve per rappresentanze teatrali. Who among us, having been

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Giovanni Battista PiranesiPrima parte di architetture e prospettivePlate 11: Group of Stairs, Embellished byMagnificent Architecture

shown this image (elevation) and its title (isn’t a rotunda circular, anddoesn’t it presuppose a completed geometrical space?), could have imag-ined that the floor plan, as patiently reconstituted by Ulya Vogt-Göknil,would turn out to be so architecturally formless, a pleading for the frag-ment right there on the plan? It is as though Piranesi had not simply beencontent to break existing architectural rules (by the eccentric points ofview adopted in his vedute), but had surreptitiously destroyed, in the veryelevations, the identity of the plan. Now this is one of the essential strengthsof Serra’s sculpture. Clara Weyergraf has remarked about Terminal, a sculp-ture that stands today in Bochum, that “the information gathered from theconstruction drawings . . . cannot be verified in the experience of thesculpture.”57 And indeed the square opening of light that the spectatorfinds above him when he enters the sculpture cannot be inferred from hisprevious walk around the work (just as it is impossible for him to know, atany particular moment, that “Terminal is made of four trapezoidal slabs ofsteel of the same size,”58 something specifically revealed by the construc-tion drawings). The elevation cannot provide the plan, for as one walks


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

around it, one finds no element that has maintained a relation of identitywith the others: “The decision to break with the expectations about thesequentialness of like elements make [sic] a dialectical relationship betweeninside 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 can-not be counted. But Piranesi’s principle of disjunction was already at workin Sight Point: even though this sculpture is constructed of a series of sim-ilar elements, nothing acts to forewarn the observer that it is, in Serra’swords, a “truncated pyramid” delineating an equilateral triangle at its top.Or again, when Serra, with some reluctance, describes the placing of thethree steel slabs of Spin Out in geometric terms, he says nothing aboutwhat the spectator’s experience will be: he pretends to give a key to thatexperience, and this key is not the right one: “The plates were laid out attwelve, four and eight o’clock in an elliptical valley, and the space in be-tween them forms an isosceles triangle.”60 I have spent some time survey-ing Spin Out, trying in particular to determine whether some sort ofgeometry was at work there, and never was I able to come to that con-clusion (on the contrary, it seemed to me that any a priori geometry wasabsent 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 thework in terms of parallax and the progress of the spectator, since in no waydoes he work with a view to the recognition of a geometric form in hissculpture—he does not work, as he puts it, “for the sake of anything inthat way.”61

The elevation does not provide the plan, and the plan cannot providethe elevation. Had it been erected in the place for which it was conceived,the piece commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou would havebeen the radical confirmation of this fundamental division. Because thework would have been placed in the pit of the Centre’s entrance hall, thespectators would have had from the outset an inkling of the plan in itssymmetry (two equal arcs of a circle arranged as an X, one opposite theother): they would have first seen the work from above, and even if theirview would not have been exactly aerial, let us say that their first appre-hension of Clara-Clara would have been a “Gestalt” one. But this viewwould have been false. And it is fortunate that in the site actually occupiedby the work at the time of its exhibition, between the Musée du Jeu dePaume and the Orangerie, something of this initial false impression can

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continue to exist, thanks to the sloping partitions that overhang the sculp-ture on each side. So at the Tuileries, as would have been the case at theCentre Georges Pompidou, the spectator of Clara-Clara had knowledgeof the overall plan of the sculpture before going up to look at it moreclosely.

Geometrically, the two arcs of a circle are two identical segments of asection of a cone (and not of a cylinder), which means that the curvedwalls of these arcs are not vertical—the first fact that the plan doesn’t tellus. Since the arcs are placed not parallel but mirroring each other (theirconvexity almost meeting in the middle), one logical conclusion would beto have the walls each lean in the opposite direction, each toward the in-side of its own curve. But Serra’s invention—the second element not ap-parent from the plan—lies in having broken this symmetry by using whatforms the top of one of these arcs as the base for the other—in otherwords, 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 bot-tleneck that these two arcs form at their middle, the spectator constantlyhas the strange impression that one wall goes “faster” than the other, thatthe right and left sides of his body are not synchronized. Having passedthrough the bottleneck, which reveals to him the reason for his strangefeeling—although the slant of the walls is actually rather slight—he thensees the lateral differences reversed: the symmetry of this effect is foresee-able, but not the surprise that accompanies it.

To get back to Piranesi: William Chambers, one of the first theoreti-cians of the English garden and a critic of Price, reports that “when thestudents at the Academie de France in Rome accused [Piranesi] of beingignorant 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 fea-ture,” writes Monique Mosser, “may be the effort made by Piranesi to de-velop at the same time two ideas that are difficult to reconcile [I would saymutually exclusive]: that of a building with a central plan and that of thestaircase as the dominant motif.”63 What Piranesi actually does in responseto the students’ accusation is to compose, to be sure, a centered plan, butthis center, on the one hand, is considerably smaller than the rooms at theperiphery (especially those at the four corners); on the other hand, it is


nothing but a thoroughfare: its sole function is to provide access to eight stair-cases. From such a plan, swarming with useless and redundant stairways,which are conceived as elevation sections leading nowhere, from thisfalsely circular structure (going up/down/up), one can infer nothing butan endless rotary and vertical circulation. The center is a thoroughfare: asUlya Vogt-Göknil had seen, this is the essential nature of Piranesi’s archi-tectural space—whether it be the space represented in the Carceri, or thevedute he provided of the Roman architecture he had before his eyes, oragain of this school design.64 The center is a thoroughfare, i.e., an indif-ferent place, with no other identity than the one conferred on it by thepassersby, a nonplace that exists only through the experience of time andmotion that the stroller may make of it. In a certain way, Piranesi can beunderstood to foreshadow not only the space of Serra’s sculpture, but thatof all modern sculpture as well. For, as Rosalind Krauss has shown, thisspace, from Rodin to Serra, is one of passage and displacement from thecenter, a space interrupted by the discontinuous time of involuntarymemory, a slender space whose divergences it is up to the spectator to ex-plore, while eventually connecting its threads for himself.65

In speaking of Shift, Krauss compares Serra’s sculpture to LevKuleshov’s famous experiments in montage. In these experiments, themontage was revealed as an “index of difference or separateness within aprevailing matrix of sameness.”66 Kuleshov’s montage demonstrated theperceptive primacy of spatial continuity, but at the same time expressedthe fact that this continuity was produced by means of discontinuity. Thisis exactly what Serra accomplishes in Shift and in many other sculpturesas well.

One has only to reread the pages Serra has written on Rotary Arc tobe convinced that film fragmentation is an apt metaphor with which todescribe his work: as one drives around the rotary, both Arc’s convexityand its concavity foreshorten, then compress, overlap, and elongate. Theabrupt but continuous succession of views is highly transitive, akin to acinematic experience.67 The “transitivity” to which Serra here refers is thenotion that he tried to work out in his first films (an action perpetuated onan object, with no conclusion) and in the sculptures in the Skullcracker Se-ries (1969), and which he expressed in the simplest way of all by inscrib-ing a list of verbs on the invitation announcement for one of his firstexhibitions.68 Now this very transitivity was discovered by Eisenstein inPiranesi when he compared to the space in the Carceri the sequence fromOctober in which

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one and the same piece showing the ascent of the head of state up themarble staircase of the Winter Palace has been cemented together insuccession “ad infinitum.” Of course, not really “ad infinitum,” butin the course of the four or five variants in which this same scene wasshot, which during the actual shooting was intended to be a very lux-urious . . . episode.69

Naturally the filmmaker’s intention was ironic (to show that Kerensky’sirresistible rise to power was built on sand), but that is not important here,since montage can express whatever it likes with “one and the sameshot.” What matters on the one hand is that this description of an almostendless repetition of the same gesture with no conclusion (climbing stairsfor no other reason than to climb stairs) exactly matches the repetitivenonevent of Serra’s first film, Hand Catching Lead (a hand tries to catchsome falling pieces of lead, sometimes does catch one, and immediatelylets it go: there is no “climax,” no orgiastic release, as there is in thebaroque).70 What matters on the other hand is that Eisenstein discoversthis transitivity in Piranesi’s work. Not only through the theme of anendless climbing of stairs (a romantic interpretation of the Carceri, andone that has been a commonplace since the famous passage in DeQuincey, quoted by the Soviet director),71 but especially because in hisopinion Piranesi works like a master of montage and bases his spatial con-tinuities on discontinuity:

Nowhere in the Carceri do we find a view in depth in continuous per-spective. Everywhere the movement begun by a perspective in depthfinds itself interrupted by a bridge, a pillar, an arch, a passageway. Eachtime, beyond the pillar or the semicircle of the arch, the movementof the perspective is once more resumed. . . . [But while] the eye ex-pects to see behind the arch the continuation of the architecturaltheme preceding the arch normally reduced by perspective, [it is infact] another architectural motif that appears behind the arch, andmoreover, in a reduction of perspective almost double what the eyehad supposed. . . . Hence an unexpected qualitative leap from thespace and the grand scale. And the series of planes in depth, cut offfrom each other by pillars and arches, is constructed in independentportions of autonomous spaces, being connected not by a single con-tinuity of perspective, but as in the successive shocks of spaces of aqualitative intensity differing in depth.


This, says Eisenstein, is exactly the way montage operates in the cinema:

This effect [in Piranesi] is constructed on the capacity of our eye tocontinue by inertia a movement once it has been given. The collisionof this “suggested” path of movement with another path substituted for it alsoproduces the effect of a jolt. It is on the analogous ability of retaining im-prints of a visual impression that the phenomenon of cinematicmovement is built.72

Serra says somewhere (I have been unable to locate the exact word-ing) that he is interested in abrupt discontinuities: no doubt “the experi-ence of shock,” elsewhere described by Walter Benjamin as the experiencepar excellence of modernity, is what gives rise to his sculpture. As thoughechoing Eisenstein, he speaks of “memory and anticipation” as “vehiclesof perception” for his sculptures,73 the two being dialectically opposed inorder to prevent “good form,” a “Gestalt” image, or a pattern of identityfrom taking over. One might say a good deal more about the relations be-tween Eisenstein’s montage and the art of Serra. We know that Eisensteindisagreed with Kuleshov (and others) on one fundamental point: he didnot want montage, the experience of shock, to involve only “the elementbetween shots,” but wanted it to be “transferred to inside the fragment,into the elements included in the image itself”74 so that the dissociationbetween the shots would end by operating in the very interior of the shot,just as Piranesi’s disjunction of plan and elevation surreptitiously destroyedthe identity of the ground plan and its traditional domination over tradi-tional space. Serra shares with Eisenstein this wish to introduce disconti-nuity into discontinuity itself, and this takes us back for one last time tothe question of the picturesque. We have seen that Terminal constituted asort of deconstruction of the narrative space created by Sight Point. Nowthe problem of narration unquestionably lies at the heart of Serra’s enter-prise: in his films as in his sculptures, he seeks to destroy that which hasbeen the age-old foundation of narration, namely its conclusion. HandCatching Lead is almost endless, “not actually endless, of course,” as Eisen-stein would say, but almost. And the descriptive account of his walk ordrive around Rotary Arc describes a complete circle: it begins and ends atan arbitrarily chosen—almost arbitrarily chosen—point, and could per-petuate itself indefinitely. When Peter Eisenman spoke of his sculptures as“framing the landscape,” Serra bridled:

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If you use the word “frame” in referring to the landscape, you implya notion of the picturesque. I have never really found the notion offraming parts of the landscape particularly interesting in terms of itspotential for sculpture. Smithson was interested in the pictur-esque. . . . That’s an interesting notion in terms of its relation to thenarrative 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 tobe discovered while walking. It is to this narrative conception of discon-tinuity that Serra is opposed, and it is this, more than anything else, thatseparates him from the picturesque. In December 1782, Hannah More re-ported to her sisters a conversation she had with Capability Brown, thefirst 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 toanother 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 oflandscape gardeners: he has no full stop. His art is not an art of punctua-tion (although often, while speaking of one of his sculptures, he draws onpaper, at the rate of ten drawings a minute, a storyboard of its various as-pects). It is an art of montage, an art that is not satisfied to interrupt con-tinuity temporarily, but produces continuity by a double negation, bydestroying the pictorial recovery of continuity through discontinuity, dis-sociation, and the loss of identity within the fragment.

Now what? This whole additional excursion into the eighteenth cen-tury just to be able to say that Serra and the picturesque are completelydifferent? They’re not completely different, although the use made bySerra of ideas developed two centuries ago could hardly be identical withwhat was done with them then, in that cult of rationality represented bythe Enlightenment. One might therefore wonder why I have insisted oncircumscribing my interpretation of his work in a vocabulary and a debatetwo centuries old. There are two fundamental reasons.

The first has to do with Serra’s manifest hostility to architects. If thishostility is, in my opinion, wholly justified, if Serra can rightly say of


Terminal that this sculpture reduces almost all the architecture surround-ing it to the mediocrity of its “cardboard-model inventiveness,”77 it is be-cause he once again brings to bear on his work notions that appeared inthe architectural debates of the eighteenth century, and which architectshave since repressed. The history of this repression, which I have tried totrace here, has seemed to me indispensable if we are to understand the sin-gular nature of Serra’s work. It was never a question to my mind of un-earthing sources for him, of seeking connections and influences. Quite theopposite, it was a matter of showing that the strength of his innovation wasthe raw one of the return of the repressed. Let us take another look at thisaspect of architecture. After Leroy, the only theoretician who conceivesarchitecture anew in terms of the effect it will produce on the movingspectator is Boullée. He does so in exactly the same way as Leroy, but headds a word to his predecessor’s vocabulary, a word to which I will comeback: sublime. (I might add that a whole parallel could be traced betweenthe idea formulated by Boullée of a buried architecture and Serra’s sculp-tures that are sunk in the ground.) Following Boullée, but a century later,the historian Auguste Choisy was to be the first to reexamine this ques-tion of the peripatetic view. He did so in connection with a discovery verymuch his own (truly unheard-of and incomprehensible to architectstrained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, for it pointed directly at somethingthey had obscured at the very heart of the example they wanted to imi-tate), that of “Greek picturesque” (namely, the asymmetrical arrangementof Greek temples, depending on the site).78 Then came Le Corbusier, oneof the few architects spared by Serra in his general anathema. Leaving asidethe issue of whether the architectural concept of “promenade” inventedby Le Corbusier is strongly influenced by Choisy’s fantastic discovery, theimportant thing here is that, for the first time since Boullée, an architectspeaks of the play of parallax for his architecture, if necessary borrowingfrom other cultures, as the cubists did from primitive art.

We know the text in Le Corbusier’s Oeuvres complètes that accompa-nies his designs for the Villa Savoye:

Arab architecture has much to teach us. It is appreciated while on themove, with one’s feet; it is while walking, moving from one place toanother, that one sees how the arrangements of the architecture de-velop. This is a principle contrary to Baroque architecture. . . . In thishouse [the Villa Savoye], we are dealing with a true architecturalpromenade, offering constantly varied, unexpected, sometimes as-

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tonishing aspects. It is interesting to obtain so much diversity whenone has, for example, allowed from the standpoint of construction anabsolutely rigorous pattern of posts and beams.79

Now here two things should be stressed. On the one hand, this “pat-tern of posts” is certainly not absolutely rigorous (contrary to what LeCorbusier says a little later, the posts are not “equidistant”). On the otherhand, this disturbance of the plan has been made necessary by the first ver-tical breach constituted by the ramp, then further complicated by the dis-placement, in the planning stage, of the staircase (which became on thisoccasion a spiral one)—that is to say, in two different ways, by thorough-fares. It has sometimes been asked why Le Corbusier kept this troublesomeramp (he who claimed that the plan generated the architecture) when asimple staircase (especially a spiral one) would have posed fewer problems.Now the very subject of the Villa Savoye is the penetration of a verticalsection into a horizontal grid (the “Dom-ino” grid dating from 1914 andtried out in the designs for the Citrohan houses of 1920–1922, in whichthe staircase was always conceived as exterior to the grid). It is this verti-cal penetration by the passageway into the arrangement of the plan, thisdisturbance of the plan by the elevation and by the movement of thestroller, that creates the richness and intricacy of the Villa Savoye (and in acertain way one could say that the aim of the free plan corresponds in LeCorbusier, despite what he says about it, to a wish to free his architecturefrom the generating tyranny of the plan). Le Corbusier, as his vocabularyshows, again takes up the idea of the picturesque, and tries to imaginewhat a picturesque architecture might be. But with him, as with Serra, itis a question of a modern picturesque, and not one of narrative and picto-riality. Hence the necessity, in the Villa Savoye, of a division of labor anda duplication (“one ascends imperceptibly by a ramp, which is a totally dif-ferent feeling from the one provided by a staircase formed by steps. A stair-case separates one floor from another, a ramp connects them”).80 It is fromthis unequal duplication, this conflict between continuity and discontinu-ity, that the experience of shock is born: quite late in the development ofthe project Le Corbusier pierced the stairwell, which had been conceivedat the beginning as a semi-cylindrical blind box, and bored openings in itthat are like the displaced projection onto the cylinder of the triangles de-lineated by the ramp. Why this give-and-take? Because the machine is notinhabited by a hermit: “It is most exhilarating when we can sense ourmovement in relation to another person on another path, catching and


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 rela-tion to that of another participant.”81 The fact that these remarks are by apresent-day architect and critic in no way detracts from my general thesis(that architects today have much to learn not only from Le Corbusier butalso from Serra), for just as Le Corbusier’s kinetic intelligence was some-thing exceptional, so the understanding of that intelligence among archi-tects 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 sculp-ture a lesson in architecture. At the time he was developing his ideas forShift, Serra spent five days walking about the site with Joan Jonas: the“boundaries” of the work were determined by the maximum distance thattwo people could cover without losing sight of each other. “The horizonof the work,” says Serra, “was established by the possibilities of maintain-ing this mutual viewpoint.”82 Or again: “My open works [those that onecan pass through] are not concerned with internal relationships. Theyhave to do with looking from where they are into space, or from wherethey are to where the other one is placed.”83 Whether this “other one” isanother element of the sculpture (as in Open Field Vertical/Horizontal Ele-vations: ten steel cubes scattered in a seemingly huge park) or another spec-tator comes to the same thing, for here we are dealing with an experienceof reciprocity, of mutuality.

It is over this fracture of identity, this division of one into two, thatthe history of parallax and of the picturesque promenade enters into LeCorbusier’s architecture and Serra’s sculpture. Hence the necessity I feelto trace back the discontinuous threads of this history, even though itmight mean a temporary retreat into the eighteenth century.

The second reason for this backward look in time is less direct but noless essential. Anyone concerned with the history of sculpture during theselast twenty years will recall the fundamental and vehement attack on min-imalism published by Michael Fried at the end of the 1960s. In a certainway, all of Serra’s oeuvre is an implicit reply to Michael Fried’s text. Hereit is not a question of going back over the terms of the discussion or evenof summarizing “Art and Objecthood.”84 Let us merely say that, accord-ing to Fried, minimalist art sinks into “theater” (understood as the identi-fication of the space of art with that of the spectator, daily life, and theworld of objects), while for him the essential goal of modernist art, and ofsculpture in particular, has been to affirm its autonomy in relation to thisreal space. More than just an attack on the confusion between two kinds

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of space—which would simply have repeated Adolf von Hildebrand’s crit-icism of panoramas and Canova’s tombs at the end of the last century85—Fried’s text denounced in the minimalist work its implication of theduration of the spectator’s experience. To Tony Smith’s enthusiastic ac-count of a drive on an unfinished turnpike (an account of a journey con-ceived as a model of the minimalist experience), Fried opposed theatemporality and instantly intelligible perception of the sculptors he wasdefending (“at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest”).86 Friedopted for a pictorial conception of sculpture (following in this an idea ofGreenberg’s: sculpture is doomed to exist in the world of objects, andshould therefore be as two-dimensional as possible in order to escape thiscondition of existence as much as it can).87 “Pictoriality,” on the contrary,seemed to Smith too narrow a framework to be able to produce experi-ences similar to the one he had had on the turnpike. The position termedmodernist (both Greenberg’s and Fried’s, despite their differences) reliesopenly on Kant: an absolute distinction between the world of art and thatof artifacts, immediacy of judgment about the beautiful, indifference tothe object’s material existence (Greenberg never speaks of texture, for ex-ample, or does so only in general terms). Furthermore, for Kant, the beau-tiful “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 prioridetermination of their limits that radically distinguishes minimalist sculp-tures from modernist works of art. Indeed, in speaking of Spin Out, Serrastates: “there isn’t any definition of boundary.”89 Finally, for Kant (as forFried), “in the case of the beautiful taste presupposes and maintains themind in restful contemplation.”90 Kant makes no reference, in his “Analyticof the Beautiful,” to the duration of the spectator’s experience (even whenit is a question of music), nor to the movement of his body (especiallywhen it is a question of architecture).

That the modernist aesthetic is Kantian through and through, no onewill deny, nor that Fried’s or Greenberg’s interpretation of the first book ofthe 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 theword. It is as though modernism had obliterated that whole other side ofthe Kantian aesthetic, Book II of the same portion of this work, entitled“Analytic of the Sublime.” For although “the beautiful and the sublimeagree in this, that both please in themselves” (i.e., without finality), “thereare 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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sublime, on the other hand, can be found in a formless object, so far asin it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented in it, and yet its totalityis also present to thought.”92 And while in the beautiful totality is imme-diately apprehended, the feeling of the sublime comes from the contra-diction between apprehension (which “can go on ad infinitum”) andcomprehension (which quickly reaches a maximum, beyond which theimagination cannot go”).93 In other words, the feeling of the sublime liesin the separation between the idea of totality and the perceived impossibil-ity of understanding that totality. The amazement of someone enteringSaint Peter’s in Rome for the first time is for Kant a sublime experience parexcellence (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 thelack of attention paid to the play of parallax). Here is what Kant says about


Shift, 1970–1972ConcreteSix 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,CanadaInstalled: King City, Ontario, Canada

this virgin spectator penetrating to the heart of the papacy: “For there ishere a feeling of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the ideaof a whole, wherein the imagination reaches its maximum, and, in strivingto surpass it, sinks into itself, by which, however, a kind of emotional sat-isfaction is produced.”94 (The pleasure I felt while walking in Spin Out didnot occur in spite of my inability to grasp its geometric form, but becauseof that inability.) In a word, Kant, in his “Analytic of the Sublime,” is forcedto imagine a mechanism of perception quite different from the one he as-sumes in his theory of judgment about the beautiful. In particular, he isobliged to introduce the temporality of the aesthetic experience. Ofcourse, for him, it is still a question, as Smithson remarks about all idealisttheories of art, of a movement of the mind, but this movement is inducedby the characteristics of the object (“the feeling of the sublime brings withit as its characteristic feature a movement of the mind bound up with thejudging of the object”).95 Why? Because the feeling of the sublime can onlycome from the grandeur of the object and the impossibility of controllingor understanding this grandeur by thought—from the impossibility, asSerra would say, of having a “Gestalt” view of it.

For when apprehension has gone so far that the partial representationsof sensuous intuition at first apprehended begin to vanish in the imag-ination, while this ever proceeds to the apprehension of others, thenit loses as much on one side as it gains on the other; and in compre-hension 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 Judg-ment where Kant speaks in temporal terms (“begin,” “proceeds,” “then”)of the mechanism of the aesthetic imagination, and one could call it a par-aphrase of Serra’s comments about his Rotary Arc. That it is a question ofthe “Analytic of the Sublime” and not that of the beautiful simply showsthat the Kantian criteria applied by Greenberg and Fried in their con-demnation of Mminimalism were inappropriate, since one cannot judgethe sublime by the criteria of the beautiful.97

I can imagine Serra’s negative reaction to Fried’s indictment inter-spersed with Kant (since his work, even more than minimalism, falls un-der the hammer of this neo-Kantian diatribe). But it seemed to me that abrief return to Kant, by way of the sublime, was called for here. Not onlybecause if the rupture of modernity actually took place in the eighteenth

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century, it is necessary for us today to go back over that past (that is, inci-dentally, what Michael Fried has done, endeavoring to describe, in orderto 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 Smith-son observed, flows from the sublime:

Price extended Edmund Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our ideas ofthe Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) to a point that tried to free land-scaping from the “picture” gardens of Italy into a more physical senseof the temporal landscape. . . . Burke’s notion of “beautiful” and“sublime” functions as a thesis of smoothness, gentle curves, and del-icacy of nature, and as an antithesis of terror, solitude, and vastness ofnature, both of which are rooted in the real world, rather than in aHegelian ideal [it is this empirical basis of Burke’s text that Kant crit-icized]. Price and Gilpin provide a synthesis with their formulation ofthe “picturesque,” which is on close examination related to chanceand change in the material order of nature.99

For Burke, the beautiful and the sublime were irreconcilable; they re-mained so for Price and William Gilpin. But as Price wrote: “the pictur-esque appeared halfway between the beautiful and the sublime; and thismay be why it allies itself more often and more happily with both thanthey do with each other.”100 There is thus a beautiful picturesque and asublime picturesque: it is to this second category, if you like, that Serra’sart belongs. The word picturesque, says Smithson, is itself like a sublime treestruck by lightning in a picturesque English garden of the eighteenth cen-tury: “This word in its own way has been struck by lightning over the cen-turies. Words, like trees, can be suddenly deformed or wrecked, but suchdeformation or wreckage cannot be dismissed by timid academics.”101 Ithas taken all the support of Serra’s work for a timid academic like myselfto attempt to repair the damage.

Postscript

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


Pompidou (henceforth called Beaubourg), an unusable space that lookslike something between a train station and a pool in a zoo. While writingthis essay, I believed that for the first time Clara-Clara would have drama-tized the specifics of this space and would have articulated its bare hol-lowness. It was in my capacity as author (my text would have to be alteredslightly) that I was advised of the eleventh-hour change of site: theBeaubourg technicians had waited until the last minute to inform the ex-hibition’s organizers that it would be impossible to install Clara-Clara inthe 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 hefinally accepted the relocation of his piece to the main entrance of theTuileries gardens, it is because it had similarities with the Beaubourgpit (notably, in its proportions). But he knew no more than anybody elsewho had followed this affair (myself included) just how much his sculp-ture would gain by such a displacement. Yet the outcome was indis-putable: 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

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Clara-Clara, 1983Weatherproof steelTwo elements, each 12’ x 120’ x 2”Tuileries, Place de la ConcordeCollection: City of ParisPhotos: Dirk Reinartz

gaining a kind of delicacy new to Serra’s work, it gave Parisians a lesson inurbanism.

Placed just behind the monumental gates opening onto the Placede la Concorde, Clara-Clara was on the baroque axis Défense–Arc deTriomphe–Concorde–Louvre, a kind of sacred urban conception towhich architects are occasionally asked to pay tribute. This “TriumphalRoute” is full of bottlenecks, said Le Corbusier in 1929. Clara-Clara wasundoubtedly one more. Partly because of the abuses perpetrated under deGaulle’s and Pompidou’s rules, the Parisian public is quite conservativetoward the urban environment (see, for example, the recent turmoil aboutI. M. Pei’s pyramid, projected on the same axis for the “Grand Lou-vre”).102 Hence, the risk of public hostility toward the sculpture was con-siderable. Furthermore, even in cities undergoing rapid transformations,like Bochum or New York, works by Serra have sometimes not been wellreceived. But here, against all expectations, the response was especiallywarm: a veritable hommage to Paris, Clara-Clara seemed the first successfulurban gesture to appear in the twentieth century on the “TriumphalRoute” that Le Corbusier scorned. Why?

Although the preceeding essay is not concerned with Clara-Claraalone, my argument was based upon an anticipated installation in theBeaubourg Forum. My point of departure was the fact that the spectatorwould first have an overall “Gestalt” view of the work. That is, it would


initially be seen in plan, from above. Thus, the visual information gleanedfrom this intellectual apprehension would be contradicted by the experi-ence of descending into the pit. From these assumptions resulted an anal-ysis of Clara-Clara in terms of parallax, an analysis not at all invalidated bythe change of site. On the contrary, for I had never imagined that the slightasymmetry in the elevation of the arcs (contradicting the symmetry of theground plan) would produce such distortions of scale and tempo. My de-scription was too simple, too linear: it presupposed a spectator who wouldhave walked through Clara-Clara only along its axis of symmetry.

But at the Tuileries there were at least three different approaches tothe piece. Of course the type of spectator I have just mentioned mighthave had the same limited experience of the sculpture even at the Tui-leries—but only if he were rushing. He would have entered the gardenthrough 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 itsaxis of symmetry (the axis of the sculpture coinciding with the baroqueurban axis mentioned above, which is also the axis of the garden).

Second possibility: a person wandering from the direction of the Lou-vre might have also walked along the axis of symmetry. He might havewondered about the slightly leaning, rust-colored twin plaques framingthe obelisk of the Place de la Concorde. Indeed, from a distance and fromhead on each visible half-arc was flattened by the effect of perspective andClara-Clara appeared merely as two walls. But, at a given moment, thispedestrian would have had to abandon his axial path (even if he subse-quently returned to it). Significantly, he would have had to follow thecurve of a circular fountain located between the Louvre and the Place dela Concorde. Even before nearing the sculpture, then, he would have per-formed a kind of dance that the slight asymmetry in elevation of Clara-Clara would have echoed. Willingly or not, the spectator would haveopened a dialogue with the sculpture (and I saw more than one person re-trace his steps and begin the dance again, not believing his eyes). Thecloser he came to the piece, the more distorted it appeared. Once he wasinside, one step off the axis of symmetry was enough to shake up the sculp-ture: one of the sides was suddenly gigantic, the other suddenly dwarfed.A heady sensation took hold, as if, with each step the viewer took, thistangible object of his senses was eluding him.

The third approach to the sculpture was from above. (Although, con-trary to what I wrote in conjunction with the Beaubourg pit, there wasno question here of a “Gestalt” view of a ground plan: the highest point

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was barely two feet above the top line of Clara-Clara.) One could enter thepark by two semicircular walkways that gradually descend from the plat-form of the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie; these two inverted commasembraced Clara-Clara without strangling it. Together with each of theconcave walls of the sculpture, they formed two immense, asymmetrical,open ellipses. Those revealed to the spectator the vastness of the interiorspace of the sculpture through which he would later have the impressionof dashing. Even for a wanderer getting to the piece from ground level,this disjunction between the accelerated view of the canyon between thetwo arcs and the more peaceful, oceanic feeling experienced whenleisurely strolling around the piece produced a stunning rhythmic changethat 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 parallaxin Western art (and the disjunction it implies between plan and elevation).Relying on Vincent Scully, Manfredo Tafuri, and Peter Collins, I locatedin Piranesi the break from the centered, axial space of the baroque age anddesignated Serra as the heir of an anti-baroque tradition that modern ar-chitecture, although itself a descendant of this tradition, has almost com-pletely repressed (except for Le Corbusier, particularly in his Villa Savoye).

But the greatness of Clara-Clara, in its Tuileries location, was thatit contended, firmly, frontally, with the overall baroque axiality that allSerra’s previous works had attempted to eliminate. At the center of aresolutely baroque complex of spaces (elliptical, axial, surrounded bycontrasting curves) and borrowing its vocabulary from the baroque, Clara-Clara insistently yet delicately pointed up the precariousness of thetype of illusionism upon which this system is grounded. Causing the ver-tical of the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde to jump like a compassneedle, Clara-Clara affirmed that baroque axiality, an authoritarian struc-ture, is a flexible thing that one can play with without being trapped by it.

The Tuileries location was ideal for this sculpture. Many hoped theFrench administration would leave it there (this was too big a dream). Onecan nevertheless be thankful to the Paris mayoralty for having purchasedit: it is today permanently installed on the Square de Choisy, in the 13tharrondissement. If it no longer benefits from the casket it enjoyed in theTuileries, at least it brings to life a rather unattractive urban area, whilecontinuing to teach what it means for sculpture to engage in a dialoguewith architecture.


Notes

1. Richard Serra and Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra: Urban Sculpture: An Interview,” inRichard 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.


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.


12. Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in TheWritings 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’oeuvrede 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 ChampUrbain, 1979), p. 19.

19. The rupture performed, according to Leo Steinberg, by Rauschenberg (passage fromthe vertical plane of the painting to the horizontal plane of the “flatbed”) precisely matchesthe one I analyze here, through the picturesque, as performed by Serra in the field of sculp-ture. As I will shortly do, Steinberg analyzes this pictorial turning point in Rauschenberg asa response to the theories of Clement Greenberg. See Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (Ox-ford: 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 dehuidige architectuur,” 2nd part, De Stijl 5, no. 5 (May 1922), p. 67. On this point and what

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it implies in Mondrian’s thought, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Du projet au procès,” in L’Atelier deMondrian (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 inSerra: 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 Uni-versity Press, 1965), p. 26.

38. Jacques-Germain Soufflot, “Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique” (1741), reprinted inMichael 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 inPetzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève, p. 147. This synthesis of Greek and Gothic was exactly theprogram expounded by Boullée in his famous Essai sur l’art.

41. Richard Etlin, “Grandeur et décadence d’un modèle: L’église Sainte-Geneviève et leschangements 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 laRecherche Architecturale (1980), p. 30. I am wholly indebted to this text for having put me onLeroy’s track.

42. Julien David Leroy, Histoire de la disposition et des formes différentes que les chrétiens ont don-nées 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 in-terest from the mother. This space may be ‘depopulated’ and the boundaries where it losesitself become fascinating with their insecurity, their flow, their lack of guideposts, their


boundless opening for the view, by a sort of extrusion of the gaze.” Guy Rosolato, “Desti-nations du corps,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (Spring 1971), p. 12.

53. Ulya Vogt-Göknil, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carceri (Zurich: Origo Verlag, 1958),p. 21.


55. Richard Serra, “‘Shift,’” in Serra: Interviews, Etc., p. 33.

56. Ibid.

57. Clara Weyergraf, “From ‘through Pieces’ to ‘Terminal,’ Study of a Development,” inRichard 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 exam-ined. See also my review of this book, “The Sculptural Opaque,” Sub-stance 31 (Winter1981), 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 es-say in this volume.

69. S. M. Eisenstein, “Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms,” trans. Roberta Reeder, in Op-positions 11 (Winter 1977), p. 103.

70. See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 243–244. The analysis of Hand CatchingLead 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 in-fluence on romanticism, see Luzius Keller, Piranèse et les romantiques français: Le mythe des es-caliers en spirale (Paris: José Corti, 1966), passim.

72. Eisenstein, “Piranesi,” pp. 105–106.


74. Quoted by Roland Barthes in “The Third Meaning,” Image-Music-Text, trans. StephenHeath (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: PrincetonUniversity 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 thebuildings that surround it. The idea of leveling the vicinity is absolutely foreign to them.

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They accept, while scarcely regularizing it, the location as nature has created it, and theironly concern is to harmonize the architecture with the landscape; Greek temples are asworthy for the choice of their site as for the art with which they are built.” There follows adescription of the various groups of temples, especially the Acropolis in Athens, accordingto the effect produced on a moving spectator. “Le pittoresque dans l’art grec,” AugusteChoisy, Histoire de l’Architecture, vol. 1 (1899). My thanks to Jacques Lucan for havingpointed out this text to me. Since the first appearance of this essay, two important articlesappeared 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 (15March 1985), pp. 42–56. It is discussed and criticized in the second, by Richard Etlin, “LeCorbusier, Choisy, and French Hellenism: The Search for a New Architecture,” Art Bul-letin 69, no. 2 (June 1987), pp. 264–278. Kurt Forster has revealed that before Choisy, KarlFriedrich Schinkel was definitively thinking in terms of parallax and movement of the spec-tator through architecture. For the monumental staircase and colonnade of his Altes Mu-seum in Berlin (1823–1829), Schinkel conceived an extremely complex spatial play whichForster described in terms reminiscent of my account of Serra’s work. Unfortunately,Schinkel’s extraordinary thoroughfare is inaccessible to the public. (Forster, “TravellingEyes: The Long and Short of Panoramic Representation in the Work of Rusca andSchinkel,” 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., Min-imal 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 Hilde-brand, Canova’s funerary monuments, unlike those of Michelangelo, are to be condemnedbecause in them there is no “boundary established between the monument and the pub-lic.”

86. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 145.

87. See Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” in Art and Culture (Boston: BeaconPress, 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.


97. I find by chance an unexpected ally in the issue of Perspecta containing the article bySerra that I have quoted several times, in the person of Karsten Harries, who teaches phi-losophy at Yale University. In an article entitled “Building and the Terror of Time,” Har-ries refers to Michael Fried’s text and to an essay by the sculptor Robert Morris (“ThePresent Tense of Space,” Art in America, January/February 1978). Although the differencesbetween the art of the two sculptors are striking, I could have mentioned Morris’s text of-ten, for it brilliantly articulates certain ideas expressed aphoristically by Serra, and speaks inparticular of Saint Peter’s in Rome and of ruins. Harries concludes the passage in his textdevoted to Morris with these words: “Just as Fried can refer to Kant to support his under-standing of modernism, in the same way Morris can refer to the Critique of Judgment, but itis 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 con-text, see also Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Rep-etition,” 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 thatfor the ceremony celebrating the laying of the first stone of the church Sainte-Genevièvein Paris (that is, the very occasion of Leroy’s dedication of his brochure to the king), “a full-scale model of the future portal of the church was erected in carpentry and canvas, with itscolumns, its entablature and its pediment” (Bruno Foucart, Sebastien Loste, and AntoineSchnapper, 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 mod-els had also been made for the Arc de Triomphe of the Place de l’Etoile, for the Elephantof the Place de la Bastille and for the Colonnade of the Place du Trône (those two last proj-ects were abandoned after provisional models were set up); see pp. 82–86.

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Richard Serra throwing lead, 1969Castelli warehousePhoto: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Richard Serra: Sculpture

Rosalind Krauss

I. Portrait of the Artist . . . Throwing Lead

The artist appears in a photograph. Backlit against the luminous distanceof the far wall of a room, his body is reduced to silhouetted gesture: legsbraced, arms outstretched, the instrument in his hand whirling above hishead, like a slingshot about to release its stone. Dressed as though forbattle, he is helmeted, goggled, gas-masked. The field on which he standsis strewn with slag. In the foreground are an acetylene tank and two largeiron pots. Behind him several vertical planes describe precarious geome-tries. At the top of this image, above the ceiling of the room, above thepicture itself, we read the title of the book for which this portrait serves ascover: The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies.1 The artist soportrayed is Richard Serra, and what he is doing, ladle in hand, is throw-ing molten lead.

The history of twentieth-century art is punctuated by famousportraits of the artist at work. It is impossible to look at Serra’s gesturewithout remembering the lithe athleticism of Jackson Pollock in thephotographs depicting him balanced above his floor-bound canvases, theballetic 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 withbrush and paint deployed in vigorous gestures, as in the famous films ofPicasso and Matisse magically creating something out of nothing as eachdemonstrates 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 throughtheir passion, their intensity, their caprice, their skill. Matisse draws a line

that is hopelessly, wrenchingly simple, just an arc that a slight pressure ofthe brush causes to widen at one end. But the flank of a body magicallyappears—sensuous, immediate, complete—and the economy of the ges-ture is revealed in all its mastery, in its total, wanton perfection. The artistis at work.

Although it focuses on the physical act of making, this portrait of Ma-tisse is conceptually compatible with another of which we have only writ-ten accounts, the image of the sign that Saint-Pol-Roux posted on hisdoor every night before going to bed: “Poet Working.” For both the la-bor of producing dreams and the work of spinning a web of line upon thesurface of an indifferent world presuppose the same nature of the creativeact. The externalization of perceptions, feelings, ideas of the artist, this actis expressive, elaborating a trace or index of interior states. So that the pic-ture of the artist at work comes to stand in a symmetrical relationship withthe artist’s works: all of them are images of the man himself. In Pollock’sportraits—in their still-photographic and filmic versions—this symmetryis 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, isa 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 dif-ference that makes all the difference. The first aspect of that difference isthe 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 hadbeen the construction of nineteenth-century naturalism. From theAfrican shaman, to the Balinese dancer, to the celebrant of Carnival, thewearer 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 theboundaries of his “private” self. The mask may be expressive, but what itexpresses has very little to do with a romantic conception of selfhood orwith individual creative will. The Portrait of the Artist Masked will thusnot line up with that series of portraits just described, for the mask, opaqueand impassive, is the enemy of expression. To the impersonal status of themask the gas mask adds the depersonalizing conditions of industrial workwith associations to repetition, seriality, things-in-a-row all alike, but alsoassociations to labor itself, to a kind of work in which a task is given in re-lation to a set of materials, in which operations are fixed by matter rather

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than “inspiration.” Thus the mask not only collectivizes the notion of “ex-pression,” but it folds “creativity” back into the condition of labor.

There is a second aspect of difference between Serra’s portrait andthose of Picasso, Matisse, Pollock. That is the absence, within the frameof this image, of the work on which the artist is working. If Serra’s gesturehas an issue, it is nowhere in the picture. And indeed, one of the docu-ments reproduced inside The New Avant-Garde is Serra’s list of verbs sus-pended in the grammatical mid-air of the infinitive tense: “to roll, tocrease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist, to twine. . . .” Theseverbs describe pure transitivity. For each is an action to be performedagainst the imagined resistance of an object; and yet each infinitive rollsback upon itself without naming its end. The list enumerates eighty-sevenacts before something like a goal of the action is pronounced, and eventhen the condition of object is elided: “of waves,” we read, “of tides,” oragain, “of time.” The image of Serra throwing lead is like this suspensionof 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, sincethere is no terminus, no proper destination, so to speak. So, while the listof active verbs suggests temporality, it is a temporality that has nothing todo with narrative time, with something with a beginning, a middle, andan end. It is not a time within which something develops, grows, pro-gresses, 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 narrativeturns on the essential distinction between the medium of narration—time—and that of the depicted image—space. In this difference, Lessinghad argued in the Laocoön (1766), one should locate both the separateproblems of the various aesthetic mediums as well as the genius particularto each. The problem for the visual artist who is limited to just one mo-ment in a narrative sequence, he concluded, is to find the most suggestiveor most “pregnant” moment, the one that will imply both what has al-ready happened and what is to come.2 Lessing’s treatise had enormous res-onance for late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century painting, forwhich the depiction of historical subjects was centrally at issue. But, it canbe argued, modernism has dispensed not only with historical narratives,but with all narrative, to achieve the stunning simultaneity of the experi-ence of the work itself, the picture as pure aesthetic object.

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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 repletewith a certain kind of understanding, a certain kind of ecstatic or spiritualdilation, a certain kind of drive to completion.3 Within this situation thegenre of the Portrait of the Artist has a special role. It is the signifier of art’shidden but persistent narrativity, for the unfolding of the artist’s gesture onthis work, which models on a small scale the larger unfolding of all his ges-tures into that totality of his works to which we give the name oeuvre, isthe 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 ofphotographs and films and obviously we could mention paintings. Butthere are as well texts, like this one, monographic studies which are alsoconceived as portraits of the artist: at work, making works, and throughthose works, producing the story of his oeuvre. But it is against this easy,culturally given cliché that the Portrait of the Artist Throwing Lead oper-ates as a kind of cautionary sign, warning one not to think that the pointof a portrait’s story is already given by its form. This caution is like the onethat Jean-Luc Godard pronounced for his films, which themselves had astrong effect on the way narrative was reconceived in the ’60s. Stories hadbeginnings, middles, and ends, he conceded, “but not necessarily in thatorder.” Chronologically speaking, the portrait of Richard Serra throwinglead stands very near the beginning of his career. But whether we are alsoto understand this as signifying the beginning of his story—that is thewarning we must read off that gesture in which an act is spun into purerepetition by avoiding its object.

One of the verbs on Serra’s 1967–1968 list—“to grasp”—opensspecifically onto a work that underscores this relation to time. In Serra’s1968 film Hand Catching Lead, a fixed frame centers on an extended arm,fingers splayed. Into the frame, at regular intervals, there falls a successionof pieces of lead that the hand endeavors to catch. Sometimes missing itsprey, sometimes capturing it—but in the latter case immediately releasingthe metal scrap, allowing it to continue on its way out the bottom of theframe—the hand opens and closes in a performance of the same slightlyirregular pulses as the falling lead. Simultaneously tense and desultory, thehand’s relation to the object is both intentional—catching lead is what it

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is doing—and pointless, for making a catch does not seem to be its objec-tive. In this insistence on the constitutive act itself, the film thus constel-lates an image of what came to be known in the late 1960s as “pureprocess.” Yet insofar as this action is pulsional, made up of regular beats, italso creates the kind of special seriality that Donald Judd had described ina famous characterization of his own work’s structure as “just one thing af-ter another.”4

This spatial repetitiveness, and its refusal to deploy the organizing, hi-erarchical devices of those compositional schemes upon which most ofWestern art had based itself, had entered the vocabulary of the Americanavant-garde with minimalist painting and sculpture: with the repetitivebands of Frank Stella’s “stripes”; with the stacked, identical boxes of Judd’swall reliefs; with the blankly juxtaposed metal plates of Carl Andre’s“rugs.” Turning this spatial seriality into a temporal hum was the work ofa group of musicians slightly younger than the first minimalists, and ex-actly 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 spentwith Glass, cementing a friendship and working relationship that was notto be diminished by their return to New York in 1967. It was there inNew York that Serra and Glass encountered the figures who would beworking out of minimalism and into the later manifestations of process. Atthat 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. Healso formed important friendships with Carl Andre and Robert Smithson,both of whose rhetorical gifts made their theoretical sparring, night afternight at the bar downstairs at Max’s Kansas City, a kind of continuous in-tellectual circus, one extremely important for Serra’s intense need to the-orize his own position, an attitude that had been, if not formed, thenparticularly focused, during his studies at Yale.

But there is a final aspect of Hand Catching Lead that addresses Serra’sattitude toward the problem of producing art within modernism, no mat-ter what the conviction about process or seriality. This is the condition ofself-reflexiveness that Serra builds into this film. For the falling lead’s pas-sage 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 passagedown into the gate of the projector and out again. In imaging-forth theconstant movement of the band of film as it unwinds from reel to reel,


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 thetemporal profile of Hand Catching Lead: a modernist-derived concern withthe representation of the work’s physical support; a minimalist-connectedcritique of composition, of those organizing hierarchies which had cometo be regarded as merely arbitrary; and a process-conditioned exchange ofthe 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 interestat all in what it was in Hand Catching Lead that the hand was catching. Orto put it another way, it is not irrelevant that what falls through the frameof the image in representational reflection of the filmic support is lead,which is to say, the metallic support of another medium, namely, sculp-ture. The logic of process that had led Serra to turn to film as a way ofmanifesting a pure operation on a physical material was also a way of op-posing the rigid geometries of minimalist sculpture in which a viewer waspresented with an object whose construction was a closed system, secretedaway within the interior of the object, invisible and remote. For this rea-son process artists like Eva Hesse had turned to materials like latex or fiber-glass or clay, materials that would yield to the imprint of the action appliedto them, and carry that on their surface as their only mark of structure. “Tocatch” 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 isthe status of sculpture.

Serra had not been a sculptor when he went to Paris. His training atYale had been as a painter (he had been a teaching assistant in Josef Albers’sfamous color course and had helped proof the plates of Albers’s book TheInteraction of Color), and in Paris in 1965 he continued to paint. But he alsofound himself drawn to the Brancusi atelier that had been reconstructedat the Musée National d’Art Moderne (located then on the Avenue Prési-dent Wilson), where he returned day after day to sketch his way into theinternal logic of Brancusi’s way of thinking about sculpture. The follow-ing year Serra went to Florence on a Fulbright, and it was there that hisidentity as a painter was submerged by the rising tide of the logic of pro-cess. 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 de-termined by the arbitrary measure of a unit of time, meted out in this caseby a stopwatch. But it soon occurred to Serra that having turned paint into

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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 andtherefore possible medium. Before leaving Italy for New York, Serra hadan exhibition at the La Salita Gallery in Rome in which his pictorial gridswere transformed into the three-dimensional geometric lattice of a set ofcages and his “material” had become the aesthetically disarticulated me-dium of biological life, as he filled these cages with animals, both liveand stuffed. “Somewhere between Kienholz and Samaras and Rauschen-berg,” as he himself has characterized it, this exhibition confirmed whathad been building since his entry into the intense but provisional coher-ence of the space of Brancusi’s studio: that painting no longer held hisimagination.

II. To Prop, to Prop, to Prop . . .

Shortly after composing his list of transitive verbs Serra discovered theenormous 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 andthus able to be cast. It was during the performance of the last of these pos-sibilities that the portrait of Serra throwing lead was made, recording thethrowing of molten metal into the “mold” formed by the angle of floorand wall of a Castelli Gallery warehouse space, the resultant casting pulledaway from the angle when hardened to allow for yet another wave ofmolten liquid.5 The logic of Casting demanded, of course, that it be ex-hibited in immediate proximity to the place where it had been made, sothat the relationship between the cast element’s shape and the “mold” thathad determined it would remain perspicuous. The castings were thereforedisplayed directly on the floor in the order in which they had been pulledaway from the angle with the wall. Tearing Lead was also, perforce, dis-played on the floor where the ten-foot-square “rug” of lead had lain whileSerra tore successive strips of metal from its edges, leaving these clusteredat the four corners.

But in less than a year Serra was to look back critically on this idea ofdisplaying process against the “background” of the floor and thereby, par-adoxically, rendering the result pictorial. “A recent problem with the lat-eral spread of material, elements on the floor in the visual field,” heexplained, “is the inability of this . . . mode to avoid arrangement qua


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

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Casting, 1969Cast leadArea occupied by work: 4” x 25’ x 15’Executed for an exhibition at theWhitney Museum of American Art,New YorkPhoto: Peter Moore

Thus the logic of process had gone in a circle: when a material oper-ation was used to break the grip of the “image,” the image came back tolay hold of the operation and to convert it into the terms of painting, tothreaten it with a space that was virtual rather than actual. One of the con-stant arguments that had kept Andre and Smithson going until 3:00 in themorning at Max’s had been just this question with regard to the logic ofAndre’s work. Lever (1966), Andre’s thirty-foot row of bricks placed end-to-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 andthen to combine them according to laws which are particular to eachparticle, rather than a law which is applied to the whole set, like glueor riveting or welding. . . . No extraneous forces apply to the set tomake it have properties which an individual particle does not have.8

Smithson didn’t see it that way. Receding along the luminous plane of thefloor, Lever read, for Smithson, as a “line.” By 1970 Serra had come toagree.

In 1968, in addition to cast, roll, and tear, Serra had used lead to enactanother transitive relation: prop. One sheet of lead, tightly rolled to forma pole, was inclined against another, still flat sheet that was hoisted againstthe plane of a wall so that the dense, inert weight of one sheet propped upthe leaden expanse of the other. Insofar as Prop depended upon the wall-plane as a ground, it was of course open to much the same criticism fromits maker as Casting and Tearing . . . But where it differed from the otherswas that the process informing this work was not something that had beenapplied to the materials of the object, imprinting itself upon them, an ex-ternal force coming from outside them to leave its trace, so to speak. InProp the process was a function of a relationship between the two elementsof the work, working against each other in a continuous labor of eleva-tion. It was in this constantly renewed tension, active within the object ateach moment, necessary to the very prolongation of its existence, thatSerra located a special aspect of his vocation as a sculptor.

The “prop” pieces of 1969—One Ton Prop (House of Cards), InvertedHouse of Cards, 2-2-1, Equal, 5:30—provided the basis for Serra’s criti-cism, voiced in 1970, of his earlier work. For these sculptures are res-olutely vertical, their internal dynamic securing their independence of anyexternal “ground,” be it floor or wall. And the extremely simple principleof their verticality is the heaviness of lead and its earnest response to the


downward pull of gravity; for in that pull there operates the resistance thatis the principle of the prop—stability achieved through the conflict andbalance of forces. In One Ton Prop (House of Cards) four lead slabs (eachfive hundred pounds) maintain their erectness through the reciprocity oftheir leaning sides, propping each other up by weighing each other down.And in 2-2-1 five lead slabs of the same dimensions remain uprightthrough 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 resist-ant forms, goading them into a continuously precarious verticality.

In this continuous remaking, the temporality organized by theseprops has shifted from the register of time in which Hand Catching Leadwas 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, hashere been powerfully recharged into something more like a perpetual cli-

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

max, an end-point that continues, and continues, and continues. In theprop 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 whichto locate the problematics of sculpture.

Serra has said that a whole generation of American artists was in-debted to Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918):

The fact that [it] measured a definite space from floor to ceiling an-ticipates Judd’s thinking from floor to ceiling, and what Andre haddone from wall to wall. The idea of the infinite implied by the mod-ule extension was most impressive in Brancusi. It changed the sensi-bility of the entire sixties. . . . Stella’s black pictures and Judd’s serialrelationships are indebted to the Endless Column. But the problems inthe Endless Column didn’t interest me at that time. I was more inter-ested 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 bodywhose feeling is found within the pressure of opposition. Over and overagain, in 1907, 1910, 1911, 1915, 1921, 1933, 1937, Brancusi exploredthat line of compression between two figures meeting in a kiss, a line thatsimultaneously breaks the stone monolith into two separate bodies andforges the endless moment of their fusion. Rippling down the center ofthe block in a constant making and unmaking of union, this line describeswhat could be called a phenomenological fissure at the center of the stone,a point of compression in which each body experiences itself only alongthat surface crushed against its mate.

The phenomenological fissure, in which unity of the body’s Gestaltis radically opened and differentiated, occurs with great frequency inBrancusi’s work and is, we might say, the peculiar invention of his partic-ular sculptural “drawing.” For Brancusi’s unitary forms, his painstakinggeometries, his ovoids, his fins, his rhomboids, open themselves to a kindof found drawing, a line that forms and reforms itself as light and reflec-tion are cast along the smooth surfaces of these objects. In the polishedbronze ovoid of Beginning of the World (1924), for example, the “line” thatdescribes the median of the prone form, dividing it into a lower and anupper half, is cast onto the surface by opposing sets of reflections fromabove and below the work, reflections that meet at the physical crest of theobject to form, through an optical moment, a line of opposition. It is in


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Prop, 1968Lead antimonyPlate: 5’ x 5’ x 1”Pole: 8’ length, 4” diameterCollection: Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, New York, gift of theHoward and Jean Lipman FoundationPhoto: Harry Shunk

the grip of this optical crossfire that the actual symmetry of the object isrewritten as a powerful disequilibrium between its two halves. For the un-derside, mirroring the dense smoothness of the base on which the sculp-ture lies, appears slightly flattened by the heaviness of the object’s weightbearing down against a resistant ground; while the upper half, carrying onits surface the scatter of random reflections from space at large, seemsalmost to float as it expands outward into its surroundings.

In this sense of a body’s yielding to pressure while simultaneously dis-solving toward an absence of sensation, there is configured the radical dis-symmetry of the lived body, the body as experienced from within. Awhole series of ovoid heads leads, within Brancusi’s work, up to this Be-ginning of the World: heads cushioned against a supporting base as they fig-uratively drift toward sleep (Sleeping Muse II, 1914); heads shattering theirprofiles through the contortion of a cry (The Newborn, 1915); headsspilling 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 thatconstantly splits and resutures the Brancusian geometries.

Serra made a video tape called Boomerang (1974) in which the fixedframe isolates the head and shoulders of Nancy Holt, the work’s only par-ticipant, focusing them as smooth oval and firm neck, while, muse-like,there forms an image of the constant splitting and remaking of the per-forming persona. Wearing a technician’s headset, Holt spends the tenminutes of the tape talking against the distraction of audio feedback, sinceher words are audible to her in a delay of about one second after she hasactually pronounced them. It is the mechanism of the delay that creates,automatically as it were, a dissynchrony between speech and audition, sothat “saying” and “hearing oneself speak” (“thinking”) become actionsdivided in consciousness. Describing the confusion she feels, Holt ex-plains, “Sometimes I find I can’t quite say a word because I hear a first partcome back and I forget the second part, or my head is stimulated in a newdirection by the first half of the word.” This stimulation “by the first halfof the word” is, of course, less like the condition of speaking than it is likethe situation of listening, listening to the speech of someone else, to in-formation not known by the listener in advance. In her moving back andforth between the self-possession of speech and the outward thrust of in-tentionality in order to grasp the words of another, Holt performs whatBrancusi had earlier pictured: the rent in the body’s Gestalt that we havebeen calling the phenomenological fissure.


To form, thus, an image of the human subject as disarticulated, and toshow it in the process of attempting to recompose itself, is to createthrough this “muse” an analogue of the sculptural props. House of Cards,in breaking with the closed, pre-formed geometries of Judd’s boxes orTony Smith’s prisms, does not merely put in place the paradox of an un-stable geometric form. It forces a certain analogue between that form andthe human body which, like the prop, “continues.”

In some sense, of course, we would have to say that all sculpture con-figures the human body, that it operates as a model—of wildly divergentkinds—of the human subject: as an image of ideal repose, or of the pur-posiveness of action, of the centeredness of reason, or the abandonmentto feeling. Further, we would have to acknowledge that it does this nomatter how reduced it might be in the manner of physical likeness to thehuman body. A generation of early modernist sculptors demonstratedsculpture’s capacity to model the human subject from the simplest formsor the most ordinary ones: from the shape of an egg to the presentation ofa teacup. The issue, then, is not that the props create for their viewer theexperience of the human subject; rather, the question must be, what kindof subject they insist on modeling.

That subject, specific to Serra’s sculptural props, might be located in an-other passage of Holt’s self-description from within the space constructedfor 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 conjur-ing an image of subjectivity as a function of objective space, of what is ex-ternal to the self, of what impresses itself upon the subject not by welling upfrom within but by appearing to it from without. They, as we have heard,are boomeranging back. Serra of course belonged to a generation of artistswho had grown up with the vastly inflated rhetoric of the claims made forabstract expressionism. action painting had been declared to be “insepa-rable 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 exis-tence.”10 This metaphysical sharing between painting and painter was itselforganized around an aesthetic model in which the virtual or illusionisticspace of the picture—the space that opened backward from its surface intothe luminous atmosphere of Pollock’s linear webs, for example, or into thechiaroscuro of de Kooning’s smeared impastos—was understood as an ex-pression or manifestation of what was interior to the artist, what was behindhis physical surface—his impassive face, his stolid body. Painting was a way

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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 valuewas, in some way, confessional. “The result,” it was averred by the apolo-gists of action painting, “has been the creation of private myths.”11

But what, logically, could a private myth be? Since a myth’s functionis to account for phenomena collectively, to use narrative to knit togetherthe social fabric, a private myth is a contradiction in terms, a story told notin public, but in confidence. This is the confidentiality of the psycholo-gistic, something that the generation of the 1960s found distasteful.Speaking about the painterly registration of “expression,” Judd foundhimself saying, “It certainly involves a relationship between what’s out-side—nature or a figure or something—and the artist’s actually paintingthat thing, his particular feeling at the time. This is just one area of feel-ing, and I, for one, am not interested in it for my own work.”12 The in-sideness of abstract expressionist space—the analogy with the interiorityof the painter—meant that this experience of the psychologistic involveda claim on the viewer’s time, as though a failure to plumb the depths of thework was to render a judgment that both artist and, by implication, viewerwere shallow. But speaking in the mid-1960s of this demand, Frank Stellaobjected, “I wouldn’t particularly want to do that and also I wouldn’t askanyone [else] to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I wouldlike to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That’s whyI make the paintings the way they are, more or less.”13

In this prohibition, this walling up, this opacity, this insistence on theshallowness, the surfaceness of the work, we can to some degree take themeasure of the power of rejection behind the flat blandness of that “I, forone, am not interested in it.” But Judd and Stella, in the same discussionas this announcement of disinterest, tie the decisions they have made fortheir art to alternative models of reality, of what the world is like and howthe human subject is constituted. Their objection is precisely at the levelof the metaphysic used by writers like Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B.Hess to defend action painting. For what they are questioning is “a phi-losophy,” one that “is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems;they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much dis-credited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like.”

If the expression of the “private myth” had come to seem illogi-cal, absurd, pretentious, it did so against an attack on the notion of privatelanguage—the idea that meanings of words are tied to ideas that I, as aspeaker, have in my head when I utter them, so that, for example, what I


mean when I say “I have a headache” is dependent upon a sensationuniquely available to me—my headache—for its truth. Not only did thisidealist view of language seem impossibly to multiply the meanings of agiven word ( John’s headache, Mary’s headache, Elisabeth’s . . .), but itraised strange problems in the practice of language, making somehow puz-zling how one would ever learn the meaning of a word, locked out as oneis from all those private spaces.

The generation of the 1960s no longer accepted such a view either oflanguage or of human experience. For both structural linguistics and or-dinary language philosophy, as well as the returns from the laboratories ofperceptual psychology, were demonstrating the way that our very sensa-tions are dependent upon the language we use to name them and not theother way round. So that, for example, if the color spectrum, which iswholly continuous, is broken at point a to create “blue” and point b tocreate “green,” this is an operation of segmentation that language per-forms on the spectrum and not a reality that our senses first report to usand 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 notpublic, or to use Wittgenstein’s term, a “form of life.”

It was the extraordinary ambition of post-abstract-expressionism totake this notion of “forms of life” seriously: to make an art devoted to theway the human subject is a function of his ambience, his culture, his me-dia bombardment, his promiscuous reading, his vicariousness. In a move-ment that began with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, thegeneration of the 1960s proceeded to make an art of the human subjectturned inside-out, a function of space-at-large, the setting, the siting, theimpress of everything outside that once-sacred virtual space of art whichhad been the “inside” of the pictorial space, the “inner being” of the sculp-tural one.

Coming at the end of this decade, Serra’s prop pieces obviously par-ticipate in this project, already formulated by much of minimalism. Theway that One Ton Prop creates a geometric form that is all outside, noth-ing but exterior, so that one’s sense of the “inner being” of this form isutterly demystified, is part of this problematic of public vs. private.Comparing this phase of Serra’s work with what he was then doing mu-sically, Steve Reich said, “The analogy I saw with Serra’s sculpture, hispropped lead sheets and pole pieces (that were, among other things,demonstrations of physical facts about the nature of lead), was that hisworks and mine are both more about materials and process than they are

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about psychology.”14 But by making the very constitution of this “out-side” a question of an always precarious, restabilizing balance, a matter ofpropping, a function of an equilibrium that has constantly to be resecur-ing itself from within the pressures of time, One Ton Prop reformulates theinside/outside issue, for the “outside” itself is now understood as organ-ized 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 industryis to a steel mill. The making of the props had been a matter, to use Serra’sterm, of “choreography.” Together with friends serving as assistants, Serra“would map out what to do. Two people would be on each plate. Therewere four or five plates. And then Phil and I would fit in the overheadroll.” But in the summer of 1969 the Art and Technology exhibitionmounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had commandeereda variety of technological sites within which artists could choose to workand Serra had chosen a Kaiser steelyard. There, in what was called theSkullcracker Yard, he worked with an overhead magnetic crane stackingand propping massive elements of steel—slabs and crop—to form a con-stantly changing array of precariously equilibrated, giant constructions,towering sometimes forty feet into the air and anchored by nothing buttheir own crushing weight.

“The first day,” Serra recalls, “I built a cantilevered work from slabsstacked up forty feet which tilted twelve feet off axis. It leaned as far as itcould while remaining stable. It was at the boundary of its tendency tooverturn.”15 Stacked Steel Slabs, one of the sculptures in this series, presentsjust such a picture of a pile of identical elements canting off-axis so thateach addition to the stack extends its mass while at the same time threat-ening its existence. The plumb line around which this work is organized isthe stack’s center of gravity, something that appears as a matter of tensionsconstantly in force, tensions externalized by the principle of the “stack.” In-sofar as the meaning of Stacked Steel Slabs is the struggle for verticality, thevehemence of uprightness and balance, it continues to locate its aestheticenergies in relation to an experience of the human body. It matters verylittle that the scale of this work (twenty feet high) is vastly over life-size. Inthis respect the work participates in the kind of expansion of sculptural scalethat would preoccupy Serra throughout the 1970s leading to works such asShift (1970–1972), Circuit (1972), and Delineator (1974–1975). But as would


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Stacked Steel Slabs (SkullcrackerSeries), 1969Hot-rolled steel20’ x 80’ x 10’Installation: Kaiser Steel, Fontana,California

be true of them as well, Stacked Steel Slabs is concerned with the dynamicsof a relationship between a center and an outside that exercises a powerfulpull on that center—a relationship that is, one could say, the very meaningof its existence. And what is at issue in that relation of center to peripherycontinues 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 dif-ferent shots to form the complex web of continuity that we call film, amatter of an action or event persuading us that it continues even acrossenormous gaps in our view of it. The logic of this “continuity” ensures,for example, that during an angle-reverse-angle sequence—in which in-dividual shots of two different people on, say, a couch are spliced togetherto create the impression of that continuous presence of both parties nec-essary to what we understand to be a conversation—we are convinced thatwe are seeing two aspects of a single space, that the unity we attribute toour world undergirds the separate images of the film. The illusion organ-ized by this logic was patiently explored during the heroic years of filmexperimentation in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1920 Lev Kuleshovdemonstrated for his Moscow film classes the way the cut functioned as amagical interstice: a severance that also, and at the same time, seamed; anindex of difference or separateness within a prevailing matrix of “thesame.” The mere juncture between two strips of celluloid, it was revealed,was enough to convince that the White House stood solid and indestruc-tible in the heart of Moscow, or that filmed details of several differentwomen could fuse beyond the cut to form a single body. Over and overthese experiments revealed the primacy of spatial continuity—showingthat the cut would have to wedge into it very deeply indeed before thatcontinuity would break.

The films of the Russian avant-garde—Eisenstein, Vertov, VsevolodPudovkin, Aleksandr Dovshenko—were recycled regularly in the pro-gramming of the Anthology Film Archives, which had been opened inNew York in 1970 by Jonas Mekas and was devoted to both the histori-cal, and the contemporary cinematic avant-garde. There, in a bizarrely de-signed visual solitude, one could view, over and over, the deft precision ofRussian “film form.” And there, several nights of every week, sat RichardSerra, often accompanied by Robert Smithson or Joan Jonas, building on


his already formidable film education begun at Yale, extended in theCinémathèque in Paris, and refined in New York in the late 1960s. Therehe 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 becameevident that he intended this cut to operate like the one in film—to func-tion 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 leadsheets, steel piping, a wooden beam, and a marble slab are aesthetically“joined” by the very operation that hacks into their substance and splaysthem apart. These materials, having been laid sequentially on a two-foot-wide steel base plate, their disparate lengths extending beyond it on eitheredge, were sliced through by a circular saw, to fall and scatter on both sidesof the relatively narrow base/template.

But the Gestalt that magically forms through the agency of this cutseems to exist both “inside” the work—holding it together—and mani-

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Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure,1969Wood, steel, leadIndeterminate dimensionsCollection: Museum of Modern Art,New YorkPhoto: Peter Moore

festly “outside,” an operation performed on the latency of matter. Open-ing the performance of this unity to the viewer’s inspection, displaying itin slow-motion, as it were, it allows us to see just that leap in the darkwhere the site of one filmed detail joins up to another, places us at just thatmoment of dawning perceptual sense when the object that “disappears”by passing in back of another, reappears to the infantile viewer not as athird object, but as the same one as before, seamed together in his cogni-tive understanding by the transformational idea “behind.”

Continuing to operate with this linear device in which it is the cutthat paradoxically forges the wholeness of the work, Serra in 1970 madean extremely lyrical untitled piece, in which a twenty-four-foot steel plateis wedged into a gentle fall of ground and then torch-cut along its exposedportion to produce a fallen triangle visibly wedded to its now mostly in-visible mate: the other half of the original plate, still buried, below its ex-posed cut edge, in the earth. And in the same year he created what wasperhaps his most extravagantly Dada version: Sawing: Base Plate Measure(Twelve Fir Trees), in which twelve twenty-five-foot logs, each approxi-mately four feet in diameter, were cut off a cement base-plate template teninches high, seven feet wide, and fifty feet long, filling the main space inthe Pasadena Museum with a massive challenge to the very concept of thegallery as a site for sculpture.

By 1972 something fundamental had happened to Serra’s conceptionof the cut. For in that year he made Circuit and Twins: To Tony and MaryEdna, in which cutting was no longer a force exerted on the patient bodyof the world outside the viewer, but was, somehow, what tied that worldto the viewer, what shaped his perception and, in so doing, could beshown to shape him. Intervening between the Base Plate Measure worksand these later ones was Strike: To Roberta and Rudy (1969–1971), a sculp-ture conceived as operating the “cut” on space itself and organizing it inrelation to the viewer’s body, so that the interdependence of body andspace—coming apart and being put back together—is choreographed inrelation to the work.

Strike is simply a steel plate eight feet high and twenty-four feet longbutted into the corner juncture of two walls for its only means of verticalsupport, the steel plate transecting the right-angled volume of the space.As the viewer moves around the work, plane is perceived as contractingto line (or edge) and then expanding back into plane. Reciprocally, thespace is blocked off and then opened out and subsequently reblocked. Inthis movement open-closed-open, the space itself is experienced as the


matter on which the cut, or slice, of Strike operates, as though it were thespace of the room that had been laid across the work’s steel template andhad been severed in three. And, as in the earlier work, it is the cut thatknits back together the raveled sleeve of experience, that unites it beyondthe split into the splice. And because it is the viewer, moving through thespace, who is himself the operator of this cut, its activity becomes a func-tion of his perceptual work as well; he is working with it to reconvene thecontinuity of his own lived world.

In Circuit this implication of the viewer’s body in the action of thework is unavoidable, since the only place to experience the sculpture is atits center—as one stands in the three-foot opening in the midst of the jutof four plates—each eight by twenty-four feet—pushing diagonally fromthe four corners of a room to stop just short of its mid-point. In that cen-ter the viewer must turn 360 degrees in order to see the work, and the

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Strike: To Roberta and Rudy, 1969–1971Hot-rolled steel8’ x 24’ x 1”Collection: Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum, New York (Panza Collection)Photo: Peter Moore

wholeness of his own body becomes the guarantor of the reconstructiblewholeness of the room’s continuity beyond the cellular segmentation ofthe separate quadrants or “shots” into which the plates cut the architec-tural space.

With Twins this drama of a perceptual center is played in a variant thatcombines the Strike phenomenon with the earlier notion of cut. A hugesteel 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 projectedfrom opposing corners of an oblong room they form two triangular fins,parallel in plan but inverse in elevation, each presenting a profile thatstretches from high in one corner and narrows to a point at the floor whenit reaches the wall across the room. Given the simplicity of the geometri-cal relationships, it is extremely easy to reconstruct the original singleplate, to understand, that is, the way the cut has bifurcated and dispersedthe formerly unified plane. But to stand between the two walls of thework is to feel this reconstruction in a very special relation to one’s ownbody, to experience it through an extraordinarily acute sensation of thebody’s own symmetry—of the way that symmetry does not work as an


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

identity between right and left sides, but in inverse, mirror relationship—or through a heightened sense of the manner in which what is present tome in the space that exists behind my back, shares in the formation of themeaning of what I experience in front of my eyes.

Standing between these two fins is a matter, that is, of feeling the wayone giant element has been sheared off from the other and, rotated back-to-front into place, now exposes the outer surface of its mate to the innerarea within which the viewer stands. Thus the plate that is at the viewer’sback is, literally, the “back” of the plate he faces. And with this incrediblysimple maneuver, orientation—or what phenomenology would call situ-ation—is added to geometry. What might have been understood as a“simple” geometrical enclosure—a kind of box articulated by two wallsand two fins—has been articulated in relation to a point-of-view onto, orwithin, this construction. And this, it must be underscored, is not an ab-stract point of view, like the projective point of Renaissance perspectivethat suspends a disembodied single “eye” before the visual array. This is apoint of view that is defined instead as being situated in a body, a body thatitself has a back and a front. Thus insofar as Twins articulates its own con-

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

cern with the double-sidedness of each element, it coordinates this withthe conditions of its viewer’s body: the fact that that body has a front fromwhich it sees and a back which it knows to be there but cannot see. Yet itis this very unseen, and unseeable, side that thickens the world for the per-ceiver, that assures him that things have reverse sides, namely those aspectsthat, being hidden from him, they reveal to one other. And just as the con-tinuous presence of the body was experienced as providing the groundof continuity that seamed together the cuts of Circuit, so the sitedness ofthat body is revealed as the precondition for “knowing” the density andmultiple-aspectedness of the structure of Twins.

Two years after making Twins, Serra constructed yet another workthat articulated itself against the background or horizon of the viewer’sphysical self, which was given an added density and corporealization byfeeling itself to be the very precondition for experiencing the density andweight and inner relationship of the work. The sculpture in question isDelineator (1974–1975), consisting of two steel plates, each ten by twenty-six feet, one laid directly on the floor, the other attached to the ceilingright above it, the two plates with their planes parallel and their major axesat right angles to each other. One could of course read this juxtapositionthrough a notion of abstract coordinates and relate it to the red bars cross-ing black of Malevich’s suprematism or the graphic crosses of Mondrian’sPlus and Minus series. But that would be to omit the way a space is cor-porealized through those two anonymous plates, a space called into beingin relation to the viewer’s body. “When you’re outside the plates,” Serraexplains,

the overhead plate appears to press upward against the ceiling. Thatcondition reverses itself as you walk underneath. There aren’t any di-rect paths into it. As you walk toward its center, the piece functionseither centrifugally or centripetally. You’re forced to acknowledgethe space above, below, right, left, north, east, south, west, up, down.All your psychophysical coordinates, your sense of orientation, arecalled into question immediately.17

Explaining that he was not interested in a reading of Delineator that wouldsee it as a kind of column or zone of light suspended between the twoplanes, he added: “It’s not opting for opticality as its content. It has moreto do with a field force that’s being generated, so that the space is discernedphysically rather than optically.”18


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

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Delineator, 1974–1975SteelTwo plates, each 10’ x 26’ x 1”Installed: Ace Gallery, Venice,CaliforniaPhoto: Gordon Matta-Clark

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

Richard Serra makes several different appearances in The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies. We see him and Robert Smithsonfrom the back, setting off on the rocky road of the Spiral Jetty; we see himmaking the various casting pieces in the Castelli warehouse; and we seeone torso-length close-up of him—amazingly dirty, in coveralls and a teeshirt, hair wild and face spattered with white. And as with the Portrait ofthe Artist Throwing Lead, precedents come to mind. For there is anothertwentieth-century sculptor who relished being portrayed as though in acocoon of studio grime, who wore the dirt of his artistic life as a kind offilmy, glamorous veil: Alberto Giacometti with plaster in his hair, in thedeep grooves along his cheeks, in his lashes, on his clothing. And curiouslyenough, Giacometti was the focus for a certain phase of Serra’s attempt toassimilate the fact of Paris as a living center for art, during that first year inEurope after Yale.

In the course of several months he and Philip Glass would go, manytimes a week, to La Coupole, the Montparnasse restaurant to which Gia-cometti repaired every evening toward midnight to eat his dinner. Some-times alone, but more often accompanied by his brother Diego and a fewassistants, Giacometti would arrive covered in plaster, the noble workmanof the rue du Moulin Vert. Every night he would eat a bowl of mussels anddrink red wine. And every night Richard Serra and Philip Glass wouldwatch him eat. Later, at Glass’s insistence, they would go to the cafe whereSamuel Beckett could usually be counted upon to show up for endlessgames of snooker. One night Giacometti acknowledged this youthful au-dience of two. There are many stories of Giacometti’s having found thiskind of attention highly irritating, but that evening he seemed intriguedby these gawkers at the marks of his labor. He invited them to come to seehim the next day; but when they got there, no one was home.

For Serra, riveted on what he was experiencing as Brancusi’s abstract-ness, this failure to enter Giacometti’s studio was not an aesthetic tragedy,for Giacometti’s postwar work was determinedly figurative, presentingagain and again the rigid, standing body of his model. It is only from a laterperspective that that meeting—which could have taken the title “tomiss”—assumes the character of a charming historical irony. For Serra andGiacometti did later “meet”—if only to miss—over a text, that strangelyenough, could serve as a kind of theoretical key to the work of both, de-spite the radical difference between them.


The text in question is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenologyof Perception (1945), from which passage after passage could be cited to il-luminate the nature of Serra’s sculptural elaboration of the perceptualfield. We remember, for instance, the question of back and front as thatwas developed in Twins; and we read:

To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, andthey would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each otheror behind me. In other words: to look at an object is to inhabit it, andfrom this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect whichthey present to it. But insofar as I see those things too, they remainabodes open to my gaze, and being potentially lodged in them, I al-ready perceive from various angles the central object of my presentvision. Thus every object is the mirror of all others.19

Yet The Phenomenology of Perception was first thought not to address is-sues raised by Serra, but to create a kind of explanatory ground for late Gia-cometti. For the matter of his sculpture—those attenuated figures, risinglike stalks, built up as though through a process of destruction, an erosionthat establishes them as a kind of crumbled vagueness at the center of vi-sion—this attack on matter was often seen as the parallel in sculptural termsto phenomenology’s recharacterization of perception as a function of in-tentionality, as the simultaneous cause and result of the viewer’s “gearinginto the world,” his prise sur le monde. In the light of this notion of seeing asa kind of grasping or meshing, no objects are imagined as being given to usneutrally, to be then modified by the distance from which we see them orthe angle of view we are forced to take. The distance and the viewpoint arenot added to the object, it is argued, but inhere in the object’s meaning, likethe sounds that infuse our language with an always-already-given groundof sense, separating it at the start from mere noise or babble. “Is not a mansmaller at two hundred yards than at five yards away?” Merleau-Ponty asks.“He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and measurehis 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 fartheraway.”20 Perceptual “data” are thus recharacterized by phenomenology.They are no longer neutral stimuli to enter the bodily sensorium for point-by-point processing, but are now defined as the meanings that things pre-sent to a given point of view. “Convergence and apparent size are neithersigns nor causes of depth: they are present in the experience of depth in the

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way that a motive, even when it is not articulate and separately posited, ispresent in a decision.”21 Or further, “They do not act miraculously as‘causes’ in producing the appearance of organization in depth, they tacitlymotivate it in so far as they already contain it in their significance, and inso 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 for-mal conditions of Giacometti’s postwar sculpture. And his work, insofar asit appeared to represent the mutual relationship between the object and itsspectator, the viewer and the viewed, was directly associated with phe-nomenology. The “distance” imprinted on those represented bodies, in-scribed there by means of their hieratic removal, their frontality, theirrigidity, their kneaded and blurred surfaces, could not be effaced by mov-ing close up to the sculpture to examine it, by peering into the clefts of itssurfaces. These bodies were, instead, marked by a meaning that nothingcould erase: their separation from the viewer, their existence as a kind oflimit condition of his gaze. Forever caught in the field of the spectator’slook, the works constructed the sitedness of vision, of what it means to beseen “by” another “from” the place from which he views. “He chose,”Sartre wrote about Giacometti, “to sculpt situated appearance and discov-ered that this was the path to the absolute. He exposes to us men andwomen as already seen but not as already seen by himself alone. His figuresare already seen just as a foreign language that we are trying to learn is al-ready spoken. Each of them reveals to us man as he is seen, as he is forother men, as he emerges in interhuman surroundings . . .”23

Published in 1948, this reading established the critical ambiencewithin which Giacometti’s art was assimilated. The sponsorship by Sartremeant that for American receivers of the work, for the most part unawareof Merleau-Ponty’s still untranslated Phenomenology of Perception, Gia-cometti was understood as exemplifying the moral lessons of existential-ism, of what man-in-a-situation meant for human responsibility, humanchoice, human freedom. It meant also that figuration seemed to be a min-imum requirement for these kinds of issues to emerge, for how else wouldone get at the question of “interhuman surroundings”?

But by the time that American readers encountered The Phenomenol-ogy of Perception (it was translated into English in 1962), their aesthetichorizons had become restructured by a conviction in the necessity of ab-straction. The Minimalist generation, becoming aware of Merleau-Pontyand phenomenology against the background of the problematic inheritedfrom Pollock and Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, thus did not read it


as a call for figuration. For the minimalists, the interest of phenomenol-ogy was located precisely in its assumption of a “preobjective experience”that underlies all perception and guarantees that even in its abstractness it isalways and already meaningful; for otherwise, without an expectationof meaning located precisely in it, we would have no reason to go on tocommit acts of seeing, hearing, moving. This description was pertinent totheir ambitions, seeming to eclipse those of postwar France. In Merleau-Ponty’s text the generation of the 1960s encountered the analysis of “aspatiality without things” that gave intellectual and theoretical ballast totheir own preoccupations with a seriously intended abstract art. “Oncethe experience of spatiality is related to our implantation in the world,”they could read there, “there will always be a primary spatiality for eachmodality of this implantation. When, for example, the world of clear andarticulate 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 theidea of “a spatiality without things” we might read what Serra wrote aboutthe far-flung structure of a work that extends over three hundred yards offield in rural Canada, a work that he constructed during the period 1970to 1972 and titled Shift:

Surrounded on three sides by trees and swamp, the site is a farmingfield consisting of two hills separated by a dog-leg valley. In the sum-mer of 1970, Joan [ Jonas] and I spent five days walking the place. Wediscovered that two people walking the distance of the field oppositeone another, attempting to keep each other in view despite the cur-vature of the land, would mutually determine a topological definitionof the space. The boundaries of the work became the maximum dis-tance two people could occupy and still keep each other in view. Thehorizon of the work was established by the possibilities of maintain-ing this mutual viewpoint. From the extreme boundaries of the work,a total configuration is always understood. As eye-levels werealigned—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 theplace in totality and one’s relation to the field as walked. The result isa way of measuring oneself against the indeterminacy of the land.

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. . . Insofar as the stepped elevations [the six “walls” that are thebuilt elements of the work] function as horizons cutting into and ex-tending towards the real horizon, they suggest themselves as orthog-onals within the terms of a perspective system of measurement. Themachinery of renaissance space depends on measurements remainingfixed and immutable. These steps relate to a continually shifting hori-zon, and as measurements, they are totally transitive: elevating, lower-ing, 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 mightremind us of that earlier sequence of actions contemplated by the ArtistThrowing Lead: “to splash, to knot, to spill, to droop, to flow, toswirl. . . .” And like that earlier set of named actions, these also appear tofloat 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 in-finitives 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 theprogressive tense, seems to indicate an action that is reflexive—modifyingthe subject in the process of modifying the object. Neither pole of the ac-tion is named, but the type of action imagined—foreshortening, con-tracting, turning—implies a field of reciprocity, as though it wereimpossible to think of an object without thinking at the same time aboutthe way it carved out and determined a place for oneself.

Thus from the coming into being of Shift as the recorded trace of themutual sighting of two people as they walk opposite sides of a hilly groundbut struggle to keep each other in view; to its construction as a networkof perspectives that would establish an internal “horizon” for the work (asopposed to the real horizon), which in turn would continually defineone’s vision of the object through one’s physical relation to it; to its ideaof the transitivity of this relationship such that the work marks the activ-ity of the viewer’s connection to his world: Serra’s conception of Shiftseems to arise quite naturally from the kind of phenomenological settingin which it is argued, “I cannot understand the function of the living bodyexcept by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which risestowards the world.”26

The opening movement in the making of Shift is a kind of choreo-graphed version of that determination to experience the self only, as Sartre


had said, “as he is for other men, as he emerges in interhuman surround-ings.” (It is perhaps a marker of the distance separating the immediate post-war 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 bythe next movement, in which one passes from the interpersonal into aninteraction with space itself, it seems to follow that one will discover a net-work of horizons, a system that will constantly reorganize itself not as onestands back and surveys the terrain, but as one gives way to the topo-graphical embrace. It is in this movement in which the horizon is rede-fined not as a spatial limit operated by measurement but as a coordinatinglimit operated by meaning, that we hear the echo of phenomenology’s ac-count of perception: “because to look at the object is to plunge oneselfinto it, and because objects form a system in which one cannot show it-self without concealing others. More precisely, the inner horizon of anobject cannot become an object without the surrounding objects’ be-coming a horizon and so vision is an act with two facets.”27

Shift does not, of course, relate to The Phenomenology of Perception aswork to source. Rather, the ideas developed by Merleau-Ponty had beengenerally assimilated by a first generation of minimalist artists, affecting theassumptions by Judd or Robert Morris that sculpture had better own upto what it had, in its former idealism, attempted to hide, namely, that “ifthe object is an invariable structure, it is not one in spite of the change ofperspective, but in that change or through it.”28 In the play of perspectivesin which minimalism now grounded the object, abstract geometries wereconstantly submitted to the redefinition of a sited vision. And it is againstthis background that Serra arrived at the choreography of Shift in which awork could be conceived as the mutually established “horizon” of twopeople at a distance.

Within this context, too, we understand how Serra’s idea of “seeingat a distance” can never coincide with or map onto that of Giacometti. Forwhere Giacometti locates the depiction of distance in the object world,and specifically in the representation of the human figure, it was Serra’s as-sumption that the ground for the perception of distance was not to befound in figuration, but in abstraction, an abstraction that parallels the no-tion of the preobjective experience. Which is to say that for Serra, the onlyway to approach that primordial, preobjective world is through a use ofform that, though palpable and material—directly engaging the viewer’sbody—is rigorously nonfigurative, insistently abstract.

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The abstract elaboration of the plane in Twins and Circuit and Strike isdeployed over the vast expanse of Shift. Moving over the grounds of thework, one experiences the walls as elements in constant transformation:first as line, and then as barrier, only to become line once more. From thevantage of high ground, the upper edges of the walls are the vectors alongwhich one sights as one stands above them looking down, and theythereby establish one’s connection to the distance. Whereas from the van-tage of one’s “descent” they broaden and thicken to become an enclosurethat 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 thelinear 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 andout of depth of a plane.

The opening sections of The Phenomenology of Perception sketch some-thing of the preobjective world when they speak of the internal horizonof an object as that network of views from everywhere within which it iscaught:

When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only thequalities 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 theface which it “shows” to the chimney. I can therefore see an object inso far as objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each onetreats the others round it as spectators of its hidden aspects whichguarantee the permanence of those aspects by their presence.29

This passage opens a section titled “The Body,” in which the author ar-gues that it is the interconnectedness of “back” and “front” within a sys-tem of the meanings of these relationships, given preobjectively by thespace of the body, that we can construct as a primordial model to explainperception. The body as the preobjective ground of all experience of therelatedness of objects is, indeed, the first “world” explored by The Phe-nomenology of Perception.

As the plane of Shift rotates to become now internal, now externalhorizon, it functions as a kind of syntactical marker—an equivalent withinthe abstract language of sculpture for the connection between the body’s“horizon” and that of the world beyond. The abstraction of Shift, like thatof Twins, is therefore a function of the abstractness of the open vectors that


are marked, the possible coordinates that are mapped in their latency,rather than being a matter of the nonfigurative character of the planeitself. Constructivist sculpture had, throughout the opening half of thecentury, based its own claim to abstraction on the nonobjective, non-referential forms of the elements it put to use: smoothly transparentrectangles of celluloid, shiny grids of aluminum, mattely deadpan ovals ofwood or metal. The realness of these materials—their associations toworkplace, to laboratory, to transport—did nothing to interfere with theaura of the “abstract” within which these shapes located the constructivistobject. For that object seemed to exist in the ideal space of geometric di-agrams, of textbook structures, of engineering tables. The transparency ofthe materials seemed to underscore the way these intellectualist models,these diagrams for objects, could be opened to the inspection of a thoughtthat penetrated them as though from all sides at once, entering and ac-quiring them. Thus a translucency to thought became the real “subject”of constructivism, the marker of a triumph over matter by the formal op-erations of logic or of science, the object baptized in the powers of reason.In this way the constructivist plane acts to overcome the “appearances” ofthings and to redefine the object itself as the géometral of all possible per-spectives, which is to say, the object seen from nowhere or, as phenome-nology critically characterizes it, the object as seen by God: “For God,who is everywhere, breadth is immediately equivalent to depth. Intellec-tualism and empiricism do not give us any account of the human experi-ence of the world; they tell us what God might think about it.”30

Now, no matter how geometrical in form, the planes in Shift locatethe meaning of the work in a place utterly distinct from that of this con-structivism. Which is to say that these planes do not enter the formal do-main of transparency, and this not because they are literally opaque (madeof concrete, half-buried in the earth, at one with the compactness of theland) but because they participate in a system that finds abstraction onlywhen carnally enacted as the dual coordination of a lived perspective sup-ported by the preobjective space of the body, “an act with two facets.” Ac-knowledging that vision is this “act with two facets,” the planes in Shiftserve to mark both the thickness of the body and that of the world, as wellas the mutual, motile engagement that is at the heart of perception. Fur-ther, because the constructivist sculpture is seen from a vantage point inthe Absolute, as it were, its viewer is represented as immobile, hoveringsomewhere above it in that total, simultaneous presence to its being thathas no need of movement. But Shift ’s viewer is represented (through the

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sculpture) as in constant motion; and this bridging between the body’shorizon and that of the world, this abstract transitivity—“foreshortening,”“contracting,” “compressing,” “turning”—must be seen as the subjectmatter of the work.

Chiasma is a relationship of crossing and exchange. It can be used lin-guistically to chart the reflexive crossovers between words, or it can beused to describe a spatial transitivity, as in the mutual interaction of seerand 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 chi-asmatic trajectory, became the subject of much of Serra’s work. It is an ab-stract subject, most often given visual form by correspondingly “abstract”elements, like the diagonally oriented fifteen-foot-long bars and the twosteel blocks that they displace within the spectator’s field of vision in thework called Different and Different Again (1973). But it is a subject that onecan continue to experience abstractly, syntactically, even when the me-dium through which it is expressed is not the geometrical plane of Shift orof Twins but a real, functional, and functioning object, an industrial ob-ject, for example.

It was precisely a bridge, a revolving turnbridge, that became themedium of the chiasmatic loop in the film Railroad Turnbridge, whichSerra made in the summer of 1976 as a kind of encomium to his reveredmasters of the Soviet filmic avant-garde—to the Eisenstein of the raising-of-the-bridge sequence in October (1927) and to the Dziga Vertov of thesteel mills in Enthusiasm (1931). In this film the camera, from a position atone end of the bridge, sights down its entire length to make of the bridgeitself a giant viewfinder, a kind of semaphor of vision, reaching like anextended bellows toward the remote landscape. The view beyond thistunnel-like construction is thus entirely a function of the distant apertureat the bridge’s end, and in this way the lens of the camera and the open-ing 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 theother. View and viewer are thus mutually implicated both at the level ofform and at the level of the dispositif, or apparatus, of vision; the majesti-cally slow turning of the sun-struck bridge operates simultaneously on theposition of the seer and on that limited part of the world available to beseen. As Serra says about this work,

Not only does it use the device of the tunneling of the bridge to framethe landscape, but then it returns on itself and frames itself. In that,


there is an illusion created that questions what is moving and what isholding still. Is the camera moving and bridge holding still or viceversa? That is contained within the framing structure of the materialof the bridge itself, right down to its internal functioning element—the gear.31

Indeed, in Railroad Turnbridge nothing of the bridge’s physical exis-tence, or its historical density (such as its material place in the develop-ment of truss-construction within the nineteenth century’s conquest ofspans), is banished from sight, and nothing of the landscape toward whichthe 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 frameand 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 partof the ethos of Serra’s generation of independent filmmakers. Thus in thelate 1960s Michael Snow had made Wavelength, a forty-five-minute filmthat consists of a single camera movement—a zoom—that traverses thespace of a downtown loft, seeming to distill in startling purity an abstractexperience of “suspense.”32 Right after it was made Serra took Snow’s filmwith him on a working tour in Europe and insisted on showing it every-where he went. Over and over he watched that dawning of the irre-versible, the inexorable, as something that could be not so much picturedas plotted. It was when he saw the turnbridge on a trip to the PacificNorthwest that he realized the relation between this abstract, filmic driveand his own specific subject.

In Railroad Turnbridge Serra found access to a space made visible in andof itself by the fact that it is in motion, a space swollen by a brilliant lumi-nosity that serves as a metaphor for vision, yet a space traversed by the mu-tual implication of back and front, thus creating a visual figure for thepreobjective space of the body. The physical turnbridge is the medium,the support, the pretext for this experience, not its subject. The subject ofthe film remains absolutely consonant with that of Shift.

Another aspect of the abstract subject emerges from reading RailroadTurnbridge and Shift together, and that is their parallel preoccupation withtime as the medium within which movement unfurls the complications ofits connections. For if, for Serra, the abstract subject can only be a func-tion of time, this is because any subject that is timeless—fixed, isolated,

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and unchanging—lapses into an image. And an image is by definition notabstract. Always an image of something, it always acts to depict: this per-son, that chair, this concept. Giacometti’s sculpture has, in this sense, con-stant recourse to images, not just because it is figurative but because it isresolutely static, a function of the “image” of distance become “picture.”Stamped onto the surface of his works through the indelible fracture of themodeling, through the abruptness with which the sides of the sculptedfaces recede before our eyes, this frozen picture operates to insure that,whether physically far or near, we will always be presented with this ideaof distance as an image.

For Serra the abstract subject only becomes available to the artist oncespace and time are acknowledged as functions of one another. For it iswithin the very moment of a shift in vision that what is seen is experiencedas not bounded by the condition of being fixed, as is an image. In this in-sistence on an abstraction that fuses the temporal with the spatial, so thatthe bridge of Serra’s film is imaginable as a medium only because, like thegears of the camera itself, it is turning, one continues to feel a phenome-nological 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 holdit, or that I still hold it, it is in the future or in the past as well as be-ing in space. . . . But co-existence, which in fact defines space, is notalien to time, but is the fact of two phenomena belonging to the sametemporal wave.33

And once again Merleau-Ponty links the space of this continuum tosomething preobjective and abstract:

There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a worldexists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This cap-tive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which isthe instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this orthat world, but the system of anonymous “functions” which drawevery particular focus into a general project.34


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 bring-ing 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 aneed to read the landscape but assert that no determinate reading can bearrived at, no closure to this experience, no final figure that will resolveonce and for all the “ground.” The sculptures “point to the indeterminacyof the landscape,” Serra has said, adding, “The dialectic of walking andlooking 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, geo-metrical shape. And these two regularities—horizontal plane and verticalarc—might now suggest a different subject for the work, a different rela-tionship 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 choreo-graphed a shot to be taken from the work’s very center, at the endpoint ofits trajectory as it spirals out from shore to curl around and into itself. Con-ceived as a continuous camera movement, that shot is a 360-degree panalong the horizon of the Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point, a horizon nowmimed, redefined, and displaced by the outer rim of the Jetty. On thestoryboard of the film Smithson composed the shot; it begins:

North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, waterNorth by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northeast by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, waterNorthest by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, waterEast 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 amonotonous immensity. Unlike the constructivist triumphal entry intothe heart of the material object to conquer it cognitively, this centering

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acknowledges instead a kind of perceptual defeat, a great entropic assaulton intuition which would, as Smithson wrote, “end in sunstroke.” Look-ing for a geometry to end geometry, to collapse it utterly, Smithson foundit in the “immense roundness” of his site, which he compared to a “rotarythat enclosed itself.” This site seemed to provide the means to underminewhat Smithson viewed as the presumptuousness of the certainties pro-duced by the art he knew. “No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no struc-tures, no abstractions,” he wrote, “could hold themselves together in theactuality of that evidence.”37

In 1980 Serra located a work within a rotary, a site he found as crush-ingly disorienting as the sweep of Rozel Point, Utah. This site, a trafficroundabout at the New York City exit from the Holland Tunnel, Serradescribed as


Plumb Run: Equal Elevations, 1983Weatherproof steelThree plates, each 12’ x 40’ x 21⁄2”Overall: 12 x 40 x 731’Installed: Nassau County Museum ofFine Art, Roslyn Harbor, New YorkPhoto: Gwen Thomas

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 ro-tation where, at various times of the day, the density of traffic screensthe inner center of the Rotary, enforcing the distinction between theinside and the outside of the space so that the space seems to open andclose with the traffic flow.38

St. John’s Rotary Arc is thus, like Smithson’s Jetty, a regular geometricform placed on a level, regularized “base,” a ground that in its flatness com-pares to the “thermal mirror” of the Great Salt Lake from which the Jettyrises. And like Smithson, Serra imagined a certain narrative for the view-ing of this work, a kind of cinematic scenario even though for a film neverreally contemplated. Further, like Smithson’s shot plan, this scenario pro-jects 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 pointsare urban, functions of the metropolitan grid. The scenario begins:

On the East, Varick Street runs South, downtown: walking downVarick Street, the Arc foreshortens, expands and flattens to a plane.Standing on line with the visual center of the work (halfway down theblock) its top edge curves outward and up at the limits of peripheralvision. Walking Varick, the Arc can be read as a site-specific metaphorin that it echoes the content of a tunnel: traffic appears, disappears,reappears.39

If Smithson’s refrain, “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water,” relates to therepetitive hum of Serra’s contemporaneous Hand Catching Lead, the nar-rative of the Rotary Arc breaks away from that earlier serialized sameness.For from its very outset—“the Arc foreshortens, expands, and flattens toa plane”—we are introduced to change. Further, as was the case with thelandscape pieces (“the sculptural elements act as barometers for readingthe landscape”),40 we are being invited to a “reading”; we are asked to en-ter a space with the expectation that it will yield up meaning. But thatmeaning arises, we also realize, within a network of coordinates for whichthere is no single center. And in this we understand that for Rotary Arc, nomatter the geometrical regularities involved—the juxtaposition of the seg-ment of a circle to the rectilinear, circumscribed ground of an urban set-ting (Varick Street, Laight Street, Hudson Street, Ericsson Street)—thepreobjective ground of sense is to be found in a fundamental experience

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of the body’s own coordinates defined as pure difference. North-south-east-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 withthe visual center of the work” is the filmic direction. But the second isthe center of the site, that formed-but-formless terrain vague of gravelwhose center is given by the urban network: “On the East, Varick Streetruns South.” Rotary Arc is thus a two-hundred-foot section of a vastcircle much larger than the urban base of the rotary on which it stands.That larger, projected circle, which would be eight hundred feet if com-pleted, 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 be-gins to contract.” Hence the play of continual difference, the oscillatingattractions of two eccentric orbits. The center of the site versus the cen-ter 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 ofthe convex. But as one walks this work, which operates at the scale of thecity itself, one is never wholly inside or outside; one is always moving “to-ward,” reflexively defined as pure destination, as intentional movement.We return to the “scenario”:

On the South, Ericsson Street runs East to Varick: walking acrossthe exit ramp onto Ericsson Street toward Hudson Street, the curvesnakes back on itself and reads as a half circle. Moving further downto the corner of Hudson, the concavity is overlapped, abridged. Theconvex curve moves outward and away in a seemingly unending arc.

On the West, Hudson Street runs North, uptown: walking upHudson Street the convexity of the Arc appears enigmatic, obdurate,wall-like. It flattens gradually to an elongated, slow curve, which ap-pears concentric with the roundabout, when standing on axis withHubert Street. Here, on line with the visual center of the convexity,the top edge curves downward and away at the limits of peripheralvision.41

From this outside, then, facing this “obdurate, wall-like” closure, aviewer finds as the work’s “inner horizon” the pull of peripheral vision it-self, the activation of a field beyond, behind, outside-of. Thus whether thework maps a trajectory (“the convex curve moves outward and away in a


seemingly unending arc”) or a barrier (“obdurate, wall-like”), it operatesin the play of passage between a constant exchange of horizons. It is notso much an object as it is the map of a fluctuating set of exchanges. Serra’splot underscores this resistance to a condition for the work as object, fixedand knowable before, or outside of, lived experience. Neither the driverwho circumnavigates Rotary Arc, nor the pedestrian who moves towardand along it “can ascribe the multiplicity of views to a Gestalt reading ofthe Arc. Its form remains ambiguous,” Serra insists, “indeterminable, un-knowable as an entity.”42

That something might be “unknowable as an entity” does not affectthe possibility of its entering into a system with a viewer who moves to-ward it intending to know, and uncovering through it the resonance ofthis intention. It does not matter from what angle such a viewer ap-proaches the object, for there is no correct entry into this experience. Arational set of coordinates—north, west, south, east—may exist, “but notnecessarily in that order.” The metaphor of the film that Serra uses to plotthe experience of St. John’s Rotary Arc brings us back to that remark aboutnarrative that Godard placed in the mouth of one of the characters of Twoor Three Things I Know about Her, a film that also, interestingly enough, sur-veys an urban space by means of a 360-degree pan. “Stories have begin-ning, middles, and ends,” we remember, “but not necessarily in thatorder.” How one enters and where one leaves is variable; but all trajecto-ries live in the indissoluble marriage of the spatial with the temporal, anexperience which, if we can have it intensely enough brings to us that pre-objective 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 inRailroad Turnbridge, and remain nonetheless abstract. It can be supportedby the precise limits and conditions of a specific site as in Rotary Arc, withits concatenation of city streets at its boundaries, or Tilted Arc, positionedas it is at the particular interface between two eras of government con-struction. Nonetheless it remains abstract. The specificity of the site is notthe subject of the work but—in its articulation of the movement of theviewer’s body-in-destination—its medium. In all of this: the imbricationof the abstract subject within the most carefully observed specificities ofplace—for it is only through the placing of the one in the other that theabstract subject can be made to appear—we may be reminded of anothertext, which, like The Phenomenology of Perception, can serve to illuminateSerra’s project without in any way being taken as a source. Rather, from

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some considerable distance, it might function as a thematic ground, and ameans of orientation.

The text to which I refer appears near the opening of Marcel Proust’sRemembrance of Things Past, at the end of the section called “Combray.” Itinvolves a perception, or rather an interlocking set of perceptions, that weare shown not once but twice in succession: first in the narrative timewithin which the book is being written and then as a citation of a textualfragment written many years earlier, and set down immediately after theauthor has had the experience in question. By its narrative doubling,Proust underscores what he has already stated: this fragment possesses atalismanic quality in being the first real “writing” he ever produced; andas 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 thepoint at which he despaired of ever becoming an author.

The text, simply an intensely specific description of the constantpivoting on the visual horizon of the two bell towers of the Cathedral ofMartinville (Caen) and the one of Vieuxvicq, interrupts Proust’s youthfulnotions that writing should concern itself with abstract ideas, or with “aphilosophic theme.” Siding with quite another set of experiences, it is atext that involves itself in the voluptuous, changeant glitter reflecting off thesurfaces of things. Beneath this perceptual covering, the young Proustis sure that there lies something hidden, something important to grasp,although certainly nothing to do with the abstract truths so necessary tohis literary ambitions. In search of this buried treasure, Proust tells us:

I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, thecolour of the stone, which, without my being able to understandwhy, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up tome the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more thanthe outer coverings. It was certainly not any impression of this kindthat could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one dayin becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated withsome material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggestingno 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 be-neath the surface of the objects without, however, suggesting for one in-stant that it could be translated into the realm of concepts, this perceptual


thickening of experience into which he wished to delve, eluded Proustuntil the day that he rode in an open coach down the winding road thatfirst approached and then retreated from Martinville. Observing the per-ceptual network articulated by the towers, and his own ever-changing re-lation to them, it was this, his lived perspective that he mapped within hiswritten text, a section of which reads:

. . . we had left Martinville some little time, and the village, after ac-companying us for a few seconds, had already disappeared, when lin-gering along on the horizon to watch our flight, its steeples and thatof Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of farewell, their sunbathedpinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other twomight watch us for a moment still; then the road changed direction,they veered in the light like three golden pivots, and vanished frommy 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 uponthe sky above the low line of fields.44

The “fecundity of mind,” the meaning that operates at the heart ofperception, is released, then, within a specific site, a precise situationwhich the young writer actually inhabits. The choreography that sets hismovement and that of the towers into a mutually established set of lim-its—convex, and concave, luminous and dark, expanding and contract-ing—makes apparent to him the spatio-temporal web that connects himto 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 con-nects him to things—that is released by a site articulated by the towers ofMartinville.

The doubling of the Martinville passage models in small scale the rep-etitions of that same pleasure, released over and over again by specific sitesestablished throughout Proust’s novel, on which can be enacted other ver-sions of that movement, renewed each time by the different conditions ofthe changed context. In a similar relation to what Proust had thereforecalled “Place Names,” each of Serra’s arcs unfurls before its viewer withinutterly new situations and thus new media for meaning.

Thus Rotary Arc’s exchange between tunnel and street cannot openperspective in the same way that meaning occurs for Tilted Arc, with itsdifferent conditions of interior and exterior, its relation between work-

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place and civic spaces. And neither of these can figure within the experi-ence of movement created by Clara-Clara, whose special momentum asone passes between its two opposing but mirroring halves operates pre-objectively on the idea of the “gate,” situated as it was along that magicaltrajectory 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 defiantlybeen referred to in the 1960s as “just one thing after another.” For in themeantime this elusive thing that dilates within the body, this preobjective,abstract ground of meaning, this pure intentionality, had emerged forRichard Serra behind the obdurate physical object, as his subject. Just onething 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 Sev-enties (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 bythose 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 theformal 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 ofart is revealed as follows: Works of art are objects of the sort that can only be known in sens-ing . . . seeing feels like knowing. (‘Seeing the point’ conveys this sense, but in ordinary casesof seeing the point, once it’s seen it’s known, or understood; about works of art one maywish to say that they require a continuous seeing of the point.)” Michael Fried, in “Art andObjecthood,” 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, guaranteeingits experience as an instantaneously intuited whole. It follows from this, for example, thatin 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 partlypresent. It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetualcreation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only onewere infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to seeeverything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convincedby 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 withFour Molds: To Eva Hesse (1969) at the Castelli warehouse. This work shared the same prin-ciple as Casting (1969) made for the 1969 exhibition “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,”at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.


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 develop-ment 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, inSerra: Interviews, Etc., p. 61.

18. Ibid., p. 62.

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (Paris, 1945), trans. ColinSmith (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 thepiece: “There are two sets of stepped walls, with three elements in each. The walls span twohills which are, at their height, approximately 1500 feet apart. Each element begins flushwith the ground and extends for the distance that it takes for the land to drop five feet. Thedirection is determined by the most critical slope of the ground.” Ibid., p. 25.


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.

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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 UniversityPress, 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 PicturesqueStroll around Clara-Clara,” reprinted in this volume.


Splashing, 1968Lead18” x 26’Executed for an exhibition at theCastelli warehouse, New YorkPhoto: Peter Moore

Redefining Site Specificity

Douglas Crimp

I know that there is no audience for sculpture, as is the case with po-etry and experimental film. There is, however, a big audience forproducts which give people what they want and supposedly need, andwhich 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 usedby the Leo Castelli Gallery for storage; the occasion, an exhibition organ-ized by minimalist sculptor Robert Morris; the moment, December 1968.There, strewn upon the cement floor, affixed to or leaning against thebrick walls, were objects that defied our every expectation regarding theform of the work of art and the manner of its exhibition. It is difficult toconvey the shock registered then, for it has since been absorbed, broughtwithin the purview of normalized aesthetics, and, finally, consigned to ahistory of an avant-garde now understood to be finished. But, for many ofus who began to think seriously about art precisely because of such assaultson our expectations, the return to convention in the art of the 1980s canonly seem false, a betrayal of the processes of thought that our confronta-tions with art had set in motion. And so we try again and again to recoverthat experience, to make it available to those who now complacently

spend their Saturday afternoons in SoHo galleries viewing paintings thatsmell of fresh linseed oil and sculptures that are once again cast in bronze.

Of the things in that warehouse, certainly none was more defiant ofour sense of the aesthetic object than Richard Serra’s Splashing. Along thejuncture where wall met floor, Serra had tossed molten lead and allowedit to harden in place. The result was not really an object at all; it had nodefinable shape or mass; it created no legible image. We could, of course,say that it achieved the negation of categories that Donald Judd had, someyears earlier, ascribed to “the best new work”: “neither painting norsculpture.”1 And we could see that by effacing the line where the wall roseup perpendicular to the floor, Serra was obscuring a marker for our ori-entation in interior space, claiming that space as the ground of a differentkind of perceptual experience. Our difficulty with Splashing was in tryingto imagine its very possibility of continued existence in the world of artobjects. There it was, attached to the structure of that old warehouse onthe Upper West Side, condemned to be abandoned there forever or to bescraped off and destroyed. For to remove the work meant certainly to de-stroy it.

“To remove the work is to destroy the work.” It is with this assertionthat Serra sought to shift the terms of debate in a public hearing convenedto determine the fate of Tilted Arc.2 Serra’s sculpture had been commis-sioned by the General Services Administration (GSA) Art-in-ArchitectureProgram and permanently installed in the plaza of the Jacob K. Javits Fed-eral Building in Lower Manhattan during the summer of 1981. In 1985, anewly appointed GSA regional administrator presumed to reconsider itspresence there, to ask whether it might be “relocated” elsewhere. In tes-timony after testimony at that hearing, artists, museum officials, and oth-ers pleaded the case for site specificity that Serra’s assertion implied. Thework had been conceived for the site, built on the site, become an inte-gral part of the site, altered the very nature of the site. Remove it, and thework would simply cease to exist. But, for all its passion and eloquence,the testimony failed to convince the adversaries of Tilted Arc. To them thework was in conflict with its site, disrupted the normal views and socialfunctions of the plaza, and, indeed, would be far more pleasant to con-template in a landscape setting. There, presumably, its size would be lessoverwhelming to its surroundings, its rust-colored steel surface more har-monious with the colors of nature.

The larger public’s incomprehension in the face of Serra’s assertion ofsite specificity is the incomprehension of the radical prerogatives of a his-

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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 ofthe assertion, and it is that which provided the background of Tilted Arcfor its defenders. But they could not be expected to explain, within theshort time of their testimonies, a complex history that had been deliber-ately suppressed. The public’s ignorance is, of course, an enforced igno-rance, for not only is cultural production maintained as the privilege of asmall minority within that public, but it is not in the interests of the insti-tutions of art and the forces they serve to produce knowledge of radicalpractices even for their specialized audience. And this is particularly thecase for those practices whose goal was a materialist critique of the pre-suppositions of those very institutions. Such practices attempted to revealthe material conditions of the work of art, its mode of production and re-ception, the institutional supports of its circulation, the power relationsrepresented by these institutions—in short, everything that is disguised bytraditional aesthetic discourse. Nevertheless, these practices have subse-quently been recuperated by that very discourse as reflecting just one moreepisode in a continuous development of modern art. Many of Tilted Arc’sdefenders, some representing official art policies, argued for a notion ofsite specificity that reduced it to a purely aesthetic category. As such, it wasno longer germane to the presence of the sculpture on Federal Plaza. Thespecificity 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 formalcharacteristics of its environment, but also with the desires and assump-tions of a very different public from the one conditioned to the shocks ofthe art of the late 1960s. Serra’s transfer of the radical implications ofSplashing into the public realm, deliberately embracing the contradictionsthis transfer implies, is the real specificity of Tilted Arc.

When site specificity was introduced into contemporary art by min-imalist artists in the mid-1960s, what was at issue was the idealism ofmodern sculpture, its engagement of the spectator’s consciousness withsculpture’s own internal set of relationships. Minimalist objects redirectedconsciousness back upon itself and the real-world conditions that groundconsciousness. The coordinates of perception were established as existingnot only between the spectator and the work but among spectator, artwork, and the place inhabited by both. This was accomplished either byeliminating the object’s internal relationships altogether or by mak-ing those relationships a function of simple structural repetition, of “onething after another.”3 Whatever relationship was now to be perceived was

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Douglas Crimp150

Tilted Arc, 1981Weatherproof steel12’ x 120’ x 21⁄2”Installed: Federal Plaza, New YorkCollection: General ServicesAdministration (destroyed by theGSA, 1989)Photo: Anne Chauvet

contingent upon the viewer’s temporal movement in the space sharedwith the object. Thus, the work belonged to its site; if its site were tochange, 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 modernistidealism, this privileged position had devolved ultimately upon the artist,the sole generator of the art work’s formal relationships. The critique ofidealism directed against modern sculpture and its illusory sitelessness was,however, left incomplete. The incorporation of place within the domainof the work’s perception succeeded only in extending art’s idealism to itssurrounding site. Site was understood as specific only in a formal sense; itwas thus abstracted, aestheticized. Carl Andre, who made the claim thatsculpture, formerly equated with form and structure, was now to beequated with place, was asked about the implications of moving his worksfrom one place to another. His reply: “I don’t feel myself obsessed with thesingularity of places. I don’t think spaces are that singular. I think there aregeneric classes of spaces which you work for and toward. So it’s not reallya problem where a work is going to be in particular.”4 And Andre enu-merated these spaces: “Inside gallery spaces, inside private dwelling spaces,inside museum spaces, inside large public spaces, and outside spaces ofvarious 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 producea fully materialistic critique of modernist idealism. That critique, initiatedin the art production of the following years, would entail an analysis of,and resistance to, art’s institutionalization within the system of commercerepresented by those spaces listed by Andre. If modern art works existedin relation to no specific site and were therefore said to be autonomous,homeless, that was also the precondition of their circulation; from thestudio to the commercial gallery, from there to the collector’s privatedwelling, thence to the museum or lobby of a corporate headquarters.The real material condition of modern art, masked by its pretense to uni-versality, is that of the specialized luxury commodity. Engendered undercapitalism, modern art became subject to the commodification fromwhich nothing fully escapes. And in accepting the “spaces” of art’s insti-tutionalized commodity circulation as given, minimalist art could neitherexpose nor resist the hidden material conditions of modern art.

That task was taken up in the work of artists who radicalized sitespecificity, artists as various as Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke, Michael


Asher and Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra. Theircontributions to a materialist critique of art, their resistance to the “disin-tegration of culture into commodities,”6 were fragmentary and provi-sional, the consequences limited, systematically opposed or mystified,ultimately overturned. What remain of this critique today are a history tobe recovered and fitful, marginalized practices that struggle to exist at allin an art world more dedicated than ever before to commodity value.

That history cannot be recovered here; it can only be claimed as nec-essary for any genuine understanding of Richard Serra’s Splashing andwhat he was to make afterward. We need hardly be reminded of the dan-gers inherent in divorcing art practices from the social and political cli-mates in which they took place; in this case, the very mention of the year1968 as the date of Splashing should serve sufficient notice. The followingparagraphs, written in France by Daniel Buren just one month after theevents of May ’68 and published the following September, may provide areminder 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, academ-icisms, countless new taboos and new schools have been created andoverthrown!

Why? Because those phenomena against which the artiststruggles are only epiphenomena or, more precisely, they are only thesuperstructures built on the base that conditions art and is art. And arthas changed its traditions, its academicisms, its taboos, its schools,etc., at least a hundred times, because it is the vocation of what is onthe surface to be changed, endlessly, and so long as we don’t touch thebase, nothing, obviously, is fundamentally, basically, changed.

And that is how art evolves, and that is how there can be art his-tory. The artist challenges the easel when he paints a surface too largeto be supported by the easel, and then he challenges the easel and theoverlarge surface by turning out a canvas that’s also an object, and thenjust an object; and then there is the object to be made in place of theobject made, and then a mobile object or an untransportable object,etc. This is said merely by way of example, but intended to demon-strate that if there is a possible challenge it cannot be a formal one, itcan only be basic, on the level of art and not on the level of the formsgiven to art.7

Douglas Crimp152

The Marxist terminology of Buren’s text locates him in a political tra-dition very different from that of his American colleagues. Moreover,among the artists of his generation, Buren has been the most systematic inhis analysis of art in relation to its economic and ideological bases, and thushe has reached a far more radical conclusion: that the changes wroughtupon art within practice must be “basic,” not “formal.” In spite of RichardSerra’s continued work with the “forms given to art,” however, he has in-corporated important components of a materialist critique. These includehis attention to the processes and divisions of labor, to art’s tendency to-ward the conditions of consumption, and the false separation of privateand public spheres in art’s production and reception. Although Serra’swork is not systematic or consistent in this regard, even the contradictorymanner in which he has taken a critical position has produced reactionsthat are often perplexed, outraged, sometimes violent. Determined tobuild his work outside the confines of art institutions, Serra has frequentlymet with the opposition of public officials and their surrogates, who havebeen quick to manipulate public incomprehension for their censorialpurposes.8

The extraordinary status that has accrued to the work of art during themodern period is, in part, a consequence of the romantic myth of the artistas the most highly specialized, indeed unique producer. That this mythobscures the social division of labor was recognized by minimalist artists.Traditional sculpture’s specialized craft and highly fetishized materialswere opposed by minimalism with the introduction of objects industriallyfabricated of ordinary materials. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights, DonaldJudd’s aluminum boxes, and Carl Andre’s metal plates were in no wayproducts of the artist’s hand. Serra, too, turned to industrial materials forhis early sculpture, but at first he worked those materials himself or withthe help of friends. Using lead, and working at a scale proportionate tohand manipulation, his early torn, cast, and propped pieces were still evi-dence of the artist’s activity, however much the processes Serra employeddiffered from the conventional crafts of carving, modeling, and welding.But when, in 1971, Serra installed Strike: To Roberta and Rudy in the LoGiudice Gallery, New York, his working procedure was transformed.Strike was only a single plate of hot-rolled steel, one inch thick, eight feethigh, twenty-four feet long, and weighing nearly three tons. That steelplate was not, however, the work. To become the sculpture Strike, thesteel plate had to occupy a site, to assume its position wedged into the


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 thissimple fact. The steel’s tonnage required yet another industrial processthan the one that produced the plate itself. That process, known as rig-ging, involves the application of the laws of mechanics, usually with theaid of machinery, “to put [material] in condition or position for use” (Web-ster’s). Beginning with Strike, Serra’s work would require the professionallabor of others, not only for the manufacture of the sculpture’s material el-ements but also to “make” the sculpture, that is, to put it in condition orposition for use, to constitute the material as sculpture. It is this exclusivereliance on the industrial labor force (a force signaled with a very particu-lar resonance in the sculpture’s name) that distinguishes Serra’s productionafter the early 1970s as public in scope, not only because the scale of thework had dramatically increased, but because the private domain of theartist’s studio could no longer be the site of production. The place wherethe sculpture would stand would be the place where it was made, and itsmaking 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 thework’s sole creator, and thereby to deny the role of industrial processes inhis sculpture. While any large-scale sculpture requires such processes,while even the manufacture of paint and canvas require them, the laborthat has been expended in them is nowhere to be discerned in the finishedproduct. That labor has been mystified by the artist’s own “artistic” labor,transformed by the artist’s magic into a luxury commodity. Serra not onlyrefuses to perform the mystical operations of art but also insists upon con-fronting the art audience with materials that otherwise never appear intheir raw state. For Serra’s materials, unlike those of the minimalist sculp-tors, are materials used only for the means of production. They normallyappear to us transformed into finished products, or, more rarely, into theluxury goods that are works of art.9

This conflict between the product of heavy industry, unavailable forluxury consumption, and the sites of its exhibition, the commercialgallery and museum, intensified as Serra developed the implications ofStrike toward the total negation of the normal functions of gallery spaces.Rather than subserviently taking their cues from the formal conditions ofroom spaces, as site-specific works increasingly tied to purely aestheticideas began to do, Serra’s sculptures worked not “for and toward” butagainst those spaces. The enormous steel-plate walls of Strike, Circuit

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(1972), and Twins: To Tony and Mary Edna (1972) took on new dimen-sions with Slice (1980), Waxing Arcs (1980), Marilyn Monroe—Greta Garbo(1981) and Wall to Wall (1983). These dimensions were also assumed in thehorizontal steel-plate works Delineator (1974–1975) and Elevator (1980),and the forged-steel block pieces Span (1977) and Step (1982). Testing andstraining against the outer limits of structural, spatial, visual, and circula-tory capacity, these works pointed to another sort of specificity of the siteof art, its specific historical origins in the bourgeois interior. For if the his-torical form of the modern art work was conceived for its function inadorning that private interior space, if the museum goer could alwaysimagine the painting by Picasso or the sculpture by Giacometti transposedback inside the private dwelling, it was hardly so comfortable a thoughtto imagine a steel wall slicing through one’s living room. “Inside privatedwelling 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 ofheavy industrial materials and their mode of deployment. At the same time,art’s institutional exhibition spaces, surrogates of the private domicile, wererevealed as determining, constraining, drastically limiting art’s possibilities.

By the time Serra installed these later works in commercial galleriesand museums, he had already transferred much of his activity out-of-doors into the landscape and cityscape. The sheer implausibility of the in-door works, shoehorned as they are into clean white rooms, imposes theterms of a truly public sculptural experience within the confines of theusually private site. In effect, Serra reversed the direction generally takenby sculpture as it ventures into public space, the direction concisely spelledout in one critic’s statement of resignation: “All we can ever do is put pri-vate art in public places.”10 Unwilling, as we shall see, to accept this cal-cified idea of private versus public, Serra insists rather upon bringingthe lessons learned on the street, as it were, back into the gallery. In theprocess, the gallery goer (Marilyn Monroe—Greta Garbo is subtitled “ASculpture for Gallery Goers”) is made excruciatingly aware of the gallery’slimitations, of the stranglehold it exerts on the experience of art. By turn-ing the tables on the gallery, holding the gallery hostage to sculpture, Serradefies the gallery’s hegemony, declares it a site of struggle. That the termsof this struggle hinge in part upon questions of the private versus the pub-lic site of art is demonstrated by Slice, installed in the Leo Castelli Galleryon Greene Street, New York, in 1980. A continuous curve of steel plates,ten feet high and over 124 feet long, the sculpture sliced through thegallery’s deep space and lodged itself into the two corners of one of the


long walls. The room was thereby divided into two noncommunicatingareas, an area on the convex side of the curve, which we may designate aspublic, and a concave interior “private” area. Entering the gallery from thestreet, the gallery goer followed the curve from an expansive open spacethrough the compression where the curve closed in closer to the long walland then opened out again into the gallery’s back wall. The sensation wasthat 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 galleryand reentering through the door off the lobby, the gallery goer was now“inside,” confined in the concavity of the curve, privy to the gallery’scommercial dealings. In thus experiencing the two sides of Slice as ex-traordinarily different spatial sensations, neither imaginable from theother, one also experienced the always present and visible but never truly

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Slice, 1980Weatherproof steel10’ x 124’6” x 11⁄2”Installed: Leo Castelli Gallery,New YorkCollection: the artist

apparent relations between the gallery as a space of viewing and as a spaceof commerce. In installing a work that could not partake of the commer-cial possibilities of commodity circulation, Serra was nevertheless able tomake that condition of the gallery a part of the work’s experience, if onlyin abstract, sensory terms.

But possibilities of disrupting the power of galleries to determine theexperience of art are exceedingly limited, dependent as they are upon thewillingness of the contested institution. This is also true, of course, formuseums, although the latter might claim greater neutrality with respectto all art practices, even those that question the privatization of culture asa form of property. The museum, however, in the benevolence of thisneutrality, simply substitutes an ideologically constituted concept of pri-vate expression for the gallery’s commercial concept of private commodi-ties. For the museum as an institution is constituted to produce andmaintain a reified history of art based on a chain of masters, each offeringhis private vision of the world. Although his work does not participate inthis myth, Serra is aware that within the museum it will be seen that wayin any case:


In all my work the construction process is revealed. Material, formal,contextual decisions are self-evident. The fact that the technologicalprocess is revealed depersonalizes and demythologizes the idealiza-tion of the sculptor’s craft. The work does not enter into the fictitiousrealm of the “master.” . . . My works do not signify any esoteric self-referentiality. Their construction leads you into their structure anddoes not refer to the artist’s persona. However, as soon as you put awork into a museum, its label points first to the author. The visitor isasked to recognize “the hand.” Whose work is it? The institution ofthe museum invariably creates self-referentiality, even where it’s notimplied. The question, how the work functions, is not asked. Anykind of disjunction the work might intend is eclipsed. The problemof self-referentiality does not exist once the work enters the publicdomain. How the work alters a given site is the issue, not the personaof the author. Once the works are erected in a public space, they be-come other people’s concerns.11

When Serra first moved out of the institutions of art, he moved veryfar indeed. It was 1970. Robert Smithson had built the Spiral Jetty in theGreat Salt Lake in Utah; Michael Heizer had carved Double Negative intothe Virginia River Mesa of Nevada; Serra himself was planning Shift, thelarge outdoor work in King City, Canada. For all the excitement gen-erated by the development of earthworks, however, Serra found suchisolated sites unsatisfactory. An urban artist working with industrialmaterials, he discovered that the vast and inevitably mythologized Amer-ican landscape was not his concern, nor were the pathos and mock hero-ism of working in isolation from an audience. “No,” he said, “I wouldrather be more vulnerable and deal with the reality of my living situa-tion.”12 Serra negotiated with New York City officials for a site in thecity, and eventually they granted him a permit to construct a work in anabandoned dead-end street in the Bronx. There, in 1970, Serra built ToEncircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, a circle of steel angle,twenty-six feet in diameter, embedded in the surface of the street. Halfthe 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, thework was invisible; only when the viewer came directly upon it did thework materialize. Standing within its circumference, the viewer couldreconstruct its sculptural bulk, half buried under grade. There was, how-ever, a second approach, also from a distance, from which the work was

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visible in a different way. The dead-end street gave onto stairways lead-ing up to an adjoining street at a higher level; from there the street belowappeared as a “canvas” upon which the steel circle was “drawn.” Thisreading of figure against ground, rather than reconstructing material bulkin the ground, worried Serra, seeming to him once again to evoke thepictorialism into which sculpture always tended to lapse, a pictorialism hewished to defeat with the sheer materiality and duration of experience ofhis work. Moreover, this deceptive pictorialism coincided with anotherway of reading the sculpture that Serra did not foresee and that came torepresent for him a fundamental deception against which he would po-sition his work. That deception was the image of the work as against theactual experience of it.

To Encircle’s site was, as Serra described it, “sinister, used by the localcriminals to torch cars they’d stolen.”13 Clearly those “local criminals”were not interested in looking at sculpture—pictorial or not—and it wasSerra’s misconception that anyone from the art world was interestedenough in sculpture to venture into that “sinister” outpost in the Bronx.The work existed, then, in precisely the form in which earthworks existfor most people—as documents, photographs. They are transferred backinto the institutional discourses of art through reproduction, one of themost powerful means through which art has been abstracted from its con-texts throughout the modern era. For Serra, the whole point of sculptureis to defeat this surrogate consumption of art, indeed to defeat consump-tion altogether and to replace it with the experience of art in its materialreality:

If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you’repassing on only a residue of your concerns. You’re denying the tem-poral experience of the work. You’re not only reducing the sculptureto a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you’re deny-ing the real content of the work. At least with most sculpture, the ex-perience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the workresides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is adeception.

But it could be that people want to consume sculpture the waythey consume paintings—through photographs. Most photographstake their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image con-tent for an easy Gestalt reading. I’m interested in the experience ofsculpture in the place where it resides.14


To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, RightAngles Inverted, 1970Steel26’ diameter, 8” rimInstalled: 138th Street and WebsterAvenue, the Bronx, New YorkCollection: St. Louis Art Museum,St. LouisPhoto: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Serra’s attempts to enforce the difference between an art for con-sumption and a sculpture to be experienced in the place where it resideswould, however, embroil him in constant controversy. The first workSerra proposed for a truly public location was never allowed to occupy thesite for which it was intended. After winning a competition in 1971 for asculpture for the Wesleyan University campus in Middletown, Connecti-cut, Serra’s Sight Point was ultimately rejected by the university’s architectas “too large and too close to the campus’s historical building.”15 It was, ofcourse, just this size and proximity that Serra wanted. Sight Point is one ofa number of large-scale works that employ the principles developed in theearly “prop” pieces, principles of construction that rely on the force ofgravity. But at their greatly increased scale and in their particular publicsettings, these works no longer use those principles merely to oppose theformal relationships obtaining in modernist sculpture; now they comeinto conflict with another form of construction, that of the architecture oftheir surroundings. Rather than playing the subsidiary role of adornment,focus, or enhancement of their nearby buildings, they attempt to engagethe passerby in a new and critical reading of the sculptures’ environment.By revealing the processes of their construction only in the active experi-ence of sequential viewing, Serra’s sculptures implicitly condemn archi-tecture’s tendency to reduce to an easily legible image, collapsed into,precisely, a facade. It is that reduction to facade, the pictorial product ofthe architects’ drawing board, site of the architect’s expressive mastery,that, presumably, the Wesleyan University architect wanted to protect forthe campus’s “historical building.”16

When asked what Sight Point (1971–1975) lost by being built in theback court of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam instead of its intendedlocation, Serra replied simply: “What happened with Sight Point was thatit lost all relationship to a pattern of circulation, which was a major deter-minant for its original location at Wesleyan.”17 Serra recognized that evenpublic art was generally granted only the function of aesthetic enhance-ment in the seclusion of museumlike sites, removed from normal circula-tion patterns and placed, as it were, on ideological pedestals:

Usually you’re offered places which have specific ideological conno-tations, from parks to corporate and public buildings and their exten-sions 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


cultural awareness. . . . But there is no neutral site. Every context hasits frame and its ideological overtones. It’s a matter of degree. Thereis 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 thehub of commuter traffic. “The streetcars miss it by a foot and a half.”19

Terminal is a prop construction of four identical trapezoidal plates ofCor-Ten steel, forty-one feet high. The plates were manufactured at theThyssen steelworks in the nearby town of Hattingen, one of a number ofsuch towns in the Ruhr industrial district of which Bochum is one of themajor cities. Although Terminal was initially built in Kassel for Documenta6, Serra meant the work for its present site, in part because he wanted itlocated in the center of the steel-producing district where its plates weremanufactured.20 It is this social specificity of its site, however, that wouldcause a furor over Terminal.

At first the work aroused a response not unusual for Serra’s publicsculpture; graffiti identifying it as a toilet or warning of rats, letters to theeditors 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 firmlyentrenched Social Democrats, who had voted to purchase the work forthe city. Vying for the votes of steelworkers, who constitute a large blockof the region’s electorate, the CDU printed campaign posters showing aphotograph of Terminal montaged against one of a steel mill. The slogan:“It cannot always be like this—CDU for Bochum.” The Christian Dem-ocrats’ objections to Terminal are extremely revealing of the issues raisedin Serra’s public sculptures, especially insofar as his abstract vocabulary in-tersects with explicit social and material conditions. It is therefore worthquoting at length from the press release issued by the CDU stating its po-sition on Terminal:

The supporters of the sculpture refer to its great symbolic value forthe Ruhr district generally and for Bochum in particular as the homeof coal and steel. We believe the sculpture lacks important qualitiesthat would enable it to function as a symbol. Steel is a special materialwhose production demands great craftsmanship, professional andtechnical know-how. The material has virtually unlimited possibili-ties for the differentiated, even subtle treatment of both the smallest

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and the largest objects, both the simplest and the most artistically ex-pressive forms.

We do not believe this sculpture expresses any of these thingssince it looks like a clumsy, undifferentiated, half-finished “ingot.” Nosteelworker can point to it positively, with pride.

Steel signifies boldness and elegance in the most varied construc-tions; it does not signify monstrous monumentality. This sculpture isfrightening because of its awkward massiveness, untempered by anyother attributes. Steel is also a material that, to a great degree, suggestsresilience, durability, and resistance to rust. This is especially true ofthe high-quality steel produced in Bochum. This sculpture, madeonly of simple steel, is already rusting and disgusting in appearance.Steel is a high-quality material developed from iron and so is not atrue raw material. Yet this sculpture gives the impression of raw ma-terial . . . extracted from the earth and given no special treatment.

If, as its supporters claim, the sculpture is to symbolize coal andsteel, it must provide the possibility of positive identification for thoseconcerned, that is, for the citizens of this area, especially the steel-workers. We believe that all of the characteristics mentioned provideno positive challenge and identification. We fear the opposite will oc-cur, that rejection and scorn will not only result initially but will in-tensify over time. That would be a burden not only for this sculpturebut for all self-contained modern art works. Such cannot be the goalof a responsible cultural policy.21

The hypocrisy of the Christian Democrats’ claim to represent thesteelworkers’ interests, at a time when the German working class was suf-fering from the increasingly brutal policies of that party, need hardly bepointed out, and the steelworkers were undeceived in this regard: the So-cial Democrats retained power in the region.22 What is most importanthere, however, is the nature of the demand made on public art to providethe workers with symbols to which they can point with pride, with whichthey can positively identify. Hidden in this demand is the requirement thatthe artist symbolically reconcile the steelworkers to the brutal workingconditions to which they are subjected. Steel, the material that the citizensof the Ruhr district work with daily, is to be used by the artist only to sym-bolize boldness and elegance, resilience and durability, the unlimited pos-sibilities for subtle treatment and expressive form. It is, in other words, tobe disguised, made unrecognizable to those who have produced it. Serra’swork flatly refuses this implicitly authoritarian symbolism, which would


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Christian Democratic Party (CDU),campaign poster, Bochum, WestGermany, 1979

convert steel from raw material—although processed, steel is a raw mate-rial in the capitalist economic structure23—to a signifier of invincibility.Instead Serra presents the steelworker with the very product of his alien-ated labor, untransformed into any symbol at all. If the worker is then re-pelled, heaps scorn on Terminal, it is because he is already alienated fromthe material; for although he produced those steel plates, or materials likethem, he never owned them; the steelworker has no reason whatsoever totake pride in or identify with any steel product. In asking the artist to givethe workers a positive symbol, the CDU is really asking the artist to pro-vide 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” thatwould not be a burden for “self-contained modern artworks” parallelsofficial public art policies in the United States that have emerged andexpanded over the past twenty years. Taking for granted that art is privateself-expression, these policies are concerned with the various possibilitiesof transferring such an art into the public realm without offending publicexpectations. In an essay tellingly entitled “Personal Sensibilities in Pub-lic Places,” John Beardsley, who worked for the Art in Public Places Pro-gram of the National Endowment for the Arts and was commissioned towrite a book about it, explains how the artists’ private concerns can bemade palatable for the public:

An artwork can become significant to its public through the incor-poration of content relevant to the local audience, or by the assump-tion of an identifiable function. Assimilation can also be encouragedthrough a work’s role in a larger civic improvement program. In thefirst case, recognizable content or function provides a means bywhich the public can become engaged with the work, though its styleor form might be unfamiliar to them. In the latter, the work’s iden-tity as art is subsumed by a more general public purpose, helping toassure its validity. In both cases, the personal sensibilities of the artistare presented in ways that encourage widespread public empathy.25

One of Beardsley’s prime examples of the empathy solicited throughrecognizable content involves a public much like that for Terminal:

[George] Segal was awarded his commission by the Youngstown AreaArts Council. He visited the city and toured its steel mills, finding the


open hearth furnaces “staggeringly impressive.” He decided to makesteelworkers at an open hearth the subject of his sculpture, and usedas models Wayman Paramore and Peter Kolby, two men selected bythe steelworkers union from its membership. His commission coin-cided with a severe economic crisis in Youngstown during which aseries of mill shutdowns eventually idled some 10,000 workers. Yetcompletion of the sculpture became a matter of civic pride. Numer-ous local businesses and foundations gave money; one of the steelcompanies donated an unused furnace. Labor unions assisted in fab-ricating and installing the work. One cannot escape the conclusionthat the subject matter was largely responsible for this outpouring ofpublic support. The people of Youngstown sought a monument totheir principal industry, even as it collapsed around them. Segal’s Steel-makers 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 historicalcondition of the steelworkers is that of being forced into the industrial re-serve army. Just whose tenacity does this work really pay tribute to? To thesteelworkers hopelessly trying to maintain their dignity in the face of job-lessness? Or to the society—including the business community, steelcompanies, and labor unions whose largess contributed to the work—thatwill go to any length to ensure that those steelworkers will never recog-nize the nature of the economic forces arrayed against them? Perhaps theCDU in Bochum would find Segal’s Steelmakers insufficient as a symbol ofthe boldness and elegance of steel—the work is, after all, cast bronze—butit can certainly be said to fulfill their essential demand: that the sculpturereconcile the workers with their brutal conditions by giving them some-thing with which they can positively identify. The fact that their identifi-cation is manipulated, that the workers’ pride is only intended to maketheir slavery more tolerable, is precisely what such a cultural policy is con-certed toward.27

Needless to say, such a cultural policy, whether that of the Right inGermany or of the liberal arts establishment in the United States, finds thepublic sculpture of Richard Serra considerably more problematic. Con-servatives in this country, who argue against all federal funding for culture,oppose Serra’s work categorically, confident that when all public commis-sions are once again exclusively paid for by the private sector, there willbe no more room for such “malignant objects” (Serra’s Tilted Arc is illus-

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trated in an article of that title).28 The cultural bureaucrats want, however,to appear more tolerant, hoping that “Serra’s sculpture may eventually wina greater measure of acceptance within its community.”29

That a difficult work of art requires time to ingratiate itself with itspublic was a standard line of defense of Serra’s Tilted Arc during the pub-lic hearing of March 1985. Historical precedents of public outrage meet-ing now-canonical works of modern art became something of a leitmotif.But this deferral to the judgment of history was, in fact, a repudiation ofhistory, a denial of the actual historical moment in which Tilted Arc con-fronted its public in all its specificity, as well as a denial of Serra’s intransi-gent rejection of the universal nature of the work of art. For to say thatTilted Arc would withstand the test of time is to reclaim for it an idealistposition. The genuine importance of Tilted Arc can best be understoodthrough an analysis of the crisis that it precipitated within established cul-tural policy.

Tilted Arc was built on a site that is public in a very particular sense. Itinhabited a plaza flanked by a government office building housing federalbureaucracies and by the United States Court of International Trade. Theplaza adjoins Foley Square, the location of New York City’s federal andstate courthouses. Tilted Arc was thus situated in the very center of themechanisms of state power. The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and itsplaza are nightmares of urban development, official, anonymous, over-scaled, inhuman. The plaza is a bleak, empty area, whose sole function isto shuttle human traffic in and out of the buildings. Located at one cornerof the plaza is a fountain that cannot be used, since the wind-tunnel effectof the huge office bloc would drench the entire plaza with water. Serra’sTilted Arc, a twelve-foot-high steel-plate wall, 120 feet long and tiltedslightly toward the office building and the trade courthouses, swept acrossthe center of the plaza, dividing it into two distinct areas. Employing ma-terial and form that contrasted radically with both the vulgarized Inter-national Style architecture of the federal structures and the Beaux-Artsdesign of the old Foley Square courthouses, the sculpture imposed a con-struction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architec-ture. It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experiencethat was counterposed against the bland efficiency established by theplaza’s architects. Although Tilted Arc did not disrupt normal traffic pat-terns—the shortest routes to the streets from the buildings were leftclear—it did implant itself within the public’s field of vision. Soliciting,even commanding attention, the sculpture asked the office workers and


other pedestrians to leave their usual hurried course and follow a differentroute, gauging the curving planes, volumes, and sight lines that markedthis place as the place of sculpture.

In reorienting the use of Federal Plaza from a place of traffic controlto 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 thanthose relegated to it by its governing institutions and discourses. For thisreason, Tilted Arc was considered an aggressive and egotistical work, withwhich Serra placed his own aesthetic assumptions above the needs and de-sires of the people who had to live with his work. But insofar as our soci-ety is fundamentally constructed upon the principle of egotism, the needsof 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 socialcondition. The politics of consensus that ensures the smooth functioningof our society is dependent upon the shared belief that all individuals areunique but can exist in harmony with one another by assenting to the be-nign regulation of the state. The real function of the state, however, is notthe defense of the citizen in his or her true individuality, but the defenseof private property—the defense, that is, precisely of the conflict betweenindividuals.30 Within this politics of consensus, the artist is expected toplay a leading role, offering a unique “private sensibility” in a mannerproperly universalized so as to ensure feelings of harmony. The reasonSerra is accused of egotism, when other artists who put their “private sen-sibilities in public places” are not, is that his work cannot be seen to re-flect his private sensibility in the first place. And, once again, when thework of art refuses to play the prescribed role of falsely reconciling con-tradictions, it becomes the object of scorn. A public that has been social-ized to accept the atomization of individuals and the false dichotomy ofprivate and public spheres of existence cannot bear to be confronted withthe reality of its situation. And when the work of public art rejects theterms of consensus politics within the very purview of the state apparatus,the reaction is bound to be censorial. Not surprisingly, the coercive powerof the state, disguised as democratic procedure, was soon brought to bearon Tilted Arc. At the show trial staged to justify the work’s removal, themost vociferous opposition to the work came not from the public at largebut from representatives of the state, from judges of the courts and headsof 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 InternationalTrade began the campaign to have it removed.32 Preying upon the people’s

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impotence in controlling their degraded social environment in a citywhere that control is granted only to property owners, Judge Re held outthe deceptive promise of pleasant social activities, which he claimed couldnot take place on the plaza unless the steel wall was removed. With accu-sations that an elitist art world had foisted its experiments upon them,many office workers signed petitions for Tilted Arc’s removal. But thejudge and his fellow civil servants really had a very different view of thepublic from the beneficent one that saw people gathering to listen to mu-sic on their lunch breaks. On the one hand, the public consisted for themof competitive individuals who could be manipulated to fight it outamong themselves over the crumbs of social activity dishonestly offered tothem. On the other hand, they were the frightening individuals lurkingon the other side of the wall, lying in wait for the judge as he left the pro-tection of his chambers and ventured out into the public realm. In one ofthe many letters written to the GSA complaining of the sculpture, JudgeRe made his fears explicit: “By no means of minor importance is the lossof efficient security surveillance. The placement of this wall across theplaza obscures the view of security personnel, who have no way of know-ing what is taking place on the other side of the wall.”33

Judge Re’s attitude toward the people was further elaborated duringthe GSA hearing by one of those security personnel. Her testimony isworth excerpting at some length, since it gives a clear and chilling sense ofthe state’s current regard for its citizens:

My main purpose here is to present you the aspects, from the securityangle, which affect us in the execution of our duties here. The Arc iswhat I consider to be a security hazard or a disadvantage. My maincontention 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 build-ings, 1 Federal Plaza and 26 Federal Plaza. The front curvature of thedesign is comparable to devices which are used by bomb experts tovent explosive forces. . . . The purpose of these . . . bomb devices isto vent explosions upward. This one could vent an explosion bothupward and in an angle toward both buildings. . . .

Most of the time the wall was [sic] closer to the building. Itwould, of course, take a larger bomb than [those] which have beenpreviously used to destroy enough for their purposes; but it is possi-ble, and lately we are expecting the worst in the federal sector. . . .Most people express their opinions against us in either violent waysor with graffiti and those types of ways. . . . The wall—pardon, Tilted


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 seefrom our side of the building. We, by the way, only concern ourselveswith the federal side of the building.34

If a public sculpture can have projected upon it such an explicit statementof the contempt in which the public is held by the state, it has served a his-torical function of great consequence. We now have written into the pub-lic record, for anyone who wishes to read it, the fact that the “federalsector” expects only the worst from us, that we are all considered poten-tial loiterers, graffiti scribblers, drug dealers, terrorists. When Tilted Arc isconverted, in the paranoid vision of a state security guard, into a “blastwall,” when the radical aesthetics of site-specific sculpture are reinter-preted as the site of political action, public sculpture can be credited witha new level of achievement. That achievement is the redefinition of thesite of the work of art as the site of political struggle. Determined to “bevulnerable and deal with the reality of his living situation,” Richard Serra

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

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

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 de-stroy 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 CeremonialCourtroom, International Court of Trade, One Federal Plaza, New York, the hearing onthe removal of Tilted Arc took place before a panel consisting of William J. Diamond, Re-gional Administrator, General Services Administration; Gerald Turetsky, Acting DeputyRegional Administrator, GSA; Paul Chistolini, Public Building Services, GSA; and twooutside panelists, Thomas Lewin of the law firm Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett, andMichael 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 recommenda-tion was adopted by Dwight A. Ink, Acting Director of the United States General ServicesAdministration, Washington, D.C., and on 31 May 1985, he announced his decision to re-locate the sculpture.

3. Judd, “Specific Objects,” p. 82.

4. Quoted in Carl Andre, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” by Phyllis Tuchman, Artforum7, no. 10 (June 1970), p. 55.

5. Ibid.

6. Walter Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” trans. Kingsley Shorter, inOne-Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 360.

7. Daniel Buren, “Peut-il enseigner l’art?” Galerie des Arts, Paris, September 1968. Trans-lated from the French by Richard Miller.

8. There have been several attempts to remove Serra’s work from public sites. Soon afterthe decision to remove Tilted Arc was announced, St. Louis City Alderman Timothy Deeintroduced a bill to the Board of Alderman that would, if passed, allow city voters to decidewhether Twain (1974–1982), a work in downtown St. Louis, should be removed. Accord-ing to The Riverfront Times (St. Louis), 6–10 September 1985, p. 6A, Dee said: “The prob-lem is the real gap between regular people—my constituents and the overwhelmingmajority—and the elitist art community, who decide to do something because they’ve all in-vested in certain artists” (italics added). The most thoroughly documented case is that of theChristian Democratic party of Bochum, West Germany, against Terminal (1977). For thiscase, see Terminal von Richard Serra: Eine Dokumentation in 7 Kapiteln (Bochum: MuseumBochum, 1980), and my discussion below. In addition, a number of major commissionsawarded to Serra have never been built, owing to opposition to the work from architectsand city officials. These include works for the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corpo-ration in Washington, D.C., the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and works for outdoorsites in Madrid; Marl, West Germany; and Peoria, Illinois. Sight Point (1971–1975), com-missioned for Wesleyan University campus, was not built there. For a discussion of the dif-ficulties Serra has faced in building his work in public, see Richard Serra and Douglas


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 two-department system for the purposes of explaining reproduction. Department I consists ofthe means of production: raw materials, machinery, building, etc.; Department II consistsof consumer goods. Later Marxists have added to this scheme Department III to designatethose goods that do not play a role in the reproduction of the working class since they areintended for consumption only by the capitalist classes themselves. Department III includesluxury goods, art, and weapons. For a discussion of this relation between art and arms, seeErnest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Verso, 1978), especially chap-ter 9, “The Permanent Arms Economy and Late Capitalism.”

10. Amy Goldin, “The Esthetic Ghetto: Some Thoughts about Public Art,” Art in America62, no. 3 (May-June 1974), p. 32.

11. Richard Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road,” in Richard Serra: Recent Sculp-ture 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 thisvolume; 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 vol-ume, p. 45.

20. In the Michelson interview, Serra discusses at length his experience working in steelmills. Steelmill/Stahlwerk (1970), the film he made with Weyergraf was shot in the millwhere the plates of Terminal were fabricated, although the shooting took place during theforging of Berlin Block for Charlie Chaplin (1977).

21. Press release, CDU representatives to the Bochum City Council, reproduced in Ter-minal von Richard Serra, pp. 35–38.

22. From 1982, when the CDU came to power in West Germany, to 1986, when his es-say was written, the unemployment rate rose to a postwar record: as of 1985, there were 2.2million registered unemployed and an estimated 1.3 million unregistered job seekers. Hard-est hit were areas such as the Ruhr district, where heavy industries are located. In October1985, the Federation of German Labor Unions staged a week-long protest against theCDU’s economic policies to coincide with the heated debates on the issue in the Bun-destag. In these debates, the full range of the opposition attacked the CDU for contribut-ing 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 CDUattempts to mystify, through an appeal to a natural-versus-man-made distinction, the placeof steel within capitalist production. Steel is, of course, a product of Department I, used forproducing the means of production; see note 9.

24. “To each capitalist, the total mass of all workers, with the exception of his own work-ers, appear not as workers but as consumers, possessors of exchange values (wages), money,

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which they exchange for his commodity.” Karl Marx, Gundrisse: Foundations of the Critiqueof Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 419. Inthe postwar period in Germany, attempts to reconcile the working class to its social condi-tions has operated precisely on the symbolic level, including language itself. Thus the wordsArbeiter (worker) and Arbeitklasse (working class) are no longer used in official discussion, asGermany is now said to be a classless society. In this society, there are only Arbeitnehmer (onewho takes work, employee) and Arbeitgeber (one who gives work, employer). The irony ofthis linguistic reversal is not lost on the workers themselves, who, for their part, know per-fectly well that it is the worker who is the giver of work (Arbeitgeber) and the employer whois the taker of work (Arbeitnehmer). In such a climate it comes as no surprise that the right-wing 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 (June1981), 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’ “subjec-tion to the ruling ideology.” Thus one of the functions of the cultural object confrontingworkers 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 Leninand 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 PublicSculpture,” Public Interest, no. 66 (Winter 1982), pp. 3–21. For other neoconservative at-tacks on public spending for art, see Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse: Visual Artsand the Public Interest (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Samuel Lipman, “Cultural Pol-icy: 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 andcivil 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 impor-tance 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 mock-ery. The hearing was presided over, and the four other panelists were selected by, Wil-liam J. Diamond, Regional Administrator of the General Services Administration, who hadpublicly asked for the removal of Tilted Arc and circulated petitions and solicited testimoniesfavoring its removal. And although two-thirds of the people testifying at the hearing favoredretaining Tilted Arc on Federal Plaza, Diamond’s panel nevertheless recommended removalto the GSA. For a complete account of the Tilted Arc case, including Serra’s unsuccessful at-tempts 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.


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

The Un/making of Sculpture

Hal Foster

Just as no one perspective can comprehend a given sculpture by Richard Serra, so noone 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 in-clusive reading, I offer a series of notes, less a picturesque stroll through the workthan an obsessive circling around its central concept: the making and unmaking ofsculpture.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now?, Liza Béar asked Serra in1976. After a long pause, in which he looked back over ten years of ma-ture work, Serra replied: “It means a life-time involvement, that’s what itmeans. It means to follow the direction of the work I opened up early onfor myself and try to make the most abstract moves within that. . . . Towork out of my own work, and to build whatever’s necessary so that thework remains open and vital. . . .”1

Much in this characteristically precise statement holds true twenty-plus years later. Opened up suggests that the work is carved out of the artof significant precedents (not only sculptors like Constantin Brancusi andpainters like Jackson Pollock, but, as we will see, particular architects andengineers as well), which it endeavors both to displace, in order to makea space of its own, and to carry forward through this very carving out. Themost abstract moves suggest that this carrying forward brooks no return tothe figurative or even the imagistic: pictorial conventions of figure-ground and Gestalt readings of images in general remain anathema toSerra. 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

than by prior models. But lest this language become involuted, the workmust also remain open and vital through building, through the exigenciesof materials, projects, sites. Thus the statement implies three dynamicsthat have governed the work since its opening up, three forces of which itis the fulcrum: engagement with particular precedents; elaboration,through pertinent materials, of an intrinsic language; and encounter withspecific sites.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? In 1986, ten years afterthis question was first asked, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a ret-rospective, the title of which, “Richard Serra: Sculpture,” was laconic, asif the answer were obvious. But how are we to read the relation repre-sented by the colon? In a title like “Piet Mondrian: Painting,” the colonreads almost as an equation, a relation of immanent analysis: Mondrian re-fined painting to its essential lines and primary colors in such a way as toreintegrate them in a new totality of harmonious parts that would renderpainting both autonomous and emblematic of an ideal society of just re-lations. But this relation was supported by a medium-specific paradigm ofmodernist art that does not hold for Serra—or for advanced art over thelast thirty years. He still asks the ur-modernist question “What is themedium?,” but his responses cannot deliver an ontology of sculpture inmodernist fashion. This is not to say that Serra evades the medium, muchless that he considers it voided; on the contrary, he is singularly commit-ted to its concept. But this concept has changed, in part through the forceof his example.2 Today “sculpture” is not given beforehand but must beforever proposed, tested, reworked, and proposed again. This is a modusoperandi of his work, too—indeed, of his significant peers as well.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? In 1965 Donald Juddcould state flatly that “the specific objects” of minimalism were “neitherpainting nor sculpture.”3 On the one hand sculpture had contracted to thespace between an object and a monument (the restrictive coordinatesgiven by Tony Smith for his emblematic cube Die of 1962); on the otherhand it had expanded to the point where great expanses could be con-templated as sculpture, or at least as its site (the notorious example, offeredby Smith again, was the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike).4 In short, onthe one hand, minimalism diminished sculpture to almost nothing; on theother hand, it pointed toward a situational practice with few apparentlimits.

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This opening was abyssal to many artists who became lost in its arbi-trary spaces. But for the more astute the stake of minimalism was moreprecise: a partial shift in focus from object to subject, from ontologicalquestions (of the essence of a medium) to phenomenological conditions(of a particular body in a particular space as the ground of art). This shiftinaugurated by minimalism was fundamental for Serra too; indeed he haspushed it further than anyone else within sculpture. Yet he was also criti-cal of minimalism, not only of its closed system of construction but of itsodd preoccupation with painting. Although the minimalist object is oftenmisnamed “sculpture,” it developed primarily out of hard-edge painting(as the early career of Judd alone testifies). For Serra, precisely because itsunitary forms and serial orderings sought to defeat pictorial conventionsof relational composition, they remained too bound by these concerns.Like his peers, he wanted to defeat this pictoriality, especially as it under-wrote Gestalt readings of art, which he saw as idealist totalizations thatserve to conceal the construction of the work and to suppress the body ofthe viewer.5 But Serra wanted to defeat this pictoriality completely, and insculptural terms. What might this mean?

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? In 1966, when Serra“opened up” his work, it meant that minimalism had obviated sculpturemore than exceeded it. This was hardly its doing alone; much conceptual,performance, mixed-media, and installation work would do so as well. Sohow might one proceed differently, sculpturally, to develop the categorydeconstructively rather than to declare it void triumphally?

As is well known, Serra stressed the very terms suppressed in Gestaltreadings of art encouraged by dominant models of modernism—termslike materiality, corporeality, temporality—stressed them beyond thepoint of minimalism. First, in lieu of a logic of medium-specificity, he sub-stituted a logic of materials submitted to a set of procedures.6 Thus thewell-known Verb List of 1967–1968 (“to roll, to crease, to fold . . .”) thatissued in several kinds of work: sheets of lead rolled, torn, or otherwisemanipulated; molten lead splashed along the base of a wall and peeled backin rows; slabs of steel stacked or propped; and so on.7 These processestransformed the traditional object of art, but the results did not defeat pic-toriality, as Serra acknowledged in a self-critique of 1970: “A recent prob-lem with the lateral spread of materials, elements on the floor in the visualfield, is the inability of this landscape mode to avoid the arrangement quafigure ground: the pictorial convention.”8 Characteristically, rather than

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pull back, he pushed forward, and exacerbated the very term, ground, thatseemed problematic. This foregrounding of place was signaled by CarlAndre in the mid-1960s with his arrangements of bricks and plates, andconfirmed for Serra in 1970 by encounters with the Spiral Jetty of RobertSmithson, 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 thesubject that it had otherwise inaugurated) and the time of boldily move-ment in this field—in short, corporeality and temporality.10 After suchsignal works as Shift (1971–1972) and Spin Out (For Bob Smithson)(1972–1973), Serra was prepared, in 1973, to describe “the sculptural ex-perience” in terms of a “topology of [a] place” demarcated “throughlocomotion,” a “dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape.”11

According to this parallactic model, Yve-Alain Bois has argued, sculptureframes and reframes subject and site in tandem, and it guided Serra afterhis breakthrough of 1970—not only in works set in a landscape to revealits topology (from Shift to Sea Level [1988–1996]), but also in pieces set inan 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 itsparameters (from Strike: To Roberta and Rudy [1970–1971] to Chamber[1988]). Place is fundamental, of course, but, as Rosalind Krauss has ar-gued, site-specificity is not the object here so much as the medium, themedium of “the body-in-destination,” so in this respect the body remainsprimary.12 Thus emerged a further formulation of sculpture—as a relay be-tween site and subject that (re)defines the topology of a place through themotivation of a viewer.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? By 1976, then, the workanswered as follows. The emphasis on making—on the verb, the sculp-tural effect, rather than the noun, the categorical essence—is correct. Thismaking foregrounded materials like lead and steel, which are inflected bypertinent procedures into particular structures. This is the first principle ofsculpture for Serra, and it might be called constructivist, for it focuses, asdid Russian constructivism, on the expressive development of structuresout of the effective treatment of materials (which the constructivists calledconstruction and faktura respectively). The second principle for Serra, whichmight be called phenomenological, is that sculpture exists in primary re-

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lation to the body, not as its representation but as its activation, in all itssenses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale. Thethird principle, which might be called situational, is that sculpture engagesthe 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 tomotivate a body and to demarcate a place: not a fixed category of au-tonomous objects but a specific relay between subject and site that framesthe one in terms of the other, and transforms both at once.

This provisional definition suggests a partial typology of work: land-scape markings, urban framings, and gallery interventions. These modescontinue; recent examples of each include Afangar (1990), set on an Ice-land island, Torque (1992), at a German university, and Sub-tend 60 Degree(1988), in a Dutch museum. Yet Serra has expanded this typology too. Onthe one hand he returns to past modes of work like the “props” to recon-nect with his basic syntax of “pointload, balance, counter-balance andleverage.”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 corridorsand/or enclosures; indeed the extraordinary Torqued Ellipses (1997) sug-gest both passages and envelopings. So, too, as if to counterpoint thesespatial manipulations, Serra elaborates other types, such as the “rounds”and “blocks” which, rather than frame space, “obliterate” it throughmass.15 This is what it is to develop a sculptural language.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Yet a paradox remains:Serra insists that his work is strictly sculptural, while his best critics regardit as a deconstruction of sculpture.16 Yet this paradox might be the point,for with Serra sculpture becomes its deconstruction, its making becomesits unmaking. For sculpture to harden into a thing-category would be forsculpture to become monumental again—for its structure to be fetishized,its viewer frozen, its site forgotten, again. In this light to deconstructsculpture is to serve its “internal necessity”; to extend sculpture in relationto process, embodiment, and site is to remain within it.

This paradox qua sculpture is focused in the problem of site. “Thebiggest break in the history of sculpture in the twentieth century,” Serrahas remarked, “occurred when the pedestal was removed,” which he readsas a shift from the memorial space of the monument to “the behavioral


space of the viewer.”17 Yet as a dialectical event this break opened up an-other trajectory as well: with its pedestal removed, sculpture was free notonly to descend into the materialist world of “behavioral space” but alsoto ascend into an idealist world beyond any specific site. Consider howBrancusi, the most significant prewar sculptor for Serra and peers, devel-oped this dialectic. With his ambition to convey near-Platonic ideas—forexample, 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 celebratessheer material; his bronzes are often polished to the point where they re-flect specific contexts as well. Brancusi also articulated this dialectic in theparticular terms of the pedestal: some works absorb the base of the sculp-ture into the body, as it were, with the effect that they become siteless,while other works appear to be nothing but base, nothing but groundedsupport (e.g., Caryatid [1914]).18 In this way Brancusi was as committed tothe idealist space of the studio (he bequeathed his own studio, as his ulti-mate 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, dominantaccounts of modernism privileged the idealist side of this dialectic, the hy-postasis of sculpture as pure form. In effect Serra and peers developed itsmaterialist side—sculpture plunged into its support and regrounded in itssite—as a critical counter, which is one reason why this collective work isa crux between modernist and postmodernist art.19

Perhaps the contradiction between idealist and materialist impulses ex-ists not only in modernist sculpture but in modern society as a whole. Cer-tainly 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, col-lective basis of industrial production on the other. In industrial society,Benjamin Buchloh has argued, these old paradigms of sculpture, whichsought to be eternal, could only become archaic, even atavistic, and theywere “definitely abolished [as valid models] by 1913” with the advent ofthe first readymade of Duchamp and the first construction of Tatlin.20

These new materialist paradigms repositioned sculpture subversively interms of epistemological inquiry (the readymade) and architectural inter-vention (the construction), with the effect of “the eventual dissolution ofits own discourse as sculpture.”21 For this reason Western art institutions,predicated on the old idealist models, mostly repressed these new materi-alist paradigms. Nonetheless, the contradiction between artisanal sculptureand industrial society did not disappear; on the contrary, it persisted in the

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very practices that sought to resolve this contradiction mythically—to me-diate between individual craft and collective industry through various ver-sions of welded sculpture, found objects, and assemblage (Buchloh citesJulio Gonzalez, David Smith, John Chamberlain, and Anthony Caro inparticular—figures whom Serra has critiqued to different degrees as well).22

In the 1960s, however, artists such as Judd and Flavin, Andre and Serraboth recovered and related the repressed models of the readymade and theconstruction. And they did so in ways that served not only to deconstructthe idealist presuppositions of most autonomous sculpture but also to de-mystify the quasi-materialist compromises of most welded sculpture,found objects, and assemblage—“literally to ‘decompose’” these mythicalmodels through industrial materials, processes, and sites.23 Again, Serraand peers also pushed the situational aspect of sculpture after its break withthe pedestal to the point where this break, which was only announced in1913 with the readymade and the construction, became actual by 1970with new site-specific practices. But in what sense did these practices re-main “sculpture”?

Serra agrees with Buchloh that the initial project was to demystifymodernist models, to defetishize them along constructivist lines. “In allmy work,” he wrote in an important text of 1985, “the constructionprocess is revealed. Material, formal, contextual decisions are self-evident.The fact that the technological process is revealed depersonalizes and de-mythologizes the idealization of the sculptor’s craft.”24 But “sculpture,”even “craft,” remain in this statement. For Buchloh this categorical insis-tence is to mythify the constructivist demystification of sculpture as sculp-ture.25 For Serra this insistence is not only logical but necessary—part of asearch for a sculptural basis in engineered construction, in the construc-tivist notion of the tectonic.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Of course a basis forsculpture would be sought only if it is felt to be lacking. “The origin ofsculpture is lost in the mists of time,” Baudelaire wrote in a famous ex-pression of this lack; “thus it is a Carib art.”26 Here, in a short section ofThe Salon of 1846 titled “Why Sculpture is Tiresome,” Baudelaire repeatssome tiresome complaints about sculpture: that it is too primitive, “muchcloser to nature” than painting, and too ambiguous, more various thanpainting because, as an object in the round, “it exhibits too many surfacesat once.”27 These criticisms adhere to the idealism not only of a Hegel,whose hierarchy of the arts positioned sculpture below painting on


account of its relative materiality, but also of a Diderot, whose celebra-tion of the tableau privileged the putative instantaneity of the singular sur-face of painting over the implicit duration of the “many surfaces” ofsculpture. As I have argued, Serra and peers sought to defeat these ide-alisms once and for all. But what of the provocative remark about “lostorigin” and “Carib art”? By “Carib” Baudelaire means that sculpture isprimitive, impure, hybrid, fetishistic (he goes on to discuss fetishes in thissection of The Salon). Now in his time the fetish was understood as an al-most formless object not worthy of the cult worship devoted to it, and inthis respect it served as a discursive token of the lowest registers of art andreligion alike. Thus the “lost origin” of sculpture: Baudelaire suggeststhat its fetishistic beginnings do not provide sculpture with an adequatebasis to develop into a proper art.28 Obviously Serra does not agree withBaudelaire—not exactly, anyway. But he does seek a principle that mightstand as the “lost origin” of sculpture, and he uses its “Carib” status tocritical advantage in doing so.

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Serra has already sug-gested one definition of sculpture: that it motivate a body and frame aplace in a parallactic relay between the two. But he also positions sculp-ture between two other terms: opposed to painting on the one hand, andcritical of architecture on the other. In The Salon of 1846 Baudelaire calledsculpture a “complementary art,” “a humble associate of painting and ar-chitecture.” This, too, is in keeping with the idealist hierarchy of Hegel,which ascends from architecture through sculpture to painting (and on tomusic and poetry).29 In effect Serra uses the middle term of this old hier-archy to pressure the adjacent terms. More precisely, he employs the rel-ative materiality of sculpture—its ability to activate the body—to critiquepainting, and the relative autonomy of sculpture—its ability to analyzestructure—to critique architecture. In so doing he proposes a further prin-ciple of sculpture, one that is not medium-specific but medium-differential, and that turns its “Carib” vice—as impure and hybrid—intoa critical virtue.30

Serra approaches a differential understanding of sculpture through aphilosophical point of procedure drawn from Bertrand Russell: “everylanguage has a structure about which nothing critical in that language canbe said”; only a second language with a different structure can perform thiscritique.31 Serra adapted this principle to think the relation of his drawingsand films to his sculpture, but it may also be the relation of his sculpture

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to painting and architecture in general. He insists on the absolute status ofsculpture 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 ofpainting and architecture in the very articulation of its difference. Thus even ashis sculpture opposes painting in the guise of figure-ground conventions,it also partakes of the pictorial in the sense of the picturesque.32 And evenas it critiques architecture in the guise of scenographic kitsch, it also par-takes 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 archi-tecture because its language is not as compromised by capitalist rationali-zation and bureaucratic regulation. But Serra suggests more: that sculpturecan recover a neglected principle in architecture, recover it as a “lost ori-gin” for sculpture.

Often his sculpture “works in contradiction” to the architecture of itssites.33 This can be aggressive (it does not aid its destroyers to note thatTilted Arc challenged the awful architecture of the Federal Plaza in NewYork). But it can also be subtle, complementary, even reciprocal, whensculpture and architecture frame one another. There are pieces (often arcs)that primarily frame, such as Trunk (1987), first installed in a baroquecourtyard in Münster; there are pieces (often blocks) that are primarilyframed, such as Weight and Measure (1992), first installed in the neoclassi-cal 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 tothe Burgundian church behind it. Sometimes in such historical settingsthere is even a reversal: the sculpture seems to foreground the architec-ture, with the former a foil for the latter (the two austere blocks of Mar-guerite and Philibert [1985], for example, throw into relief the elaboratevaulting of the sixteenth-century cloisters in which they are set).

For the most part, however, to contradict the architecture is to cri-tique it, and this critique is of two kinds at least. The first critique is pro-cedural, to do with basic modes of architectural drafting: the elevation (thestructure of the building drawn en face) and the plan (the array of its spacesdrawn from above). As Bois has remarked, Serra often destroys, “in thevery elevations, the identity of the plan,” and vice versa, with the re-sult that neither presentation (in front or from above), neither view (from


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

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

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? The tectonic may be acrucial term in the constructivist lexicon, but it is also advanced in archi-tectural discourse today, especially by Kenneth Frampton. His argumentis polemical, too: like Serra, Frampton assails the scenographic kitsch ofmuch postmodern architecture, and he insists on the bodily and the tectonicto protest the ideologies of the virtual and the simulacral in capitalist ex-change today.36 But his argument is also ontological: “the structural unit,”Frampton states, is “the irreducible essence of architectural form.”37 Hegoes so far as to project an origin myth of architecture (along the lines ofold origin myths, such as the primitive hut, as advanced by Abbé Laugierin the service of neoclassical architecture). For Frampton, architecture isfounded in the apposition of a tectonic frame (exemplified in wood con-struction) and a compressive mass (exemplified in brick construction). “Thevery essence of architecture,” then, is “the generic joint,” and this “funda-mental syntactical transition from the stereotomic base to the tectonicframe” is “a point of ontological condensation.”38 According to Framp-ton, 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 hiswork too; often left bare, not fixed, it is the intersection where structurereveals production most clearly—and points to the demystification ofother sculptural modes as well. Louis Kahn once remarked that ornamentis the adoration of the joint; for Serra “any kind of joint—as necessary asit 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 occursparadigmatically at the joint, may correspond to the coordination of“weight and measure” in Serra; certainly the relation of load and supportis fundamental to his work—his lead and steel props in particular subsumethe tectonics of wood and the stereotomics of brick. But above all Serrajoins Frampton in the call for the tectonic. This too is most apparent inthe props, to which he returned in the late 1980s as if to counter, by simpleexample, the superficial shoddiness of much postmodern construction.Again, the props demonstrate his “building principles” of “pointload, bal-ance, counter-balance, and leverage.” But other works, especially of thelate 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 almostto support the ceiling); Timber (1988), a T of steel plates also set under a


gallery ceiling; T-Junction (1988), another T of steel bars, here set short ofthe gallery ceiling, in which the horizontal element is extended; and fi-nally Maillart (1988), in which this horizontal element is extended evenfurther, supported by two bars, in a structure that suggests a bridge (as doesthe titular reference to the great Swiss engineer Robert Maillart).

Yet between Frampton and Serra there remains this obvious differ-ence: Frampton claims the tectonic for architecture, Serra for sculpture.How to decide between the two? But perhaps there is no need; perhapsarchitecture and sculpture have a common ground in the tectonic; per-haps in an industrial age they share an originary principle in engineeredconstruction.41 Serra is forthright about his favoring of engineering; hisstatement from 1985 bears down on this point in particular:

The history of welded steel sculpture in this century—Gonzalez, Pi-casso, David Smith—has had little or no influence on my work. Mosttraditional sculpture until the mid-century was part-relation-to-whole. That is, the steel was collaged pictorially and compositionallytogether. Most of the welding was a way of gluing and adjusting partswhich through their internal structure were not self-supporting. Aneven more archaic practice was continued: that of forming throughcarving and casting, of rendering hollow bronze figures. To deal withsteel as a building material in terms of mass, weight, counterbalance,load-bearing capacity, point load has been totally divorced from thehistory of sculpture, whereas it determines the history of technologyand industrial building. It allowed for the biggest progress in the con-struction of towers, bridges, tunnels, etc. The models I have lookedto have been those who explored the potential of steel as a buildingmaterial: Eiffel, Roebling, Maillart, Mies van der Rohe. Since I choseto build in steel it was a necessity to know who had dealt with the ma-terial in the most significant, the most inventive, the most economicway.42

Serra offers much to develop here, as he does in related accounts of hisearly formation, some details of which are telling: his father was a pipe fit-ter in a San Francisco shipyard; as a young man Serra worked in variousBay Area steel mills; he was particularly impressed by the Golden Gate,Bay, and Brooklyn Bridges (he once punned that this predilection is gen-der-based: “I think, if it comes down to little girls liking silk and little boysliking corduroy, that little boys like bridges”);43 and so on. Here, despite

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the predominance of European figures in his tectonic pantheon, a dis-tinctly American mythos is at work: long before Duchamp nominatedplumbing 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 Americanethos of building as analogue of self-building.44

All this is relevant, but it is beside my main point here, which is thatthe very insistence on the tectonic, on engineered construction, in Serraas in Frampton, speaks to its atrophy, even its loss, today. In this respect adifferent mythos is also in play: the story of a “dissociation of sensibility”between architecture and engineering on the one hand and sculpture andengineering on the other. The first Fall is quasi-historical (sometimes it isdated, emblematically at least, to the foundation in 1795 of the FrenchEcole Polytechnique, which divided training between these fields); butthe second Fall never occurred, because sculpture and engineering werenever united in the first place (Serra: “steel as a building material . . . hasbeen totally divorced from the history of sculpture, whereas it determinesthe history of . . . industrial building”). So, unlike Frampton, who some-times dreams of a reassociation of architecture and engineering, Serra hasnothing to redeem, only an opportunity to exploit, as his datum is the sep-aration of sculpture from engineering. Thus he is free to rework sculpturevis-à-vis engineering so as to render it pertinent to an industrial age. Thisreorientation runs throughout his work, but it is programmatic in a piecelike Maillart Extended (1988), a post and lintel of steel bars that extends thepedestrian walkway across the Grandfey Viaduct designed by Maillart inSwitzerland in a sculptural way that reveals its structural logic.45

There is a risk here, however; it is the one foreseen by Buchloh: Serramight demystify sculpture as artisanal craft, only to remystify it as indus-trial structure. In effect this is to turn on Serra his own critique of weldedsculpture (that it is a compromise-formation between art and industry),and to suggest that his productivist aesthetic, now outmoded, concealsmore than reveals the contemporary relation between art practice andproductive mode. But his productivist aesthetic did not seem outmodedwhen Serra emerged in the mid-1960s (again, Russian constructivism wasrecovered from relative oblivion only by this generation). “We,” he onceremarked of a group including Andre and Robert Morris, “came from apostwar, post-Depression background, where kids grew up and workedin the industrial centers of the country.”46 As we know, they brought thisindustrial frame of reference to art, where it transformed the parameters


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Maillart Extended, 1988Forged weatherproof steelTwo posts, each 12’ x 1’ x 1’Two lintels, each 24’ x 1’ x 1’Site: Grandfey-Viadukt, railroad andpedestrian bridge connecting Fribourgand Bern, SwitzerlandPhoto: Werner Hannappel

of material and process, siting and viewing (the expanding of the galleryspace vis-à-vis the loft studio, the opening to distant landscapes, the en-counter with urban architecture, and so on).

Obviously much has changed over the last thirty years; we are oftentold that our economy has shifted to a postindustrial order of consump-tion, information, and service. Yet if this is so, the change alters the rela-tive position occupied by Serra as well.47 Rather than fetishistic, then, hiscommitment to industrial structure can be seen as resistant—not only tothe pervasive decay of the tectonic in sculpture and architecture, but alsoto its putative outmoding in a postindustrial order of digital design.48 Inother words, if the industrial model of the tectonic is in part outmoded, itmight be strategic, for reasons of historical consciousness, to reassertits claims today; this new state might even endow it with new criticalenergies.49

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Over the last decade Serrahas pushed the tectonic to expressive ends, two of which are especially sig-nificant. 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) andGravity (1993), the first initially in the Stommeln Synagogue in Germany,the second permanently in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wash-ington, D.C., that develop the “ontological consequences” of the tectonicin a way that evokes spiritual conditions—not in opposition to secularconditions (of sculpture, body, and site) but by means of them. In suchworks 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 memorialseems immanent to the structure.50 Second, there are works, such as theTorqued Ellipses, in which structure, in pace with engineering, has becomemore complicated, to the point of a new subject-effect: these works are sophysically intense that they become psychologically intense, too; herephenomenology becomes almost perverse. Like the commemorativeturn, this psychological development is also a surprise, given the (post)-minimalist avoidance of private spaces of meaning.51 Yet, paradoxicallyenough, this psychological dimension is not necessarily private. I want tocomment on both these developments, and then to conclude with a briefremark on site-specificity today.


What does making sculpture mean to you right now? In the West, RosalindKrauss has argued, the logic of the monument has governed most tradi-tional sculpture: “it sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolicaltongue about the meaning or use of that place.”52 As we have seen, mod-ernist sculpture broke with this logic, as signalled for Serra by its breakwith the pedestal. Again, this was a dialectical event that opened sculptureto the possibilities of autonomous sitelessness and abstract site-specificityalike. In recent works Serra suggests a further transformation of theseterms: a sculptural paradigm that is neither siteless (in the modernist sense)nor site-specific (in the postmodernist sense) but both autonomous andgrounded in other ways.

This direction became apparent in the early 1990s with works set be-fore 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 inti-mate and communal nonetheless. The Drowned and the Saved suggests acommemoration of the Holocaust by place as well as by title (whichalludes to a book by the great memoirist of the Shoah, Primo Levi). Thissubject is not figured but evoked through structure alone, two L-beams(the horizontal longer than the vertical) that support one another throughabutment: a bridge form. Serra once termed this form a “psychologicalicon”;53 it is an icon of spanning and passing, and both kinds of movementare 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, thedrowned. These two passages, these two fates, are opposed, but they cometogether as the two beams come together, in support. Here support is notonly equal to load; it is one with it: the L-beams are mutual. In this waythe tectonic principle first articulated for the props in 1970—“as forcestend toward equilibrium the weight in part is negated”—takes on aspiritual significance.54 For in this support is a reciprocity that suggests aresolution 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 fore-grounds “weight,” which takes on a spiritual significance too.55 Gravity isa massive plane that steps down from the Hall of Witnesses of the Holo-caust museum to the floor below; thus the psychological icon here is nota bridge but a stairway, which has “ontological consequences” of its own.

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Does this stepped plane intimate descent or ascent? Does it express grav-ity or its counter? For, though movement is implied by the steps, it is alsostilled by the plane (there is another icon in play: the memorial wall) insuch a way that oppositions of ascent and descent, of grace and gravity al-most seem undone, even overcome. Works like Gravity and The Drownedand the Saved shift, at least in part, from a parallax of subject and site to anarresting of the viewer before the work. This arresting can be felt nega-tively, 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 besymbolized, made to make sense. Or this arresting can be felt positively, asan “ontological condensation,” a manifestation of the copresence of the


The Drowned and the Saved, 1992Forged weatherproof steelTwo right-angle bars, each 4’ 81⁄4” x 5’1” x 133⁄4”Collection: ErzbischöflichesDiözesanmuseum, CologneSites: Synagogue Stommeln, Pulheim,Germany (shown) and ruin of sacristyof Sankt Kolumba, ColognePhoto: Werner Hannappel

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

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Gravity, 1993Weatherproof steelSlab: 12’ x 12’ x 10”Collection: U.S. Holocaust MemorialMuseum, Washington, D.C.Photo: Dirk Reinartz

What does making sculpture mean to you right now? Weight and equilibrium,gravity and grace, have effects that are psychological as well as bodily andspiritual. 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 thenraise and lift itself and find its balance. . . . The ship went through atransformation from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyantstructure, free, afloat, and adrift. My awe and wonder at that momentremained. All the raw material that I needed is contained in the re-serve of this memory which has become a recurring dream.59

One need not turn to a psychoanalysis of screen memories and primal fan-tasies to register the psychological impact of this event. Perhaps this di-mension 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 roughlyphenomenological terms—as “preobjective,” abstract, not disturbed by anunconscious. Feminist art in turn elaborated this body critically: it agreedthat no viewer exists without a body but added that no body exists with-out an unconscious. More recently artists influenced by feminism (e.g.,Mona Hatoum) have looked to a minimalist idiom to draw out its psy-chological implications—which suggests they were there all along.

From the beginning Serra and peers—Smithson, Nauman, Hesseabove all—were ambivalent about the rationalism of minimalism. On theone hand their project was also rational: to foreground process in order todemystify the viewer about the making of sculpture. On the other handthis process suggested an erotics that implicated the anxious and the per-verse as well.60 In recent works like the Torqued Ellipses these two effectsare folded into one another: they appear rational and perverse at once. (MyCurves Are Not Mad runs the title of double tilted arcs from 1987, at thebeginning of this development: one both accepts the denial—the curvesare rational—and reads it, à la Freud, as an admission—they are alsomad/dening.) In the Ellipses the rational aspect—to manifest productionand structure—remains, but the perverse aspect—to disconnect elevationand plan, to turn inside out and vice versa—is exacerbated to the pointwhere one seems to experience different sculptures, indeed different bod-ies, at almost every step (Serra calls this “thinking on your feet”). The


effect is baroque: a simultaneous sense of a subjective deforming of spaceand a spatial overwhelming of the subject. Why baroque? Like classical ar-chitecture, the minimalist object appears objective: however engaged bythe object, the subject remains external to it. But like baroque architec-ture, the Ellipses put the subject in play within the space in a way thatseems to derange its rational structure. And, again, the result is an ex-traordinary chiasmus: the subject feels overwhelmed by the space even ashe or she seems to overwhelm it—as if the space were a projection of thebody, of bodily fantasies.61

“The generation of the 1960s made an art of the human subjectturned 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-inside-out now also seems to be space-turned-outside-in, made a function of thesubject. In this way, just as the rational and the perverse are forced to-

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Double Torqued Ellipse, 1997Weatherproof steelOuter 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 LouiseRiggio)Photo: Dirk Reinartz

gether, so private and public seem confused well. These confusions couldbe traumatic (trauma means wound, the pathological point of confusionbetween inside and outside), but the effect is more oceanic than anxious,more maternal than maddening. In any case a psychological dimension isopened here—and a surrealist sense of spatiality as well.63 This, too, couldnot be expected, for, as we have seen, Serra has long plied the construc-tivist 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 op-posed trajectories in modernism suggests the semi-autonomy of artisticdevelopment won by Serra in his practice. Again, this practice decon-structs sculpture vis-à-vis its site, but in a way in which unmaking is notopposed to making, or a commitment to site-specificity to the category ofsculpture.65 Indeed, the semi-autonomy of the work is crucial to its site-specificity—as it must be if site-specificity is to be site-critical as well. Thispoint—that semi-autonomy is the guarantee of site-criticality, not its op-posite—is often lost in recent developments of site-oriented and project-based practices today, which threaten to dissolve artistic practice intosociological or anthropological fieldwork. Serra has always stressed the“internal necessity” of sculpture, always insisted on the “uselessness” of artin general. Here this necessity, that uselessness, do not void the politicalcriticality of art; Serra shows that they can also underwrite it. This lessonis important to learn again today.

Notes

1. Richard Serra, “Sight Point ’71–’75/Delineator ’74–’76,” interview by Liza Béar, inRichard 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) sculp-ture—another ur-modernist formulation—it has driven him to transform the medium be-yond 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 NovaScotia School of Art and Design, 1975), p. 184.

4. See Samuel Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum (December 1966). On thesetransformations 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 amodel of art that is not only implicitly representational but also analogous to a private


interiority of artistic conception that they wanted to bracket (the classic text on this pointis Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility,” Artforum 12, no. 3 [November 1973]). For thisgeneration, meaning is public, performative, a matter of open research.

6. The logic of medium-specificity was often confirmed in reactions against it and/or ob-viations 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 Serracommented in 1980: “What was interesting about this group [he mentions Robert Smith-son, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Michael Heizer, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, and MichaelSnow] was that we did not have any shared stylistic premises, but what was also true wasthat everybody was investigating the logic of material and its potential for personal exten-sion—be it sound, lead, film, body, whatever” (interview by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, inibid., p. 112).

8. Richard Serra, “Play It Again, Sam,” in ibid., p. 7. For Serra, the line of painting thatminimalism 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 forAllan Kaprow”).

9. Richard Serra, “Rigging,” in ibid., p. 98.

10. On the first, “phenomenological,” move, see Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra, a Trans-lation,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MITPress, 1984); on the second, “picturesque” or “parallactic,” move, see Yve-Alain Bois, “APicturesque 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: Wil-helm Lehmbruck Museum, 1994), p. 102. This essay was originally published in RichardSerra: 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 theArts, 1997), p. 26. I do not discuss these different types at length as there are catalogues de-voted to most of them.

16. “Despite what he says about it,” Bois remarked in 1984, “all of Serra’s work is based onthe deconstruction of such a notion as ‘sculpture itself ’” (Bois, “Picturesque Stroll,” p. 62in 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 inthe 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 Chan-tal 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 in-dustry is anticipated, in elliptical form, by this note of Walter Benjamin in “Paris, Capital of

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the Nineteenth Century” (1935): “Excursus on art nouveau. . . . The transfiguration of thesolitary soul appears its goal. Individualism is its theory. . . . The real meaning of art nouveauis 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. Theyfind their expression in mediumistic line-language, in the flower of naked, vegetal natureconfronting a technically armed environment. The new elements of iron building, girderforms, 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 timethe real center of gravity of living space is transferred to the office. The derealized individ-ual creates a place for himself in the private home. Art nouveau is summed up by The Mas-ter Builder—the attempt by the individual to do battle with technology on the basis of thisinwardness 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 forDuchamp—for the un/making of sculpture, say, more than for its un/naming. He was waryof the emphasis in the readymade on consumption, at least in its neo-avant-garde recep-tion. Indeed, his credo remains productivist—“not a manipulator of a ‘found’ industrialproduct, 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. JonathanMayne (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 Mem-ories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet”: “I take this to mean thathaving irrevocably lost contact with its origins, the art of sculpture is unable to mobilize itspast 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) andthen a release from it, even an undoing of it.

31. Serra, “Extended Notes from Sight Point Road,” in Writings Interviews, p. 146. He re-turns 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 ambiva-lence regarding the picturesque as it suggests a static, optical imaging of a site as well as aperipatetic, parallactic framing. He also seems to have regarded it as a discursive field alreadyoccupied 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 ei-ther, 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 Writ-ings Interviews.

36. See Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel à l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” Architectural De-sign 60, nos. 3–4 (1990), reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Archi-tecture Theory 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). Frampton


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 deco-rated shed . . . in which shelter is packaged like a giant commodity” (in Nesbitt, Theorizinga New Agenda, p. 518). Just as some architects were seduced by the blandishments of thepop-commodity, so some are seduced today by the blandishments of the information-commodity.

37. Frampton, “Rappel à l’ordre,” p. 519. “We intend,” Frampton continues, “not only thestructural component in se but also the formal amplification of its presence in relation to theassembly of which it is a part” (p. 520). It may seem obvious that construction is funda-mental 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 maysound, a technocratic notion; on the contrary, Frampton insists on the “poetic manifes-tation 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 GottfriedSemper as well.

39. Ibid. To say that this apposition is universal is not to say that it is uniform: for Framp-ton 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 beyondAdolf Loos: not only is ornament a crime but imaging is taboo. And here he participates inan important iconoclastic (sometimes Protestant, sometimes Judaic) genealogy withinmodernism that gathers disparate practitioners such as Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mondrianas well as theorists such as Greenberg and Fried.

41. Perhaps this sharing is also primordial. As Frampton tells us, tekton means, etymologi-cally, carpenter or builder, a vocation that may lie between architecture and sculpture—orunderneath 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 opposi-tion to federal officials who spoke in its name. And in work after Tilted Arc he referred toliterary 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 inthe 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. Serraemerged amidst the rusting of an old industrial capitalist order—and works today amidst thevaunting of a new postindustrial ultra-capitalist order. His position, then, is not as a futur-ist celebrant of the industrial tectonic but as an interested investigator of its structures. “Wecannot repeal the industrial revolution, which is the cause of the urban glut,” he stated in1986, 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 andJohn Chamberlain he saw “the image of the proletarian producer” combined “with that ofthe melancholic stroller in the junk yards of capitalist technology” (Buchloh, “MichaelAsher,” p. 58). But again our situation has changed—in a way that appears to subsume the

Hal Foster198

old opposition, made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss, between engineer and bricoleur, orproletarian producer and melancholic stroller.

48. To assist in the design of the Torqued Ellipses Serra employed the CATIA program usedby the office of Frank Gehry to assist in the design of the Bilbao Guggenheim, but the El-lipses provide an instructive contrast, “the total opposite of the construction of the Guggen-heim 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 ofthe Intelligentsia” (1929), who suggested that the surrealists were “the first to perceive therevolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the firstfactory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pi-anos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebbfrom them” (Reflections, p. 181).

50. In this sense the principle stated in 1980—they “do not relate to the history of monu-ments. 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 theenigmatic statement that “my sculpture [is] related to an old use of space”). Whereas themonument usually serves the authority of the state, the memorial sometimes bespeaks a dif-ferent kind of collective remembering and marking.

51. See note 5.

52. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: 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” threat-ened by “the flicker of the image,” by the dissolution of memory in media, which he seeksto 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 notonly a flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a con-figuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystal-lizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where heencounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessationof 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 refusalto represent a public that does not exist as figurative public sculpture so often projects it toexist, 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 setin the register of trauma, with the Shoah turned into the paragon of History or a revelationof Spirit. Gravity commemorates the Holocaust but does not sublimate it into a religion.

59. Serra, “Weight,” in Writings Interviews, p. 184.


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, forthe baroque subject was often a subject overwhelmed by spectacle, a subject placed in “aweand 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 placesymbolizes prenatal comfort. When it is understood that comfort resides in the half-light ofthe soft tactile depths of the one and only possible hygiene, that of prenatal desires—thencircular, spherical, and irregular houses will be built again, which man kept from cave tocradle and to tomb in his vision of an intrauterine life and which the aesthetics of castra-tion, called modern, ignore.” See The Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean (NewYork: Viking, 1980), pp. 337–338.

64. A convergence of surrealism and constructivism was also projected in an earlier mo-ment 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 in-terested in self-referentiality, but not in a modernist sense. . . . The context invariably re-turns the work to its sculptural necessities. The work may be critical of the context, but italways returns to sculpture as sculpture” (Serra, Writings Interviews, p. 150).

Hal Foster200

Index of Names

Page numbers in boldface indicate illustrations.

Afangar, 179Albers, Josef, 53, 105Althusser, Louis, 173n27Andre, Carl, 4, 6, 7, 26, 103, 107, 109,

151, 153, 178, 181, 187Lever, 107Lost Ladder, 6Spill (Scatter Piece), 7

Anthology Film Archives, 21, 26, 53, 117Artforum, 34Art in Public Places Program (NEA), 165Asher, Michael, 152

Baker, Kenneth, 17 Base Plate Measure, 32Baudelaire, Charles, 181–182Béar, Liza, 1, 17, 175Beardsley, John, 165–166Beaubourg. See Centre Georges Pompi-

douBeckett, Samuel, 18, 125Bell, Clive, 143n3Bellamy, Richard, 26Benjamin, Walter, 78, 196–197n22,

199nn49,56Berlin Block for Checkpoint Charlie, 64Berswordt-Wallrabe, Alexander von, 44Birdwhistell, Ray L., 34Bochum (Germany), 44, 162–165Boice, Bruce, 37

Bois, Yve-Alain, 178, 183Boomerang, 34, 111–112Boullée, Etienne-Louis, 80, 85Brakhage, Stan, 23Mothlight, 25

Brancusi, Constantin, 6, 104, 109, 111,125, 175, 180

Beginning of the World, 109, 111Bird in Space, 180Caryatid, 180Endless Column, 109Gate of the Kiss, 109The Kiss, 109Torso of a Young Man, 14

Brown, Capability, 79Buchloh, Benjamin, 24, 180, 181, 187Buren, Daniel, 151–153Burke, Edmund, 87

Cage, John, 5Calder, Alexander, 64Candle Piece, 5–7, 6Caro, Anthony, 181Castelli, Leo, 37, 38Castelli, Leo, Gallery, 105, 125, 147–148,

155–156Casting, 26, 105, 106, 107Cavell, Stanley, 143n3Centre Georges Pompidou, 62, 64, 74–75,

87–91Chamber, 178Chamberlain, John, 181Chambers, William, 75

Choisy, Auguste, 80, 95n78Circuit, 115, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 131,

154Clara-Clara, 62, 74–75, 87–91, 88–89,

136, 143Collins, Peter, 67–68, 70, 71, 91Color Aid, 14Conner, Bruce, 21, 22Cornell, Joseph, 3Crane, Hart, 187Cunningham, Merce, 5Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure, 8, 118,

118–119

Dean, Laure, 18n5De Kooning, Willem, 112Delineator, 115, 123–124, 124, 155De Maria, Walter, 103De Quincey, Thomas, 77Deren, Maya, 23Diderot, Denis, 182Different and Different Again, 133Documenta, 44, 162Double Torqued Ellipse, 194Dovshenko, Aleksandr, 117Drowned and the Saved, The, 189–192, 191Duchamp, Marcel, 13, 180, 187, 197n23

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 80Ecole Polytechnique, 187Eiffel, Gustave, 186Eisenman, Peter, 78Eisenstein, Sergei, 26–27, 56, 76–78,

117October, 27, 76–77, 133Strike, 53–55

Elevator, 155Equal, 107Etlin, Richard, 93n41Exchange, 178

Federal Plaza (New York), 148–151,167–170, 183

Fiore, Robert, 32, 375:30, 107Flavin, Dan, 153, 181Frame, 5, 14, 31, 31–33Frampton, Hollis, 2, 22, 23, 34Frampton, Kenneth, 185–187,

198nn36–39

Fried, Michael, 82–83, 86–87, 143n3,197n28

Friedberg, M. Paul, 57n10

Gabo, Naum, 2Galerie m, 44Gate, 185Gehr, Ernie, 24Gehry, Frank, 199n48General Services Administration, 148, 169,

173n31Giacometti, Alberto, 125–127, 130, 135Giedion, Sigfried, 71Gilpin, William, 87Girardin, René-Louis, marquis de, 63Glaser, Bruce, 16Glass, Philip, 5, 16, 23, 24, 26, 103, 125Godard, Jean-Luc, 102Two or Three Things I Know about Her,140

Gonzalez, Julio, 181, 186Graham, Dan, 4, 9–10, 13–14, 15Gravity, 189, 190–192, 192Gray, Spalding, 37Greenberg, Clement, 83, 92n19Gregor, Ulrich, 49

Haacke, Hans, 151Hand Catching Lead, 5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20,

24, 77, 78, 102–104, 108, 138Hands Lead Fulcrum, 5Hands Scraping, 2, 5, 13, 17, 24Hands Tied, 5, 13, 17Harries, Karsten, 96n97Hatoum, Mona, 193Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 181,

182Heizer, MichaelDouble Negative, 158, 178

Hess, Thomas B., 113Hesse, Eva, 103, 193Hildebrand, Adolf von, 83Holt, Nancy, 111House of Cards. See One Ton Prop (House of

Cards)Hovagymyan, Gerry, 38Hume, David, 62

Inverted House of Cards, 107Ivens, Joris, 55

Index202

Johns, Jasper, 114Jonas, Joan, 5, 26, 34, 37, 82, 117, 128,

130Judd, Donald, 4, 7, 103, 109, 112, 113,

130, 148, 153, 176, 181

Kafka, Franz, 18Kahn, Louis, 185Kames, Henry, 70(n46)Kant, Immanuel, 83–86, 87Kaprow, Allan, 196n8Kienholz, Edward, 105Krauss, Rosalind, 10–11, 14, 18, 61, 76,

178, 190, 194Kuleshov, Lev, 2, 76, 78, 117

Landow, George, 24, 25La Palmera, 136Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 185Le Corbusier, 80–82, 89, 91Villa Savoye, 80–81, 91

Léger, Fernand, 13Ballet mécanique, 2, 27

Leider, Philip, 17, 34Leroy, Julien David, 68–69, 80, 85Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 101Levi, Primo, 190Lew, Jeffrey, 38LeWitt, Sol, 103Open Modular Cubes, 10

Lindsay, Jerome, 57n10Lo Giudice Gallery, 153Long Beach Word Location, 5, 18n5Lorrain, Claude, 62Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 115

Mach, Ernst, 14Maillart, Robert, 186, 187Maillart, 186Maillart Extended, 187, 188Malevich, Kazimir, 123Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 64Mangolte, Babette, 37Man Ray, 3Marey, Jules, 13Marguerite and Philibert, 183Marilyn Monroe —Greta Garbo, 155Marx, Karl, 172n9, 173n30Matisse, Henri, 99–100McLuhan, Marshall, 4

Mekas, Jonas, 23, 117Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 61, 126–128,

130, 131, 135Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 64, 186Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 44, 64

Moholy-Nagy, László, 3, 14Light Display, Black and White and Gray, 3Light/Space Modulator, 3

Mondrian, Piet, 64, 123, 176Monk, Meredith, 5Moore, Henry, 64More, Hannah, 79Morris, Robert, 5, 26, 96n97, 130, 147,

187Mosser, Monique, 75Musée National d’Art Moderne, 104. See

also Centre Georges PompidouMuseum of Modern Art, New York,

176My Curves Are Not Mad, 193

Nauman, Bruce, 3, 4, 18n5, 193Flour Arrangements on the Floor, 7

New Jersey Turnpike, 176Newman, Barnett, 127, 196n8Noguchi, Isamu, 64

Obenhaus, Mark, 37Octagon for Saint Eloi, 183, 190Oldenburg, Claes, 3, 4Nekropolis, 3“Soft Objects,” 3Store Days, 3

Olmi, Ermanno, 22One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 25–26,

107–108, 108, 112, 114–115, 124Open Field Vertical/Horizontal Elevations,

82

Pasadena Museum, 119Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 147Patton, George, 57n10Paul Revere, 34, 37Paxton, Steve, 18n5Pei, I. M., 89, 96n102Pevsner, Antoine, 2Picasso, Pablo, 99, 186Piranesi, Giambattista, 71–74, 72, 73,

75–78, 91Plumb Run: Equal Elevations, 136, 137

Index 203

Pollock, Jackson, 7, 15, 99, 100, 101, 112,127, 175, 196n8

Price, Uvedale, 69–70, 75, 87Prisoner’s Dilemma, 37–38Prop, 107, 110Proust, Marcel, 141–142Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 117Pulitzer 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, 21Rauschenberg, Robert, 5, 6, 92n19, 105,

114Re, Edward D., 168–169Reich, Steve, 5, 23, 24, 103, 114Pendulum Music, 5, 18n5

Repton, Humphry, 70Rice, Ron, 21Riley, Terry, 24Rodin, Auguste, 2, 14, 76Roebling, John Augustus, 186Rosa, Salvatore, 62Rose, Barbara, 3Rosenberg, Harold, 113Russell, Bertrand, 182

St. John’s Rotary Arc, 60, 66, 67, 69, 76, 78,86, 136, 138–140, 142

Saint-Pol-Roux, 100Samaras, Lucas, 105Sartre, Jean-Paul, 127, 129–130Sawing: Base Plate Measure (Twelve Fir

Trees), 119Scatter Piece, 7, 8, 11Schechner, Richard, 37, 38Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 95n78Schleyer, Hans-Martin, 50Schoolman, Carlotta, 36Scully, Vincent, 71, 91Sea Level, 178Segal, GeorgeSteelmakers, 165–166

Serpentine, 174Shapiro, Joel, 30, 38Sharits, Paul, 24, 34Shift, 59, 60, 74, 76, 82, 84–85, 115,

128–133, 134, 136, 158, 178

Sight Point, 65, 66, 66, 74, 78, 161, 171n8,178

Skullcracker Series, 76, 115–117, 116Sleight of Hand, 8Slice, 155–157, 156–157Smith, David, 181, 186Smith, Jack, 21, 22Smith, Tony, 83, 112, 176Die, 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, 26Wavelength, 22–23, 24, 26, 134

Soufflot, Jacques-GermainSainte-Geneviève, 68, 96n102

Span, 155Spin Out (For Bob Smithson), 58, 62, 66,

74, 83, 86, 136, 178Splashing, 7, 11, 146, 148, 149, 152Splash Piece: Casting, 8, 12, 12Stacked Steel Slabs, 115–117, 116, 124Steelmill/Stahlwerk, 35, 38–44, 39, 45–56Steinberg, Leo, 92n19Stella, Frank, 16, 103, 109, 113Step, 155Still, Clyfford, 127Strike: To Roberta and Rudy, 119–120, 120,

121, 131, 153–154, 178Sub-tend 60 Degree, 179

Tafuri, Manfredo, 91Tatlin, Vladimir, 180, 197n23Tearing Lead from 1:00 to 1:47, 105, 107Television Delivers People, 34–36, 37Terminal, 44, 73–74, 78, 80, 162–165,

164, 171n8Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, 8, 10,

105Tilted Arc, 136, 140, 142, 148–151, 150,

166–170, 170, 183Timber, 185T-Junction, 186To Encircle Base Plate Hexagon, Right Angles

Inverted, 158–159, 160Torque, 179Torqued Ellipses, 179, 189, 193–194, 194

Index204

Trunk, 183Twain, 171n8Twins: To Tony and Mary Edna, 119,

121–123, 122, 124, 126, 131, 133, 1552-2-1, 107, 108, 115Tzara, Tristan, 200n63

Venturi and Rauch, 57n10Verb List, 7–8, 8–9, 101, 102, 105, 118,

177Vertov, Dziga, 2, 26, 27, 56, 117Enthusiasm, 54–55, 133

Vogt-Göknil, Ulya, 72, 73, 73, 76

Wall to Wall, 155Warhol, Andy, 22, 26Chelsea Girls, 21

Waxing Arcs, 155Weight and Measure, 183, 184Weiner, Lawrence, 152Wesleyan University, 161Weyergraf, Clara, 38, 40, 41, 42–56, 73Whitman, Walt, 187Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 114

Zille, Heinrich, 53

Index 205

Hal Foster Richard Serra October Files 2000

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