Book Title: Richard Serra – Writing Interviews

Book Publisher: University of Chicago

Book Description: The book is based on the interviews with Richard Serra about his artworks and the relation between the sculpture and to its space. It also talks about the controversies over the removal of the artwork, ’tilted arc” and a little bit about his personal life.

Relevance to the UREP Research:

In an interview with Liza Bear, Richard Serra defined his work as an effort which is “a state of mind, an activity and an interaction with the world”.  He also talks about his drawings. According to Serra, drawing comes from the source – “experience and intuition”.

For some of his works, he mentioned that the pieces are never joined in a permanent manner. They are usually erected with the help of a professional crew in relation to each other and in relationship to the construction. Serra says that at some point he used to work with smaller scale models which were manipulated with his own hands. But the drawback was that he could not experience the art work completely in terms of its accessibility. “You could not enter into them”. So, he started to become more interested in larger scales and larger masses. “All the landscape pieces involved anticipation and reflection and walking and experiencing the time of the landscape.”

In his interview with Brenda Richardson, he speaks about artworks in public spaces with a lot of traffic. He usually avoids such contexts and tries to place his works in “detached spaces” i.e. these spaces are not juxtapositioned to specific buildings. He believes that the setting of the space depends on the nature of the work. It is important for the artwork to have interaction of the people. He also says that he prefers natural sunlight for all his works (drawings, sculptures, etc).