Richard Serra, Sculptor
Jeffrey Brown from the PBS NewsHour, Transcript by Daniel G. Hill.
RS: “A list of verbs. To cut, to roll, to form, to curve, to lean, to prop.”
JB: “And what was the idea?”
RS: “Just to take a material and in relation to a procedure, see what would happen. Now you could go through a lot of variations… Let me show you one. If you look at a piece like this, one of the verbs was called “To Lift.” I had a piece of rubber and it was about maybe eight or ten feet long. It was about four feet wide. I took it on its edge and I simply lifted it up. And I wondered if that was enough to sustain itself as a work of art. And because it had a continuous inside and outside surface and it free-stood and it really was an exposition of the activity of lifting, I thought that I can put my name on that. I wanted to really invent my own procedures for making what I thought could be considered a work of art.”
…
RS: I think what artists do and they’ll continue to do is they invent their own procedures. Because if you’re going to use the tools of another master, you’re never going to be able to deconstruct his house. You’re not going to be able to use the same tools if you're going to do your own original work. And I think every generation has to find its own tools and own procedures. And I think what’s interesting about art is that unexpected youth will take it somewhere else.
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RS: This is how it begins. It always begins with models. And what we try to do, what we’re really involved with is invention of form and experimenting with form. And that’s what I’ve always been involved with.
