how can something so heavy be so light? Richard Serra's RIP

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.

…

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.

Richard Serra

"The torqued ellipses, spirals, spheres and toruses exist in the polarity between the downward force of gravity, their weightlessness and their upward rise in elevation which attempts to attain a condition of weightlessness. 
The sculptures are not objects separated in space but on the contrary they engender the spatial continuum of their environment. They impart from to the entire space, they shape the space through axes trajectories and passages between their solids and voids. 

I titled this installation the matter of time because it is based on the idea of multiple or layered temporalities. As one experiences each work in the context of the entirety of the installation one will become aware of the obvious diversity of durations of time.
The meaning of the installation will be activated and animated by the rhythm of the viewer's movement. Meaning occurs only through sontinuous movement, through anticitation, observation and recollection.

However, there is no prescribed view, no preferred sequence, no preferred succession of views. Each person will map the space differently. There is an unlimited range of individual experiences, but they all take place over time.
When I talk about time, i do not mean 'real' time, clock time. The perceptual or aesthetic, emotional or psychological time of the sculptural experience is quite different from 'real' time.
It is non-narrative, discontinuous, fragmented, de-centred, disorienting. "

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Richard%20Serra&page=2&f=People&cr=12

Richard Serra @ Charlie Rose

this is a must :

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11634


and more :

http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=Richard+Serra

 

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective / press release

Richard Serra, Taraval Beach, 1977
Paintstick on Belgian linen, Shown installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
Whitney Biennial, Collection of the artist, Richard Serra © 2010 Artist Rights Society (ARS),
New York

Photo: BeVan Davies

March 2, 2012 – June 10, 2012

The first-ever retrospective of the artist’s drawings, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, will be the first major one-person exhibition organized by the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center.

Though his sculptures have been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, Richard Serra’s drawings – crucial to his work for more than forty years – have never received a critical overview. This exhibition of works, drawn from major European and American public and private collections, will trace Serra’s investigation of drawing as an activity both independent of and linked to his sculptural practice. Organized chronologically, it will address significant shifts in concept, materials, and scale, and will culminate with new, never-before-exhibited large-scale works.

In the early 1970s Serra drew on paper primarily with ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon, using such sketches to explore form and perceptual relations between an envisioned sculpture and the viewer. Over the years they evolved into autonomous works of art, bold forms created with black paintstick that exploded beyond the boundaries of the paper support.

In the mid 1970s, Serra made the first of his monumentally scaled Installation Drawings, bringing radical scale and technique to an architectural context. Working on site, he attached Belgian linen directly to the wall and with vigorous and repetitive gestures applied paintstick that had been melted down and recast in large, heavy blocks.

Over the last twenty-five years Serra has continued to invent new drawing techniques. In the late 1980s he explored how to further articulate the tension of weight and gravity by placing pairs of overlapping sheets of paper saturated with paintstick in horizontal and vertical compositions. In his most recent work he has embarked on numerous series with a remarkable variety of surface effects.

Serra is among a significant group of artists whose transformative work irrevocably changed the practice and definition of modernist drawing, and challenged drawing’s role in the traditional hierarchy of media.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, is organized by curators Bernice Rose, Michelle White and Gary Garrels and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring several original, scholarly texts.

The exhibition will travel to
The Metropolitan Museum of Art April 13 - August 28, 2011,
followed by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art October 15, 2011- January 16, 2012.

This exhibition is generously supported by Laura and John Arnold, National Endowment for the Arts, Sotheby’s, Eddie Allen and Chinhui Juhn, the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation, Paul and Janet Hobby, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the Four Seasons Hotel Houston, Clare Casademont and Michael Metz, Invesco, Janie C. Lee and David B. Warren, eEvents Group LLC, Scott and Judy Nyquist, Michael Zilkha, and the City of Houston.
The Menil Collection would also like to thank Gagosian Gallery for graciously providing funds toward the production of the accompanying catalogue. 

http://www.menil.org/exhibitions/RichardSerraDrawinginRetrospect.php