Richard Serra

Image of Richard Serra
I think you always have to find where the boundary is in relation to the context in order to be able to kind of articulate how you want the space to interact with the viewer.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Space
Image of Richard Serra
On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Poetry
Image of Richard Serra
The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming home for me.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
But I don't think of any particular viewer in mind other than myself.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
I think different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
I thought Out of Action was better as a catalogue than the honeycomb because the honeycomb was like walking into one compartment and then another compartment.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
But you have to take all of those things, you have to take into consideration the paths, the roadways, how much cloud cover there is, how much foliage cover there is, whether there are streams, all of that comes into play.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
Now when you have administrators deciding what sexuality is, and what's a taboo and what's not in terms of content, you got guys, like, Trent Lott who equates homosexuality with a disease.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
Basically, what you really want to do is try to engage the viewer's body relation to his thinking and walking and looking, without being overly heavy-handed about it.
- Richard Serra
Image of Richard Serra
What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Opportunity
Image of Richard Serra
I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Space
Image of Richard Serra
To see is to think, and to think is to see.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Thinking
Image of Richard Serra
Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Weight
Image of Richard Serra
Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You're directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn't prescribed by a particular method.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Art
Image of Richard Serra
Your eye is a muscle, you have to keep it in shape and the more you draw, the more you see.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Eye
Image of Richard Serra
Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Determination
Image of Richard Serra
The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Moving
Image of Richard Serra
Time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with - not only sight and boundary, but how one walks through a piece, and what one feels and registers in terms of one's own body in relation to another body.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Sight
Image of Richard Serra
Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Art
Image of Richard Serra
I was in analysis and I told my analyst I wanted to be the best sculptor in the world and he said, 'Richard, calm down.'
- Richard Serra
Collection: Analysis
Image of Richard Serra
Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Ideas
Image of Richard Serra
If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Real
Image of Richard Serra
It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.
- Richard Serra
Collection: People
Image of Richard Serra
When I moved into making sculpture, I could handle steel the way it had been handled in the technological revolution. I could use it the way bridge builders used it; I could use it the way they used it in industry and building and not the way it had been used in art.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Art
Image of Richard Serra
If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Deception
Image of Richard Serra
Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Reading
Image of Richard Serra
Now when you have administrators deciding what sexuality is, and whats a taboo and whats not in terms of content, you got guys, like, Trent Lott who equates homosexuality with a disease.
- Richard Serra
Collection: Guy