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November 28, 2011
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Notes from Sight Point Road by Richard Serra

I NEVER BEGIN TO CONSTRUCT with a specific intention. The structures are the result of
experimentation and invention. I never make drawings beforehand. The work is not goal-
oriented. I do not assume that someone is going to learn something from my work. My work is
not bounded by a preformulated definition. That would be a limitation on me and an
imposition on the viewer. The significance of the work is in its effort, not in its intentions. The
effort is both a state of mind and an interaction with the world. I think art is a kind of activity
that burns itself out, and it does so as you finish each piece. The time of the burn depends on
the fuel.

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 architectural enclosure. Some works are realized from their
inception to their completion totally at the site. Other pieces are worked out in the studio.
Having a definite notion of the actual site, I experiment with steel models in a large sandbox.
The sand, functioning as a ground plane or as a surrogate elevation, enables me to shift the
building elements so as to understand their sculptural capacity. The building method is based
on hand manipulation. A continuous hands-on procedure both in the studio and at the site,
using full-scale mock-ups, models, etc., allows me to perceive structures I could not imagine.
Mnemonic retention of physical properties is limited.

In all the work, the construction process is revealed. Material, formal, contextual decisions are
self-evident. Revealing the technological process depersonalizes and demythologizes the
idealization of the sculptors craft. The work does not enter into the fictitious realm of the
master. The contextual issues of site-specific work remain problematic. Site specificity is not a
value in itself. Works which are built within the contextual frame of governmental, corporate,
educational, or religious institutions run the risk of being read as tokens of those institutions.
One way of avoiding ideological cooptation is to choose leftover sites that cannot be the objects
of ideological misinterpretation. There is, however, no neutral site. Every context has its frame
and its ideological overtones. Its a matter of degree. But there are sites where it is obvious that
art works is being subordinated to/accommodated to/ adapted to/ subservient to/ required to/
made useful to

I think that if a work is substantial, in terms of its context, then it does not embellish, decorate,
or point to a specific building, nor does it add to a syntax that already exists. My large-scale
pieces in public spaces are often referred to as monumental; and yet, if we look at these pieces,
are we asked to give any credence to the notion of the monument? Neither in form nor content
do they relate the history of monuments. They do not memorialize any person, place, or event.
They relate solely as sculpture. I am not interested in the idealization of the perennial
monuments of art history, emptied of their historical function and meaning, being served up by
architects and artists who need to legitimatize their aesthetic production by glorifying past
achievements. Their appropriate historical solution is nothing other than kitsch eclecticism:
so much for the cast bronze figure on the pedestal and the ionic column. The return to historical
images, icons, and symbols is based on an illusory notion, the nostalgic longing for the good
old days when times were better and art more meaningful.

I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and
space, and to work in contradiction to the places and spaces where it is created. I am interested
in work where the artist is a maker of anti-environment which takes its own place, makes its
own situation, or divides or declares its own area. There are in this country, right now,
especially in sculpture, tendencies to make work that garnishes architecture or to build
sculpture in studios and adjust it to a site. I am not interested in work that is structurally
ambiguous or in sculpture that satisfies urban design principles. I have always found them to
be not only aspects of mannerism but also of a need to reinforce the status quo of existing
aesthetics. The reigning dilettantism plays upon what the cultural connoisseur likes and
knows. Supply and demand: give them what they want. I am interested in sculpture that is
nonutilitarian, nonfunctional. Any use is a misuse. There is a trend now to demean abstract art
as not being socially relevant. What you have in place is a return to a reactionary value system. I
have never felt, and I dont feel now, that art needs any justification outside itself. I dont
assume that art has to serve humanistic needs. One can only be suspicious of those artist and
architects who gotta serve somebody (Bob Dylans Jesus Christ capitalist theology). A gold
anodized aluminum TV antenna on a home for the elderly serves the in-house radicals notions
of the far out while the old people are being cynically mocked and stripped of their dignity.
Steel workers exalted in life-size bronze smacks of similar cynicism.

When I conceive a structure for a public place, a space that people walk through, I consider the
traffic flow, but I do not necessarily worry about the indigenous community and the politics of
the sitre. I am not going to concern myself with what they consider to be adequate,
appropriate solutions. Placing Pieces in an urban context is not synonymous with an interest in
a large audience, even though the work will be seen by many people who wouldnt otherwise
look at art.

Indifference toward peoples needs, as manifest in a useless piece of sculpture in a public

place, makes it difficult to spend taxpayers money to get work built. Politicians who play with
peoples needs and who are also responsible for the funding of those pieces realize that they
could be trapped in what they consider to be a contradiction. Politicians tend to go with the
flow. Reagan, for example, found an easy way out of this dilemma by cutting the National
Endowment, thereby reaffirming art as a market commodity.

One of the basic problems posed by any context (landscape, urban, or architectural) is that of
content. The relationship between context and content is that of the chicken and the egg. To be
effective my work must disengage itself from the already existing content of the site. One
method of adding to an existing context and thereby changing the content is through analyzing
and assimilating specific environmental components boundaries, edges, buildings, paths,
streets, the entire physiognomy of the site. The site is redefined not re-presented. In my urban
works the internal structure responds to external conditions, but ultimately the attention is
refocused on the sculpture itself; whereas, in the landscape pieces, the redefinition of the site
becomes the content of the work. The placement of all sculptural elements in the landscape is
determined by the elevational fall of the terrain. The placement of the sculptural elements in
 the open field draws the viewers attention to the topography of the landscape as the landscape
is walked. In the landscape pieces there is a dialectic between ones perception of the place in
totality and ones relation to the field as walked. The result is a way of measuring oneself
against the indeterminacy of the land. The machinery of Renaissance space depends on
measurements remaining fixed and immutable, being predicated on the Copernican notion of a
sun-centered and fixed universe. Similar elevations elevations equal in height in an open
field shift both horizontally and vertically in relation to ones locomotion. Because of this the
center, or the question of centering, is dislocated from the physical center of the work and
found in a moving center. Memory and anticipation, the peripatetic time of walking, become
the vehicles of perception. The time of the experience is cumulative, slow in its evolution.

The difference between architecture and sculpture in the landscape is: a house is a house is a
house. . . .

erra, Richard. Notes from Sight Point Road. Perspecta 19 (1982): 173-181. Web. 28 Nov. 2011.
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