Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)

[Music] this year richard serra had been acknowledged by the art world is one of our most innovative sculptures the New York Times called him quote probably the most original and significant sculpture of his generation in his evolution as an artist he has created works with torn rubber propped led and finally steel along the way he produced a series of films each focused on the artist performing one simple tasks such as catching a piece of lead many may know Sarah for his tilted arc which sparked furious debate in the 1980s he is perhaps one of the most dynamic artists working today we began this hour with Richard syrup at the Gagosian Gallery the site of his most recent exhibition if I went back to the very beginning of Richard Serra's life what would be the earliest thing that I found that might suggest who he is today probably a little kid walking along the beach for a couple of miles turning around walking back looking at his footprints and being amazed that what was on his right in one direction when he reversed himself was now on its left and it was completely different and it startled him and he never got over it he was how old four or five on the beach on the beach this is San Francisco yes and the car was it I mean wouldn't even looking back now even though you wouldn't have captured the profundity of it at that time I think certain things stick in New York law or they stick in your imagination and you have a need to come to terms with them and spatial differences what's on your right what's on your left what it means to walk around a curb looking at a convexity and then looking at a concavity just asking fundamental questions about what you don't understand those things have always interested in you are don't be modest judged to be one of our best not our best sculptor what's the connection between the talents you have and what it was naturally that made you want to look at those footprints curiosity inquisitiveness then I used to draw every day and I used in order to please my parents because my brother was taller and bigger and stronger and in order to capture my affection of my parents really to compete with my brother I would draw every night after dinner and my parents have encouraged that drawing so drawing for me became another language and it became a language that was a key into the world it kind of mediated a reality for me so I would I've been drawing since I was four years old and my parents encouraged it in encouraging than kind of the breeds confidence did you have a natural talent for drawing yes always I remember when I was in the second grade I'm about 7 years old the teacher had my mother come to school because she had pasted my drawings all up around the walls for other people to see him for the whole school to see it was something I had a facility for and she said to your mother look this this is something needs to be nurtured yes and my mother immediately started dragging me to museums and my mother didn't introduce me as Richard my mother used to introduce me as Richard the artist which I was I was very nervous well yeah this could do something to you if you're not careful no India because of that I thought I would major in English language and I did a major in English and I thought drawing was something that I could always do and I would find my way into it and eventually what happened I went to the University of California and I transferred to Santa Barbara Santa Barbara was a marvelous hotbed of intellectual activity issue of it was there and Niebuhr and Margaret Mead and I sent seven drawings to Yale after majoring in English literature and Yale accepted me saying we think we could teach you something and because I hadn't been painting up to that point and that was a big breakthrough of my life they made me get their undergraduate art history degree and then I stayed two more years of an MFA and an MA and an MFA the acceptance by Yale did what well I was thrown into a group of students and a couple of them here are still in New York painting very well Brice Marden Chuck Close or a lot of really famous people at the time and we were all young art students from all over the country thrown together in a very very competitive atmosphere with terrific professors and up to that point I could take education seriously but not that seriously ever press that hard and yell really challenged me and I think it brought out the best in it by that time you were thinking sculpture or painting as a painter you were paint us do it basically I was still making drawings and I had learned how to translate drawing into painting and I was looking at those people who I thought I could learn more from than anyone else at the time namely Pollock and de Kooning and I think what students do is they emulate those people who are on the scene but then I had very very good teachers coming in at the time Frank still it was just a little older Rauschenberg Philip Guston ad Reinhardt but there was this other event also in your childhood your father takes you somewhere takes me to a ship to a shipyard he's working where he's working as a what welder or pipe fitter pipe there and you see he takes me to the launching on the ship that he's worked on and because he's proud he's proud and it's a little frightening me because it's so enormous it's like a skyscraper on its side you know laying over like this yes and it's obdurate and there are thousands of Hill there and there looks like there's going to be a celebration but it's also a moment of high anxiety because they undo the shackles and the dunnage and all of a sudden this enormous object is going down a chute at a fairly increasingly rapid speed and it hits the water and when it first goes in the water the bow goes under and the stern lifts and there's like an apprehension that it's not going to make it and then it raises and it's adrift and it's a float and people are celebrating and there's foghorns and to me that was a transformation it was like an object can become something light that month that amount of tonnage could become something lyrical and the approval during the war of seeing a ship being launched there was something that I'd never gotten over it and so it became a reoccurring dream for you still dream still is a dream a dream and there is a direct line between that and this well cause how hoodies are hard to really pinpoint in terms of saying this cause that but certainly it's something that interests I think there's a connection how one would make it it is difficult to ascertain but for sure and I've always been interested in the sea in nautical building and engineering and math in a love for drawing and a certain inquisitiveness about things I don't understand and a playfulness I think if you want to make art at some point you have to suspend judgment and you have to involve yourself with play and not worry about the outcome so I do a lot of playing with modules in my studio until we decide exactly where to take the play and I think for an art student and that was one of the great things about yield they really had a free play period and in play that isn't about what's foreseen it's about what's unforeseen and I think a lot of what art does is teach us to see in unforeseen ways in new ways after Yayo you went to Paris yeah on a Yale traveling fellowship looking for I went to Paris I had never seen Brancusi and so I went to Brancusi studio almost every day and made drawings and I happened to have arrived there at the same time it's a very good composer here named Philip Glass and every night after dinner we would go into the locker Pole and watch Giacometti would come in and we became groupies we would sit across from him in he had you know plaster in his hair and up to that point existentialism was something that I could understand intellectually and even though I had been in front of Rauschenberg and John's and Gustin and I understood what process are it was the idea of someone giving all to himself and then eradicating it and giving it all to himself in eradicating everyday the stance that Giacometti had taken at that point in his life he was probably very old was empowering I think in a strange way what's happened in this country right now I think once again we're in an existential moment I think because of the recent terrorism it's put people very much in the moment and very much about resolutions in the moment and very much about fraud in the moment and not about foreseeing what the outcome is going to be but really living in the moment and I think the Parisians you know because of the invasion of France certainly be Casso and Giacometti had understood that in Sartre saw in Giacometti's work that kind of existential angst and that believability and creating something in the moment so I would say at that point Giacometti and Brancusi were very very empowering for me and I was an art student who was dealing in painting yeah I hadn't started making any sculpture so I went to Italy and rather to make sculpture sculpture I started experimenting in live and dead animals I really wanted to get away from my origins I think origins in terms of where you're born are very important but I think academic origins can be an enormous constraint so I really started to be very very playful it started to really stuff animals and deal with live animals and I had a show in Rome of life and stuffed animals when I was in my late 20s and they closed it down they said eat new blade growth food and then they opened it up again and the year later there was a whole movement that kind of came about in Italy called art de polvo where people started using sticks and stones and rags and first and even had a show of live horses but it allowed the scene to regenerate and I think the thing about art history that's interesting is art history is not predictable it's not linear in that way unexpected youth will always change the course because they'll always train Gress those people who have come before and that's why art remains vital because you can't predict what young people are going to do but what was the central for you was just your freedom I mean you could be playful with animals and you could do the need for me was to individualize myself to really find a way of making and doing and seeing in the way that other people hadn't was this a judgment against painting for you it was a judgment against everybody any anybody and everybody who had come before I think I think you have to be brash in that way not to be a rebel for rebels sake but to understand that if you're really going to individualize yourself you have to take yourself out of the set way of seeing I also understood that it was student work I also understood that it was experimental I never thought of it I still don't think of that work as being art but I understood at that time a great need for me to start experimenting in other materials so when I came back to New York there was a warehouse out of downtown on Duane Street that was emptying out the rubber on the street I phoned the head of the company and I moved in a couple of hundred tons of rubber into my loft with people in the neighborhood and that a couple of hundred tons of rubber of rubber into my loft and that became my material I getting a grant and started experimenting with rubber now if you think rubber has a certain flexibility one of the first pieces I did is I took a sheet of rubber maybe three feet wide a foot half wide three or four feet long and lifted it up and I called a to lift well it was self-supporting so it had an interior and exterior that was the same like and what I did then as I wrote down a verb list to roll to cut to fold again to sever to drop to twist to dapple or whatever and I started enacting those activities to roll or to twist her to hang or to prop in relation to materials whether they be rubber which then led me into lead because it have a certain flexibility and that led me into then propping and I took four lead sheets and I propped him up like a house of cards and it was a ton of lead and that was on the sixth floor a little worried if it collapsed it was going to go through the building I was married at the time my wife came to see that and said Richard that's not art you can't show that and I think within a year we were divorced I mean there is a certain point where you not not certainly because of that she was an artist also but I think there's a certain point you really have to decide that if you want to redefine what you think the nature of sculpture is you have to step outside of the dictates of the Lang but you didn't think that that was what you were doing I certainly did think that did certainly I certainly you were redefining the nature of sculpture of sculpture when I put more how old about 28 29 look you have to understand I wasn't bogged down by the academics culture there was nothing for me to lose there I knew the history of hanging and after seeing Velazquez I knew I wasn't going to be able to challenge Velazquez soon but after seeing Ben Kunze and Giacometti and I don't want to sound too brash I thought I had a shot at it I think I did what changing how we perceive bringing another meaning to perception it's interesting to me that that in a sense you wanted to do something big clearly you were not satisfied with being in some incremental change in any art I was an analysis and I told my analyst I wanted to be the best sculpture in the world and he said Richard calm down do you think you are no I think that changes year by year does it I think it changes decade by decade I think you do your work and if you're lucky an audience will follow your work but I think you have to be able to sustain your work for a good 30 or 40 year period but the 90s was a great decade for you or not a great decade in that I think the audience has responded to my work in a way that it hadn't before but I've been making I think very consequential work for 30 years now okay by then you knew you want to be a sculpture and you wanted to be after the house of cards before then I had things on the floor and I had things on the wall and they were still dealing with the pictorialism if you looked down it's like a figure against the ground if you're looking painting it's a figure against the ground I really wanted to deal mice with the idea of a volume in space and then I wanted to be able to open up that volume and walk into it and through it and around it I can tell you how the break after the house of cards really occurred Jasper Johns asked me to build a splash piece of lead and splash peas in his loft and I went there and I was heating up some lead and I took one of the pieces of lead and I put it into the corner because I wanted to use it as a template to splash against and I realized that the lead plate was only about a foot high and four feet long when wedged into the corner and bisecting the corner would free stand and I thought isn't that curious once that happened I thought if I took this plate this eight an eight by twenty-four foot plate and wedged the corner it would probably free stand so I had to drop the idea that I was going to handle it myself and I had to go get riggers and I had to get cranes and that I had worked in at steel mills as a kid so that idea of taking a big plate 8 by 24 feet long and wedging it into the corner and having it free stand was pretty much unheard of because sculpture for the most part was still leaning on painting people were still cutting out shapes and welding them together so even if you look at the best of Picasso and the best kaulder or whoever it still looks like 3d painting no one had ever dealt with the problem of how steel was really used in the industrial revolution how was used forests asses its weight its counterbalance and I had worked as a kid not only in steel builds but around steel so I knew its potential and it was like for me going into the paint store for me to go order up a few tons of lead or steel wasn't a problem wasn't a problem but do you believe that if you hadn't had that experience you might not have ever done for sure for sure if I hadn't come from a working-class background if I hadn't worked in steel mills it would have never happened it gave you something no one else had the capacity to understand the raw material to pretend the potential of weight weight and mass counterbalance gravity and that means that the notion of the object or the specificity of the object as our it was pretty much over for me I really wanted to get into the expanded field I've had people walk into and through and around now sculpture hadn't done much of walking into through and around that was the provenance of architecture so how do you deal with sculpture where you walk into and through and around and avoid architecture maybe I can make space as much part of the content as the material the steel which is a vegetable vessel just to track the space so space Oh as my work evolved really became my subject the steel right now even though I know how to articulate it know how to bend it and I even know how to make it look very flexible now it's just a vehicle to make the spatial experience one that people understand for a closer look at the work we ask the artist himself to walk through his exhibition two of his spirals to forged pieces called Ali and Frazier and works with Tauruses and spheres which is his current focus this piece starts out with a movement that's closed and as you walk it it opens then it leans to the right and then leans to the left compared this piece is called Sylvester who was a critic in London for about 50 years probably the most influential critic after the Second World War and in the last five years of his life we became great friends and he passed away recently and I dedicated this piece to him this piece is more gracious than Bellamy in that the movement through the passage is more generous in the opening space is much more cylindrical than oval the other piece of ellamy is much more compressed and has a very very tight elevation as you move through it and actually the movement seems to propel you through it this one you become much more implicated in the feeling of life and this one has a much more gracious volume much more of an empathizer kind of effect in the inside and this piece probably throws you off balance or you don't leave lose your coordinates as much as you do in Bellamy from here the outside looks more like to say the prow of a ship to give you some idea of the decentering I think it'd be best if we just walk through this piece and shoot upward at the sky and you'll have an idea of what happens to the outside of the curvature of the plate on these pieces is also very difficult to know when you're on the inside and what's the outside here on the inside of the outside that all are also on the outside of the inside space has become my subject and it's basically what informs how people think about what I'm doing the steel is kind of a way of holding the space or directing the space or compressing the space or allowing you to feel the grasp of the space so the steel in the space or the object and the void become one in the same so I don't think of space as being something apart from the condition of sculpture it's one in the same basically that is my subject I use steel to organize space Ali and Frazier Oh two big figures for me and and and these are big weights and they're obdurate and they're different in an in mass and volume how do these pieces ever so subtly displace the volume of the room the rooms are identical but the pieces are different in scale and measure so you have to go from one room to the other to make that comparative whether one finds that an interesting proposition or not I don't know but it interests me union of the Taurus and the sphere the way this piece functions if you think of a donut basically what you have in the donut is an inside section in an outside section the inside section of a donut is a torus and so is the outside section but the inside section functions a little like a ring if you took a ring on your finger and you bent it back on itself basically what you'd have is something that turns in two ways something like that torus and something like this a sphere the interesting thing about both this torus and the sphere coming out of the same doughnut is that they share the same radius and because they share the same radius you can lock them together one joint same radius two different forms if you take the pieces in the other room what I've done is taken three Tauruses and three spheres and juxtaposed them and made five spaces in between which you can walk through each of which functions differently in terms of its compression in terms of its elongation in terms of what are the evokes all these pieces because of their curvature free stand and if you walk through them you can only see the light because the floor is uneven you can even see the passage of light that comes underneath them all of them make different kinds of compression in elongations of the spaces some are made up of two Tauruses some two spheres and one a combination of a torus and a sphere these modules are exactly the same as the piece in the other room which locks together if you think about it if you took a sphere and just turned it around put it right up against here you'd have the piece in the other room the piece in the other room free stands as do these pieces I like the piece a lot but if you ask the artist would probably tell you he likes the last word he's made the death for Sara some of his greatest intellectual battles have concerned the distinction between architecture and sculpture for better understanding of this and Sara's process we went to his home and studio in downtown New York this is where his pieces began in the model making stage this one was in Venice this one I like a lot it's called left right this one's having events this year and this one just has two movements register this way in this way but it was one of the more abstract ones we built how significant in the history of sculpture do you place sculpture coming off the pedestal Oh enormous probably the biggest thing that happened in 20th century because once it got off the pedestal you no longer looked at an object that was depicting a realistic aspect of either a hero or something to idolize or something to worship or something to be seen as a part from the space you're in once it became off came off the pedal it was in exactly the same behavioral space that you were in so you had to deal with it in relation to time and space not as something from removed from you to deal as a kind of icon of worship basically once it became off the pedestal it bracketed Europe and it bracketed the Renaissance and it opened up possibilities that had been unforeseen in sculpture and there were a group of people who were pushing on the edge of those potential so there was a movement among a group of people some older some younger who were very interested in the notion of process time and space in relation to an open field all of that resonated with you well I was right in the middle of it the difference is if you think of a Cezanne you look at the painting and the subject matter of the painting is the apples or the still life here the subject matter became the person walking through so it reversed how how one have looked at art where the looking became the subject and the subject became the person and that person's behavior that not only takes it off the pedestal but it puts the responsibility of the content on how willing the person is to engage the dialogue with himself in relation to time and space and what's in front of them where's beauty beauty is kind of like an ocean that's very very hard for me to understand in that it seems to be something that people lay over any given historical period and the criteria always seems to be behind the times I think for the most part artists don't get involved with beauty they get involved with the language of art they get involved with trying to extend the language of art and if beauty happens it's a residue of their involvement in the particularity zuv what they're trying to accomplish in terms of communicating something to someone else the public may have some notion that artists are up to making beautiful things but if you talk to artists seriously that's not what they're up to they are up to in your words extending the language of art in the best way they know how and to fulfill the assumptions they have about what the aspirations of art can be but is art about making you think for sure basically to see is to think and to think is to see and it's a different kind of language but that seems to be the function of art to change the change meaning to change meaning through perception not to change meaning through beauty to say beauty seems to be like a very criteria of slippage it's very difficult to know what one means by that unless you're being sold toothpaste and then they can tell you which is the better brand or cars and they can tell you with just a better brand but that all comes through a serial criteria that we've been spoon-fed you know this artists are kind of ghetto eyes by commercialism so to break that mold and to deal with other potentials for sculpture takes another kind of aspiration it's not just about steel it's about the aspiration for the potential of sculpture so you have to get out of the commercial constraints I was very lucky in that I had a dealer named Leo Castelli who I was able to go into $500,000 in debt and he would keep supporting me I thought if I went out I'm ahead of the game and he would keep funding my work because he liked what I was up to like many like the work and he never had a chance of selling any of it because of him I was able to advance my work in in the potential for my work with no sales forthcoming that was a extraordinary gift for me I mean he helped me more probably than anyone do you think he understood you or he did it on his own sense of what he liked my aloofness yeah that's what he said to me one day he liked the fair Loomis he liked me he liked my attitude he liked my spirit and he always said he'd like my aloofness and I think he liked my aloofness in relation to him because he used to say Richard make me a small piece if I could say I'd say Leo shove it and glance is there any insecurity about you oh sure that was rollin rollin the next guy just that's it just von Bulow's the next guy yeah when did you know was there a breakthrough point in terms of gathering speed in terms of traction in terms of saying understandings like peeling an onion but something where you made a statement and you knew you knew not anybody else you you you never know I mean basically what you do is you reflect in the mirror and your reflection of the mirror is a lot of other people's reflections also so what gave me a great common sense people that who are really respected and I was know we're respected my work so very early Jasper Johns asked me to build a piece for him Judd who was very very accomplished sculptor took me under his wing the older artists in the city responded to my efforts even though they were not commercial and they liked what I was up to what's the happiest time for you is it planning it is it going there and installing it is it when you can say it's done it's all of it it's from its inception to its completion to its extension into the world to its final placement to its moving at its all of its all of it all the time you have a body of work that you're responsible for you try to delegate as much as you can but a very small crew but you try to do as much as you can and I have a marvelous wife through house and I have very great people working with me if you ask me what aspect of it is really fulfilling yes probably when the works are finally built and then I go look at them the first time they come together probably then but sometimes before sometimes in a breakthrough with a model that happens probably probably in the model making stage probably because the model making stage you decide that that's what you're going to go with so you have to go through we're trying to build peace for Toronto here we've got about maybe 10 or 12 models right now for Toronto Airport and finally we get the one that clicks in that we know we have it we'll know and you say Allen gladder and myself take me to one historical moment you're going to to out to look at at a site for Pulitzer and same thing Louis where I've come from Japan you've been influenced by the birds any cause because they're about walking and looking in time and space and they're not about an object they're about a field so if you go to rheology and there's seven rocks you don't look at the rock it's a specific thing you look at you walk along a viewing portion one Rock is hidden behind the other rock or you watch the Sun go up and down but in most of those gardens you walk in curvilinear paths and things appear and disappear so it's not about the containment of one object it's about the notion of time space and movement being simultaneous the notion of an open field of walking through into and around of things locating themselves in space that were barometers through the tree for seeing through an end of the space that became really paramount for me so when I came back to build a piece for Pulitzer I had to deal with three or four acres of land and find a way of dealing with the elevation rises and falls and holding a view a meaningful view of that landscape as you walked it that would be comprehensible to a viewer so things weren't just indiscriminately placed that being my first landscape piece probably remains still one of the most abstract pieces I've ever done maybe one of my best efforts and one of the best clients I ever had they gave me an enormous opportunity to come up against the best of their collection which was Matisse Monet Picasso I mean in a good company for well for a young hitted I went there once and I saw the 1907 woman in yellow by Picasso I walked outside it sat on the an anxiety attack instead of sweating that's absolutely true I had never had an anxiety attack wasn't only because of the work it was because they were asking me to build a work in relationship to those pieces on five or six eight three or four acres of land so they were offering me an enormous opportunity did you ever ever think about architecture as something that interested you from a professional point no there's too many constraints in architecture and architecture I lived with architects at Yale so I knew what they were up against and I wasn't particularly interested in plumbing plumbing yeah plumbing plumbing our architects have to deal with a whole host of functions that are non aesthetic you say I think we're in a time right now where the architect kind of rules and the art is kind of a sideshow that comes and goes in the museum so the architects have become the high priests building is more important than they are now so that's what happened in you know the recent decade and they're all building museums and they're all building their churches yes and is the new church yeah and the art is kind of a sideshow and the directors are more interested in the property and the turnstile than they are the art but my belief is art will take care of itself and artists will find a way into and through and around that situation and they'll be critical of that situation or they'll misuse that situation in a way that exposes that situation for what it is but right now there are some directors that really have a stranglehold on the situation where the art just becomes the hamburger and the McDonald's and that's unfortunate but if you look at your art today and the art you've done over the last ten to twelve years you have probably been more inspired in one case by one Church true I mean if you're talking about the the ellipses coming out of san carlo by gorromini if that's what you're talking about that's true but it's only true because I was interested in those problems when I walked into that church and what was there was a dome that was vertical straight up like this and I walked it on the side aisle and I wanted to torque this dome I wanted to make it at a right angle to the piece on the floor and I didn't know if it was possible to do that and iPhone engineer that I work with at Frank Gehry's office named Rick Smith and he said Richard you can possibly make a steel vessel surround two given voids but we can't play with you right now because we have to deal with Bilbao the museum that Frank was building at the time so I said alright I'll do it myself so I took two pieces of wood and I put a piece of wood like this in a dowel in between and put a piece of wood like this at a right angle to it and then I took a piece of lead and I put it on the floor and I rolled this wheel so to speak around the lid now if you remember when you're a little kid you had a bicycle or a tricycle and the back wheel broke and what was that the right angle to the other the line that the back wheel would make in the snow would be something this is an exaggeration or in the mud would be something like this well that gives you an idea of what the template would be that surrounds this form I didn't know that so after I made this model I unfurled it and I had a sheet of led that looked like this and I sent this back to the engineer up to that point that had not been done in the history of form making it had not been done in architecture it doesn't occur in nature it simply doesn't occur see that's the amazing thing it's a little minor invention but minor yeah but it might I find that amazing I mean is it just me when you're looking at ellipse doesn't occur before in sculpture it never occurred where the exact same form rose and elevation torqued on itself and the radius stayed stayed the change I wasn't actually in France and I was talking to an engineer and he said it can't be done and I said you know go home make it with paper yourself sure can be done in order to finally get it made we had to send out all over the world I went to Korea they could probably make it but it makes steel plate large enough and finally we found a place here in Sparrows Point in near Baltimore Shipyard there and the first plate that we put in they assumed that they were two cones in relation to each other that they could process as cones and they broke the first plate which was 40 feet long two inches thick in half and then we had a show coming up a deal we had to postpone it for a year because we weren't sure we could even get him built so that that was difficult that building the first three spot that was a very long haul maybe three years I mean that seems to be a a crucial turning point it was a breakthrough for me but there was a better but but I didn't I didn't know that the response was going to be what it was because right before that I was making conical shapes and I was making I thought interesting work I wasn't making contain spaces that you could walk into I think Borah meaning challenged me to do that if anything and we had no idea what the response was going to be none and what was it people responded in a way that they hadn't really responded to a lot of my work previously I came in one Sunday I came down from Cape Breton and people were sitting inside the pieces I thought that's strange people were using the pieces in a way they hadn't before I don't mean using functionally I mean using in terms of their own time they were spending time with these pieces they were walking through them they were going back to them they would leave and come back the next day I saw something that almost broke my heart a woman gotta wield it in the wheelchair had someone stand her up and walked around and walked on one of the pieces put her down in the wheelchair and walk through moved her into another one Philip Johnson came in and tried to touch the walls as he walked around the pieces and completely got blown out little things like that and I'm not patting myself on the back gave me a great deal of satisfaction because people were into dealing with a spatial experience that they hadn't dealt with before and they were getting something out of it I know critics liked it yeah yeah you can't go too much on that sometimes they like it for the wrong reason sometimes I mean I suffer a lot from what critics say but you suffer oh yeah I hate bad criticism hey do oh sure I this is just stunning to me oh everyone does well but why do you because I mean you've just said me abuse in cars because I understand to a degree the consequence of my work and what the works about and when people don't get it no when they ridicule usually this is how it happens they don't go after the work they go after me and they go after me and my personality and then they bang the work and I really find that after having worked 30 years they should get off it I mean at a very young age I that I developed a certain kind of signature as a person and I wish people would give it up and after point it's our signature was aggressive obstinate macho AMF right and it's hard to outgrow that and maybe it's true I mean you know janae said look everything anyone ever said about you is probably true not because it's true because they said it but it's difficult that people Avenue to your work becomes first about your personality not about your work and for that reason I really ducked putting my face up front I really wanted people to do deal with the work and not with my personality my personalities my personalities I'm not a movie sir I'm not interested in my personality being out there that the 80s really turned thought of artists who misread Warhol into movie stars that's never been my interest I really want to be respect and I've always wanted to be respected for my work not for my personality and I think actually it's helped to preserve my person and my work because I've been outside of the mainstream of consumption I mean if you ask a lot of people who Richard Serra when his face looks like they won't know and that's all very well and good for me with me I would just like that but they would also say he's all the things you said yeah yes well but but that can be changed let me back up from that because this is you know it's hard because there's been an evolution and because we've talked about space and and this sort of awakening to the idea of space and experiencing object and space why steal I think materials have to do with sensibilities and I think I think a choice of material has to do with one Sensibility some people would like to work in clay some people like the word priced or some people like to work in bronze some people like the color red the the the notion of a material that you respond to that you think that you can extend yourself to becomes an extension of who you are how one selects a material has a lot to do with what one knows about a material maybe arity and the potential for it and I at a very young age even though I never thought I would use steel to make sculpture never even because it was a traditional material I didn't want to get near I understood it and I realized I understood it in a way that it hadn't been used so I had no reservation about going in and picking up a big four or five ton plate I understood you could do something with it I wasn't picking it up just because I thought it was heavy I was picking it up because I thought I could make it light because I could do something with it that other people hadn't done before that I could move people through it in the way other people had moved people before is there anything about steel that that is limiting for you not right now nothing no there's no vision no creation no I wish I could get bigger plate if that's what you mean now then you get into another proposition you could probably make one longer you say why doesn't this guy construct one with the other I'm not interested in welding one on top of the other I'm not interested in constructing or framing up I'm interested in the logic of the proposition Hukilau I'm doing I'm dealing with single units for the most part because it's pure because what for me it's pure oh yes okay and it doesn't enter into the realm of architecture in that way and I can control it as soon as you start adding pieces on as soon as you have assemblies as soon as you have other parts you get away from the logic of the proposition to control those means for an end not for the logic of the needs for what you're dealing with so a lot of architects deal with tectonics for tectonics sake and you can see buildings are that they're over built to make the building look interesting for its own tectonics or they deal with the scenography of the building for its picture making potential if you're dealing with art you're dealing with the potential for sculpture for a different kind of sake of space and that's a very very fine thing to do you have to better than architects for one thing you did you're a better drawer than right Eric sorry Frank I think so yeah he would oh I draw better in my sculpture than he draws in his architect yeah I think one of the reasons there is that he's not interested in final the final detailing he's interested in a broader scheme of things he's interested in connections he's interested in circulations we come at the situation in very different ways I'll tell you this for the most part what's what architects have always done is they use the most progressive art of the time for their own ends and they get more applaud for it because the culture gives them more honor and prestige because their signs and symbols are more apparent but most of what you see in architecture are watered down ideas of sculptors who have come before but you're talking about a man here who built a building with a space with you in mind well solutions we have here no no no Frank's a friend of mine but don't for one minute think he built that space with me and mine he built that big open space that could house one of my pieces but yes of Guddu I mean that's like you know I'll throw a bit your bone here I mean I don't think he built that space with me and mine he's built that faith with Frank Gehry in mind it's not that they had my skull and I think you should be a preacher for the fact that all these architects are you saying yeah I should be appreciative well you have a lot more respect for sculptors than you do for text for sure absolutely I mean architects are not even artists as far as you're concerned for the most absolutely not because are you gonna tell me buildings are works of art yes so are people then and so we have no no no no no no no say you know me that Frank Lloyd Wright never created a single work of art whether it's furniture whether it's furnitures art now treat how about plumb it you know where do you where do you want to stop I don't know but I've art is purposely useless and that's what makes it more free than buildings okay but is that but is the difference there look there are aspects in buildings that you can say deal with the provenance of sculpture or a deal with the overlay of painting but don't start telling me buildings or works of art don't buy it what great cathedrals that have survived have nothing to do with art no they have something to do with with religion and they have something to do with social context of the time and they have something to do with people keeping people under a certain kind of moral imperative about transcendence and God but they have nothing to do with the nature of what art has always been I think architects right now and I have a big talk with Norman Foster yesterday understand that there's crossover references to sculpt to architecture but basically I'm dealing with a sculptural language in sculptural space it happens to challenge those architects because it's dealing with spaces in places in a way that they could not have foreseen or have not accomplished yet so but it's not architecture and foster would be the first one to tell you so-and-so would Frank ury if you really pin Frank down and said hey what's the distinction Frank between you as an architect and Don judge right Frank is parading right now and so are all of these mouthpiece critics that you know support him as quote the artist oh the mad artist right the architect as artists hogwash don't believe it don't buy it and I don't think society should buy it either and I like Frank is a good friend of mine but I understand the distinction between what I do and what he does and so does he all right so here we go you brought me here did this point in this conversation tilted arc yes yes yeah what did it do to you it blew a lot of time for me I'll tell you that many people first became aware of Richard Serra in the 1980s commissioned by the government he installed tilted art in Laura Manhattan the piece and Sarah were attacked as aggressive and austere Sarah was forced into the debate to support his art after fierce arguments the piece was removed it was the first time in history the government dismantled the piece of art it had commissioned it made me think that there's a world of politics out there that has nothing to do with art that can use you as fodder and change people how change people's beliefs and who you are and what you're doing merely by distorting information you try suing the federal government for thirty million dollars if you're an artist and see where you give the government had never destroyed a work of art that they had commissioned before then they lied they distorted the hearing I was set up in the kangaroo court the day of the hearing as many people in that building came out for the piece or against the piece whether that should have even been the proposition I don't know whether we should have people voting on whether they liked the work of art or not the next day the government came out and said the people of this building has declared that they want this piece out of the building that was a lie I phoned up and said hey they said you corrected did I have any could I have a venue to the press no they used me because they wanted to change the administration policies of art and architecture they wanted art that that affirmed their principles of enhancement they want a de corps that they could understand they weren't interested in the language of art not at all and they never will be why would one think that I think that if you're trying to break new ground there's a hostility that surrounds you because people who've you've moved away from resent the fact that you're doing something that's kind of taboo so I think in order to persevere you have to be obstinate you have to be marginalized you probably have to stay away from pins on your personality a certain aspect of the sociability of the art world because I think finally what happens to a lot of very very young artists so to build a meeting with parties well I think art is what we do sculpture of culture is what's done to us and art is what we make but culture does something else to artists and it pretty much eats them up like popcorn and it doesn't have too high of respect for them if I asked what we've been talking about but if I ask you to name three architects or three film directors or three politicians or three whatever three composers or whatever you can probably look like that if I if I said name three living contemporary sculptures you'd probably have to scratch your head what because it's not part of the dialogue that you and I in the world of consumerism deals with so it's another kind of language it's always taken more time it's always been ridiculed it's heavy to move around it's difficult to deal with it's not like taking a photograph in making 30 of them getting them out all over the world simultaneously it's not a easily supportable market commodity so you have to have also another belief in the potential of sculpture and what you're up to and what is your belief in the potential of sculpture to change how people see and how they think and how they seem about the world about themselves about look I don't think it's a big change but I think it's a catalyst for a perceptual change and if you can change how people think when they walk into and through in a space and you can evoke feelings that they haven't had before and you can challenge their preconceived notions about what containment in space is what release in space is with passing through spaces or whatever I think that's a worthwhile thing to do I don't think it's going to change the world but I think that it gives different people a different aspect of potential for viewing the world you think art any arts going to change the world hard to know or any book or anything else I think cultures change the world I think people fight for ideas change of ideas change the world I think cultures are involved with ideas and the sustainment of ideas and artists make a contribute or contribute to those sustaining ideas but I don't think anyone art ever changed the world the idea that Eureka had anything to do with the war is hogwash I mean no bombs were ever stopped because of Guernica I think we can go to it now and say oh look at this great tank and they showed us the horror he showed us the horrible or but it didn't prevent any bombs from falling is sculpture gaining losing holding its own in an appreciation by the cultural public I don't know I don't know it's hard to know I just know that we've had you know a lot of people have been looking at this work which is gratifying it may be useful and helpful for younger sculptors to understand that that's possible that there can be an audience for sculpture I think for a while there wasn't to regenerate sculpture particularly kind of scopes your arm involved with to think at the end of the 20th century someone could have pumped some life back into steel sculpture not a long shot I mean because in a long shot because it seemed like a dinosaur it seemed like everything had been done there it seemed like you know it pretty like that the field had been closed and it just took a certain persistence to open that up again and maybe younger people will find that helpful and useful in that that can happen on September 11th you were here in this building that we sit in now which is close to Ground Zero yeah so I don't blink him right over my house saw it right from the window saw the underbelly side of it so the wingtip down and thought that it was going to straighten out so the pilot pull you can see the pilot but so the plane pull up and then direct itself right toward center of the building a percent of the building saw the explosion saw the fireball so the fire sucked back in saw the black cavern saw the tail section is still burning down to an ash and then went down the street and I saw people jumping just very horrific went over to Hudson Street so that the fire come through didn't see the plane hit so the fire come through the other building and then I found myself on the street yelling attacked I never thought that would happen someone in front of me yelled attack on I yelled attack running back came here woman work with Carina is here now we were upstairs I went to look out the other window and she was looking out the window building came down right in front of us put two of the leashes three lesions on one dog I was so nervous got down to the street you could got out started walking up Hudson Street the other building came down nightmares for weeks we stayed here and I wanted this day I mean there was a lot to do there was a kind of cohesiveness in the neighborhood that if you didn't talk to your neighbors before you certainly did then there were just things to be aware of to keep together I mean for a while we couldn't leave here because we thought we wouldn't get back in you know you had to have an ID card you said maybe the first first three or four days we had no electricity I think for me the thing that was the most sad was to watch people jump that that was really horrifying I mean I didn't tell you how horrifying that was you saw it in nightmares yeah four weeks I'm okay now but four weeks will it in any way have an influence on the work you do people have asked me that not directly I think the interpretation of work will change people will check people's interpretation of other people's work will change and probably people will have a lot less patience with work they find frivolous I think there'll be a need for Hollywood and diversion which isn't the kind of art I'm involved with if you want even call it whatever you want to call up it'll be a big need for that but I think there'll be another respect for serious work I think serious people will take serious wears more serious and I think work that is frivolous will look privileged so I think they'll be a kind it's kind of a marker [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: KunstSpektrum

Views: 122,125

Keywords: gespräch, Charlie Rose, Talk, art, sculpture, brancusi, Richard Serra, giacometti, artist, serra, bildhauerei, paris, existentialism

Id: KEvklGKd6uE

Length: 53min 33sec (3213 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2011