Richard Serra in "Place" - Season 1 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

RICHARD SERRA: For the most part, work comes out of work in terms of how I develop an idea. I never begin with an image and I never begin with a drawing. I usually begin with a model. It’s a way of working from the inside out.

I think I’m probably building upward of 12 to 15 pieces right now, in various stages— I’m building a piece in St. Louis, I’m building a piece in Woodside, California, I’m building a piece in Sinagpore, I’m building a piece in Qatar, I’m building a piece in New Zealand— I’m building quite a lot of work right now.

I never think in terms of metaphor, nor do I think in terms of what the image is going to look like beforehand, What concerns me is the relationship of the elements that I happen to find interesting at that point. And if I think I can invent a new way of looking at those elements,

or make the possibility of walking in and through and around a piece something that startles me, then I think that there’s a possibility to proceed. With “Charlie Brown” in particular, the problem was how to bend a shape as it elevated that leaned away from you and turned…. and that came out of having worked with the “Ellipses” prior.

I was surprised in that people who had absolutely no information about sculpture were able to enter into these pieces and find a certain amount of engagement with the sculpture in ways that they probably hadn’t before. The experience for a lot of them was fulfilling because, in some sense, it was startling, because it was new, because they couldn’t locate themselves.

It had nothing to do with architecture, it had nothing to do with landscape, it had nothing to do with buildings or mountains or ravines, or anything that they could have a touchstone to.