SERRA, AND THE WORK THAT EXISTS WITH ITS SITE

On what one sculptor preserved in a century that surrendered to the image.

Richard Serra's sculpture, Equal
at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

Richard Serra produced works that refuse to exist fully within a photograph. He sustained this approach for sixty years.

The story Richard Serra left to infinity, more than two years after his passing, began in the late 1960s, when he was a young artist in New York, pouring molten lead into the corners where gallery walls met the floor. The mature works that emerged years later took place in Qatar, Bilbao, and Dia, each already weighing hundreds of tons.

Richard Serra's sculpture East-West/West-East (2014) in Qatar.
Photo by Nelson Garrido

These sculptures consisted of steel plates bent or curved at the mill. Each weighed between thirty and fifty tons and stood by their own mass, all without the use of welding or bolts between the plates in any of his works. What they relied on was their pre-calculated geometry and the feasibility of the ground beneath them to carry that weight. His works were fundamentally built on “balance.”

Artist Richard Serra stands within one of his Torqued Ellipses sculptures

From here, another conclusion emerges. A work that exists in relation to its site cannot be fully conveyed through a photograph. A photograph records only the surface and the form, while the weight of the sculpture, the distance covered while approaching it, or the acoustic shift within its environment remain outside of it. A photograph and a sculpture are two different things. Which one of them is the work itself remains a matter of discussion.

Serra maintained this approach for sixty years. Meanwhile, the world moved in a different direction. Paintings began to be experienced mostly through their photographs. Buildings became known through images before they were constructed and remembered through images after they were built. Live events began to transform into images even while they were still happening. Serra’s works remained outside of this process, as their mode of existence did not allow otherwise.

The Tilted Arc case is the most well-known example of this approach. Installed in 1981 at Federal Plaza in New York, the steel structure divided the space into two. It was perceived as obstructive by many who passed through it daily. Petitions were collected. Following the hearings in 1985, a decision was made to relocate the work. Serra objected, but he lost the case. On the night of March 15, 1989, the work was dismantled and removed to storage.

View of Federal Plaza with Tilted Arc seen from the side
Photograph by Susan Swider, Courtesy of Richard Serra

According to Serra, what was taken into storage was not the work. The moment it was detached from its site, the work had already ceased to exist for him. What remained could only be described as a pile of material that once constituted it.

Seen from this perspective, what appears to be a debate about public space carries, at a deeper level, a more fragmented ontological discussion tied to the nature of the artwork itself. If a work was brought into existence by its maker to be experienced in relation to a specific site, then, according to Serra, once it is removed from that site, it is no longer the same work.

Serra continued this approach in his later works. Pieces such as The Matter of Time in Bilbao and East-West / West-East in Qatar were designed in relation to their locations and exist together with those sites.

A view of Richard Serra's monumental steel sculpture, 
The Matter of Time

These works cannot be grasped in a single glance and instead require movement within and around them. Works defined by their belonging to specific places are, for some, seen as a controlling approach rather than a liberating one for the viewer’s experience, while others argue that every decision, from the moment an idea forms in the mind to the way it reaches its audience, belongs to the artist’s experience.

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