The Brooklyn Rail

Michael Auping: What do we mean by “site specific”? Or maybe I should ask what is the difference between something site-specific and something perfectly placed?

Richard Serra: Intention, the intentions of the artist. What do you mean by “perfectly placed”?

Auping: I guess I mean when something is precisely fitted into a space.

Serra: If your intention is to just fit something, then you are starting with the idea of being a secondary element in the context. My intention is to have my sculpture be a primary element or at least an equal element, not something that is just fitted into a situation in a decorative way. I want my work to have the same force as the space or building that it is in dialogue with.

Auping: Do you see yourself competing with the building or site?

Serra: No, not necessarily. However, when you make a strong work of art in response to a space, people usually describe it as confrontational. I learned that the hard way with Titled Arc. I designed that piece specifically for that plaza—its length, its height, its curvature… It was never meant to be confrontational. It was meant to work with the space, to anchor it and animate it.

Auping: And yet people felt intimidated by it or its material?

Serra: I don’t think the people that walked that space were intimidated by it. I think the politicians were. But that is another story and we don’t need to go over that again.

Auping: I bring up site specificity with you because I see you and Carl Andre and Buren as artists who elevated site specificity to a high level. You made it a contemporary art form.

Serra: Site specificity is a technique. I don’t know that it is an art form. The art is something deeper. Site specifics can be part of the art, and can help shape it, but it’s not the art. I think it’s how you execute it that makes it art. I don’t know how Andre or Buren feel about it, but that’s how I feel about it. The art is not just responding to a specific place. It’s inventing things within it. It’s creating your own context within a given context. One plus one equals three, or four, if you’re lucky.

Auping: So your site specificity is a collaboration with architecture.

Serra: Yes. But it’s not all about architecture. It’s not all about pitting yourself against architecture. I could argue that there is a site specifics to spatial recognition. In other words trying to discover the circuitry of a given space, or piece of land, rather than a building. And by circuitry, I don’t mean a grid. That’s a static way of seeing. Some of my most pure site-specific pieces were made by walking the land, feeling its topography with my feet.

Auping: Like the Pulitzer piece?

Serra: Exactly. That was made by walking the site many times. The size and placement of the steel was all in direct response to walking that topography. It wasn’t about putting a piece of sculpture on a piece of land.

Auping: Did you think of that early piece as a form of Earth Art? I never did. Maybe because it wasn’t done in New Mexico or Nevada. For some reason, Earth Art had to be way out there, a place that screamed “earth.”

Serra: Earth Art let us do things we couldn’t do in a studio or gallery in the city. That was important. But it eventually became a marketing tool. A lot of artists stopped actually experiencing the land. They were just using it as a platform. Today, these things could have been done in a big mega white cube. In comparison to that, the Pulitzer piece wasn’t about Earth Art. It was about a specific site that had an unusual topography and it inspired me.

Endnote

1. Interview recorded in Fort Worth, September 12, 2002. Originally published as “Untitled, Site Specifics” in Michael Auping, 40 Years: Just Talking About Art, Prestel (February 6, 2018).