The Brooklyn Rail

In the fall of 1990, I began my first year in the MFA Sculpture program at Yale University School of Art. I was twenty-four years old. Richard Serra was invited to be a visiting artist that year and everyone in the sculpture program signed up for a visit, which meant we each only had fifteen minutes with Richard. I didn’t know much about Serra’s work other than the destruction of his sculpture Tilted Arc (1981) in 1989. In my first semester at Yale, I was cutting up logs, sawing joints into the ends and reconfiguring the logs into a new tree form. In this sculpture, it took the form of a fifteen-foot spiral that almost touched the studio ceiling. It was made of hemlock pine, around three feet at the base of the tree, so it was heavy. I would guess the sculpture weighed about four hundred pounds. I was afraid the sculpture couldn’t support its own weight, so I installed a post to support the center of the sculpture. When Richard Serra entered my studio, he immediately said, “Chris, what’s the support beam for?” I said, “It’s holding it up, I’m afraid it can’t hold the weight.” He said, “Pull it out!” I looked at him and said, “I can’t, I think it will collapse.” And he said, “Come on!” So we both grabbed the support pole at the bottom and yanked it out and the whole piece slowly sunk and settled into place. Serra looked at me and said, “Say what you mean. Mean what you say,” and then he was gone. I am grateful for my few minutes spent with Richard Serra.