The Brooklyn Rail

My first conversation with Richard Serra did not go well. It was early May 2018, and I was working as an editor at Artforum, focusing on connections between art and architecture. My phone rang one morning, and I picked it up to hear: “Julian, Richard Serra is on the line for you.”  Uh-oh. I had a feeling I knew what he was calling about.  

That month’s issue included an interview I did with Frank Gehry about museum design.  Inevitably, given the extraordinary force of the installation of The Matter of Time (1994–2005) in the monumental main gallery in the Guggenheim Bilbao—surely one of the most powerful encounters between art and architecture in our era—Richard had come up. Frank was unequivocal in his praise of Richard’s sculptures, but also admitted to feeling competitive with him. Frank believed the feeling of competition was mutual, and, on Richard’s side, possibly shaded into hostility, telling me, “He doesn’t think very highly of architecture. He told Charlie Rose I was a plumber.”  

Now, Richard was on the phone, saying, “There’s a mistake in your interview with Frank Gehry.  He said I told Charlie Rose he’s a plumber.” At the time, Artforum was justifiably proud of its fact-checking, which was very thorough. As politely as possible, I tried to explain that we had duly tracked down the interview in question, watched it, and confirmed that he had indeed made remarks to that effect. “Watch it again. I never said he was a plumber. I said he thinks like a plumber. He’s an architect, so he has to pay attention to things like plumbing.” I managed to stammer an apology and promised to look into it right away. I rewatched the interview, and of course Richard was right. Our next issue ran a contrite correction. Looking back now, the real lesson of that brief conversation was that Richard maintained a razor-sharp precision in both his language and his thought—and demanded the same from his interlocutors. At the time, though, I took it as an affirmation of his hostility toward my discipline: Richard Serra doesn’t think very highly of architecture, I decided. And he thinks I’m an idiot.

But a year or so later, I had another chance. I had been invited to write the catalogue essay for a show Richard was planning at Gagosian for the fall of 2019, and one June morning I was sitting with Richard, his wife Clara, and his studio manager Trina McKeever in their space on Duane Street. I hoped that focusing on architecture as a dynamic practice—a way of thinking about material, spatial, and structural problems; a set of protocols and techniques for producing concrete interventions into the world—might allow me to explore a different kind of relationship between architecture and Richard’s sculpture: more dialogic, even dialectical.  

I wanted to start at the beginning, so I asked him about a detail I had noticed in one of his foundational works, Verb List from 1967. Comprising two sheets of paper, each covered in two columns of writing, the piece begins as one would expect from the title, with a steady beat of infinitives: “to roll, to crease, to fold….” But halfway down the second column on the first page comes a sharp change of rhythm: “of gravity.” Why, I asked Richard, is there a noun in the verb list? “Because I build with gravity,” he replied. That was what I had suspected, and soon we were talking about any number of examples across architectural history—from arches to suspension bridges—in which gravity is similarly used as a constructive force, holding structures together and keeping them stable and upright. We moved on from there. “Architecture and the body entered my work together,” he told me, explaining how, while working on a cast piece for Jasper Johns, he had wedged a sheet of lead in the corner of the room and then realized it would stand on edge, needing only contact with the two intersecting walls for support. This was the insight that led him to create the seminal piece Strike (1969–71) and install it in 1971 at Lo Giudice Gallery, New York. Here he repeated the move, this time with a three-ton steel plate, eight feet high and twenty-four feet long, creating a sculpture that completely reconfigured the rectilinear room of the gallery even as it coopted the gallery walls for its own physical support, establishing a reciprocal exchange of structural and spatial transformation.

It wasn’t long before Richard turned the tables on me: Had I visited that building? Seen this exhibition? Read that book? What did I think? He had traveled widely, and seemed to have sought out architecture wherever he went; his insights on the subject spanned the globe and several millennia of human history. True, he had blistering critiques of any number of specific buildings and individual architects—most of them hard to argue with—but he also had many stories of productive encounters that had informed his work. I was overwhelmed by the range of his knowledge, the agility of his thinking, and above all by the intensity of his curiosity—a roving, omnivorous inquisitiveness that encompassed architecture along with anything else that might help him think about his work in new ways. Here, again, was the keen precision of my first encounter, but I no longer had any impression of a priori hostility. His intellect was far too strong to need the crutch of generalization.  

 

My essay would focus on a series of new forged steel sculptures, and when I sat down to write, I found that it was a remark Clara had made that stuck most in my mind: “When he works at the foundry, he always hears, ‘We can’t do this.’” Particularly with the forged works, this condition of impossibility seemed almost ontological, a fundamental part of the work’s impact and meaning, its relentless testing of limits and articulation of boundaries. Architecture—practically but also conceptually—is about putting things together, making something bigger out of many smaller parts. You could say that joints are the constituent element of architecture, the things that make buildings possible; Richard’s adamant insistence that these works be monolithic—always produced from a single, massive hunk of steel—meant that they were always teetering on the edge of impossible, straining each link in the chain that connects studio to forge to gallery.  

As I searched for a comparable historical example of building the impossible, trying to get some critical purchase on these forged works, I thought of a brief episode in Renaissance history. In 1586, the so-called Vatican Obelisk, originally brought from Egypt to Rome on the order of the emperor Caligula in 40 CE and erected in the Circus of Nero, was moved during the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica so that the monolith would be precisely aligned with the new building’s main entrance. Though often consigned to the footnotes of architectural history, this was an astounding feat, one of the great triumphs of early modern engineering, and it defined St. Peter’s Square as the extraordinary urban space we still know today. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s encircling colonnades were not added until almost a century later, and in a sense merely formalized boundaries of the gravitational field produced by the push and pull of monolith confronting building. 

This story of this obelisk felt acutely relevant as I tried to think through Richard’s work, but I knew it might be a stretch for a catalogue essay, where the proper subject was the work on view. I glossed it briefly in the draft I sent Richard, wary of getting lost in a tangent. When he called me a few days later, his first question was, “So how’d they do it?” After a pause, I had to admit that I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “The obelisk. How did they move it?” And suddenly we were talking pulleys and capstans, horsepower and torque, iron and stone, yield strains and bending moments. He was absolutely in his element. Richard was somewhat sensitive about documenting the process of producing and installing his sculptures, as he always wanted the in-person experience of his work to be primary. But I explained that I felt that this extraordinarily difficult, complex process was inherent to the meaning of the work, and a key part of its historical significance too—if nothing else, it was crucial to the argument I was trying to build about his work. He was willing to hear me out, and in the end, my essay included color photos from the forge in Germany where the pieces were made, as well as of the works being installed by his riggers from Budco—to my knowledge the first time such images were published with his permission—alongside a sixteenth-century engraving showing the moving of the obelisk.  

Richard’s supreme generosity, indivisible from his insatiable curiosity, was the foundation of my experience with him. I don’t doubt that at one point in his career he was as tortured as the next young artist, and he certainly never learned to suffer fools gladly, as many who knew him far better than I can attest. But by the time I met him, I think that in some intuitive sense he understood that his creativity was infinite; he was generous with his ideas and insights because he knew he would always have more and to spare.  

This generosity and open-mindedness existed in a kind of electric tension with the singular power of his work, which confronts viewers and critics alike with something real, something solid. It resists mere interpretation, and can’t be bent to fit cultural trends or academic fashions—“the logic of the work,” as he liked to say. To describe this quality as timeless doesn’t do it justice, since so much of Richard’s work is so poignantly of our time—insistently tactile and material as existence becomes ever more virtual, manifestly industrial when most industrial production has migrated far out of sight for most of his audience, trenchantly abstract when the comforts of content and imagery have been welcomed back into contemporary art. But he was also engaged with certain transcendental questions about how to make nearly impossible things, and how to place those things into cities and landscapes so as to give shape to space, to inflect encounters and interaction, and to shift the horizons of experience. It was this combination of an unending range of new possibilities and connections with an unyielding core that has sustained such a vital discourse around his work. So many of the critics and historians I admire most have produced some of their best writing about Richard’s sculptures. We have lost the privilege of confronting them as the works of a living artist, but their abiding challenge will endure.