The Brooklyn Rail

To draw.

Richard Serra drew. His drawings were large and often monumental works on paper, known as his presentation drawings. When they hang on the wall, they not only take up space but define it with an extraordinary strength that comes from his theoretically expansive gestures and the vigorous processes he took to create them. He pushed and pulled bricks of paintstick against walls, and after processing black pigment through a meat grinder, he would press and splatter the substance against heavy supports. Sometimes, he forcefully slammed his boot into the viscous surface, smashing the substance deeper into the fibers. Drawing has never been the same.

Yet there was another side to this bravado. He also drew as an intimate, daily, and cerebral exercise, a way to mark time and understand what he saw and felt, and he drew all of the time. Roni Horn’s understanding of drawing comes to mind. She describes the activity as so biologically rooted in her existence and her body as an artist that it just happens, stating, “When I breathe, I draw.” It is not the other way around.

Over the weeks we were installing his 2012 drawing retrospective at the Menil Collection in Houston, he always had a sketchbook under his arm. He would pull it out and, with a thick black line, show the art handlers how the tilt of paintstick-covered canvas should be stapled to the wall. He drew the oak trees out the window, he drew me, he drew the lines of the gallery’s architecture. We would then go to Texas Art Supply to buy more sketchbooks. When Serra was not drawing, when the activity on the floor paused for a coffee break, he would go to the museum library and look at the lines drawn by others. During this time, he attempted to go through Christian Zervos’s thirty-three-volume catalogue of the work of Pablo Picasso.

Some scholars and curators have discussed Serra’s incessant drawing as a way of keeping his hands busy. As a sculptor of big objects—monumental and obdurate—he worked in industrial fabrication spaces and hot factories that far exceeded the need for an artist to participate in physical making. But drawing, for him, was much more. It was his way of being in the world. It was the means to process the moment that his line, the pressure of his hand, came into contact with a sheet of paper. This adamant demonstration I witnessed redefined my understanding of the power, primacy, and deeply humanist implications of making a mark. He showed me that drawing, the most fundamental act of making art, can stand against the disintegration of the idea of presence in a virtual moment. His drawings, like his sculptures that forcefully remind you to be in your body and have an experience IRL, remain prophetic and urgent.