The Brooklyn Rail

Richard Serra and I were contemporaries and friends in the late 1960s, familiar with each other’s work in sculpture and dance. Our mutual interest in film was particularly apparent in our early ventures into making short films. I can best account for the latter in a quote from a recent article by Kyle Bukhari titled “Movements of Media in Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) and Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968)”:

The historical aspect is key in identifying both Hand Movie and Hand Catching Lead as hybrid forms, cases where the artists have combined their respective artistic media with the new medium of film. In order to understand what Rainer is doing with her hand as an instance of the dance medium, and what Serra is doing as occurring within the plastic arts, it is necessary to have followed the historical development of their respective media, and how they chose to respond to its conventions at that particular moment in time. For Rainer, it was a concern with the materiality of the body and functional, self-contained movements that resisted phrasing, transitions, or overt theatricality. For Serra it was a concern with the way materials interacted with the process of art-making, and how this became visible in residual forms that purposely defied medium-specific definitions.