Installations
Title: Richard Serra
Essay by Lynne Cooke
Concerns quintessentially sculptural have engaged Richard Serra for more than thirty years, although as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s he was strongly affected by the work of a number of contemporary dancers, above all Yvonne Rainer. Such work prompted him to consider "ways of relating movement to material and space," he has explained, in that it allowed him "to think about sculpture in an open and extended field in a way that is precluded when dealing with sculpture as an autonomous object. . . . I found very important the idea of the body passing through space, and the body's movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement."1 A visit to a number of Zen gardens in Kyoto while on a trip to Japan in 1970 reinforced Serra's growing preoccupation with work that was defined through the processes of its reception. There he discovered that "your vision is peripatetic and not reduced to framing an image. It includes and is dependent upon memory and anticipation. . . . The relationship of time, space, walking, and looking—particularly in arcs and circles—constitutes the only way you can see certain Japanese gardens." more