THE COLLECTION
Richard Serra (American, born 1939)
One Ton Prop (House of Cards)
- Date:
- 1969 (refabricated 1986)
- Medium:
- Lead antimony, four plates
- Dimensions:
- each 48 x 48 x 1" (122 x 122 x 2.5 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Gift of the Grinstein Family
- MoMA Number:
- 286.1986.a-d
- Copyright:
- © 2013 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years
, June 3–September 24, 2007Artist, Richard Serra: I had built, I think, six or seven large lead pieces, all dealing with the relationship of a pole and a plate to the wall. But I got very dissatisfied with the wall pieces that somehow they were still dealing with some sort of pictorial convention. And I wanted to move the pieces out onto the floor.
And so we decided to take four lead plates and just lean them up like a house of cards. And that piece weighed about a ton: it was called One Ton Prop. And that was the beginning of a whole series of pieces dealing with basic tectonics of building. I nicknamed it House of Cards.
Once you understand how the House of Cards is being held in terms of one edge leaning against the other holding up all four plates then you can think, what if you took these plates apart? Could you hold all four of them up simply with a roll overhead?
If you are interested in reproducing images from The Museum of Modern Art web site, please visit the Image Permissions page (www.moma.org/permissions). For additional information about using content from MoMA.org, please visit About this Site (www.moma.org/site).
© Copyright 2011 The Museum of Modern Art