Remembering Richard Serra (1938–2024)

I do not remember when I first met Richard Serra. But I do remember the first time I was bowled over by his work. It was in the fall of 1996 when I saw the monumental 58x64x70—the title describes the dimensions of each cube—at the Gagosian Gallery in Soho. The six massive, forged-steel cubes that made up the work were astonishing. Their weight and mass were unlike anything I had seen before. They took over the gallery and forced you to recalibrate your relationship to both the space and the forms themselves. You felt the pressure of their weight and the heaviness of their presence in a way that made you conscious of your own weight and mass.

Richard Serra. Equal. 2015

Years later I thought of 58x64x70 when I first encountered Equal at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. Like the earlier work, the eight enormous forged rectangles of steel (now on view at MoMA in Gallery 210), alter your understanding of space through their distribution of mass and weight. But this time, the cubes are stacked in pairs to create four columns. The pairs differ from each other in the way the cubes are stacked, but each pair weighs the same, 80 tons. Equal in size, equal in weight, equal in overall shape, the work is a meditation on symmetry and asymmetry, on time and space, on the way we experience weight and form. This is sculpture that operates at a heroic and timeless level.

Walking around the sculpture with Richard in 2015, it was fascinating to hear him talk about how he had to forge the steel himself because the factory he used did not believe they could achieve the tolerances he wanted. Making sculpture for Richard was always an intellectual challenge, not unlike solving a complex mathematical equation, and also a physical one—how to actually fabricate something that has no antecedents. Although he would probably have denied it, his work is also beautiful. The surface of his sculptures in Equal are so richly textured with fissures, stains, and pittings from their forging that you want to run your hands over them.

In an interview about Equal (an excerpt of which you can see below), Richard talks about the tactility of these forms and why he is interested in their physical presence. Virtual reality was not his concern. His focus—and he was one of the most focused and intense individuals I have ever met—was on how to make forms whose weight and mass compel us to think about the forces of gravity that hold forms together in the spaces around us.

He had a restless mind and continuously challenged himself to think differently. He demanded the same from his viewers, his critics, and his friends. He had a reputation of being difficult to work with, which worried me when we agreed to do his retrospective in 2007. Curated by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke, it involved dozens of staff and outside riggers and complex and stressful protocols for moving monumental steel plates through the city and the Museum. Streets had to be closed so giant 24-wheelers could come through midtown, rigs had to be set up in the galleries to hoist the plates and everyone was on edge. But Richard was the calm and centering force who made everyone who worked with him feel part of his team and deeply appreciated.

He kept a small sketchbook on him at all times, and as an idea formed in his mind, he would take the sketchbook out and begin explaining to you how a form, perhaps one that had never been made before, would look and how it could be made by bending and forging steel in new and unexpected ways. I once asked him about one of his sculptures and he made a little drawing to explain it to me, really just a couple of lines. I have had that sketch on my desk for almost two decades to remind me of Richard and our many rewarding conversations.
—Glenn D. Lowry, Director, MoMA

When Richard Serra passed, the world lost an incredible artist who will be missed by people around the world. For me it was much more personal. Richard was instrumental in getting Budco involved in the art world. The fact that other artists and galleries knew we were doing Richard’s work constantly opened doors for us, and continues to do so to this day.

I have so many great memories of time spent with Richard installing his sculpture. One great memory is from when we were installing Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at MoMA in 2007. We had so much challenging sculpture to install and my stress level was pretty high. Richard had many great qualities but patience was not necessarily one of them. We were in the process of rigging a piece up the elevator shaft and it may not have been going as well or as quickly as we both would have liked, and Richard started questioning me. I guess I snapped at him a little so he snapped right back. We went back and forth a few times until someone from MoMA said, while laughing, that we were like a married couple. Richard and I both started laughing and we moved on. Of course that show was a huge success and we were proud to be part of it.

Another great memory is of our studio meetings to discuss new sculpture. I would often get called into Richard’s studio, where he would have a model of a potential new sculpture to show me. I would always start out by saying how much I liked it, because what was not to like? He would immediately respond by saying, “Can you move it?” Sometimes I would say, “Richard, this is really too big.” Maybe it was too high or too wide and I would ask if he could maybe make it six inches lower or not as wide or not as heavy and he would always, without fail say, “NO! You will figure it out,” smile, and walk away. He was right. We always figured it out. The excitement of being one of the first to see a potential new sculpture, or occasionally seeing one that never actually became a reality, is a privilege very few had.

I will miss these studio meetings. I will miss the challenges of new sculpture. I will miss our interaction on installations and our conversations on long business trips. But most of all, I will miss a great friend.
—Joe Vilardi, Budco Enterprises

Installation view of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, MoMA, June 3–September 24, 2007

Richard Serra. Verb List. 1967

In the last few years, a generation of sculptors—who had redefined what it meant to be artist and viewer in the 1960s—has entered the history books. Through their work, they devised new ways of making and of experiencing art. They demonstrated that art could weigh thousands of pounds or be as light as a feather, stretch for miles or fit in the palm of your hand. The world became their studio, and they made art wherever they were invited, responding to specific sites and contexts, directly engaging with the public.

When Richard Serra died, I turned to Verb List, a simple list of words that he had neatly arranged on two sheets of paper some 60 years ago. I wanted to go back to where it all began, when art was just a thought, an energy about to be unleashed. While of paramount importance in the literature devoted to his work, Serra didn’t think of Verb List as art. To the collector Wynn Kramarsky, who inquired about whether the artist would cede it to MoMA, he replied that he couldn’t sell something that had no value—so he gave it to the Museum in Wynn’s honor.

Verb List is not art, not even process art. It’s pure process: to roll / to crease / to fold / to store / to bend / to shorten / to twist / to dapple / to crumble… Energy flowing through the lines. The world is yours to make—direct, immediate, formidable. Serra noted that he used these words as “a guidepost of possibilities,” “applying various activities to unspecified materials.” He lifted a large rectangular piece of vulcanized rubber on its side, creating an ever-lasting undulating curve (To Lift, 1967). The following year, he splashed molten lead at the juncture of a wall and the floor, letting the material cast itself as it cooled down (Splashing, 1968).

What remains of an action? Traces, marks, residues, but also the thought that it can happen again. While Serra is gone, our desire to engage with the processes he put in motion persists. And the last line of Verb List shows us the way: to continue.
—Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints

So heralded are Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses today that it’s hard to imagine how game-changing they were when first presented, almost three decades ago, in a skylit garage—a former taxi repair shop—on Manhattan’s far west side. The trio of massive sculptures were closely clustered. As visitors navigated their undulating, morphing forms, they leaned and canted unpredictably. Occasionally, this kinetic unspooling was interrupted by lines burnished into the Cor-Ten steel surfaces, marks that recorded the pressure of an industrial roller as it bent each customized plate to the required curvature. That 1997 show kickstarted the second phase in a brilliant career. The first was shaped and governed by the ambit of 1960s-’70s artistic vanguards; this would be largely self-directed.

When Serra first approached Michael Govan and me, then director and curator at Dia Center for the Arts [now Dia Art Foundation], with a proposal to show these yet-to-be-realized sculptures, his conviction and resolution were palpable. The enormity of the gambit—the daunting challenge of figuring out how they could be fabricated since there was no precedent in commercial steel production—doesn’t figure in my recollections of our preliminary discussions. We were immediately immersed in the logistics of realizing the project, itself no small undertaking given the resources that would be needed to transport the works into the city and install them in a newly renovated gallery.

Frank Gehry, a close friend, offered Serra the hi-tech CATIA software system that fueled the architect’s formally related designs, but Serra found no leads in computer-based programs. Rather, he improvised with materials to hand. After attaching elliptically shaped pieces of wood to each end of a dowel, he rolled the makeshift device across a sheet of lead and then cut out the irregular pliable plane defined by the rotating oval “wheels.” When trimmed and wrapped around the apparatus, it offered a suggestive template for working at scale.

Serra’s recourse to a humble manual tool might seem anomalous within a practice that, even early in his career, seldom evidenced traces of the authorial maker. Yet it chimes with a mode of what I think of as embodied thinking—a way of moving a problem forward—that habitually guided our meetings in the coming months. Invariably, Richard arrived with a black sketchbook tucked under his arm. Whenever something needed clarifying, he’d make a rapid sketch, annotating and amplifying the point as he drew. The jerry-rigged device, like the indispensable notebook, was an affordance for manifesting the unsayable, for limning a burgeoning insight.

In the tributes that have poured forth since his death on March 26, much is rightly made of his fortitude, his seemingly unshakeable determination in pursuit of his vision. Those qualities were fully put to the test when it came to contracting a fabricator who not only believed that the torqued sculptures could be built but who was willing to assume the substantial risks, financial and otherwise, integral to their making. However, what now resonates for me from our initial encounters was his readiness to take matters (literally, on occasion) into his own hands. In ways unprecedented in his practice, the Torqued Ellipses center the viewer’s experience in an active physical engagement in real time. To the investiture of affect with lofty claims, Richard remained characteristically agnostic. How you make that impactful bodily-based encounter work on your behalf is up to you.
—Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art, and co-curator, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years

Installation view of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, MoMA, June 3–September 24, 2007

Richard Serra. Videy Drawing XIX. 1991

Richard Serra. Delineator. 1974–75

One of the many remarkable works by Richard Serra in MoMA’s collection, Delineator (1974–75) positions two one-inch-thick planes of hot-rolled steel, each 10 × 26 feet, above and below each other, at right angles, on the ceiling and floor of a room. The work’s title points out that the sculpture “delineates” the volume of the room it occupies. True enough, as are Serra’s lucid comments about it for visitors to the 2007 retrospective here at MoMA. Serra consistently spoke about his work—and everything else—in perfectly clear terms. The materials, always from the realms of industry and construction. The weight of the individual elements, their dimensions and proportions. The temperatures of the forges in which they were produced. That proclivity reflects Serra’s place in the generation of the late 1960s; art was not the stuff of lofty mystification, but of democratic, straightforward directness.

This meant, however, that a lot was left unsaid. What about the marvel of invisible rigging affixing a five-ton plate of steel across the ceiling as if it were a sheet of paper? What about the crazy bravery, or faith, required to enter the work and stand upon the floor plate and beneath the ceiling plate? What about the absolutely non-linear psychophysical responses elicited by placing oneself in the work and staying there? Over the course of the half-century since Delineator was made, such rare sensations as wonder and amazement became more and more part of the sometimes overpowering experience of Serra’s art. Yet he left such talk—of a secular sublime, for example—largely to others, while he maintained a position that was firmly, intensely, and exactingly grounded.

At MoMA, during the past two decades, Serra was acutely focused on forming the best possible representation of his work in the Museum’s collection. He facilitated this by making generous gifts, or, for example, by replacing a sculpture that had been remade to accommodate a particular architectural situation with its original, authentic version. This close attention to his eventual legacy never struck me as egotistical; rather, it was clear-eyed, responsible, and, like everything he did, immensely intelligent. Obviously, the demands that much of Serra’s work places on a museum building and its infrastructure are uniquely great. But, as Serra would say, it is not the artists’ job to make art that fits the museums they’re given. Instead as museum workers it is our role and our privilege, from one generation to the next, to follow where the artist leads.
—Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture

Richard Serra. Television Delivers People. 1973

Richard Serra began making films and videos almost at the same time as his sculptures, and this work has been at The Museum of Modern Art since 1985. Initially circulated through the Department of Film’s Circulating Film Library, and now through the film loan program.

While his 16mm titles were preserved through analog processes in the early 2000s, it wasn’t until 2017–18 that our media conservators began the digitization of all his titles. With Serra’s generous support, the Museum has been able to scan all original materials at 4k resolution and digitize his video works. His studio and MoMA remain committed to screening the films on film when requested and therefore are continuously working with labs and other cultural institutions to make new 16mm prints, which can be challenging at this particular time in celluloid history.

His collection of films resides at MoMA’s Film Preservation Center, along with work by many of his contemporaries who influenced his curiosity about the film and video medium, including Joan Jonas, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow.
—Katie Trainor, Film Collection Manager, Department of Film

Richard Serra, Clara Weyergraf. Steelmill/Stahlwerk. 1979

Richard Serra produced 18 total film and video works, and was one of a handful of artists to truly embrace video as a medium at a very early stage, with two masterpieces produced in quick succession in the mid 1970s: Boomerang and Television Delivers People. Both were produced at a television station in Amarillo, Texas (Richard was in town helping Nancy Holt and Tony Shafrazi complete Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp), and thankfully were recorded onto 2" tape, which was only available to broadcasters at the time. After the Castelli/Sonnabend gallery’s distribution arm folded in the early 1980s, MoMA cared for and distributed this material through its prodigious Circulating Film Library throughout the years, and the Museum has frequently migrated the video works to new analog and digital formats, preserving the film on celluloid as well as scanning them to digital files so they can be experienced anew on modern displays.

While reviewing a digital scan of his film Steelmill/Stahlwerk, Richard mentioned to me that one scene should evoke a particular “spooky, Frankenstein-y aesthetic,” and it was this comment that rearranged my conception of the film that I thought was primarily about the operation of a German steel mill. While I was aware of the humor that infused a lot of his film and video work, it was also this muted, but still very much present, use of classical Hollywood tropes that were sprinkled throughout.

A recent example is the collaboration with Joan Jonas, Anxious Automation. Thanks to this preservation work, a digital transfer from the original half-inch Portapak recording is now on view in the installation Organic Honey, in Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning. The conservation and preservation of his work is still ongoing, but Richard’s commitment to distributing these works throughout the years has ensured that this truly groundbreaking work in both film and video can be seen for future generations.
—Peter Oleksik, Media Conservator

In honor of Richard Serra’s life, we’ve compiled videos from our archive that feature the installation of his work and his discussion of it.