Sculptor Celebrated for Steel Artwork

Transcript

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RAY SUAREZ: Now, an artist who builds big and thinks big. Jeffrey Brown has that story.

JEFFREY BROWN: Some visitors are turning circles; others do the wave. Adults stare in wonder; children explore with pleasure. The monumental steel sculptures of Richard Serra are impossible to take in from any one vantage point. Instead, they seem to invite people to walk around, in, and through.

They’re on display in an exhibition celebrating 40 years of Serra’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

RICHARD SERRA, Sculptor: The piece is composed of two torqued spirals that are connected by an interior serpentine passage.

JEFFREY BROWN: For Serra, the idea of this sculpture, called “Sequence,” and all his art, is to create what he calls a “personal experience in a public space.”

RICHARD SERRA: Here the content doesn’t reside in the work. It resides in you. You’re the subject matter. Your…

JEFFREY BROWN: My experience.

RICHARD SERRA: Your experience.

JEFFREY BROWN: So stop here, because we’re walking, but it’s a little hard to convey the sense of the experience here. I mean, it is…

RICHARD SERRA: It may be disorienting.

JEFFREY BROWN: It is disorienting, because we have this leaning down on us.

RICHARD SERRA: Leaning away from you.

JEFFREY BROWN: This is leaning away, but then right over there it’s leaning back at us.

RICHARD SERRA: Then, as you take five more steps, the whole thing is going to reverse itself and it’s going to lean in a different direction completely. You become implicated in the space. And you’re implicated in the passage. And your movement is kind of coordinated to how the piece leans away from you or towards you.

JEFFREY BROWN: You think of part of the idea of the piece is my experience of walking through it?

RICHARD SERRA: Yes, here your experience spatially is the content and the subject matter.