Hal Foster in Sidecar:
Richard Serra, who died in March of this year at the age of eighty-five, sought out the resistance of other voices, in part to clarify his own. The composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich performed that role early on, as did the artist Robert Smithson. Critics and curators like Rosalind Krauss, David Sylvester and Kirk Varnedoe stepped up later, and for six decades his wife Clara Serra was his essential interlocutor. I, too, was lucky enough to be in dialogue with Serra for many years; it was one of the great adventures of my life as a critic. At times, though, it was harrowing; my private title for our 2018 book Conversations about Sculpture was ‘Godzilla Meets Bambi.’ But Serra was no monster, and I learned not to shy away from his challenges. Our book works, to the extent that it does, because we agree just enough so that, when we disagree, the differences count.
One issue we debated is the difference between site and context. ‘Might you be so inside your language,’ I asked Serra, ‘so attuned to its nuances, that you’re not alert enough to conditions that are already there, embedded in the context – conditions that are social, economic, and political?’
‘If you go into a community to make a work,’ he replied, ‘and you try to follow the demands of the local people, which are never homogeneous anyway, you end up serving their interests more than your own. And usually their interests are transitory . . . So you have to hold fast to your work.’
More here.
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