Serra builds a textured surface with layers of oil stick, blurring the distinction between drawing and sculpture.
Richard Serra, Artaud, 2009, oil stick on paper, 200 x 200 cm (Art Bridges) © Richard Serra. Speakers: Bill Conger, Chief Curator, Peoria Riverfront Museum and Beth Harris, Smarthistory
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0:00:05.2 Beth Harris: We’re in the galleries at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. And we’re standing in front of a work by Richard Serra, who we normally think about for his sculpture, in fact, for his enormous torqued ellipses. But here we are standing in front of a drawing. We know from interviews with Serra that drawing was important for him through his entire career. It was one of the ways that he worked out his ideas.
0:00:30.3 Bill Conger: Serra has achieved so much in his career, and yet even in the realm of drawing, has essentially redefined what drawing is, how it can affect the viewer, and how it can actually physically be constructed. We know of his very early pieces flinging lead into the corners of gallery walls, that drawing for him was an act. It was a physical, timely act. And I think what I respond to most is that I am seeing the result of an action here.
0:01:06.3 Beth Harris: That’s so interesting because it’s very hard for me to reconstruct the action or series of actions that created what we’re seeing in front of us. It almost feels like molten earth.
0:01:18.4 Bill Conger: This is compressed oil stick paint, which should not even be physically possible. To apply oil to paper is one of the most cardinal of sins in the drawing realm, but here he has achieved it. And we are allowed to be engulfed by the result of this, which is this black presence that really encompasses the entirety of the paper.
0:01:44.2 Beth Harris: For me, it does much the same things that so much of his sculpture does, which is, I feel drawn to it, I feel repelled by it, I feel this in my body.
0:01:55.2 Bill Conger: Not only is there physical density and psychological density to this, which could also be seen as a whole, as much as it could be seen of a surface or an object.
0:02:07.1 Beth Harris: And there is something kind of cosmic about it. The round shape that suggests a three-dimensional sphere. The idea of a planet, of an explosion even, as we look at the edges where we see that paper coming through.
0:02:23.1 Bill Conger: It almost appears to be geographic in the way that he has allowed this paint to be built up. There are almost peaks and valleys to this surface. So we could be above something while we are somehow looking directly at it as well.
0:02:39.3 Beth Harris: Which explains my feeling of disorientation. And that might bring us to the title, which is Artaud, a reference to Antonin Artaud, an early 20th-century French writer who most famously wrote about an idea that he called the Theatre of Cruelty.
0:02:57.4 Bill Conger: We are left to connect the title and the enormity of this piece. And what we’re left with is the weight of the historical importance of Artaud and the historic importance of philosophy and literature and writing and all the things that also happen on paper.
0:03:18.9 Beth Harris: And I think there’s something about the way that Artaud wanted to transform audiences, to evoke a kind of transformation. That seems very much like what Serra’s goals often are in his work. When we think about the history of drawing, I think about delicate lines from Renaissance drawing and subtle modulations of light and dark or cross-hatching. And none of that language of drawing is here. Just like he dismantles our ideas of what sculpture is and the boundary between sculpture and architecture, here we have a dissolving of the difference between drawing and sculpture.
0:04:00.5 Bill Conger: He is continually elusive between his materiality and the end result, which really is our reaction, our physical and bodily space and reaction to his activity.
0:04:13.2 Beth Harris: It’s surprisingly powerful.
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