Richard Serra’s “Shift” (1970) in King City, Ontario (image courtesy Jason Paris’s Flickr page)
There are many illuminating moment’s in Hal Foster’s Conversations about Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2018) with Richard Serra, including the discussion of the infamous “Tilted Arc” sculpture, Serra’s formative years as he battled with Minimalism and Conceptual Art, his idea’s around site-specific art, and the role of text and image in his oeuvre.
The podcast begins with Serra’s own voice from a SFMOMA clip that asks the question, “Why Make Art?” and continues with a little adventure to see the artist’s first land artwork, “Shift” (1970), in King City, Ontario. Finally, I sit down with Foster, who talks about his own relationship with an artist who has reinvented himself a few times in his career.
This and more in the current episode of our weekly Art Movements podcast.
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This is a great service. It reminds me of the kind of content the BBC used to put out on radio 3 back in the 70’s – late 80’s. You had in depth radio documentaries on serious art related subjects, and because the medium of radio couldn’t fall back on slo mo pretty picture shots of related imagery you tended to get 30 minutes or so of information – modern visually based documentaries are plagued by this, you usually get maybe 10 minutes of spoken information in an 50 minute slot! So kudos to Hyperallergic for restoring this kind of service!
Like the interviewer, back at the time I dismissed Serra as “some guy doing typical macho big heavy sculpture” and totally missed out the conceptual side of his work. Strange of me because I love Walter De Maria. This podcast brought me up to speed and I will probably track down the book because Serra’s connection with Glass and that whole minimalist scene is of deep interest and importance to me.
I would love a podcast on James Acord – The Nuclear Sculptor. This sadly overlooked artist gave a stupendous lecture (more of a performance really) on his work back in the 1990’s at Chelsea Art School in London when I was a student there. The man and his work were remarkable and he received a standing ovation from a full lecture auditorium, a rare thing indeed for an unknown visiting artist.