Richard Serra Quotes

I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.

It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs ... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.

The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming home for me.

The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging.

And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public.

Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.

I think you always have to find where the boundary is in relation to the context in order to be able to kind of articulate how you want the space to interact with the viewer.

Now when you have administrators deciding what sexuality is, and what's a taboo and what's not in terms of content, you got guys, like, Trent Lott who equates homosexuality with a disease.

I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here.

But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape.

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

Your eye is a muscle, you have to keep it in shape and the more you draw, the more you see.

I thought Out of Action was better as a catalogue than the honeycomb because the honeycomb was like walking into one compartment and then another compartment.

Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.

Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.

Time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with, not only sight and boundary but how one walks through a piece and what one feels and registers in terms of one's own body in relation to another body.

What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.

But I don't think of any particular viewer in mind other than myself.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.