"I think working in steel mills gave me a whole notion
of how to use steel in a way that it hadn't been used before."
"The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's
like coming home for me. I mean, I grew up here and you
never forget about the light here, you never forget about
the smell here, you never forget about these bridges."
"I'm more interested in the poetics, the vastness of
the seas say, than I am of the desert. And I'm more interested
in the ocean as a way of thinking about space than I am
about urbanness. I'm interested in the largeness of the
ocean..."
Could you tell us about being
here in San Francisco, what it means to you?
SERRA:
I started working for Bethlehem
Steel when I was about 16 during the summers. And then I worked
for Ryerson Steel when I was 17 and went back to Bethlehem
Steel when I was 18. And I worked in the steel mills in the
Bay Area here in order to pay my way through college. I think
working in steel mills gave me a whole notion of how to use
steel in a way that it hadn't been used before. There was
a building going up here that's still here now, the Crown
Zellerbach building. It was one of the first riveted buildings,
a high-rise built in San Francisco. But I was around rigging
of steel and the fabricating of steel in order to make money
to go through school. It's the quickest way to make the most
amount of money for the hardest amount of labor in the shortest
period of time. So there were a lot of kids who went there
and worked their way through school that way. And I didn't
think I was going to come back to it until after graduate
school at Yale, and then I realized that I knew about how
to deal with steel, and I had a feeling for it, and I could
use it in a way that it hadn't been used in sculpture up to
that point. So I had a certain freedom to move right in to
it, and use it in ways that the Industrial Revolution had
used it.
The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming
home for me. I mean, I grew up here and you never forget about
the light here, you never forget about the smell here, you
never forget about these bridges. And you can travel all over
the world, and I certainly don't live here any longer, I haven't
lived here for decades, but this is truly one of the most
beautiful cities I've ever been to. And I think if you come
from here, you have an advantage going to the East Coast because
you're not encumbered by a great deal of history, so you don't
have the weight of Europe on your shoulders, nor the weight
of the history of New York on your shoulders. You have the
freedom to move from your own source or your own direction,
or to discard things immediately, where you don't feel trapped
by heavy convention, if you come from the West—particularly
San Francisco—it looks west, it doesn't look east.
And mainly when I was growing up here, the people who were
the most influential were jazz musicians. Charles Mingus was
here at the time. And I remember when I was about 16 or 17
I went into the Jazz Workshop and had a fake ID, and sat down
and had a drink. And they were having a set in the afternoon.
And there was a fan on; it was really loud, and Mingus was
going through a set and they were recording, and the bartender
turned the fan off and Mingus had an apoplectic fit—he just
went completely crazy. He jumped over the bar and he practically
throttled the guy. And he said, "That fan was one of my instruments."
And it made me think, as someone who wanted to be an artist,
that you had to pay attention all the time to everything that
was going on, because everything was potential use if you
could see its potential. I think later John Cage made that
more clear to a lot of artists. But I was very, very young
at the time and the
Beat generation was starting. But I was more interested,
not in the Beats, but in the Jazz Workshop here. Blacks were
a big, big influence on me when I was growing up in San Francisco.
ART:21:
Tell me about the ocean as a
metaphor
for you, if it is.
SERRA:
I think that it's an easy metaphor
for me to use, to say that, and it's a little simplistic.
But the fact of the matter is that I'm more interested in
the poetics, the vastness of the seas say, than I am of the
desert. And I'm more interested in the ocean as a way of thinking
about space than I am about urbanness. I'm interested in the
largeness of the ocean, I'm interested in the Aurora Borealic
feeling of the ocean. I'm interested in the sensibility of
the ocean, and I'm interested in ships. But I'm not interested
in ships to make sculptures that look like ships. I mean,
that's way too simplistic. 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.
I've never lived away from the sea, so it's really part of
what I look to and it's part of what nourishes me; without
sounding cornball about it, it's something I've always been
around.
ART:21:
Could you talk a little about
"Switch," a newer work that seems related to the "Torqued
Ellipses?"
SERRA:
"Switch" is strange in that,
after the "Torqued Ellipses," I had done pieces that were
involved with conical sections. "Intersections" is a conical
section, "Ocean" is a conical section, "Call Me Ishmael" is
a conical section. And I thought that there was still something
to work out in the cones in relation to the space that had
evolved with the "Torqued Ellipses." If you take a conical
section, there's only three things you can do with it. You
can either make it open, or, if you take exactly the same
module, you can close it, or you can make it parallel. Parallel
this way or that way. And I decided to use those three permutations
in a work and turn the inside outside. And what happens in
that piece is when you go to the center of it, the center's
involved with all convex shapes. So you're walking into the
center, and you're in a triangulation of three convex plates.
You've never found yourself probably confronting three convex
plates unless you're on the outside of something. So the inside
of that piece has the feeling of being outside, and yet you've
walked through the inside of three pathways on the outside
of the inside, and then on the outside of that there's another
outside.
So the whole play between which way—Alice In Wonderland,
Hansel and Gretel, or whatever—becomes part of that piece.
And what's interesting about that piece for me, it has no
ending and no beginning. There's no main access. It doesn't
say "begin here," or "begin there," or "leave here," or "exit
there." There are nine openings that you can go into, so it's
nondirectional in that sense. And it's nonlinear in that sense.
It's open to any kind of discourse that you want in terms
of walking and looking and involvement. And it gives you certain
feedback, psychological or otherwise, that are different in
kind. And I've watched people actually go in there and play
with the piece, in different ways. So it gives you a different
kind of charge, emphatically to your body. It gives you a
different kind of empathy in relation to the sensibility of
what it engenders.
Having gone back to an early series of cones and having done
the ellipses, I didn't know that the piece was going to be
as complex as it ended up being. You can't know that from
a model. So after we built the piece I was actually surprised
that the piece sustained my involvement as long as it has.
Every day I've been back in New York while the piece was up
I've gone to see the piece. And it continually makes me think
about other possibilities. So that piece still holds a lot
of potential for me. I don't know how that's going to spill
out. I don't know what kinds of works are going to come out
of it, but there's still a kind of wonder in that piece. That
piece hasn't reached closure for me. Neither has this one—"Charlie
Brown." But that piece particularly hasn't. And I thought
that it was probably going to be the last conical section
piece I dealt with, and it's not, I'm sure it's not.
ART:21:
Are you concerned at all about
the viewer?
SERRA:
I think that if you make enough
pieces that are leaning, or if you deal with enough concave
and convex sections, you understand that you have a different
psychological relationship to the lean. Like, if you lean
something an inch to a foot, that means at twelve feet it's
leaning a foot, or if you lean something two inches to a foot,
it's very, very different in terms of how it affects your
body. What you try to do or what I try to do is deal with
the logic of the problem without making the lean an affectation.
Certainly you want an effect, but you don't want it to make
an affectation. You don't want to get into falsely dramatizing
a situation. You don't want to throw fish to the whatever
in order to get an immediate feedback. You don't want the
kind of "wow" effect. Basically, what you really want to do
is try to engage the viewer's body relation to his thinking
and walking and looking, without being overly heavy-handed
about it. But you want to be able to engage the viewer nevertheless.
So if you've built enough pieces you learn eventually what
will give yourself release, what will give the viewer release.
And you can't think about who the other viewer is. What you
have to do is think of yourself. When something's overly claustrophobic,
or when something's overly threatening, when something allows
you to walk into a passage and then feel a release—those
things you learn only through the doing and only through the
buildings of forms. But I don't think of any particular viewer
in mind other than myself.
