where the people arent

Notes on Drawing 04may07

Richard Serra

(https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/equal.jpg)

When I was twenty, I traveled to Mexico City via Guadalajara to see the murals of Diego Rivera,
Orozco and Siqueiros. After having particularly studied Orozcos murals in the Hospicio Cabanas
in Guadalajara and in the courtyard of the Colegio Grande in Mexico City, I was convinced that
the Mexican muralists, in grappling with the problem of architectural space and structure, were
more advanced than their contemporary North American painters. The context was the issue, not
the stretcher.
I started the black canvas drawings after I completed Strike (1969-1971, plate 37) and Circuit (1972,
plate 67). For Strike I placed a steel plate, measuring 8 x 24, into the corner of the room, so that the
plate is held by the corner, dividing the room into two equal juxtaposed spaces. As one walks
around the work, it is perceived as plane-line-plane. For
Circuit I placed four plates into the four corners of a square room. The edges of the plates,
functioning as lines, and the spacial quadrants, resulting from the placement of the plates,
converge towards a central core. The open square of the central core becomes the perceptual
intersection of lines, planes and volumes, creating the simultaneity of a centrifugal
and centripetal effect. After Strike and Circuit I became involved with sculpturally structuring a
given context and thereby redefining it.

This preoccupation with site and context was paralleled in drawing, in that my drawings began to
take on a place within the space of the wall. I did not want to accept architectural space as a
limiting container. I wanted it to be understood as a site in which to establish and structure
disjunctive, contradictory spaces. By the nature of their weight, shape, loca tion, flatness and
delineation along their edges, the black canvases enabled me to define spaces within a given
architectural enclosure.
The weight of a drawing derives not only from the number of layers of paintstick but mainly from
the particular shape of the drawing. It is obvious-from Mantegnas Christ to Cezannes apples-that
shapes can imply weight, mass and volume. A square carries more weight-gravitationally-than a
rectangle: a trapezoid, more than a diamond. A triangle is a light, very quick shape.
The only way to hold a weight within the confines of a given space is by defining the shape of the
drawing in direct relation to the floor, wall, corner or ceiling of the space. In so doing, a space or
place can be located within the architectural container that differs in character from the
architectural intention. The black canvas installations are successful when they
achieve the displacement of the architecture on the flat surface. All illusionistic strategies must be
avoided. The black shapes, in functioning as weights in relation to a given architectural volume,
create spaces and places within this volume and also create a disjunctive experience of the

architecture. (https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/terminal.jpg)
To give an example: Two black shapes installed on opposite walls foreshorten the width of the
room. The enclosure becomes narrower; the compression of the space is haptically registered. Very
specific decisions have to be made to determine size and directionality, horizontality or verticality
of a drawing in a given space. How much surface is actually needed in order to hold the shapes as
weights in relation to the size of a given space? Which are the cuts that have to be made in order to
destabilize the experience of the space? The process of decision-making is similar to the
conceptualization of site-specific
sculpture in that the site determines how I think about what I am going to do. I usually us my
studio only to prepare the canvas with glue and gesso. I cut and cover the canvas with paintstick
in the place of installation. Theoretically, there is no need for me personally to surface my
drawings. But in the process of covering a canvas with paintstick, moving from the inside out, I
often find the solution needed in terms of weight and shape of the drawing in relation to the total
field of the wall and the total volume of the space.
The cutting decisions have to be based on the actual experience of the site of installation. To cut is
to draw a line, to separate, to make a distinction, to define the specific relationship between the
lines of the drawing and the lines of the architecture. The cut as line defines and redefines
structure. If one works for several days continuously in a space, one becomes aware of how people
transverse that space, how the light appears in that space how the entrances and exits of that space
are being used, whether it is a transitory space or a gathering space. Depending on the different
functions of a space, different drawing solutions must be found. It is very difficult, if not
impossible, to make these decisions with out having an experience of the space firsthand. I would
never send a few assistants out and have them work from a given scheme. I am not interested in
applied art. To work from a priori premises or schemes invariably leads to ornamentation and
decoration. That is the reason why most wall drawings resemble wallpaper. They have a
decorative, not a structural, function.

(https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/spiral.jpg)

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To use black is the clearest way of marking against a white field, no matter whether you use lead
or charcoal or paintstick. It is also the clearest way of marking without creating associative
meanings. You can cover a surface with black without risking metaphorical and other misreadings.
A canvas covered with black remains an extension of drawing in that it is an extension of marking.
The use of any other color would be the extension of coloration, with its unavoidable allusions to
nature. From Gutenberg on, black has been synonymous with a graphic or print procedure. I am
interested in the mechanization of the graphic procedure; I am not interested in the paint-allusion
gesture. Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger
volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. Since black is the
densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the
artificial as well as the natural light in a given room. A black shape can hold its space and place in
relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.

Canvas is my most expedient solution for extending drawing directly to the wall. Paper is limited
by its size and its strength. It is too flimsy to carry several layers of paintstick and to adhere flush
to the wall. Canvas comes in large rolls that I can cut in place. After being treated with rabbit-skin
glue and gesso, the canvas remains thin but becomes firm and can be easily worked on the wall.
Paper carries the paintstick on the surface, whereas with canvas the paintstick becomes one with
the surface. Paper is always understood as vehicle with paint applied to it. I wanted paintstick and
support surface to be read as one.
Any kind of joint-as necessary as it might be for functional reasons-is to me always a kind of
ornament. The notion of using canvas has a flip side, in that this conservative medium is put to the
end of realizing a drawing concept that contradicts its established and traditional use in painting.
My necessities were to resolve drawing in relationship to architecture. Freed
from its traditional use in painting, canvas enabled drawing to play off and against an
architectural context.

I am aware that people call my black drawing installations sculptural. Not only are these drawings
flat and flush with the wall, but they do not create any illusion of three-dimensionality. They do,
however, involve the viewer with the specificthree-dimensionality of the site of their installation.
The drawings make the viewer aware of his body movement in
a gallery or a museum space. They make him aware of the six-sidedness of a room. In creating a
disjunction in the architectural entity, the drawings bring formal and functional characteristics of
the architecture to the viewers critical attention. It is this experience, I assume, that is equated
with a sculptural experience. To call the drawing installations
sculptural for any other reason is a complete misrecognition; it is as wrong as calling my films
sculptural. When people are confronted with experiences that are new, instead of accepting them
as such, they try to relate them back to secure knowledge. By denying the new they not only
deprive themselves of its experience but contribute to a basic misun-
derstanding of development in art. Everything is seen in the lineage of ; breaks and disjunctions
are not allowed for.
If they are only formal hand-me-downs, metholodogical preoccupations become the content of
ones investigation, and then the work ends up being a reformulation of formalist strategies. If the
art is so tightly bound and contingent upon a historical referential tradition, it will be severely
limited and susceptible to obvious formal analyses. The drawing installations do not accept a static
definition, do not give over easily to analyses and categorizations; they negate traditional
definitions.

The drawings on paper are mostly studies made after a sculpture has been completed. They are
the result of trying to assess and define what surprises me in a sculpture, what I could not
understand before a work was built. They enable me to understand different aspects of perception
as well as the structural potential of a given sculpture. They are distillations of the experience of a
sculptural structure. Drawing is another kind of language. Often, if you want to understand
something, you have either to take it apart or to apply another kind of language to it. Since I
started working, I have always thought that if I could draw something I would have a structural
comprehension of it. I do not draw to depict, illustrate or diagram existing works. The shapes in
paper drawings originate in a glimpse of a volume, a detail, an edge, a weight. Drawing in that
sense amounts to an index of structures I have built. I never make drawings for sculptures.
Drawing is a separate activity, an ongoing concern, with its own concomitant and inherent
problems. It is impossible, even by analogy, to represent a spatial language. Most depictions and
illustrations are deceitful.

(https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/street_level32.jpg)

(https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/street_levels2.jpg)
(https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/to_encircle1.jpg)
(https://reproach.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/to_encircle2.jpg)

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