Writings/Interviews

Serra was the rare sculptor who argued his own case in print, and this collection is where the arguments live: on what site specificity obliges, on why a work cannot be moved without being destroyed, and on the difference between sculpture and decoration.

Published by the University of Chicago Press in 1994, the 286-page volume gathers essays, statements and interviews spanning roughly three decades, with 32 halftones. The interlocutors include the critics Douglas Crimp and David Sylvester, who press him on specific installations, and the architects Peter Eisenman and Alan Colquhoun on what sculpture and architecture owe each other. Longer pieces include "Extended Notes from Sight Point Road" and Serra's sustained account of the removal of Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza in New York, a dispute that turned a commissioned public sculpture into a legal argument about authorship and public space.

Richard Serra (1938–2024) came out of the Process Art milieu of the late 1960s — lead thrown molten against a wall, propped plates held up by gravity alone — and spent the following decades on weathering steel works whose scale and curvature reorganize the ground a viewer walks on. His later dialogues with Hal Foster were collected as Conversations about Sculpture in 2018.