Quotes from Richard Serra

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.

Stone seems to bring into play an opposite quality of time. Stone, unlike man-made materials, is a primary material; therefore, it seems to existed not in a bracketed temporality but in a time that implies the infinite. Stone seems to have an otherworldly quality to it.

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.

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.

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.

Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work.

I think different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work.

I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work.

But you have to take all of those things, you have to take into consideration the paths, the roadways, how much cloud cover there is, how much foliage cover there is, whether there are streams, all of that comes into play.

Play is a necessary ingredient in art because there is a kind of wonder that goes on when you play. You're directing your activity toward a conclusion that isn't prescribed by a particular method.

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