Serra began in 1969 to be primarily concerned with the cutting, propping or stacking of lead sheets, rough timber, etc., to create structures, some very large, supported only by their own weight. Richard Serra throws molten lead inside SFMOMA. Richard Serra was born November 2, 1939, in San Francisco. Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. SPEAKING OF HIS EARLY PRACTICE, Richard Serra makes a succinct claim: “This is this. As a materialist, Serra shares certain concerns with other artists, including Smithson and Carl Andre (who actually imagined showing his work according to a progression of media based on the order of the periodic table). They're startlingly reinventions of what the work of art can be. I BEGAN by saying that the early splash/cast pieces are no longer extant. Reich broke the phrase into two loops: “it’s gonna” and “rain.” The two fragments were to be repeatedly played in succession on separate tape recorders, which, via headphones, were made to correspond respectively to his left and right ear. He would have welcomed the on-site preservation of other examples, but most of them were occasioned by temporary exhibitions. rossnerimages has uploaded 21 photos to Flickr. Buchloh’s text includes a lengthy theorization of the splash/cast works and related activity in Serra’s early practice. (All early works in lead by Serra, such as his props, are subject to the instability of the medium itself, which, being relatively soft, gradually fails to hold a form over time.) During playback, due to slight discrepancies between the machines, the tapes gradually fell out of sync. A statement the artist composed for the Fall/Winter 1970–71 issue of Aspen pushes the precept to an extreme: In the text, Serra proposes a work that would be produced from a “quantity of [molten] lead” dropped from a height of fifteen thousand to thirty thousand feet into a body of water or other “soft earth site.” “The liquid lead volume in descent forms a precise spherical mass: a continuous solid, a ball, a bomb.” Two supporting references are added: to Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics (published in 1963) and to the Shot Tower in Baltimore, an early-nineteenth-century structure once used in the making of spherical lead shot (blobs of molten lead were dropped down the length of the shaft—some two hundred feet—where they landed in a vat of water). Visit the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Richard Serra’s Early Work: Sculpture Between Labor and Spectacle,” in Richard Serra Sculpture, 51–52. Jan 31, 2014 - Explore rossnerimages' photos on Flickr. We speak of the agency of Serra as author (together with the efforts of Glass and others) in motivating process in the early works: lead works in which the medium is torn, cut, folded, and rolled, for example, as well as melted and splashed; large, heavy scraps of pliable rubber that are cut and strewn or hung from the wall and re-formed by gravitational pull; and the many works—in lead and then steel—that are categorically referred to as props. In 1969, Jasper Johns invited Serra to create one of his splash pieces in his studio on Houston Street. In Serra’s works from molten lead, making is grounded in process (this includes the self-forming capacity of a given medium), but process represents forward momentum, which the eventual realization of a work in object form brings to a halt. Richard Serra Splashing 1968. Richard Serra, Splash Piece: Casting, 1969-1970. Richard Serra’s looming, five-part steel sculpture “Wake” is being installed this weekend at the Seattle Art Museum’s new Olympic Sculpture Park.