Richard Serra Sculpture

"This book offers a detailed presentation of Richard Serra's entire career, from his early experiments with materials like rubber, neon, and lead to the environmentally scaled steel works of recent years, including three monumental new sculptures created for the exhibition that this book accompanies."--BOOK JACKET.

“The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work.”—Richard Serra Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra’s life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist’s work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration—from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu—revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium’s most brilliant figures. Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists working today, Richard Serra is known in particular for his large steel sculptural forms, which deal primarily with investigations of weight, balance, density, and scale, as well as their effect on the viewer and his/her sense of space. Serra’s relentless pursuit of these questions over the course of his celebrated career has deepened our understanding of the effects of sculpture on space and perception, and broadened the scope of what we allow the genre to address. Published on the occasion of Serra’s exhibition Equal at David Zwirner, New York⎯called one of “the year’s best shows” by The New York Times—this catalogue is the first in-depth overview of the artist’s works in forged steel. While he had already become known for his works in vulcanized rubber, lead, and steel, Serra first began using forged steel after encountering a large-scale forge at a steel mill in Germany in 1977. Unlike casting, wherein steel is heated until molten and poured into a mold, forging is the process of changing metal’s shape while in a solid state, through extreme heat and pressure. Serra’s first forged sculpture was Berlin Block (For Charlie Chaplin) (1977), installed outside of the Mies van der Rohe–designed Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Since then, he has continued to use this material in different configurations and formats to create works that use forged blocks, rounds, or lintels. Designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist, Richard Serra: Forged Steel presents a survey of Serra’s forged sculpture since 1977, featuring new scholarship by Richard Shiff and two texts by Serra, along with dramatic photographs of the forging process. Bringing together over sixty detailed plates of forged sculptures, this unique publication not only introduces readers to an important aspect of Serra’s work, but uses these works to return to the eternal questions of weight, balance, and perception in his practice.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified youth violence as a major public health problem. What impact does exposure to violence--be it in the form of victimization, observation, or knowledge--have on young people? How do they develop a sense of morality? And how does it affect their perception of the world around them? Devoted to this crisis in American life, this volume--originally published as a special issue of the journal Psychiatry--documents the rise in violence in our communities and explores its impact on children's physical, psychological, and social development. We know from police statistics, as well as from the evening news, that the violence in many American communities is increasing at an alarming rate. To assess the impact this may have on children, however, more detailed epidemiological data is needed. We must ascertain the types of violent acts children experience, patterns and duration of their exposure, factors that increase some children's exposure, and factors that protect others. Reporting on studies that have been initiated in this area are three chapters that describe ground-breaking projects that are distinguished by their sensitivity to community dynamics and developmental processes. Strategies for intervention are addressed in chapters that delineate the need for immediate remedial action, describe positive effects research projects can have in volatile communities, report on the impact of an innovative intervention program, and assess the influence of television violence. Other contributions draw from research on the effects of child sexual abuse and maltreatment on children's development to discuss specific psychological processes that may mediate negative effects, as well as risk and protective factors in the culture, community, and family. Reflecting on the implications of our culture's violence on the early development and morality of our children, final chapters focus on the children who are currently facing sever adversity. Rounding out the volume, a powerful case is made for a deployment of the country's resources to support the potential for resilience in the children and families whose everyday lives are affected by this national problem.

Essays by Hal Foster and Carmen Gim nez.