Notes on Drawing

04May07

Richard Serra

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 Orozco’s 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 Mantegna’s Christ to Cezanne’s 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.
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.

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 viewer’s 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 one’s 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.

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