thanks for sending me this, mike!
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8453814925462673894&ei=0GCjSJ2aEImSrwKx08DTDw&q=richard+serra&vt=lf[/googlevideo]
Some quotes (please watch it for yourself):
mediazation (something that has been reduced to a flat surface, a screen that allows you to partake in its own reality, and not the situation of the reality in which it exists, a frame, a box), direct experience, metaphor, the immediacy and actuality of the place and moment, this being like that, the intensity of the work as it exists in its’ place, curves: concavity, convexity – no one knows a curve until they experience it, until they walk it. the latter part of the 20th century was devoid of curves, it was the tyranny of the right angle, we are entering an era when the curve will predominate and the corner will evaporate, art evolves through misinterpretation of what came before, and to use it as their own ideological purposes, every new generation purposely misinterprets what has come before, if you are just re-articulating what has come before you are being academic and probably treading water, a lot of art that doesn’t reinvent form, it lays a new content on an old form, if you look at pop art it is just rehashed cubism with new commodities thrown in, form, to a certain degree negates value, and that remains interesting to me.
Interesting. To me it’s not a question of either/or, it’s a question of integrating these experiences (in Serra’s words mediazation, and the experience of things as they really are in their place and moment), and understanding a given moment as a series of realizations that are built from a sequence of understandings embodied in different logical constructions (metaphoric, direct experience, etc.). He mentions simultaneity a few times, too, btw, and I’m not so sure we have any real ability to sense a genuine simultaneity in detail. I think our, or at least my, understandings often come down to sequence(s), anyway>>
To me, any given, known moment seems to be a cubism of different, but related logical constructions, and the exciting discovery comes from acknowledging the different logics present (whether based in the mind, physically instantiated in objects, or somewhere in between), and exploring that moment via the specific, shifting light that each provides. Put another way, the experience of a given moment is derived from the interaction between different modes of understanding that reside equally between the external and internal worlds. the oscillation between expression/participation, and observation of the specific modes, and their concentration and collective sequence seems to be where the fun is. cultivating an ability to see things this way and to accurately express one’s experience in those terms strikes me as a promising practice for thinkers and mashup artists of any discipline today.