To Whom It May Concern: Richard Serra and the Phenomenology of Intransitive Monumentality

In an interview with Douglas Crimp in July 1980, Richard Serra rebelled against the tendency to interpret his sculptures in the sense of “monuments”: “When people see my large-scale works in public places, they call them monumental, without ever thinking about what the term monumental means […]. They do not relate to the history of monuments. They do not memorialize anything.” Yet, especially in front of his stelae it is difficult to avoid the impression of being faced at least with a form of monumentality: they are therefore “intransitive” in the sense that their apparently memorial gesture actually lacks the object as a referent of commemoration. From this problematic tension, we will attempt a parcours through Serra’s writings meant to single out the fundamental motives of his thinking about a certain idea of sculpture: site-specificity, the role of materials and scale, the relationship with architecture, cooperation and multi-authoriality, kinesthetic fruition, the relationship between sculpture and performance.