Richard Serra

"And mainly when I was growing up here, the people who were the most influential were jazz musicians. Charles Mingus was here at the time. And I remember when I was about 16 or 17 I went into the Jazz Workshop and had a fake ID, and sat down and had a drink. And they were having a set in the afternoon. And there was a fan on; it was really loud, and Mingus was going through a set and they were recording, and the bartender turned the fan off and Mingus had an apoplectic fit—he just went completely crazy. He jumped over the bar and he practically throttled the guy. And he said, "That fan was one of my instruments." And it made me think, as someone who wanted to be an artist, that you had to pay attention all the time to everything that was going on, because everything was potential use if you could see its potential. I think later John Cage made that more clear to a lot of artists. But I was very, very young at the time and the Beat generation was starting. But I was more interested, not in the Beats, but in the Jazz Workshop here. Blacks were a big, big influence on me when I was growing up in San Francisco."

"E, principalmente quando eu estava a crescer aqui, as pessoas mais influentes eram músicos de jazz.Charles Mingus estava aqui na altura. E lembro-me, tinha eu 16 ou 17 anos, de ir ao Jazz Workshop com um falso BI, de me sentar e de tomar um copo. E eles estavam num "set", à tarde. E havia uma ventoínha ligada; era mesmo muito barulhento e Mingus ia a meio de um "set" e estavam a gravar e o empregado do bar desligou a ventoínha e o Mingus ia tendo um ataque - ficou completamente maluco. Saltou para o bar e praticamente estrangulou o tipo. E ele disse, "Essa ventoínha era um dos meus instrumentos". E isso fez-me pensar, enquanto alguém que queria ser artista, que tens de prestar atenção o tempo todo a tudo o que se está a passar, porque tudo é potencialmente utilizável se tu conseguires ver o seu potencial. Acho que depois o John Cage tornou isso mais claro para todos os artistas. Mas eu era muito, muito, jovem na altura e a Beat generation estava a começar. Mas eu estava mais interessado, não nos Beats, mas no Jazz Workshop daqui. Os negros tiveram uma grande, grande, influência em mim quando eu estava a crescer em S. Francisco".




"The existence of the sculpture, a series of concrete walls called Shift, has become a legend in King Township. 'What I wanted,' Serra wrote, 'was a dialectic between one's perception of the place in totality and one's relation to the field as walked'."
Heather Robertson, "Richard Serra: Shift ", BorderCrossings Magazine, nº 93



Torqued Ellipses 1997 New York