UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the first decade of Richard Serra's career, beginning with the European travels that followed his graduation with a Masters of Fine Arts from Yale and continuing through the mid-1970s. This period is especially interesting because it was during these years that Serra initiated the sculptural practice for which he is now best known, yet he was not so single-mindedly devoted to it as he would become - he was also very actively involved in the production of film, video, photo essays, conceptual proposals, and occasional ephemeral works. This dissertation studies these projects in conjunction with Serra's sculpture, arguing that they are in some respects parallel investigations, and arguing further that it therefore becomes necessary to find language that allows us to address the possibility that Serra's sculpture has some kind of content - whether psychological, political, or philosophical - despite the artist's assiduous avoidance of representation.

I begin with a discussion of Serra's movement into "process art." Tracing a line through the visually very dissimilar sculptures that Serra made just prior to his process works, I argue that the tendency of Serra's earliest sculpture to privilege logical contradiction and perversity sets it apart from contemporary minimalist literalism, and opens it up to models of meaning found in the writings of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the psychologically-minded art educator Anton Erhrenzweig, both of whom Serra was reading at the time. Then I turn to Serra's Props, lead sculptures propped up with no fixed joints that have often prompted viewers to focus on their threatening aspects. Tying these sculptures to works in other media that took the Vietnam War and Cold War technocratic theories as their materials, I argue that the Props did not simply (literally) enact violence but communicate about it. Finally I address the earliest of Serra's large-scale steel sculptures and landscape works, tying them to contemporaneous films, photo projects, and videos in order to argue that Serra's approach to sculpture here, while very much focused on embodiment, is more mediated by the mechanical image than has previously been acknowledged.