NARRATOR:

In the late1960s, Serra began creating so-called “prop pieces,” enormous slabs and poles of steel and lead that were supported by their own weight. The pieces weigh tons, but for Serra…

RICHARD SERRA:

The prop pieces are really about a kind of defiance of gravity, they’re really about the mechanics of building without using a fixed joint, and the mechanics of gravity and gravitational load, and having two things come at an arrested motion, and allowing them to reach a stasis because of the leverage of one to the other. If they’re really done well, there’s a quality that, in some pieces, where there’s a weightlessness; where even though they’re being pinned, one seems to just fly away from the other. And if the weight is actually— has an equivalency to it, then the pieces kind of release and almost float.

NARRATOR:

In their simplicity and geometry, the prop pieces represent an action-based investigation that is mirrored in Serra’s drawing practice. Gary Garrels.

GARY GARRELS:

All of Serra’s work has a strong relationship to the body, to the activities of the body, the body’s relationship to gravity, counterbalance, cantilever, the relationship of one body to another body. One sees this in the prop pieces, where, in this particular one, House of Cards, the four plates of lead are propped against each other, with no other support, other than their own weight pressed together, poised in a tense and fragile equilibrium. We also see the rough edges of the plate, and their smooth surfaces that evoke qualities very similar to the drawings that we’ll see later on.