Richard Serra Quotes

I'm a very physical person. I'm very tactile. I wrestled in college, so a lot of my communication with the world comes through physicality - what I take in and what I put out there.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

I have always been interested in having people fall into the image and be aware of their reaction first, and then think about the style.

What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing.

I think you always have to find where the boundary is in relation to the context in order to be able to kind of articulate how you want the space to interact with the viewer.

In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

When you step back and watch people, you realize that we use every single body part. Movement, dance - I find it genius because it's ultimate expression, really.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge - tacit, nonscientific knowledge - and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design.

People get confused when they see my shows, but that isn't the intention. My intention is to destabilize the act of seeing.

Just as there is no substitute for original works of art, there is no substitute for the world of direct sensual experience.

There are many different styles of, and approaches to, tap. My own leans towards a more intellectual view: tap dancing not just for the sake of entertainment but to educate and spark emotion.

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.

So much energy comes out of concerts sometimes, especially good ones that are really moving. And that energy, no matter how great the show is, it dissipates within two weeks or a month.

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

The spectator, as he walks the gallery, will stop, or pass along. To give a general air of grandeur at first view, all trifling, or artful play of little lights, or an attention to a variety of tints is to be avoided; a quietness and simplicity must reign over the whole work, to which a breadth of uniform and simple color will very much contribute.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

Movies have an enormous power to open the mind and the heart and everything. You are sitting and seeing something moving in front of you, and then your mind goes into a trance. You are completely there. It's a real great art; it's not only a business. It's to open the mind, to understand this mystery within reality. This is why we need it.

One of the things that's really lousy about making movies is that you have such little interaction with your audience.

Seeing and playing with physical objects can enable access to symbolic ideas. When I studied physics and math at university it was all done through equations and textbooks whereas artists go to art school and start making stuff; they fling paint at the walls, they dance and bash things together with giant bits of metal. Our society has come to think of science as being a very abstractified thing, and art as being a materialized thing.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.