“Imagination is to reality what poetry is to prose: the former will always think of objects as massive and vertical, the latter will always try to extend them horizontally.”

-Goethe

Throwing the old Art 21 DVD into the player is always a good time, but this spin was especially excellent because of the episode on Richard Serra. His sculptures without figure, landscape or likeness are always a joy to see. There’s something totally unique about the paradox of seeing a huge steel something, yet believing it to be elastic and free. A phrase he used during that episode has especially stuck with me though: when we’re engaging this type of art, we’re working the muscles of our imagination and creativity. Even as the works are being set up, Serra is already mining them for more ideas, letting his thoughts run out ahead onto future projects. This is a sure sign of valuable work – that it leads straight to even better things.

Image ran an article on Serra in its Spring ‘08 edition. I noticed some great quotes applying to our Cube work, at least tangentially: “What interests me is the opportunity to become something different from what we are by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.” Our vision for the Cube is, if nothing else, that it would be a place of expanding the personhood of the people who encounter beauty there.

Another line of thinking fom Serra that I found intriguing was the complex interaction of art with its surroundings: “I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense. I am interested in work where the artist is a maker of “anti-environment” which takes its own places and makes its own situation, or divides and declares its own area.”