Richard Serra

Richard Serra is considered by many to be the most important sculptor of the postwar period. The essays in this volume cover the complete span of Serra's work to date — from his first experiments with materials and processes through his early films and site works to his current series of "torqued ellipses." There is a special emphasis on those moments when Serra extended aesthetic convention and/or challenged political authority, as in the famous struggle with the General Services Administration over the site-specific piece Tilted Arc.October Files October Files is a new series of inexpensive paperback books. Each book will address a body of work by an artist of the postwar period who has altered our understanding of art in significant ways and prompted a critical literature that is sophisticated and sustained. Each book will trace not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. The series editors are Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois,and Rosalind Krauss.

A critical primer on artist Richard Serra's work.

Library Journal

A sculptor friend glancing through my review copy said "This is not for the layman." Perhaps this first volume of a new paperback series to be called "October Files" (after the art criticism journal October, from whence come many of its essays) could best be described as serious writing about serious art. Lay readers are certainly not excluded from reading serious art criticism, but this book is not intended as an introduction to or overview of the work of Richard Serra, the prominent metal sculptor. Instead, six essays, accompanied by photographs drawn from October and various exhibition catalogs, discuss various aspects of the artist's filmmaking, lead casting, sculpture siting, and philosophy. By turning an intensive gaze on particular segments of the artist's total oeuvre, the reader can proceed to a larger understanding of his work. For academic libraries.--David McClelland, Philadelphia Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (1996), and Prosthetic Gods (2004), all published by the MIT Press, and other books.