Richard Serra, who died in March of this year at the age of eighty-five, sought out the resistance of other voices, in part to clarify his own. The composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich performed that role early on, as did the artist Robert Smithson. Critics and curators like Rosalind Krauss, David Sylvester and Kirk Varnedoe stepped up later, and for six decades his wife Clara Serra was his essential interlocutor. I, too, was lucky enough to be in dialogue with Serra for many years; it was one of the great adventures of my life as a critic. At times, though, it was harrowing; my private title for our 2018 book Conversations about Sculpture was ‘Godzilla Meets Bambi.’ But Serra was no monster, and I learned not to shy away from his challenges. Our book works, to the extent that it does, because we agree just enough so that, when we disagree, the differences count.

One issue we debated is the difference between site and context. ‘Might you be so inside your language,’ I asked Serra, ‘so attuned to its nuances, that you’re not alert enough to conditions that are already there, embedded in the context – conditions that are social, economic, and political?’

‘If you go into a community to make a work,’ he replied, ‘and you try to follow the demands of the local people, which are never homogeneous anyway, you end up serving their interests more than your own. And usually their interests are transitory . . . So you have to hold fast to your work.’

‘But don’t you then divide site from context, treating site as primarily physical and context as primarily social, privileging the former and bracketing the latter?’

‘No. I’m dealing with context; I’m just not treating the community as the preeminent arbiter of context – that’s the difference.’

I can’t let this issue go, and so later I ask him, ‘Then what do you see as the politics of your sculpture?’

‘What I do and how the work is received are two completely different things. What I do isn’t dependent on the needs of any group. I don’t canvass anyone; I don’t take a census and then decide what to make. That’s not what I do. On the other hand, I’m fine with what people bring to the work. As soon as you put a piece in a public place, it’s going to be judged, and I can’t control that. Nor do I want to – I don’t want to exclude opinions . . . I think engagement is mostly ex post facto – it happens after. I don’t direct my work toward engagement, but I think part of its autonomy includes engagement. Why can’t it be both?’

In a flash, as with my distinction between site and context, Serra undid the old opposition between artistic autonomy and political engagement. Here’s a related instance of deconstruction on the fly, which crops up in our discussion of viewers, about whether they should be specified somehow by a work of art.

‘Might your very focus on phenomenological experience lead you to treat the viewer as just a body – in fact as just any body?’, I ask Serra. ‘Might it obscure the very differences that define us? Certainly you don’t differentiate viewers by gender, race, or class. But then we’re not all the same. What do you make of that line of questioning?’

‘It’s simply at odds with my project. I don’t want to make any distinctions among viewers. It depends on the work and its context, but my viewer is anybody and everybody. I don’t cater to group specificity.’

‘But if your work addresses all people as the same, might it totalize them? If you frame experience in phenomenological terms alone, might you overlook other determinations of our subjectivities like class, race, and sexuality?’

Here Clara Serra intervenes: ‘Richard has to stop at the phenomenological because he wants to leave the experience open. And that’s where the work is democratic in a different way. He makes the work available, literally, to anybody and everybody. It’s not specific to gender, class, or race. How could it be when, as he’s said many times, what the viewer brings to the work is what the viewer brings to the work?’

That egalitarian imperative was very strong in Serra; it’s one reason why so many people respond to his work so intensely, and why they were moved by his death so profoundly.

Toward the end of our work on the book, Serra was ill. Still, he rose to the occasion of each conversation, and certainly his art deepened during that difficult period.

‘Do you think that, with your recent work, you have entered a “late style”?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does that term mean to you?’

‘More emphasis, more weight, more density, more tension, more introspection.’

‘More austerity?’

‘Maybe. More emotion.’

Clara asks: ‘More symbolic form?’

‘Yes.’

‘The classic example of late style,’ I add (pedantically), ‘is the late quartets of Beethoven: there’s a new asperity to his music, a stripping of conventions to the point of dissonance. But there are different examples too, as in ‘the return to fundamentals’ in late Matisse, as in his cut-outs that recapture the delight of his early Fauve work. Is there a return to fundamentals in your late style? And if so, do you feel more asperity or more delight?’

‘I feel both. I’ve gone back to forging, and weight has reentered the proposition strongly, with all its symbolic connotations. The forged works register on a different psychological level. Am I conscious that this is late work? Yes.’

‘What’s the relation between the presence of weight in your new work and the sense of mortality in your life now?’

‘I think it’s one and the same.’

‘To what extent is the interest in the fundamental . . .’

‘A contemplation of my own death? To a great extent.’

Serra knew the value of his enterprise, and he appreciated that value when he saw it in other work as well. He could be critical of artists, for sure, but he could be generous too. At the same time he was always self-critical; self-critique was the very motor of his art. ‘Work comes out of work’ was one of his mantras. Although ‘modesty’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind with Serra, he was measured about his own influence.

‘How has my work been assimilated, if at all? Probably by misinterpretation. Did some people take advantage of it in ways I couldn’t foresee? Yes. Do I think the work is open enough to allow people to deal with it in a lot of different ways? I hope so. Sculptors and architects will figure it out; some performers, dancers, and others will find it useful – or again that’s my hope. Duchamp said that you’re lucky if you get thirty or forty years. Warhol said all we get is fifteen minutes. Who knows? The fact is you can’t know. In the end I still believe that matter imposes its form on form; that’s why it’s important for me to stick with materials I understand.’

I think we do know. People will engage his art for a very long time, maybe as long as they care about art at all.

Read on: Hal Foster, ‘Towards a Grammar of Emergency’, NLR 68.