RICHARD SERRA | SEQUENCE IN STANFORD

Serra's recent installation at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.


Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s 

"Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and 

conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, 

with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous 

experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s 

steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of 

a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet 

high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete 

slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the 

Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled 

all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous 

experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine 

sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher 

Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission 

of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 

200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, 

during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the 

disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” 

Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed 

in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arcwas eventually decommissioned, 

forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never 

know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture 

wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted 

the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public 

works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.



Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral 

(Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, 

found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant 

of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of 

Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, 

the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. 

This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled 

from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from 

the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, 

perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco 

Museum of Modern Art.


Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. 

Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. 

Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at 

Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious 

capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied 

experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space 

and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them 

in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual 

psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the 

sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces 

really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its 

two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained 

volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you 

put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”


Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers 

John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. 

Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) 

plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra's 

"Sequence" (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). 

Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at 

Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, 

seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s 

flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture 

from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always 

to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped 

MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration 

some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie 

the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active 

engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a 

place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within 

each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and 

contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, 

Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more

matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences 

of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity 

of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between 

two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite 

memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, 

a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?


Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the 

Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek 

above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission 

of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some 

reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, 

according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should 

satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling 

the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s 

original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems 

to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for 

Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman 

said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and 

the artist approved of the site.


Half of Richard Serra’s "Sequence" (on loan by the Fisher Art Foundation) 

nestled in the cul-de-sac formed by the museum’s old and new wings. 

Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center 

at Stanford University.

At 1:00 p.m., the pad is empty. Seen from the second-floor McMurtry 

Family Terrace of the new wing, the 200-ton crane that would lift each

plate sat idly on the dirt to the left of the slab, the site of a past and future 

lawn. In the distance, each of the steel plates sat on its own flatbed trailer. 

The silence was barely disturbed by the arrival of Budco Master Rigger 

Joe Vilardi and his crew. Brandishing a floor plan, a T-square, two tape 

measures, a spool of hot pink twine, a roll of lime green masking tape, 

a hammer and stakes, the team carefully mapped out the reference 

points for each steel plate to guide the assembly of the sculpture.


Joe Berlese (left) and Domingo Tejada work with John Barbieri 

and Joe Vilardi (behind the plate in the left hand photo) to guide 

it into position. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission 

of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. "Sequence" is on 

loan from the Fisher Art Foundation.

Over the course of the next three days, the assembly unfolded, at times 

like a dance, but one that never masked the painstaking process of 

hauling the trailers, attaching the plates to the crane, hoisting, swinging, 

lowering, and positioning the plates, and winching, clamping, hammering, 

grinding, and welding.



The assembly mimicked the disorientation and confusion 

I felt when I first walked Sequence’s pathway—formed of two 

nesting S-curves—in 2007. The first plate, closest to where I 

stood, curved from the terrace, blocking the space beyond from 

my gaze. Each succeeding plate seemed not only to bare itself 

and define the growing form, but also to hide more of the concrete 

and abscond with the expanse—compressing the volume as if into 

the magician’s hat. I had not expected that this process, as beautiful 

as the evolving form was, would also entail a feeling of loss, a spurned 

desire to see.

Serra describes the primary experience of Sequence as confusion: 

“After a point . . . you become confused about whether you’ve been 

in the same place before or whether you are turning back on yourself. 

And then you arrive at an exit and you think, ‘This isn’t where I thought 

I was going to be.’”Sequence is not only about this confusion of 

orientation, but also about the veiling of space, about the theft of 

the certainty of my bodily relationship to the space I inhabit. 

Experiencing a new perspective, I lose the old one. Retracing 

my steps, I fail to recover the space that was.

On the fourth day, I walk through the completed sculpture. 

My experience of Sequence matches both Serra’s description 

of confusion and my New York memories, at least until I look up. 

Hovering above the sculpture is a bit of parapet, the curved wall 

of the terrace, a tree top, the octagon’s wall, the building’s 

pediment—all landmarks that might orient the Sequence 

participant and fix reference points that establish what Serra 

calls “your body’s own axis.” Do these markers undermine 

Sequence’s ability to steal, along with everything else, a 

consistent sense of verticality by registering not only top 

and bottom, but also north, south, east, west?


Landmarks of the Cantor Arts Center do little to orient the 

participant walking through Richard Serra’s "Sequence," 

on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. 

Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor 

Arts Center at Stanford University.

To remove the work is to destroy the work? It is a mistake to assume that Serra 

hews to site specificity out of abstract and unyielding principle rather than 

out of practical necessity: to collaborate with a site is the unavoidable means 

he applies towards his goal of engaging space. A sculpture’s intended site is 

integral to this process of creation. That particular site, however, may not always 

be integral to the resulting sculpture’s capacity to achieve Serra’s goals for his 

participants. Tilted Arc could achieve Serra’s goals for it only in Federal Plaza. 

As Serra wrote in 1985, “Tilted Arc was constructed so as to engage the public 

in a dialogue that would enhance, both perceptually and conceptually, its relation 

to the entire plaza.” And, as art historian Douglas Crimp notes, “[Tilted Arc] imposed 

a construction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architecture. 

It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experience that was 

counterposed against the bland efficiency established by the plaza’s architects.”

Can Sequence, born in the cramped MoMA gallery, achieve Serra’s goals for it 

in the expansive space of the Cantor courtyard? It remains, I suspect, that Sequence 

works best in the place where it originated.Sequence’s seeming expansion of the 

New York MoMA gallery space seemed magical in a way thatSequence, situated 

in the Cantor courtyard, cannot match. But Sequence’s capacity to reconceive 

space is far more potent than the mundane verticals of the courtyard’s architecture. 

And the sculpture’s capacity to confuse is far more significant than the landmarks 

that might otherwise orient me within the Google-mapped world of my mind.

Serra’s goal for Sequence was not to perform a political or social critique of the 

New York MoMA gallery’s space, as his goal for Tilted Arc had been to engage 

Federal Plaza. Instead, he sought to finesse the limitations of the gallery’s 

architecture toward the goal of engaging the participant in this disoriented 

experience of space and time.

Ultimately, Serra seeks this work to “be a catalyst for thought, [to] change how

 people think . . . and how they see.” In this sense, his work remains profoundly 

political. It is political, too, in its capacity to force the subject back and forth 

between the positions of outside observer and embodied participant, and to 

construct an environment in which the participant freely relinquishes, or at 

least shares, agency with the sculpture. Sequence, then—at Stanford as in 

New York—is not just movement and meter. It is an emergence from the safe 

cocoon of autonomous selfhood into the danger of an unpredictable dance, 

a negotiation with the sculpture, the space it reveals, and other visitors, 

as each participant navigates a self-contained—yet profoundly 

communal—encounter.


Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, 

is on view now at the Cantor Arts Center. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, 

© 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.





Carmen Winant

http://dailyserving.com