The Richard Serra retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art offers us an occasion for seriously reconsidering Serra’s work and its place in (or out) of our personal pantheons. Should you be thinking along these lines–about where Serra and other modern sculptors belong within the context of art history–the Pulitzer website has a new resource to offer: the transcript of a conversation between Richard Serra, curator Carmen Gimenez (Guggenheim NY), and Pulitzer director Matthias Waschek, on the occasion of our 2005 exhibition Brancusi and Serra in Dialogue.

You can find “A Conversation with Richard Serra and Carmen Gimenez, Moderated by Matthias Waschek” under ‘Events & Programs’ or at this permanent link: www.pulitzerarts.org/serra-gimenez/interview.

The conversation comes at a very interesting moment in Serra’s career: shortly after his triumphant installation at the Guggenheim Bibao, The Matter of Time, and shortly before his retrospective at the Modern. It was no doubt a time when Serra himself was thinking about his position in art history. Indeed, agreeing to discuss Brancusi and Serra in Dialogue, which literally put the artists’ works side by side, made confrontation and comparison with history inevitable for Serra.

If you watched the video clips Rachel posted of Serra talking to Charlie Rose, you know that last month, at his retrospective, he was not willing to draw many relationships between his work and the masterpieces in MoMA’s collection:

Rose: How is this [your work] going to be of that import?
Serra: I don’t know.
Rose: Speculate for me.
Serra: I can’t.
Rose: But is it of that quality?
Serra: How would I know? I don’t know. I’m just trying to do the best I can do.
Rose: But you think you are every bit of that quality! You do!
Serra: No, I think I’m of that effort.

In 2005, in the conversation we have preserved, it seems to me Serra had not yet decided to be so undecided about his qualitative relationship to the past. In fact, Serra repeatedly speculates in the fashion Charlie Rose requested. Herein lies much of the transcript’s value. It allows one to consider Serra considering his own significance–the artist inside history weighing his own work.