Richard Serra
Richard Serra is a well-known minimalist sculptor. He is mostly known for working with metal as a medium, but he has also worked with other industrial materials. Although he is mostly considered to be a minimalist, his work can also be linked to process art because of the way he treats his materials. He is more interested in the process than the product. When asked about his work he stated that he has nothing to do with entertainment but with the physical piece being there. Richard Serra’s early life heavily influenced him to work with industrial materials. Although his industrial materials link him closely with minimalism, Serra is considered to be a figure in process art as well.
Richard Serra was heavily influenced to work in his medium because of the time he spent working in a steel mill. "Early works focused on industrial materials that we worked with in his youth in West Coast steel mill and shipyard: Steel and Lead" (Art 21). In an interview Serra explained how, as a boy going to the shipyard with his father, he saw a tanker going off to sea and was transfixed. Serra explained what it was like to see what used to be "dead weight" sail off gracefully into the sea. When Serra thought about that moment, he said, "All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory which has become like a reoccurring dream" (Seidner). This may have influenced the artist to have his metal sheet artwork grow to immense size during the 1970’s. His sculptures were often composed of gigantic plates of steel, like the ship in his memory. He explained that during his time working at the shipyard he learned how "to use steel in a way that it hadn't been used before" (Art 21). Some of his works such as Band, which is a large steel sculpture mimic almost sides of a ship where Serra might be looking back into his memory at the shipyard where he first saw a tanker. He worked with materials he felt comfortable with. For example, one of his early experiments was with lead, a medium that he came to use often because of its malleability Serra created "Gutter Corner Splash/ Night Shift" in which he poured liquid lead inside the corner of his studio over and over again to make casts of it. He has said that this piece had nothing to do with anything, it was the simple act of making it with the raw material, which is the art. The technique which Serra approached this sculpture illustrates how he treated his work more like the act of the labor than the finished product, which links him to the process art movement.
Richard Serra is not only a minimalist and a modernist but a process artist. Though because of the forms he creates in his works he could be considered a minimalist, the way he uses the forms in certain works links him to process art. Serra's interest in process art was evident when he created "Verb List", "two pages of hand written phrases, including 'to fold,' 'to impress,' 'to flood,' 'to grasp,' 'to bundle' and many more" (Johnson). He applied these action words to his work to experiment with lead. Some of his process works include "Hand Catching Lead" where Serra shows in black and white his hand repeatedly catching falling lead, and his countless sculptures that include metal sheets being held up by one lead pipe, such as Prop. and 1-1-1-1. In these pieces, Serra works with the weight of the objects against each other and gravity to have them stand in space. By using gravity the pieces are therefore presented as process art. Richard Serra inspires artists to this day with his experiments with lead and metal sculptures and will always be a founding figure in the process art movement.
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Jackie Winsor
Jackie Winsor is a post minimalist sculptor who has a fixation with "ritual and preindustrial modes of workmanship" (D. E. Scott). She "expands a Minimalist vocabulary of simple geometric forms" while she openly explores the "ideas about process and labor" (Paula Cooper Gallery). An example is her work Four Corners, which weighs fifteen pounds and is made of wrapped twine. The artist could have hired assistants to help in the process but chose not to. "She believed that the process of making and her role in that process were critical to the success of the work" (D. E. Scott). Many of this artist's works mimic the same style and attention to process. Through the use of her materials and the element of time, Winsor's works express her passion for labor and rawness which is evident in the process artists of the time.
Winsor’s materials were influenced by her childhood. She selects materials for her art pieces that either have a strong link to nature, or are minimally processed from natural materials. Windsor grew up on the rugged coast by the ocean, and experienced the force of the sea, the sand, the seaweed. In an interview, she stated “It was very integrated in the experience of all these natural elements. I suppose I'm very interested not in new, different, decorative material, but in the substance of what you work with, and working with that.” In her early pieces, she often used earthy materials such as logs or wood. In her piece Bound Logs, she “wanted the energy in it to equate with the presence of the wood.” (Chadwick) Winsor has also used twine, a fiber made from natural cotton or hemp. She preferred these natural or raw, minimally processed materials over highly processed materials, such as plastic. Her choice of materials and subject matter also came from Winsor's background since her father was an architect. She worked with concrete, a composite of limestone, sand and water, and she has worked with bricks. She stated that construction, plumbs and squares were very familiar to her. This idea is brought up in the sculptures Burnt Piece, Painted Piece and Brick Square, where the artist works with geometric form. Burnt Piece is also an example of Winsor's interest in using known and unknown materials. The "cube" was known to her, while the unknown was the idea of working with fire which was introduced into the piece. She wanted to "bring the materials that I'd gotten to know together with the unknown. What I used as unknown was the fire or the force of explosives, which I didn't know anything about." (Chadwick).
Time is a large factor in Winsor work. She is very adamant about having her own hands build and create all of her work. Winsor at a young age was influenced by her mother who was a stay at home mom. Her mother grew food, canned, cooked, baked, spun wool, knitted, sewed, pumped the household's water and kept its fire going all year round. "By contrast with her father's paid daytime employment, her mother's unpaid "job" generally impressed Winsor as "bigger and longer" (Chave). In an interview with Winsor, she spoke of her mother building their new house which was designed by her father. In Chave's review of Winsor's work, she states, "Her [Winsor's] sense of her sculpture's value remains closely tied to the countless hours of effect she invests in it--effort that, she believes, "attracts energy to it" from the viewer in turn" (Chave). Winsor said "It's simply having put in the time, like a life" (Chave). For Winsor, the value of the piece is not how it looks or how attractive the color is. It is the sweat, labor and time that went into its creation which is the true determinant of worth.
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