Richard Serra's Sculpture In The St. Louis Citygarden

Before and After the Context of Twain

The completion of an art work goes through four processes in some way: the conception in the artist’s head, the expression of the ideas, the perception and the interpretation of the audience. The audience has the freedom to decide what to perceive and how to interpret an art work, while if the last two processes happen without a basic understanding of the first two processes, the whole progress would be like a broken chain that may cause deviation. As an art piece of Minimalism, Richard Serra’s Sculpture in the St. Louis Citygarden, Twain, is stingy in telling the original thoughts of the artist. Before long since its birth, the elites in St. Louis gave it the name “Le Pissoir”. To the detractors the Twain

Another work by Serra in King City, the Shift, was also his trial to explore spatial relationship between human’s perception and the landscape. Appearing in the same time as the Twain, the Shift presents features of Minimalism—six triangular concrete panels forming a zigzag shape in a vast farmland, the sculpture even does not attempt to recall any metaphorical significance. However, the logic lying behind the simple geometric shape is the maximum distance two people should keep in order to stay in view of each other when walking in a vast land. Once again, instead of telling stories by geometric form and colors of the sculpture itself, Serra emphasized on the spatial experience that people will have when interacting with the land. “The result is a way,” as he described the work, “of measuring oneself against the indeterminancy of the land.” (Citation

With such information, we are able to feel Serra’s affection for metal by empathetic imagination of his childhood; we will have better skills to read the work with an understanding of Minimalism; we recall related works to get a bigger picture of art in that specific time. With the knowledge of context, we see the reason and the outcome of an art work, instead of merely the shape and the