Richard Serra

Music and words by ANDREW SHAPIRO

The big book that tells me made me like you right away
Monumental pieces by yourself?
Like the beauty that the rust creates on your curved scarred steel

And I rubbed it and I scratched it and I stained my hand and I stained your art

A haunting scar remains in the floor
Like the small pink curved one that I got when I slipped while climbing up my fire escape
Steel wishing it would fall
You probably know how far my mind had fallen

You sixty-year-olds all have faces on heads controlling hands
Looking like they carried their own equipment a long time ago
And is that long time ago now me?

American Minimalism as a visual art form would also play a role as a major influence [on Shapiro], particularly the photorealism of Chuck Close and the giant steel sculptures of Richard Serra. In 1979, Serra was commissioned by the American government to make a large-scale work for the courtyard outside of the Federal Plaza building in downtown Manhattan. What he came up with, Tilted Arc (1981), (a 120-foot-long steel plate bisecting the courtyard diagonally, dwarfing humans, and, like all Serra’s work, sitting in a space between fragile danger and tensile strength) seemed the last straw for a public fed up with high conceptual art. Against Serra’s wishes, the piece was dismantled and destroyed in 1989. For Shapiro’s first EP Invisible Days, (2003) Shapiro wrote the song Richard Serra as a tribute to Serra’s ordeal and also as an homage to Shapiro’s heroes, New York visual and musical artists of Serra’s generation, Close, [Michael] Riesman and [Philip] Glass among them.

—Mark Prendergast, author, The Ambient Century.

"RICHARD SERRA" (from the ANDREW SHAPIRO album INVISIBLE DAYS)
(P) & © 2003-2019 by Airbox Music Publishing LLP (ASCAP), Brooklyn, NY.
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