Speaking of his early practice, Richard Serra makes a succinct claim: “This is this. This is not that.”1 His works from the mid to late 1960s were intended to express the actions of “process.” In so doing, they demonstrate the deployment of basic procedures that activate the primary qualities of media derived from construction and industrial fabrication, such as fiberglass and vulcanized rubber. Produced from molten lead, the works known as “splashings” or “castings” (or sometimes both) are chief examples of this category of work. Indeed, in their case, the role of process is deepened by the passage of the lead medium—during the on-site production of a given work—from liquid to solid, a material transformation. A splash/cast piece is self-evident, an exposed manifestation of matter plus process—Serra’s nonsymbolic this. Process, in turn, implicates change, a temporal register. Given these conditions of medium and change, can we further say that a work’s material and conceptual terms bear meaningful relevance to its eventual fate? One fact is salient, if generally ignored: Serra’s early works from molten lead no longer exist.
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