Hear the Professor of Art and Archaeology (PP618)

Richard Serra finds great strength in the material language of his sculpture. More than any other artist of the postwar period, he has kept sculpture not only alive but vital, making it central, even essential, insisting on the category when others abandoned it or stretched it beyond all recognition, developing it in ways that keep faith with the great sculpture of the past while also opening up new possibilities for the future. Serra connects past and future so intensely in his work by always insisting on the present of our own experience. That’s the first and last test for him: How does the work engage us? How do we engage it? It’s a challenge that’s always open, never hermetic in its workings, never prescribed in its effects. So, however private our experience might be, it is always public too.

This fabulous ribbon piece of two long passages is called The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title refers to a famous typology of thinkers proposed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, one based on the ancient saying that “a fox knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing.” (Berlin divided minds up in this way: Plato, Dante, and Proust were hedgehogs, he thought, while Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Joyce were foxes.) I imagine Serra means the work as an invitation to students to explore these two passages—to dive deeply into one subject, like the hedgehog, or to scout out various fields of study, like the fox.