Education Quote by Richard Serra

Serra is talking about rigging the way some artists talk about anatomy: as a discipline you only really understand once it’s already in your hands, under load, and capable of hurting you. The line is almost willfully self-contradictory - you can learn it, but not from a book - and that paradox is the point. Rigging, in Serra’s world of massive steel and precarious movement, isn’t a tidy body of knowledge. It’s apprenticeship, muscle memory, and judgment under pressure. The stakes aren’t aesthetic in the abstract; they’re physical, financial, and moral.

The subtext is a refusal of romantic myths about solitary genius. Serra’s sculptures may read as monolithic statements, but they’re built on collective expertise: riggers, fabricators, engineers, installers. By naming “master rigger,” he’s acknowledging a class of knowledge the art world often keeps offstage - the people who translate ambition into reality and who know exactly how much risk a piece can tolerate. “No book” is also a quiet rebuke to institutions that want art to be legible, archived, and teachable in clean curricula. Some crucial intelligence lives outside the library.

Context matters: Serra’s practice depends on industrial processes and site-specific installation, where every space behaves differently and every lift is a unique problem. He’s defending a kind of learning that’s closer to craft and labor politics than to theory: knowledge earned by doing, and by not dropping the work - or anyone standing near it.