"Work out of your work. Don't work out of anybody else's work"
About this Quote
Serra’s line lands like a studio commandment, blunt enough to feel almost hostile to the contemporary art world’s favorite sport: borrowing. “Work out of your work” isn’t just a plea for originality; it’s a demand for continuity, for an artist to treat each piece as both result and raw material. The phrase “out of” matters. It suggests excavation rather than invention-from-thin-air: you dig into what you’ve already made, discover what the material and the process are telling you, then push further. Art as iterative labor, not a mood.
Coming from Serra, the subtext is inseparable from weight, scale, and risk. His sculptures aren’t clever references; they’re situations you walk into, where gravity feels like a collaborator and a threat. That physical seriousness underwrites the ethics of the quote. To “work out of anybody else’s work” is, in Serra’s universe, not homage but evasion: an attempt to outsource the hard part, the confrontation with form that only your own failures can teach.
It also reads as a quiet rebuke to art-world trend cycles, where being “in conversation” can become a euphemism for laundering influence. Serra isn’t denying that artists learn from other artists; he’s insisting the learning has to metabolize. The cultural context is late-20th-century American sculpture’s pivot toward process and site, away from prettiness and toward consequence. The intent is protective: defend a practice from becoming a playlist of citations.
Coming from Serra, the subtext is inseparable from weight, scale, and risk. His sculptures aren’t clever references; they’re situations you walk into, where gravity feels like a collaborator and a threat. That physical seriousness underwrites the ethics of the quote. To “work out of anybody else’s work” is, in Serra’s universe, not homage but evasion: an attempt to outsource the hard part, the confrontation with form that only your own failures can teach.
It also reads as a quiet rebuke to art-world trend cycles, where being “in conversation” can become a euphemism for laundering influence. Serra isn’t denying that artists learn from other artists; he’s insisting the learning has to metabolize. The cultural context is late-20th-century American sculpture’s pivot toward process and site, away from prettiness and toward consequence. The intent is protective: defend a practice from becoming a playlist of citations.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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