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.
To address the splash/cast pieces as a discrete group is to engage the specificity of their circumstances and means. Serra produced the first six such works in fairly rapid succession in 1968 and 1969. Four were made for group shows in which he was invited to participate. (The molten-lead splashes were one of several types of work he ultimately exhibited.) The initial one was made in 1968 for “9 at Leo Castelli,” organized by Robert Morris at Castelli Warehouse in New York. The others were produced in 1969: for the exhibition “Op Losse Schroeven” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (using an exterior wall of the museum); for “When Attitudes Become Form—Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information” at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland; and for “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Each of these shows was devoted to the state of contemporary post-Minimal and Conceptual art practices. A fifth work was made for Serra’s solo exhibition at Castelli Warehouse in 1969. Later that year, the artist executed his final early work from molten lead—in Jasper Johns’s studio, a former bank building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.