captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose.

stripes and released hi solo album blunder bust last year. he founded the label together with the late roots music pioneer john fahy. i'm pleased

and some of his recordings turned out were actually pressed by paramount records. although they were on another label and it just seemed like at every turn paramount sort of reared its head and was sort of irresistable as a force. and so jack and i have long shared a passion for this music. >> rose: the point here is to give people who may not know the story or may not

know the music or to have the music together in 1 place. >> yeah. there's plenty of labels like columbia that have been around for a 100 years and they are still around today, that they can, you know, that have muscle an money behind them to be able to expose it in a bigger way, paramount is sort of like, they're sort of a strange part of the history of record labels in america. but-- the beautiful part about them is they accidentally in my opinion sort of captured american culture by wanting to sell record player cabinets. they were a furniture company that started as a wisconsin chair company. and they fell into this by getting a job from the edison phony graph company to make cabinets first. and that is what i thought about it. when dean brought that up, my record paramount label has history and history with furniture as well. so we had a laugh about that. an those kind of similarities started to creep into the idea of how

can we put this all together in something bigger to bring attention to all these lost gems and these people who recorded one record or maybe only two records. and let's put something together where there is a massive amount of music. >> it just the case alone how we were going to do. >> look at that case. >> i said let's do, it's at home here on this table, i said -- >> it really is at home here. >> yeah. let's do all those fonnograph cases and at that time period coming out of arts and craft, let's start with the coroson oak case to highlight the fact that it was a furniture company, they put the badge of the wisconsin chair company in there. that was one of the first design components. and we kind of kicked it off from there. >> what was the business model from paramount? >> as jack said they really, they started out in 1917. they under contract made

some fonnograph cabinets for edison because his factory had burned down in orange, new jersey. and they just wanted to sell phono graph cabinets and the records were a necessary evil to them. they had no interest in the music or the artses on there. >> anybody, any time, any genre, it didn't matter t was religious, secular, blues, gospel, country, hill billy, whatever, if you can sell ten copies let's do it, an on to the next one. they didn't have any knowledge of what was good or bad and they didn't have the money to get the big artist names. >> rose: think of the name blind lemon jefferson, ma rainy, louis armstrong. >> who were unheard of when they were recording for paramount. these were lower grade artists at that time, most of them. they were unknowns. who maybe some of them went on to record for the bigger labels afterwards. >> and what happened to them? i mean what was the

evolution from paramount to stardom? >> well, there was this producer at the time that was the link from the paramount business white executives to the black artists, named mayo williams. and he was their link to getting them to come and record and also to sign the contract which he was apparently really good at. so much so that he got the nick name inq because he could get the ink on the contract. without him a lot of these artists wouldn't have been discovered and founded. he was finding them in chicago and bringing them up to wisconsin to record. >> rose: and so this release will capture what paramount was about. for anybody who has heard about it but don't know about it, this is a sense of we'll give it to you, the paramount experience. >> it's the first of a, we consider it like a two volume omnibus telling this curious tale it has this classic curious tale aspect to it. i mean paramount didn't,

certainly didn't intend to you know to do something important from a document arians or anything like that they merely wanted to move units in the modern parlance, you know. and it just, they almost, they almost, you know, triumphed in spite of themselves. they produced, the records are notorious for sounding terrible, the sound quality is bad. they made-- they did everything on the cheap. recording, pressing, they used the cheapest materials to actually make the records. and so you do have to sort of penetrate through this gauze of static to hear these gems. >> but when we were putting this together, we sort of made this in a way let's do everything paramount didn't have the money to do and didn't have the care to do-of-thinking how important a cultural thing they were capturing at the time. we said let's put everything into this that they wouldn't have had the know how or the means to do.

and putting together like this. >> rose: this is the way it should have been done. >> we, gold foil labels and we tried to make the vinyl look as much like burled chestnut as possible. and with the whole set we skipped over the cd and we just did vinyl and this, it is supposed to like like a needle die gram, this is a portable phonograph case, and there has 800 songs and all the advertise testimonies, the beautiful advertisements that they put out. >> rose: look at this so you can see exactly, you can see here. >> so that plugs right in. >> 800 songs which is probably one of the biggest if not the biggest set of music all of one time of this area of american culture. and i think what's great about that is you can really just sink into this for a long time this is a box you could listen to on the way to work for a couple of days, you could spend months delving into all-this material. >> rose: does any of the artists particularly speak to you? >> oh, well, the number one

artist that paramount fell into which is going to be highlighted in the second set of this is charlie paton who was basically the great grandfather of all pop music in american music especially. he just seems like an alien to me. doesn't seem like someone who could have actually existed. the only known photograph of him doesn't look like a real human being to me. but that is where we're getting to. we're laying the groundwork of this is where paramount started, the furniture company, what they started to do. and when we get to charlie paton it is the crescendo. he is the saviour of this. >> rose: all right. we'll get to that in a moment. let's look at some images, here is ethyl waters black aad you can see that image there, hopefully. the next image is paramount phonograph images, let's see that, there you go. and then finally they celebrate 60 years-of-the emancipation proclamation.

>> uh-huh. now that may seem like a really, what a wonderful thing they were doing to highlight the emancipation proclamation but i got to think that they're doing anything they can possibly do to sell records too, to rural families. black families and sell record players to them. and you know, but here's the beautiful part about all this. is that these are the first times that people are allowed to speak their own voice, minorities and women are telling their own stories. i think there's a comparison that could be made about early hollywood, black actors were sort of given a character, a stereotypical character and told okay, be this character and say these lines. that's in film. with none of their own voice. but in this scenario, we're going to drop the needle and record. do your thing. >> rose: right. >> what is your thing. and so many of these records came out, even this ethyl waters aad, this is as here

girl left in cold vows revenge. like we don't sort of think of black women being allowed to have revenge and have it being highlighted in the 1920s, like this being a thing that is applauded and used as a selling point. that is a massive amount of freedom that kind of goes against, i mean women were just given the right to vote a couple years before this record was put out. >> it does have a feel of america at a particular time. and maybe because, and i think paramount was unique among labels of that era just because they, maybe it is because of expediency, their cheapness, just wanting to get to the point. they wanted to get people in the studios, they didn't really have a filter so you really do get this sense of what, much more representative view of what america really sounded like, in all its, you know, multitudes during this time frame. >> rose: a point of musical history. did the blues get hijacked by rock 'n' roll? >> rock 'n' roll is sort of the blues, you know, a

thousand rpm or something like that, you know. >> rose: not 78. >> a thousand. >> that's right. all modern music to me is the blues, and sort of-- . >> rose: really, all modern muss sick the blues. >> i feel that way. i think it's that important. the blues hijacked music. and i think it made people not really care. >> rose: and has been better because of it. >> i think so because now if you talk to people who are sort of purists or maybe into or chet-- or chest ral, opera, sheet music, that kind of level of musicianship, people who are composers, the class and respect they're given, it's still to this day hard for them to get the exact same respect if you wrote a song, even the beatles, a song of theirs that is so important culturally to the world is still not given the exact same respect as ludwig beethoven. and i think that is a strange thing still. but this is the people speaking, not someone who has been trained ors with a product i believey, this is

the people-- prodigy, this is the people speaking. and the blues was not only the people speaking, these weren't big bands with a trained singer and someone wrote the other song and there was a push button and made it happen. which are beautiful things is we are dropping the need told record and this is a person from blah blah blah, mississippi, who has one song that we can record right now in five minutes. go. and that's america right there. in a nutshell. >> rose: this is boweevil blues, here it is. ♪ ♪ bo weevil ♪ ♪ don't some more ♪ yeah ♪ boweevil ♪ don't chase the blues no

more ♪ ♪ boweevil yeah ♪ boweevil everywhere you go ♪ ♪. >> boweevil. you once said i think that the blues is sort of like the physical pain your brain gives your stomach when someone leaves you and is not coming back. >> uh-huh. you felt the blues? >> i think that what you were saying before when this came, when the blues finally came into existence sort of, no one really knows when it started but it seems like a 20th century phenomenon. when it first came out this is the first time humans are actually singing out loud their own story about their own pain. instead of somebody else writing a grand piece with 40 people involved this is a single individual. and we need to be able to see women playing their own

guitar and accompanying themselves in the 1920s. and just playing by themselves, especially the black male version of the blues at that time, one man, one guitar, his own story, the whole world gets to see it or has the possibility of hearing it. and it's so anybody who is feeling any kind of pain which is every single person on earth has a chance to relate to this intimately. that story could be your own story and probably is your own story in whatever version it is. i'm glad you picked boweevil, because every blues and folk-music-- musician and seemed to cover that. her is really slow, you know, really slowed compared to led bellies. and led belly was able to sell a bigger audience and bring it to almost like a standard like this land is your land in a way. >> so but still the pain is there for everyone, to like a caption, put it into their own persona.

>> there is another one we have which i think you requested. i want jesus to talk to me. give me the sense of that song. >> this is an interesting example i think that paramount would record anything as long as they thought there was a group of people that might like it like those north carolina ramblers, okay we have the carliners covered this is hill billy music, religious music, christian music, whatever we can get. a lot of the artists that recorded religious songs like i want jesus to talk with me by homer quincey smith, that we should take a listen to, this shows you that this is an evil sounding son. this doesn't sound like some happy religious song that you would sing on sunday. this song sounds evil. by the time he is finished with it has transend mood something incredibly beautiful that i can't even imagine the people in the room that recorded it even knowing what they had just recorded. i think they probably just moved on and saw that as something novel. >> it is hard to imagine who the intended audience was for this, this kind of

anguish cry. we were talking about this yesterday. but my mentor fahy, he thought of songs like this as, he said i'm not sure if i'm hearing the serious beating of angels wings or shall you know, the clove and hoove beating out time because it really has that quality where you don't, what did i just listen to, it-- all i can tell is it's sort of a wail, a wailing. so it would be great to have a listen to homer quincey smith. >> rose: let's hear homer quincey smith. ♪ ♪ ♪ i got jesus ♪ ♪ in me

♪ ♪ journey ♪ lord i want jesus ♪ to walk with me ♪. >> rose: you said it's just evil. >> i can't imagine a religious person walking into the room and hearing you know grandma listening to this record and saying yeah. >> rose: because the title is i want jess to us walk with me. i want to talk with he me and by the end he's just wailing and in pain almost at the end. it's just beautiful. it sort of covers 15 different things about america, the black side of things, the religious side of things, the southern side of things. the capitalism of this company just wanting to sell records if people will buy this and think it is

religious music fine, we'll sell it to them. fine, doesn't matter. >> rose: so somebody sees this and says i want some of that, what do they do? >> well, we, there has been releases of paramount throughout the decades and there is-- then there are collectors too who have found they are really hard to find there is only one of these disks in existence people know about. it was just an idea to get together a set that could, you could just dive not entire world and absorb it all so we are, you know, selling these through thirdman's web site and also at record stores everywhere. >> rose: but i mean my understanding is you got all kinds of people that are going to sort of define america. >> yeah. i-- i guess for example third mann records started about five years ago and this year i took off from touring and i wanted to dedicate to archival projects that we could get involve with, this being the

biggest one. we also partnered with sun records re-released all their 45s. >> i was thinking about sun. >> and document records out of europe and re-releasing their collections and trying to make this more available. when i was a teenager i had to go look for blues records in vintage bins and there wasn't, you couldn't just easily, readily available get them. you definitely couldn't get them at kmart or whatever. you had to go looking for them. and i want to make it more and more available, more and more a peeling. the design aspect of putting it together is all just a trick. the melodies and songs are a trick. the cover of the album are a trick. the commercials for them are a trick. it's all to get to you go down to the store and get you involved in the story and lure you in my trend burnett who you know said digital sound has dehumanized it and taken away some of of what we hear without telling us. >> he's ck in that i think that the downfall in technology in the 80s when

digital equipment started to come around really saturated music with really bad feelings and tones. and it's-- there's an analogy about analog versus digital. and analog is this. if you drop a needle or magnet on a tape recorder, and you record you are dragging that pencil across the table. and you're hurting. digital is this. it doesn't matter how many samples you do per secretary t is still that. there is empty space and i think some people think it psychologically fat agencying which is a whole other story but the idea is these scratches in this stable table. some people think that is recording sound if i scratch this table it possibly could be recording what we are talking about right now. and so i think when i listen analog recordings and digital recordings side-by-side they don't have any warmth, any romance to them. and there's a lot of to do with mechanics. i think once we get away

from mechanics and mechanical thingsing things that turn that we can actually watch and things that are actually recorded and working in a mechanical way, we lose warmth and romance am you can sing about an old phonograph like robert johnson but ipod blues, there is nothing romantic about that. >> rose: you feel the same way about lps, vinyl. >> of course. it's the best format that music was ever attached to. it's in there. the music is in there mechanically. you can retrieve it with a needle. you can take a needle and put it in a cup and listen to that music and that's pretty amazing. i don't think it was ever bested by anything else. it may be more portable, no problem with that. i listen to an ipod in my car too, you know, but portability does not mean better sound and better feeling. >> rose: but it does mean portability and access. >> exactly. >> rose: that's important too. >> exactly. >> and we didn't want to be anti-technology with this thing. how else are you going to deliver 800 tracks to people

other than through some sort of digital carrier. >> right. >> rose: so last time were here, you were not a solo artist. >> right. >> rose: tell me about your evolution. >> as a musician. >> rose: personal, as a muss ig, you know, i don't get you but once every eight years i'm getting all i can. >> i work every single day of my life. it's a privilege to me to be able to think of myself as an artist and think of myself as a creator and i don't take it lightly. it's not an, cus for me to wake up at 2:00 in the afternoon, so every day i create something. and mi always putting them out under different names or different ideas or different people involved, whether i'm producing or directing or writing or performing it myself. it doesn't matter to me, you know, all my albums could be called, you know, whatever john doe, it doesn't matter what the name is on it. i just wanted to make something that didn't exist before. sometimes i have fun with the design of how it is

weren'ted and how it is put on display or how it is recorded or whatever. but at the all that really matters to me making something that didn't exist. >> rose: so what's changed. >> what has changed is my ability to do things that i couldn't do when i was younger. i used to think you know well, if i had a record label it would be nice to be able to do this, this, and this. well now i have one and we can make a set like this that maybe nobody would have done this, maybe they would have 20 years from now. i have no idea. i feel the same way from his standpoint. if you get to a spot where you are able to make something exist that didn't exist before, are you really connecting with the entire human race. you are giving to them. you're not taking. >> rose: was it inevitable that you would be solo? >> i don't know. i don't know-- maybe i've always been solo, you know. maybe, you know, we talked about the history of the 1920s of the first moment where we are having one man against the world record into a phonograph, that was the beginning of the freedom

to be allowed to be an artist like that, musically. painters are have been able to did it before. >> rose: so are you saying, in other words, is this the kind of thirst for freedom this decision you made to go solo? >> i don't think anybody who like thrives on creativity or art, you're definitely not looking to put yourself in a place where someone else makes the decisions for you and tells you what to do. you're looking for a way to break free and do it your own way. >> great to meet you. >> great meeting you. >> rose: much success. so don't make it so long next time, okay. >> all right, i will come back soon. >> rose: it's great to you have, dean, jack white, back in a moment, stay with you us. >> sequence is two ellipses connected by an s and the s is a passage that reverses itself right in the center of the piece. and you might have the concern that you're walking back in the same direction that you came from but you are he is not.

>> rose: richard serra is here, need i say more. "the new york times" have called him a titans of sculpture. i call him one of the best artists of our time, known for large scale steel sculptures that pushed the medium to its limits. recently he is thinking more about the ways people experience his art. a new exhibition in the gagosian gag ree releases a connection in business work on you. >> from the 21st and 24th street location, will be there until january --, 2014. i am pleased to have once again richard serra at this table. welcome, sir. >> thanks, nice to be here. >> rose: nice to have you here. is this a new direction for you? >> it's a new body of work. >> rose: well, clearly that. >> it has precedence in some early work but you know if you work a lot, what happens is that as sequences unfold, new forms come out of old pieces. and i felt after doing a lot of curved linear pieces and quasi bar oak pieces it was

time to push it in another laq"ction so this is a new body of work. >> one piece intervals, that had a precedence in pieces hi dornlier, one piece in-- and another piece with larry that dealt with the locks you walked in between. but the piece at 21st street isn't that curved linear. >> 21st, but all the 24th are flat plain, and one forged piece. >> rose: but is there something to the idea that you wanted those of us without go to experience a more of an intimacy with the work? >> well, i think the piece on 21st street you enter into a path and then you follow the paths and the path is revealed to enclosures in the intend-- interior and you walk outside and there are two enclosures you could enter and exit from the outside. but those pieces ant transparent. you have to walk and find your way through them. >> rose: right. >> everything on 24th street is pretty transparent. >> rose: you see the whole thing.

>> yeahment and there is no hire arcee on where you should g you can enter anywhere you want and leave anywhere you want. >> rose: okay i will ask this question. where are you in terms of the evolution of you thinking about sculpture and what you hope to achieve? >> well, what i want to constantly do if i can is to exceed my own language. and that's difficult because you know you have things it that you have done. and what happens is as solutions occur, the form changes. but you have to go through various solutions before that happens. with this show i really wanted to clear the deck and i wanted to up the thickness of the scale and i wanted to exceed what i had done. and there's one big piece there, 7 flight six angles where the plates are 8 inches thick and they're 10 feet high and 40 feet long. we're talking about 7 plates so we're into like 380, it's a lot of weight. >> of course, tons. and then the other piece is 24 plates and they're nine

inches thick. and they're set parallel an they're different lengths and different heights. the heights 4, 5 and 6 and the lengths are 5, 7-eleven and 9. >> so we should experience both, both the idea of what the sculpture says to us as it sits there, you know, and as we move around it. and at the same time we should look at the forward reach of the artist in achieving something this massive. how does he or she do it. >> physically? >> yeah. >> i mean what is it, with the large piece in 24th street, the 6 angle piece, 7 plate piece i actually set it up in new jersey in wood to make sure i knew what i was doing because you don't want to order, you know, tonnage like that and not know what you're about. and it took a great deal of precision to get it into the floor at one point we had to

dig up the floor because of hurricane sandy to make sure the bedding underneath the slab was still stable. so there's a lot of preparatory procedures that go into putting these pieces together. >> but is this more than mechanics and engineering? >> well, the result is. but a lot of getting something into production has to do with the process of how you do what. but the what is how you receive it through your sensation and experience, is something else. but i have to pay particular attention to getting the pieces into place. that's my job. >> that's the job of the sculpture to make sure you get the pieces. >> you have to stand the pieces up, get them in place and you have to make them reveal what you intend. >> well, engineering changing in terms of what you can do and what we can learn both because of computers and images and all of that? >> in terms of the bending in place and the process of plates and the making of plates, that's changed since

the computer sglachlingts that's changed a lot in the last ten years. the pieces on 24th street, the flat pieces, those are, that technology hasn't changed. but very few people would deal with 8 inch thick plates 40 feet long, 10 feet high. that's just not, you don't find that in industry or very few people would forge blocks that are 36 tons. people just don't do that. there's no need for that. >> they don't do it, i see. >> there's no need to produce anything like that to make anything with without having to then retool it and form it into a piston or a nose cone or something else. i'm using it purely as it comes and making it into a form to serve my needs at sculpture. but it has no useful purpose in industry. >> well, are you going to ever go work in something other than steel? >> i just did a show, a little plastic pieces of paper that were very small, i think, 20 inches wide and

30 inches high, 12 of them, on both sides of the plastic which i spent a good six months doing. very small work. and i put a great deal of effort into it. so i don't only do large work. i do a lot of drawings. >> but you are defined by large work. >> that is because of the public. i do a tremendous amount of drawing. i draw all the time. >> rose: and take as much pride in what you draw as well as what you put on the floor in steel. >> i do, yeah, it's a different volume of work and has a different tension and a different involvement for me. >> rose: are you in a good place in terms of your artistic life. >> yeah, very good, yeah. particularly with this show, way. i needed to clear the air. i needed to do a new body of work. and you know, the chips fall where they may but if you ask me i do feel good about t i feel great about it, particularly the big piece, particularly the seven plate piece. >> rose: i loved it. >> so did i. >> rose: i loved it. >> but-- . >> rose: everything about t i loved ou it oxidized. the color is just stunning.

>> yeah, they're blue gray because of the mill scales they haven't been sandblasted. they haven't rusted. i will store those pieces indoors. i don't want them to oxidize. >> rose: due do not. >> nobody, i like them the way they are now. rarely dow get pieces out of the mill with that kind of mill scale that's completely tight like that. and there's two prop pieces in the other room that have a blue gray scale and i'm going to keep them that way if i can. >> rose: you can. >> i can keep them indoors. i'm not going to store them outside. >> rose: but still won't they change even indoors because of the nature of -- >> overtime but it will take 8 or 10 years before the mill scale even comes off then they have to rust again. >> rose: what would happen if i go put water on it. >> they would start to rust. >> rose: that is what i thought. and if you kept putting water on them it would rust and in about 8 years it would turn dark dark brown, almost amber color and then they would cease because that's the nature of core is to form a skin and it doesn't oxidize any longer. >> rose: if you are's

richard serra, are you competing against yourself? >> well, if i am richard serra it is contrary to the fact conditionaling i am richard serra. of course i'm competing against myself. >> rose: you are, aren't you. >> sure. >> but you not only compete against yourself but everybody who came before you and everybody who came after you. and you are born at a certain moment in to a history, a continuum. and where you enter that history and continuum has a lot to do with what you do, about who came before you and also who comes after you. and everyone is born into a different continuum and everyone enters into the kind of overturn of art history at a different age. so you know, i came out of the mid 20s century and we're into the 21st century. at the turn of the century you had picasso. it moves on. >> rose: you came out. you began life as a painter, did you? or -- >> i began life as an english major making drawings and got into yale making drawings and painted and when i started sprmenting

with live and stuffed animals and that took me in a different direction. >> rose: what direction did that take you into. >> formulating processes with rubber and rubber lead me to lead and lead led me to steel. but as a kid-- . >> rose: will steel lead you to anything. >> as a kid i worked in steel mills and i knew a lot about it. and i knew more about than most sculptures who worked before because it had been used in the industrial revolution an i under tad its building potential. >> rose: and that gave you an edge over other sculptures. >> i don't know about an edge. i understood in a way that hadn't understood it. >> rose: therefore you could do more things. >> if you look at the history of sculpture from gonzalez,-- most people cut t fold it or hung it out as a three dimensional painting. i came to sculpture and used it for its stas is, wait shall counterbalance,ic lippium, its stas is, its density, its gravitational load and gravity is a force, engineering graph sit not used because it has a tendency to overturn so i

started using things that weren't as ifened, weren't glued, weren't stitched, weren't welded. a and that was a whole different way of approaching sculpture. >> rose: take a look at some of these things so you know what we're talking about. to figure out things where he is in his life. first images the grief and reason this is, with ale's talk about it, 2013. >> there it. tell me about that. >> picture does to the do justice to sculpture. >> yeah, that's right. they're blocks, about 6, vi by 3 feet and blocks, 6 feet by 2 and a half feet. and the same block that's on the top is on the bottom and then reversed. probably has a almost a symbolic form, in a reading. could probably go back to a scar cough guy. >> why is it called grieve

and reason. >> did you read joseph broughtski. >> of course i did. >> and on grief and reason that one essay is a robert frost poem about a wife looking out the window at a burial mount and a husband standing at the bottom of the steps and wondering why she doesn't talk to him and where she goes when she leaves. so there is an implied double sadness in the fact that she is probably looking at her lost son and a great friend of mine had just died while i was building this piece so i called it grief and reason for walter. so it not only connects to brodsky and that poem and the poem is actually called home burial. so it fits into the form. >> rose: next piece is seven plate six angles 2013. this is, it's hard to see them this doesn't do justice. >> the plates are 8 inches thick, they're eight feet high and 40 feet long and they're freestanding. and you walk into different corners. and the corners probably go from 11 feet apart to oh 33

feet apart, the angles are open and closed as you go. the compression of the piece varies as you walk into it. there's very few times where you are asked to walk into a corner. it's not something people walk into. and when you walk into these corners, some of them compress the space so it's somewhat clause tro phobic and uncomfortable and others as you round the corner is complete real estate leaf to so it is like walking into conners that compress you and open up. >> the next one is 7 plates six angles this is more detailed. >> it's hard to get an overview. the piece takes up the whole gal rye and the gallery is 60 x 100. >> rose: the next one is intervals, 2013 this is the one we were talking about, this looks like the cemetery. >> i don't think it looks like a cemetery. nevertheless. >> rose: some people have said that. >> it's okay. >> rose: okay. >> when you walk through it, what it does is it kind of brackets you from the

shoulders up so are you either looking at other people amongst themselves looking through and across and it deals with elevations as you walk in through and around it. and they are spaced 42 inches apart. and they go from 4, 5 to 6 feet high and they ride up and down as you move in and out of it. and there's no hierarchy in terms of where you enter or exit. >> rose: the next one is interviews again, more detail. >> yeah. >> it's fairly dense, fairly compacted. i have a considerable fondness for this piece, hi done two earlier pieces that were more opened and more about a horizontal cut into the field looking across the plain this is more about the psychological presence you feel when are you standing in the room. maybe that's why you related it or someone related it to a cemetery. >> yeah. but you want what you want us to do is to feel something we haven't felt before. >> yes. >> well, i think-- . >> rose: connect to some experience of our own.

>> i think any work of art what happens is that if you are open to seeing it then you probably have a sensation and that sensation leads to an experience and that is probably private and deals with your background, where are you born what you have been exposed to in life. who you know what your education was and it will lead to other ways about thinking about other things and just exactly what is in front of you. i think probably an easy metaphor for this one if are you going it to say cemetery is that, but when people walk amongst it that's not what they tell me. >> rose: what do they tell new. >> they tell me they feel the weight of the entire room. they tell me, someone told me they felt weak in the knees, the downward compression of the space. they felt the rhythm of the piece. a lot of people thought, composer told me thought it was very musical so people have different relationships. you never know what people will tell you. but if the work is open enough i think it provides or it can provide multiplicity of experiences that anybody can go in,

enter into, and find something if they don't have a prejudgement or bias about what they are looking at. but i think a lot of people come to work and not willing to see it and if you come with that judgement you're not going to see anything. >> rose: that is true about all art. don't you any? you have got-- you have to become willing to experience it and not come in and have a judgement or restraint on how you're going to feel. >> i think people even go to museums, pay the, go through the turnstile and still have a prejudgement about that can't be art. i will give you a prime example. take a painter like robert who paints all quite paintings, if you listen people like morley safer or whofer, they are still not going to give him the benefit. >> they don't want to call it art. because they refused to open their eyes and look at what's in front of them, as namely just paint on canvas. and you know, it's also there is a suspicion that if you don't know about art and

you're not going to give yourself the benefit of the doubt then you will be suspicious that the artist is foisting something over on you and that remains. >> doesn't make it good art, just makes it art. >> i don't think art i is-- artists make art to foster a hoax. i don't think why people-- . >> rose: of course they don't. we are talking about-- we've been here, everybody has been here, the idea what is art and the idea of what morley safer raised in that "60 minutes" piece. suppose i go up to a canvas, you know, and -- >> no, no, let's bring it right back to where are you on this piece. you said it reminded you of the cemetery. >> rose: i did. >> i think that's closing off your ability to see other ways of reasoning and seeing the piece. >> rose: suppose i said it reminded me of a circus s that-- in other words, t reminded me of anything i'm closing myself off to everything else.

>> no, no, no, no. but when you said it reminded you of a cemetery i think that's already laying over a definition on it because you have freestanding plates that one could say are in a row that somewhat-- maybe it has a parallel to the cemetery. but that is certainly not when you walk in around it and give it time. i don't think that is the meaning that comes across. at least that's not my intention. >> what is your intention? >> to have part, people participate in the rhythm of the intervals of the intersections of the pieces as they move through them. >> rose: and what if i participated with the intervals in the spaces and walk through them and came out saying it makes me feel like i'm in a cemetery. >> there's no signage. in a cemetery there's always signage. >> rose: you mean in terms, signage meaning here lies so and so. >> yes this is the symbolic of anyone here and under. cemeteries are about what is under the ground. they mark a place where

somebody has been intered this is not that. >> you just deeper thinker than i am. i was talking about what it is i see. the visual image, not how i project what is under the ground. you look at a series of images. >> these thing are freestanding. stones in cemeteries are not freestanding. >> rose: did somebody write this looked like a cemetery and you didn't like it. >> no. i'm just trying to answer your-- your perception of my work. >> rose: well, who do you know that has a better, you know, appreciation of your work. but let me go on to this. we will come back to 24rx because i think, i mean i-- you know, over all -- >> different people see work differently, that's for sure. so why don't you allow them to he is it anyway they want to. >> they can see it anyway they want to. >> rose: but you are saying if they see it a certain way they are limiting themselves. >> i think. >> rose: they can see it anyway they want to but if they see it a certain way they are limiting themselves. >> often work gets tagged with a moniker that then

doesn't allow people. >> rose: we're not talking about anybody else, we're only talking about one person. >> but there are works that get tagged with monikers when they first go up. and people from then on can't see it any other way than the headline of the journalism which has tagged it. that happens all the time. >> rose: yeah. so what is this? >> that's a bridge. >> rose: a bridge, really? >> yeah. >> rose: it's not what i thought it meant. i thought it was a piece of art in which i looked at it and it had two separate-- a ceramic and glass and paper within the paper is a bridge between the two. >> rose: but if you do that then you're limiting yourself. >> you asked me what it was. actually, for sure it is a glass and-- . >> rose: sure that is a bunch of steel together. >> but for sure this is a cup and a glass and a piece of paper. >> rose: and for sure that's steel. >> you asked me how i see it as a sculpture i will say it's a bridge. >> rose: is this art. >> if you say it is. >> rose: that's the

definition. >> if i say it is. i just created this, is it art. >> if you say it's your art then i will say it's your art. and then we have to compare it to every other work of art that has ever been done and then we have to think b we're in trouble. >> rose: all right s there anything else we need to see, counter weight 1 and counter weight 2. >> what's interesting is they are exactly the same dimension they are five inches thick, they lean against the wall there is no fixed joint and they just stand on top of each other while they are leaning against the wall. if says if you took a piece of plywood, cut it in have and put the top on the bottom and it just stood there. >> that one actually came at 3:00 in the morning. i woke up and thought oh, i think that will work. i got up the next morning and did it. >> why didn't you just do it right then before you forgot it. >> it was cold and i didn't want to go downstairs.

i wanted to remember-- . >> rose: so artists are succumbing to creature comforts. >> well, no, i don't have-- a lot of workpeople will say their work os kur in dreams. but that one did occur in the middle of the night. i thought i wonder if i could do this. >> rose: had you been thinking about it at all. >> no, it just occurred to me. sometimes it is seepage. sometimes you think about a lot of things that are possible and then you take them off the table or they fall to a different part of your brain and then for some reason they come up. i think what's interesting is about this whole brain discussions we had before. >> rose: when you were hear, right. >> i think there's a limbic part of the brain which deals with intuition, emotion, and experience. and i think that if i look at this last show, the reason that these pieces probably came about was i really wanted to get away from the curve linear things that i was doing. and i probably allowed myself a greater freedom in terms of intuitively wanting to move into a-- space and i

hadn't dealt with corners like that, maybe in one piece but only one piece against the wall. and that was something i hadn't done. and then to do it and to exceed it with 8 inch plates that are 51 ton each, that was a big move for me to make. when the piece is up and you look at it and oh, they just made plates and ordered them, so what. psychologically for me to order a plate of that size t was a step. hi built an earlier piece of a single plate which was higher t was ten feet high and 30 feet long and 8 inches thick. and i liked it. i liked it a lot. and i didn't know how i could extend it. and then i thought well if i use f i extend the plate longer, make the plate 40 feet long, little lower i can probably put together a complex of spaces that would be interesting. but i was interested in freestanding plates like that. >> all right, here's my question. is there, is there part of

the appreciation should be, part of the appreciation of a piece of sculpture, how difficult it is to mount it. >> to mount it. >> yeah to mount it and the overall weight that it carries in contrast to other things. >> no, i just happen to be interested in weight. i think or my installations need a certain industrial procedure. but if you take serra z or other people they can build pieces out of things that are minuscule. and i have no, i have no presumption about the necessity of large installations or heaviness of weight that is just something i happen to be involved with. i don't think it's quality. i just think it's a different in kind. >> rose: the desire to move away from curve linear. >> i will be back. i just moved away in this show. >> rose: but i want to understand, was the desire to move away because you felt like a new show needed

something fresh and different or was it desire propelled by the fact that you just simply wanted to express new things because you were feeling like i need to go in another direction, was it the show dictates this. >> the piece on 21st street hadn't been produced and it was three years backlogged. >> right. >> and i didn't want to then start another curve linear piece which i knew would be another three years backlog. i wanted to do a new body of work. hi a need to do a new body of work and i wanted to exceed what i had done in terms of the thickness of plates in terms of the psychological bearing of a load. and that came from posoa. it really kind of-- got me excited about that possibility. >> so when people write about you, are they going to say he follows in the tradition of, he was -- >> of who. >> who, i'm asking you. >> i have no idea. >> in other words, you look at richard serra, who really went off in a brand-new direction. >> i think, yeah, that's right. i think. >> but you were influenced, i think by -- >> yeah, but i was also

influenced by paulica newman. >> hmmmm. >> probably by paulic a lot. >> how so. >> in terms of process. in terms of the verb list, in terms of how you go about doing what you do. you know, you can talk about the how and the what, when you get to the why it gets a little more difficult. and that's something that no one ever talks about. louis talked about it but never stopped talked about it. but artists don't talk about the why. and that's hard to talk about because the y has to do with motivation but it probably also has to do with competition with your forebearers, hoss who came before, so if you ask me how do i fit into the tradition, i would have to talk about not only sculptures but painters. because that's the bigger tradition of abstraction. abstraction first begins in painting, not in sculpture. begins with you know -- >> right. >> cad inski. >> and do you think you might have an influence on painters?

>> on architects for sure. on painters, i don't know. >> who you don't consider artists. >> who, architects. >> rose: yes. >> well, let's to the go there, charlie. >> i just-- i'm still a mischievous little boy but i'm really interested in this. >> okay so, in the forward push of art, you know, how you so much influenced by paintings, well, the work you do. >> no, no but i was also influenced by donatella, i was also inflinsed. i have been influenced by everything i come across. and i try to suck it all up. i'm a vacuum-cleaner. i really look at all of it. i look at everything. i've always done that i was very kind of con she shen-- conscientious. >> when i was at yale during the summer i went through every book in the yale art history library one by one so i do that. that interests me. >> and taking something away from all of them in a sense. >> well, you try. >> you assimilate and --

>> it becomes your-- comes out with something new within you're responsible for that history. art doesn't come from nowhere. it comes for a large deal it comes out of art. out of the art that has been done before. an you're just another stone on the wall. your life is like a nanosecond an if you can make a contribution you're lucky within well clearly you're lucky. >> so what next? >> i don't know. i'm going to take a deep breath. >> yeah. >> you're not slowing down for a second. >> no, i'm off the guitar, actually. >> what are you doing in guitar. >> i have two museum shows and something else i'm doing that qatar. >> but you condition tell me what the something else is. >> it's not sure it's going to happen or not. >> okay. i was-- i don't know how i done have any pictures of the curve linear stuff which i loved. now that is just-- anybody with a little bit of

knowledge would say richard serra, inmistakeably richard serra, within by now i guess. >> rose: it is not a question of anybody doing that near the level you are doing it,. >> i have done a lot of curveilinear pieces in the last 20 years and this happens to be the largest. >> you cannot walk inside of that without feeling a whole range of emotions. >> yes, i would think, yes. >> believe me it's true. it's great to you have here. >> good, thanks. >> rose: always good you have here this is, you should get down to gagosian, new sculpture on the 24th, 2 1st between 10th and 119 and 24th street, new gagosian gallery it will be there until january 25th, 2014. a good reason to go down to 24th and 21st. richard serra, probably in

anybody's list, of the great arties of our time, thank you for joining us. see you next time.

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