A sculptural ramble with Richard Serra

"What you have with 'Band' is a very logical floor plan," Serra says of his most recent work, which introduces a wavy, ribbon-like template. "But in elevation, everything leans continuously in opposing directions, which means that as the band unfolds, nothing ever repeats itself and no volume is ever the same. So even though you walk in and out of four cavities and you have a sense that they are very similar, they are all different.

"You might find yourself in a space where you think you have been before, but you realize it is different and you don't know quite why. And then you find yourself in another space, and you think it's the outside of the space you have just been in, but it's not. Or you think it's the inside of the space that you just left, but it's not. If you continuously walk the piece, what you anticipate and what your memory allows you to foresee don't always conclude to be what you suspect."

Like the earlier "Torqued Ellipses," "Band" and "Sequence" differ from much current art, he says, because "you and your experience is the content of the work. In work that is representational or in a frame, the subject matter is a depiction or literal manifestation of a person, place or event. Here, the subject matter is your experience, and it's yours and yours alone. It differs for everyone even though there's a common threshold. What you have is people having a private experience in a public space with other people. It's a kind of collective experience that's both private and public."

A native of San Francisco who settled in New York in the mid-1960s, Serra has had a low profile in Southern California for decades. But in the last couple of years, major works have been installed at UCLA, the Orange County Performing Artscenter and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Once identified with a brutal form of Minimalism that occasionally incited protest, Serra still looks the part of the macho blue-collar artist, but his public image has changed. Although "Torqued Ellipses" and their successors are anything but warm and fuzzy, they have been embraced by the masses as well as many critics.

"That's something I could not have anticipated, and it started happening about 10 years ago, when I showed the 'Torqued Ellipses' at Dia in New York," he says. "I think people yearn for direct experience, something that is not programmed. Here, you are free to come and go where you want. There is no beginning or end. There is not a hierarchy of experiences built into it."

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com