Richard Serra (b. 1939)
Joe  (2000)
weathering steel
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Comissioned for the Pulitzer courtyard, the 125-ton weathering steel sculpture, is named in homage to Joseph Pulitzer Jr. The sculpture is the first of the artist's torqued spiral series.


On Joe, by Richard Serra
(Published in Abstractions in Space: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, edited by Laurie A. Stein, St. Louis, 2001.)

In March of 1998 Emmy Pulitzer wrote to me and asked if I was interested in making a proposal for a sculpture in conjunction with a building to be designed by Tadao Ando.  This was early on during the preparatory stages and initial design phase of the foundation building and courtyard.  Later that year after receiving plans of the Ando building I made a trip to St. Louis to see the site and met with Peter Clarkson who was the construction manager and would oversee the project.  My initial concern was to locate a site.  At the time this could only be tentative in as much as there was to be an adjoining building, the Forum for Contemporary Art to be designed by Brad Cloepfil.  I returned again in 1999 to meet with Emmy, Tadao Ando and Brad Cloepfil as well as Betsy Millard the director of the Forum in order to discuss how the space between the two institutions could function in terms of elevation and circulation and how to create an outdoor plaza.  At that meeting we reached a general agreement as to the location for a sculpture at the South end of the complex adjacent to the Ando building.  

I had mentioned to Emmy that I was working of a new series of torqued spirals and thought that one of the spirals could mediate between Ando’s building and the Forum.  Emmy came to New York to look at the models of the torqued spirals and chose one.  In consultation with the architects and Emmy I decided on the orientation of the work in relation to circulation and certain details of the design of the courtyard whish were important for the viewing of the sculpture.  The main concern was the access from the stairs leading down into the courtyard.  

The width of the stairs, their extension into the plaza and the rhythm of the descending walls adjacent to the stairway had to be considered and the scale relationship of the sculpture and the site had to be worked out.  I requested that a high wall be erected at the South end of the complex creating an outdoor enclosure in scale with the architecture and the sculpture.

In June of 2000 I met with Emmy in Germany to inspect the finished work.  The sculpture was installed in October of the same year.  I titled it “Joe”.  The viewing of the spiral is continuously different from the outside and gives one no indication of its inside and vice versa.  Walking through the interior passage of the spiral your experience of space is distinct at each and every point as the walls lean toward you or away from you or become parallel.  When you walk between the walls you become implicated in the tremendous spiraling force of the movement.  The velocity projects you ahead into an open interior space which frames the sky.  “Joe” cannot be grasped as Gestalt or image.  The sculpture is understood behaviorally as a function of time.