Verb List (Richard Serra "cover")
[video]
Noah Travis Phillips' "cover" of Verb List by Richard Serra, 1967
Noah Travis Phillips' artwork, "Verb List," serves as a “cover” of and a creative dialogue with Richard Serra's iconic text-based piece of the same name. Crafted several years ago, Phillips reimagined Serra's concept by infusing it with his own life experiences and artistic practice. Adopting Serra's structure of "to..." and "of..." statements (definitives and possessives), Phillips introduced his own lexicon of actions, personalizing the dialogue while honoring Serra's original.
In a subsequent evolution of their work, Phillips transformed the textual homage into a performance video, further exploring the intersections between the artists’ respective practices. Through this visual medium, Phillips portrayed each action word from his “cover” of “Verb List” with images sourced from his personal media archive. By engaging with Serra's format and perpetuating the conversation through his own creative praxis, Phillips models and participates in the potential for artistic dialogue to transcend time and generations. Their reinterpretation showcases how creative lineage can be extended, amplified, and perpetuated across diverse contexts and periods, via the flexibility and adaptability of artistic frameworks. Noah Travis Phillips' "Verb List" stands as both a “cover” of and a tribute to Richard Serra's own enduring contribution to art discourse.
Noah Travis Phillips' VERB LIST (PDF)