Memorials

For the city of Goslar, Serra designed Goslar Memorial (1981). In 1987, he created Berlin Junction as a memorial to those who lost their lives to the Nazis' genocide program. First shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the sculpture was installed permanently at the Berliner Philharmonie in 1988. For the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he designed Gravity, a 10-inch-thick, 10-foot-square standing slab of steel, in 1993.^[46] After initially joining with architect Peter Eisenmann to submit a design for Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Serra abruptly pulled out of the project for "personal and professional reasons" in 1998.^[47]

Performance and video art

Serra was one of the four performers in the premiere of the Steve Reich piece Pendulum Music on May 27, 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The other performers were Michael Snow, James Tenney and Bruce Nauman.^[48]
Hand Catching Lead (1968) was Serra's first film and features a single shot of a hand in an attempt to repeatedly catch chunks of material dropped from the top of the frame.^[49] He also produced the classic 1973 short film Television Delivers People, a critique of the corporate mass media with elevator music as the soundtrack. In Boomerang (1974), Serra taped Nancy Holt as she talks and hears her words played back to her after they have been delayed electronically. The host of Serra's 1974 parody game show, Prisoners' Dilemma, explains that the loser will spend six hours alone in a basement - "that's about the length of the average boring artist's videotape".^[50]
Serra has made a number of films concerning the manufacture and use of his favorite material, steel. Railroad Turnbridge (1976) is a series of shots taken on the Burlington and Northern bridge over the Willamette River near Portland, Oregon, as it opens to let a ship pass. In Steelmill/Stahlwerk, a 1979 documentary made in collaboration with Clara Weyergraf, Serra explores the physical construction of an art piece and at the same time examines the lives of the steelmill. These films can be viewed in a room off the Arcelor gallery in the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.^{[citation needed]}
Serra appears in Matthew Barney's 2002 film Cremaster 3 as Hiram Abiff ("the architect"), and later as himself in the climactic The Order section – the only part of a Cremaster film commercially available on DVD.^[51]