It never rises higher than a human and it occasionally seems to disappear into the earth. Artworks. Reflecting on related sculptural practices, art critic Johanna Burton describes how these residues energize the spaces they inhabit. The land was sold to Great Gulf shortly thereafter, but is still planted annually.) Shift by Richard Serra. That was an optical illusion: Each of the concrete forms is level, and that illusion is critical to the work: It reveals the ever-so-gentle rise and fall of the land. (Coincidentally, when seen from above, Shift seems similar to Heizer’s Rift 1 (1968), the first of the Nine Nevada Depressions.) Great afternoon in King City! This video documents the installation of Richard Serra's Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift (1969/1995). Richard est un artiste américain né en 1939. Richard Serra’s Shift, 1970-72. Artwork Images. But this kind of approach might also be found closer to home. Après la disparition à Madrid d'une sculpture de 38 tonnes, une autre oeuvre de Richard Serra apparaît à New-York.Nathan Kensinger, un photographe new-yorkais, publie une photo de ce qui ressemble à une sculpture de Richard Serra. While 19th-century landscape painting surely was not in Serra’s sights, Shift’s embrace of the subtle, the soft and the sloping, is a rejoinder to the tendency of early American painters to amp up every element of their paintings in an effort to shock-and-awe. When the cold muck reached my ankles, it occurred to me that the much-discussed romance of the journey to land art is considerably overrated. Shift could be considered a response to that idea: Here direct engagement, from the land itself, is everything. They rise or fall (depending on your point of view) with the slope of the land. (True: Despite this seeming ease-of-access, in a weird way Shift is nominally less accessible than the more famous earthworks: It is on private property and requires a willingness to trespass to view it.) Manuel Revilla on Twitter “#UnDiaComoHoy, pero de 1965, se apagó la luz de Le Corbusier. King City councillor Cleve Mortelliti, who has worked longer to save Shift than anyone else, told me that the council’s recently passed protections should effectively override the Ontario Conservation Review Board’s finding that Shift has no cultural value. Their dogged, insistent stewardship of Shift in the face of developer and, frankly, art world indifference is one of the great untold stories in art and in preservation.). He has written about the formative experience of watching the launching of the huge steel tankers, in which balance and buoyancy were dramatically tested. Given its firm foundation, set in an Ontario field, we have the pleasure of witnessing its force and the shifting relations it catalyzes, year after year. (American artists who have looked at the land, from Thomas Cole to Carleton Watkins through Smithson and Serra, have all been interested in this idea.). Publisher - magazine for architects and related professionals. In Gutter Corner Splash  (1969), he hurls ladles of molten lead into the corner created at the intersection between the gallery floor and wall. Main. Frolicking among the sand dunes in his own backyard, he had little exposure to fine arts early in life. They were so loud that for a few moments I couldn’t hear the sounds of subdivision construction that had greeted me when I found Shift. In 1973, Serra described the process that led to Shift with one of his more acute, even elegant, descriptions of process, one that emphasizes the physicality of his creation of the piece: “[Joan Jonas and I] discovered that two people walking the distance of the field opposite one another, attempting to keep each other in view despite the curvature of the land, would mutually determine a topographical definition of the space. So while Serra revealed the character of the landscape, Great Gulf eradicated it, leveling the land so that it could more quickly and easily build McMansions. The work runs roughly from the northeast to the southwest across what was most recently a cornfield. In fact, Serra consistently performs his sculptures. “Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties.”. Although the subdivisions are encroaching, and from time to time a developer insists the artwork be destroyed in the name of progress, the Township of King has seen fit to designate Shift as protected under the Ontario Heritage Act, preventing its destruction or alteration. Published February 26, 2013 Updated February 26, 2013 . Richard Serra est un sculpteur américain, né le 2 novembre 1939 à San Francisco. Shift’s beauty comes from how it provides access to a visual pleasure that I had neither anticipated nor previously considered: Its concrete forms each provided a guide that encouraged me to find and to follow what had been all but invisible, the gentle topography of a barely-rolling landscape. The boundaries of the work became the maximum distance two people could occupy and still keep each other in view.”. 154k followers. Through the 60s and 70s, minimalist artists, including Serra, claimed that the space around a work of art was the subject of sculpture. Among the ways in which Mortelliti and the council have tried to pointedly raise the profile of the work is in their naming of streets in Great Gulf’s “King Oaks” subdivision: It was the town council, not the developer, who named streets in Great Gulf’s subdivision “Richard Serra Court” and “Sculptor’s Gate.” Mortelliti said that the council’s hope was to effectively tell people about King City’s treasure — and to push Great Gulf to value it. of trucks in reverse, the flat, crashing sound of plywood and two-by-fours being dropped to the ground, and the whining buzz of mechanical saws. Shift consists of six narrow concrete forms as long as 68 meters and as short as 28 meters, each embedded in the earth. Progression of Art. I looked up through a thin stand of oak trees at the edge of Shift’s field and saw a dozen geese, maybe more, flying south. Richard Serra. Richard Serra construit d’énormes plaques d’acier et des rouleaux et travaille à différentes intensités d’usure de la matière. Aledvood is an architectural designer at Moriyama. Concrete Architecture. The following 15 files are in this category, out of 15 total. Sacred Architecture. Shift is strikingly beautiful, albeit not how a Thomas Hill or a George Inness is beautiful. (To be sure, the two friends were not in total alignment: Smithson was fascinated by what he called “aerosurveying,” the seeing of an artwork from above, most famously enumerated by his 1966–67 proposal for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. I looked at Shift from what I came to think of as the ‘bottom’ of the sculpture, the view that looks slightly uphill toward what still seems to be farmland. In the decades since making Shift, Serra has become well-known for his interest in determining a process from which forms emerge rather than for imposing merely imagined forms on a material or into a landscape. a verdant valley! That told me I was close to a subdivision that was being built by Great Gulf Homes, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Hickory Hill Investments, which today owns the land in which Shift is sited. Serra was born on November 2, 1938, in San Francisco, the second of three sons. The former, a community of species, stands in contrast to the single-mindedness of this year’s alfalfa crop. Author of “Carleton Watkins: Making the West American”; producer/host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. He spent time with his working-class immigrant father, a pipe-fitter at a local Marine Shipyard. Prototypes demonstrate the poten tial of a concept, while perhaps leaving certain claims unfulfilled. More information. Published February 26, 2013 . We propose recuperating Richard Serra’s Shift, first performed in 1972, as a prototype for contemporary ecological art. Land art by Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler and Jonas’ own Wind (1968) engaged even more directly with the idea of the invisible or near-invisible. We walk this land fifty-some years after Serra. Interior Architecture. (Heizer is well-recalled by Tom Holert in his excellent essay in the “Ends of the Earth” catalogue, an especially valuable contribution as Heizer insisted on being left out of the exhibition.). Pooya Aledvood is an architectural designer at Moriyama & Teshima Architects. While walking through a boggy stand of trees one chilly Ontario spring morning, I groaned as with each step my shoes sunk deeper into muddy mire. (It is important to note that were it not for Mortelliti, his colleagues on the town council and the way in which King Citians cherish Shift — walk into the town’s tiny library and ask about Shift as I did, and you’ll marvel at how quickly everyone within earshot will want to talk and talk and talk about it — Shift may have long-since been substantially compromised or even destroyed. His father, Tony, was a Spanish native of Mallorca who worked as a candy factory foreman and in steel mills. King City, Ontario, Canada.Filmed: April 7, 2011.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra As I left Shift I heard something I hadn’t heard before: Honking. A friction comes into view between the sculpted environment and the larger development processes beyond the surrounding woodlots. Richard Serra's "Shift" (1970) (15453455084).jpg. In the fields, the typically straight paths created by agricultural tools instead bend. I looked at Shift from the northwest, where I could see $1 million McMansions in Great Gulf’s “King Oaks” subdivision (now open!) Both his parents were left-leaning and he … Some artists document their performances through notes, photography, film or video. Gesture, material and place intersect and coalesce as a residue. My destination was Richard Serra’s Shift (1970–72), and despite having printed out several overhead views of the earthwork and the landscape around it, I took more wrong, wet turns than I want to admit. Akin to misaligned retaining walls, they are objectively poor objects: eroding concrete, cast without reinforcement. People also love these ideas. Shift, which by King City’s count occupies about 10 acres of a 241-acre parcel of agricultural land, is similarly dwarfed by its landscape. Modernist art critic Michael Fried accused their work of “theatricality” for taking this position. — often tarted up with extra drama so as to be more striking, more sublime, providential. Richard Serra is one of the preeminent American artists and sculptors of the post-Abstract Expressionist period.