Public Art
December 10th, 2009
High on my long list of Spacing posts I’ve not yet had time to make is one on Richard Serra’s “Shift” sculpture. It sits in a field near King City, north of Toronto. As of today I no longer have to make the post because Derek over at BlogTO wrote an excellent piece on it. When Spacing Review’s editor Jessica Duffin Wolfe and I went out to see Shift on a sub-zero Sunday afternoon last February, the future of this crazy-wonderful piece of art was unclear. However, as the Globe reported a few days ago, it’s future may be secure. Derek at BlogTO writes:
“Shift” is challenging in the way that almost all good modern art is. It doesn’t reveal its meaning or its beauty quickly. But given the chance to dwell upon it for a while, it’s impossible not to acknowledge the seamlessness by which it’s incorporated into the landscape. In speaking of his intentions for the installation, Serra reveals that what he “wanted was a dialectic between one’s perception of the place in its totality and one’s relation to the field as walked. The result is a way of measuring oneself against the indeterminacy of the land.”
Though Serra’s work has at times been termed monolithic, nothing could be further from the truth here. Not only is the boundary of “Shift” defined by the “maximum distance two people [can] occupy and still keep each other in view,” but the structure also emphasizes the natural curvature of the terrain, rising and falling in direct proportion to the land itself. Its scale is thus determined by a sort of parallax effect, whereby the most distant reaches of the sculpture blur with the land.
“Shift” is also a profoundly human structure. The maximum height of each shifting wall is five feet and hence at eye-level. At no point does it ever disregard the viewer or the land. But this human quality also extends beyond the formal elements of the sculpture.
Read the rest of his post. We were also in a bit of a daze when we finally found the sculpture. We knew what to expect but when you see it in person it overwhelms and we visited it for an hour or so before walking back to the car. What follows are photos of our journey to see a snow-covered Shift (part of the motivation of this mini-post is that our fingers froze to the point of pain while taking pictures, so they need a full public viewing to make it worthwhile). One question some of our readers may be able to answer: where is Roger Davidson now, the wealthy art collector who first commissioned Shift in 1970? Google searches only pick up mention of him in stories about Shift (proving the only way to hide from Google is to have done things before, say, 1993). Beyond checking the links in BlogTO’s post, pick up a copy of Coach House’s 2007 book Concrete Toronto and read a short essay on Shift by Toronto artist and architect Adrian Blackwell.
November 2nd, 2009
The BeautifulCity.ca coalition has admirable, but possibly naà¯ve, expectations about the civilizing benefits of public art.
The group wants the city to use the projected $11 million windfall from the new billboard tax to finance public art projects in every nook and cranny of Toronto. As BeautifulCity has told councillors [ PDF ], “Economic spin off effects of this historic increase to arts funding helps to ease recession and youth unemployment. Tourism goes up. Torontonians enjoy a more humane, fair and beautiful city.”
I’m not persuaded. For years, we’ve been shaking down developers for a public art contribution, and they, in turn, have been making perfunctory gestures. In general, I’d prefer better architecture, but one takes what one can get.
Does it make the city more “humane”? At the margins, yes, although I can think of numerous public art installations that do little to improve the public realm.
I also question the non-aesthetic benefits BeautifulCity touts. Public art projects don’t produce steady work. If you’re an artist, you may get one or a few commissions out of such a program. But the city’s going to want to spread the wealth broadly, so it won’t add up to a steady income for anyone, except perhaps the inevitable consultants who turn up to direct the effort.
Let me suggest an alternative.
Teenagers are the one demographic group consistently excluded from public spaces, both by neglect and design. While the city and neighbourhood groups go to remarkable lengths to build playgrounds, we all get nervous when adolescents congregate in parks, which, in turn, rarely offer little more than a slab of asphalt with a couple of hoops.
October 27th, 2009
It’s a busy week for talking about North York: Last week I wrote about the Leona Drive project in Willowdale, tonight is the North York Modernist Forum, and on Wednesday …
October 22nd, 2009
In this week’s Eye Weekly my Psychogeography column is dedicated to wandering the bungalow and skyscraper skyline of Willowdale in North York but with the added bonus that a major art …
October 22nd, 2009
Last night, in the darkness under the Gardiner Expressway, Toronto’s first permanent multimedia art commission was unveiled. WATERTABLE, the 500 m2 light and sound installation, by …
October 16th, 2009
Berlin artist Jan Vormann is transforming World War II damaged buildings around Europe with his version of a quick patch job. The project, called ‘…
October 5th, 2009
Nuit Blanche has come and gone for another year and I survived the all-nighter with a little help from Tiny Toms Donuts and a Mercy blanket at Fire and Sausage.
This year the festival hit a huge milestone with over a million people roaming the streets of Toronto, an amazing jump from the 425,000 that attended in 2007. While the popularity of the event bodes well for exposure of the artists and the city, I wonder how it has changed the way we experience the installations. Many of the popular pieces housed inside, had lines that could have you waiting for an hour. In other cases the crowds were so large, that the art almost got lost in the visual and literal noise of the city. However, this success has brought contemporary art to a much broader audience and, through its anonymity, given people a chance to engage where they might otherwise have felt that daunting feeling of not understanding.
While some may argue that the event has changed from its almost impromptu nature of a few years ago, the true success of the evening is the way it allows Torontonians to engage with their city on a very different level. It exposes areas of the city that people may not have encountered and, especially this year with the interactive elements, it creates a dialogue in which to interact with others. Not only were there the official applications of “My Night” and “Night Navigator” for iPhones and Blackberries, but also many of the side projects had attendees posting reviews and photos of what they’d seen throughout the event. Not only were the opportunities for interactions on the technical side, but also with the chance for the audience to participate in the art. Many of the installations allowed attendees to sing, dance, ride, crawl, build and play with the art, breaking down the barriers that contemporary art often creates.
October 2nd, 2009
Calling all art fans and insomniacs…
This weekend is Nuit Blanche 2009, that runs from sunset (6:55pm) on Saturday, October 3 until …
August 7th, 2009
New bike lanes are not the only reason why Dupont has recently moved up on my list of preferred cycling routes. Just this Tuesday, as I approached the unfriendly intersection
…
August 4th, 2009
New murals are going up on Christie Street’s retaining walls just north of Dupont. While the sunflowers and pastoral scenes emerging on the newly reconstructed concrete walls don’t seem particularly unusual …
