Photo courtesy Sarah Zabrodski and Hyperallergic.com

Writer Sarah Zabrodski examines Shift, Richard Serra’s enigmatic and inaccessible land art work, in her latest entry for art blog Hyperallergic. Located in a cornfield on private property 50 kilometers north of Toronto in King City, Ontario, Shift has been at the center of heated political debate as to its status as a protected cultural heritage site. Zabrodski made the trek to the rapidly-developing King City to search out the large-scale sculpture and investigate the many complex issues surrounding public access to the work and its conservation:

Although structurally sound, the sculpture is clearly in need of conservation. While no one expects Land Art to remain in pristine condition, the giant cracks and graffiti are evidence of patent neglect. The status quo is untenable. The CRB — and by extension the provincial government’s — lukewarm stance on “Shift” as a matter of historical, artistic, and civic importance is, quite frankly, embarrassing. Serra is a world-renowned artist and “Shift” a remarkable early career sculpture – he was only 32 at the time of construction. It is also one of only two Serra sculptures made of concrete, as steel is the artist’s preferred sculptural material. The municipal embrace of “Shift” and open recognition of its significance is laudable.

Details of Zabrodski’s investigation, and images of the work, are available here.

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Allison Smith, design for International Orange Blanket, 2012; image courtesy the artist and MacFadden & Thorpe

FOR-SITE Foundation invites you to join us for artMRKT San Francisco at its new location in Fort Mason Center, May 16 through 19.  As we mark FOR-SITE’s 10th anniversary in 2013, we’re celebrating the foundation’s acclaimed past projects and looking forward to exciting endeavors on the horizon.  Our artMRKT presentation will feature works from International Orange, last year’s FOR-SITE exhibition at Fort Point honoring the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge with fresh perspectives on that enduring landmark.  Included will be multiples from Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood, Allison Smith, and Stephanie Syjuco.

FOR-SITE is pleased to offer complimentary one-day passes for our friends.  Reserve your tickets today!

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“HERE, NOW vs. THERE, THEN”

HERE, NOW vs THERE, THEN is here, now!  This publication – created to capture the thoughts, dialogue, ideas, and discussions exchanged during Richard T. Walker’s Fall 2012 Education Program with six Visual Arts MFA students from California College of the Arts – is available for perusal at FOR-SITE’s office at 49 Geary Street, Suite 205.  Our library is also stocked with publications from past Education Programs, books from and about artists that FOR-SITE has shown, and many other resources exploring diverse interpretations, understandings, and manifestations of “art about place.”

Come here and get comfy with some great books!

FOR-SITE Foundation’s Library

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The Seattle Art Museum revealed artist Doug Aitken’s MIRROR last weekend, a responsive, permanent installation on the exterior of the museum that utilizes an expansive collection of moving images to reflect local life. Aitken explains:

“I was interested in the idea of creating a living museum, a downtown building that could change in real time in relation to the environment around it. It‘s like an urban earthwork.”

The narrative that unfolds on the exterior of the museum relies on hundreds of hours of footage that Aitken filmed at various locations in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, capturing both natural and manmade environments, such as the snow-covered Cascade Mountains, the city’s skyscrapers, and workers assembling jets on the floor of a Boeing factory. The imagery moves across the building’s facade both horizontally and vertically, creating kaleidoscopic patterns that combine and overlap. Sensors placed just outside the museum capture real-time conditions—automobile traffic, pedestrian movement, weather, and so on—that effect the sequence and rhythm of the vignettes with the help of a custom computer algorithm. When interviewed by Wired magazine Aiken explains,

“I was interested in seeing if there was a way to allow the moving image to create a constantly new and changing composition. In MIRROR, imagery at times is abstract and moves in an almost musical tempo. The work generates its own tempos and patterns feeding off the landscape, movement, temperature, light or darkness, wind or many other live organic things around it.”

Read more and see images of MIRROR–Doug Aitken’s first permanent installation for a public museum–here.

Doug Aitken – MIRROR at Seattle Art Museum from Doug Aitken Workshop on Vimeo.

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Co-organizer of the Guggenheim exhibition, Nat Trotman, says of Turrell’s new commission for the rotunda of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum:

“You normally look across the ramps and don’t think about this volume that is the center of the museum.  That is crystallized and solidified. It’s really about a dialogue between Wright and Turrell.”

Read more about the upcoming James Turrell exhibitions in the New York Times article “A Tribute for Turning Light Into Art”

A rendering of a new work by James Turrell for the Guggenheim Museum.

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We have to create a new situation,

One where we can once again convince ourselves that I am alien to all of this.

We need to return to the understanding that I am a completely separate entity.

Then we can long for a time when we can be together again.

For it is within the proximity of longing that I remember the experience of our unity being the most palpable.

Jotta reviews the exhibition, currently on view at Carroll/Fletcher in London.

Richard T. Walker, let this be us, 2013

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Everything ultimately seems to find its way into his work. Does he ever buy things just for himself? “I’m kind of a low-budget antiquarian,” he said. “What I do when I’m really broke, and totally depressed, is that I go to the Strand and just spend half a day going through their dollar and two-dollar bins. I’ll leave with a big stack of books and I’ll feel like a king.” Other times he heads up to Argosy in Midtown, which has a hefty selection of three-dollar prints. “It takes a minimum of two hours,” he said. “You walk out of there not spending more than $20 and you have some incredibly beautiful things. You just put in the time to find the treasures.”

Mark Dion, Curator’s Office, 2013, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (installation view); courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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Photo: Stuart Davidson

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Syjuco’s Proposition is a bodily experience, a feeling as well as the thoughts that attend it. The mind ricochets between disinterest and interest, from the object’s beauty to the desire to purchase it, from frustration at the object’s unattainability to engagement, even wonder, as the Commemorative Store achieves the rare state for a conceptual art object: its punch—not punch line—is visceral as well as intellectual.

Rob Marks of DailyServing weighs in on Stephanie Syjuco’s The International Orange Commemorative Store (A Proposition) in the third installment of his series #museumpractices: The Museum on My Mind.

Stephanie Syjuco, The International Orange Commemorative Store (A Proposition), 2012 (installation view); photo: Jan Stürmann

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