In a potato field north of Toronto, a massive hidden artwork teaches us about site-specific art

Hey everybody! One day while sitting around the fire, my uncle told me a tale of something hidden deep in the wilds north of Toronto, something he described as "a thing people think is art, but it's really not anything at all." So, of course, I knew it would be beautiful.

Today on Art 101 we're learning the tale of an important artwork called Shift made by a renowned artist in a potato field that somehow was forgotten, and what it means to keep it safe.

The journey

To get to my uncle's least favourite piece of art, you may have to do as I did and go on a quest — crossing swampy water, scrambling over trees, negotiating an apiary (which I think is abandoned, but is still full of bees), watching out for snakes, climbing over still more fallen trees. You emerge into a clearing, where something strange lives: a zigzag of long weathered concrete walls that look like they're growing out of the ground. They also look like something that's been abandoned for decades.

The work is called Shift and it was made by iconic artist Richard Serra.

Meet Richard Serra

Richard Serra's work can be seen around the world, usually made out of massive sheets of metal. You can even find one of his works, called Tilted Spheres, in Terminal 1 of Pearson International Airport in Toronto, where the section of building it's in was designed to accommodate the huge installation.

Serra is often named as part of what we call Minimalism, or sometimes you'll hear about him in the context of Process Art — both types of art a lot of people misunderstand or find super boring. But you'll always hear about him as one of art's heaviest hitters (and one of Professor Lise's favourite artists).

And he's sometimes been the subject of controversy. In 1981, his work Tilted Arc was installed in New York's Federal Plaza. It was a site-specific commission (in other words, an artwork that was designed to fit a specific place), but people who worked in the buildings surrounding it saw it as imposing, cutting them off from crossing the plaza. The cry to have it removed resulted in a public hearing — and eventually, Tilted Arc was taken away.

Before all that, when Serra was an emerging artist, experimenting with materials and techniques, he was invited from America to Toronto in 1970 by an art collector named Roger Davidson, who commissioned him to make a work on property owned by his family. Serra walked the piece of land with fellow artist Joan Jonas and they stood at the farthest point, where they could see each other, and walked toward the other.

The six concrete slabs that zigzag through the field follow the path they had to walk, shifting diagonally as they kept each other in view. It's actually really romantic, once you see it.

The land that time forgot

Four years after Shift was installed, in 1974, the potato field owned by Roger Davidson's family was sold to a land development company called Hickory Hill Investments. And that began decades during which Shift became less accessible, more vulnerable and the stuff of legends for both people who love art and uncles who want new subdivisions on potato fields.

That piece of land is hotly debated. Is Shift a piece of artwork that people should get to see, or an obstacle in the way of new development? It's been the subject of civic debate and so far, it's been protected. Shift became a protected cultural landscape in 2013 after citizens pushed for that protection by the Ontario Heritage Act, which means it can't be altered or demolished.

That doesn't mean it's open to the public, though. Over the years, a very sturdy (and high) fence was erected around the field, and nowadays you need to study Google Maps pretty closely or get a trusted friend to write you directions. And to be clear, you will be trespassing if you go and visit. Even though I'm a certified fake professor, I still cannot guarantee your freedom from prosecution if you make the choice to brave the bees and go see Shift.

The Shift conundrum

Hickory Hill knows the value of what it's sitting on — the most recent estimate of Shift's value puts it between seven and eight million dollars. So why not sell it, put it in a gallery, dust off our potato field hands and walk away?

Thing is, it's not that simple. What happens when you make a site-specific work that's made out of six slabs of concrete, each of them 20 inches thick and 90-240 feet long, in a field that's pretty not flat at all?

Shift relies on the particular topography of that field, the way that it rises and falls and changes your view. That's what makes it site-specific. But if you move it, there are a few things you'll need. First: the space. Where do you put it? You can't put it in a gallery, because those slabs need to rise from and recede back into the ground. And that ground can't be level — it itself needs to rise and fall, just as it did when Serra and Joan Jonas made their first walk across it.

In a gallery, or even in a sculpture garden, the work won't be surrounded by tall trees or the nests of cranes. It won't live under that same piece of sky.

So, what if you make that field itself a sort of museum? One of the residential streets around it is already named Richard Serra Court, so at least some people know it's there. Why not tear down the fence around it, put some signage up and let people more freely make the pilgrimage, avoid the bees, and get to see Shift without packing trail mix?

That sounds like a really lovely idea — but it also means letting a multi-million dollar artwork be vulnerable to whomever wants to hurt it, which is a little different than a piece of public art in a very crowded square in a city.

Why do we care?

Here lies the unfixable problem with site-specific art: sites change. Spiral Jetty, created by artist Robert Smithson the same year that Serra created Shift, has degraded over time and required considerable intervention — and money — to keep it safe. But Spiral Jetty is really famous — it's documented in every art history textbook and every coffee table volume about Earth art. Shift, on the other hand, is a little more like a story passed between art friends around a fire that nobody knew how to make.

But there's a sort of beauty in that: the effort put into creating a physical experience in a potato field — something you need to put real effort into seeing, something that takes time to really see, as you walk along the full length of it and see how Richard Serra really thought about the land, the rolling effect of the field and what it felt like to stand in it on a Saturday.

He made that field into a magical place, and you can only find out how magical if you make it there.

This video contains an excerpt from Simone Estrin's film A Shift in the Landscape, which Estrin made after studying Serra's work and then later finding out about the nearby hidden work of his, which she visited and was captivated by. You can watch Simone Estrin's full film, featuring an interview with Serra about its creation, on Simone Estrin's Vimeo.