What can this hidden masterpiece of Canadian land art tell us about place?
Toronto artist Derek Sullivan spent a year studying the site of Richard Serra's Shift
There is a small scratch of farmland nestled in a subdivision of King, Ont., that is remarkably ordinary. Its pebble-pocked soil has produced commonplace crops: potatoes, soybeans, wheat. The ragged hedgerow fringing its irregular border leads to marshy swampland. Beyond that sit rows of mass-produced mansions with faux-stone facades.
And yet, this site has inspired the creation of not one but two notable Canadian artworks whose meanings are inextricably bound to its specific coordinates and conditions.
The field is a shallow, undulating bowl. Its slight dip makes it awkward to plow. But what really gets in the way are the six large concrete slabs zigzagging through its centre, each 20 centimetres wide and 1.5 metres high.
Installed between 1970 and 1972 by the late U.S. sculptor Richard Serra, who is widely regarded as one of the most important artists in modern times, the slabs standing in the field constitute the artwork Shift.
The work is no secret, but it has been largely overlooked in the annals of art history. No plaque or signage near the site indicates it is anything other than abandoned construction materials.
Shift was commissioned by collector Roger Davidson, who invited Serra to perform a sculptural intervention on a small plot of land he owned. Serra and his partner at the time, U.S. artist Joan Jonas, walked toward each other from either side of the field, and the paths they took inscribed Shift's form.
In the years that followed, Serra (and Jonas, too) rose to worldwide acclaim. Serra became known as a "giant" or "titan" of Minimalism, in celebration of his colossal Cor-Ten steel counter-monuments, which challenged the constraints of the white cube. In 2004, for example, Toronto's Pearson International Airport built the roof and walls of its Terminal 1 around the metal fins of Serra's Tilted Spheres.
Davidson sold the field to a developer a few years after the sculpture was completed, and both continued to exist in a state of benign neglect for decades. A few devoted art pilgrims trekked past "no trespassing" signs to glimpse the early Serra earthwork in person, but the setting was mostly an overgrown backdrop for local dog walkers. For 50 years, not much changed.
Artist Derek Sullivan first visited the artwork on a muggy day in July 2021. "I remember having to pull the mosquitoes out of my eyes. It was horrible," he says of his initial trip, trudging through a murky swamp, to access the Shift site.
Sullivan's original plan was to visit the U.S. to see land art masterworks such as Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field (1977), but that idea was scuppered by COVID-19 travel restrictions. "I liked the theatre of getting there," he says of his desire to visit the remote and mythic destinations, "and thought as a research project it could be interesting."
Then Sullivan remembered there was supposedly a seminal work of land art located practically in his backyard. "It has all of the things that are problematic about these other works," he realized. "Someone from away, coming and making this large gesture for seeming perpetuity on the landscape."
Raised in Richmond Hill, one town over from King, Sullivan was born in 1976, just a few years after the first bag of concrete was poured to make Shift's foundation. During the pandemic, like so many others around the world, he spent a lot of time taking walks. Over the next year, he began making expeditions to the field every few weeks.
In summer, it was a "herbaceous meadow, with all of the dogwoods in full leaf," says Sullivan. Herons perched on Shift's concrete walls before soaring up to their treetop nests. In fall, wind whipped through the landscape, and local BMX-riding teenagers made bonfires against the sculpture's sides. In winter, occasional footprints crunched into the fresh snow revealed how infrequently the land was traversed. Befitting the mood of a brutalist artwork in the suburbs, his experiences were rather antisocial. On one of the few attempts Sullivan made to greet a passing dog walker, she quickly shot at him, "I can't even talk."
Sullivan isn't the first artist to have corresponded with Serra's work as part of his practice. In 1981, David Hammons used Serra's sculpture T.W.U. (Transport Workers Union) as a urinal in the performance Pissed Off and flung footwear at it in Shoe Tree. In 2003, for The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney featured Serra slinging Vaseline (instead of lead, as the sculptor did in Splash Piece: Casting from 1969).
Serra isn't the first senior artist that Sullivan has been in conversation with, either. Sullivan's Endless Kiosk reimagined Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938) as expanding in girth instead of height, and his artist book, Persistent Huts, pays homage to artists Martin Kippenberger and Ed Ruscha, who famously quipped, "All art comes from other art."
"I'm going to be honest, I'm actually not a huge Richard Serra fan," Sullivan admits. For his purposes, Shift became merely "a thing to think with." In the series of large-scale drawings that Sullivan created as a response to his visits to Shift, the sculpture rarely appears. Instead, Sullivan focused on the "negative space" around it. "I end up looking at the ground more than the sculpture," he says.
Laid out in Sullivan's characteristic style emulating press signatures, the drawings become a scrapbook of the ephemera the artist accumulated during his trips: rocks he picked up, signage he noticed, ticket stubs he found in his jacket pocket, shadows cast in iPhone snapshots. "Most of the things included are chance discoveries," he says.
"The hubris of modernist sculpture in this period, the way that artists were attempting to modify the landscape, that is a very male [ego-driven] idea," says McMichael Canadian Art Collection curator John Geoghegan, who organized Field Notes, an exhibition of the works Sullivan created from his Shift studies. "I like that Derek takes the piss out of that."
Sullivan has been a professional in the art world for more than two decades, and is careful to maintain a healthy distance from its more pompous trappings. "I keep thinking of the way that our art knowledge is so enriching," he says. "The way that these things are made can tell us about other people's experiences of the world. But at the same time, I also wonder how much of that might get in the way. Like, when I'm having a great walk from now on, will I think, 'Oh, this is like that Serra'? It actually diminishes it. It imposes a filter on the experience."
As Sullivan's drawings are layered with flora, fauna and other tangential signifiers of his viewing experience, he makes note of the strata of meanings stacked around Shift.
"I love the way that most of those plants that grew along the sculpture were either deposited by the wind or by the poop of birds," Sullivan says. He sees the movement of glaciers in the rocky soil, evidence of colonial and 100-acre farm agricultural systems in the imposed boundaries of the land, and another impending recalibration of the area as wealthy cul-de-sacs encroach on the site's outskirts.
"What does it mean to stage global conversations from Toronto? What does it mean to show artists from here thinking about the world and how those conversations happen?" asks Adam Welch, associate curator of modern art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has acquired Sullivan's six-panel drawing, Out Standing in a Field, 2021–22, from this body of work.
"This work is so aligned with that idea," says Welch. "We're thinking about an artist who is very much from here, has a very robust and interesting international practice and is exhibited widely, but attends to this history in the GTA that a lot of people wouldn't know."
Now that Sullivan's project has been exhibited at a local art museum, recorded in book format, acquired by a national institution and written about by journalists, is his shift at Shift complete? "I don't feel the need to come as often as I did before," he says. The experience has inspired a new way of drawing for him that involves close looking and a gradual accrual of overlapping elements. "I've been focusing on the specifics of locations," Sullivan says. "Subsequent to this, I have been working on drawings of the view of the back alley behind my place in Toronto."
He has also started building (and drawing) a wall of his own from stones excavated during a renovation of his studio, which sits in a patch of farmland he owns in eastern Ontario. At 21 metres long, it is "almost at the scale of one of the segments here," Sullivan says, referring to Shift.
As for the sculpture and the field, now basking in the afterglow of renewed attention, what comes next? Perhaps the site will have its cause taken up by a passionate conservationist who will erect a plaque, encase the crumbling concrete in a Plexiglas tomb and manicure the land into a lawn for picnickers. Perhaps it will slip silently into another long hibernation and be swallowed up by wildflowers and weeds. Perhaps it will attract a fresh wave of art pilgrims and inspire another artwork that will enhance our understanding of the passing of time and our place in the world.
To find out, we will have to keep walking and looking.
Derek Sullivan: Field Notes runs through June 29 at McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont.
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