Township presented book on works of creator of The Shift

Mayor Margaret Black recently accepted a copy of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years.from Elaine Robertson, chair of the King Township Heritage Committee.

The creations of Richard Serra have been drawing a lot of international attention, and people in King Township have been working to promote the local sample of his work.

The Shift is a wall created by Serra that stands in a field in the southwest quadrant of King City.

Elaine Robertson, chair of the King Township Heritage Committee, was at a recent council meeting to present a copy of a catalogue of Serra's works, entitled Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years.

The presentation was accepted by Mayor Margaret Black.

In making the presentation, Robertson called The Shift "an amazing piece of art."

It is a collection of zig-zagging pieces of concrete wall, built in six sections and spanning two hills about 1,500 feet apart. The sections amount to about 815 feet in length, "not something that one would trip over or fail to notice," she observed.

There are several explanations for the work. Robertson cited the brochure of a recent 40-year retrospect of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which referred to "this experience of space."

"Unlike traditional sculpture, it emphasizes movement and its psychological impact, not contemplation from a distance," it added.

"The work is monumental," according to an article by Nicolaus Mills in the magazine Dissent, which Robertson referred to. "Serra is not out to create sculpture that can be looked at as a visible object. He has instead given himself over to his longstanding concern with relationship between a work of art and the person viewing it."

"My own reaction to the work was that it invites you to stand, to look, to get a sight line and to lean up against it and contemplate your surroundings," Robertson commented. "It takes one into a fourth dimension, forcing ourselves in relationship to space, when most of us are accustomed to seeing ourselves only in relationship to concrete world."

"To walk around it is to experience a walking meditation, causing one to have a paradigm shift, to begin to view in time and space in a totally different way," she added. "After all, time and space is all that we have in the end; all that is really important."