free basin 2000
plywood, concrete, steel, skateboarders
Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL
Mood River, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus OH
Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
Session the Bowl, Deitch Projects, New York
drum n basin, A Foundation, Liverpool, England
free basin was inspired by California skateboarding culture of the 70s, when water shortages left swimming pools empty, and early skateboarders discovered they could be skated to emulate the movement and feeling of surfing. The work consists of an elevated kidney-shaped wooden skate bowl that was fully accessible to skateboarders during gallery hours. Exhibited seven times in seven years, it was designed and engineered to be modular, installed as a significant architectural intervention in each exhibition. Always initially encountered from the underside, visitors were confronted with the bowl’s large wooden form, usually alive with resonant sound from the skaters above. A spiral staircase allowed access to the bowl deck where gallery visitors and participating skateboarders intermingled in an atmosphere of conviviality and controlled chaos.
Like Joyce's 'festival of language, a delirium of words', skateboarding is a festival of movement, a series of precise spatial-temporal actions rendered demented and deranged, and which ultimately destroys and recreates body and architecture together. This is super-architectural space.
-Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and The City: Architecture and the Body, 2001
-Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and The City: Architecture and the Body, 2001
Hyde Park Art Center 2000
Documenta 2002
