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 Los Angeles skateboarding culture of the 70s, when empty swimming pools were riden to emulate the movements of surfing. The work consists of an elevated kidney-shaped skate bowl that was fully accessible to skateboarders during gallery hours. From the underside, visitors were confronted with the large bellied wooden form alive with rumblings from the skaters above. A spiral staircase connected the two levels.
Close quarter viewing and participation merged in controlled chaos the six times free basin was erected nationally and internationally from 2000-2007. It provided a sculpted architectural form to local skateboarders whose poetic movement became the focal point of the transformed gallery space.
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
