Listening to Art

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Listening to Art, by William Denton.

Volume twelve, number six: Tilted Spheres by Richard Serra.

Hello, and welcome to Listening to Art. I’m William Denton.

Of the five recordings so far in this retrospective of the first eleven volumes we have heard three works viewable by the public and two in private collections. Tilted Spheres, which we first heard in volume five number five, is in a private collection yet viewable by the public, but with restrictions and at a great price: it is past the security gates in Terminal One at Toronto Pearson International Airport. To see it, one must take an international flight out of Pearson that is leaving from one of the gates in Pier F.

The sculpture is enormous, so big and heavy that it was laid into the floor when the terminal was under construction and then the walls and ceiling were built around it. The airport is vast, harshly lit, expensive and crowded. Tilted Spheres stands in mute rebuke to the busy, unpleasant experience that is modern air travel.

This is a sculpture, made of weatherproof steel, 1210 cm wide by 430 cm high by 1390 cm deep.

Now let’s listen to Tilted Spheres by Richard Serra, recorded at Toronto Pearson International Airport, in Toronto, on 22 May 2018.

That was Tilted Spheres by Richard Serra. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did.

For more information and links to things I’ve mentioned, please visit listeningtoart.org.

Listening to Art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Bibliography

All web sites accessed as of date of publication.