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ARTWORK OF THE WEEK

Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (1970 - 2005)
Robert Smithson

Likely an homage to Frederick Law Olmsted’s design of Central Park, Floating Island offers a displacement of the park from its natural habitat, instead of the park being encircled by Manhattan, the park could now circle Manhattan.
The island is a further twist on Smithson’s career-long fascination with displacement. This generally meant taking art outdoors and bringing pieces of the land back indoors, into galleries. In the case of Floating Island, the displacement is all outdoors, an exploration of land and water, urban and rural, real and recreated, center and periphery.

Posthumously realized in 2005 from a sketch made in 1970, the island was towed around Manhattan for a week.

See more here

Read the story of the construction in the New York Times: It’s Not Easy Making Art That Floats

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