Books

“From this ephemeral experience, I have kept in mind that every work can only be, as Duchamp phrased it, an “encounter,” here a shared experience. Then comes a flood of images, the moments of contemporary art among which Sabine’s project resolutely takes its place: Dennis Oppenheim’s tracing Annual Rings in the snow in 1968 at the Fort Kent border crossing between the United States and Canada; Robert Smithson’s making Spiral Jetty in 1970 on Great Salt Lake in Utah; Alice Haycock’s constructing her temporary Maze in 1972, near New Kingston, Pennsylvania; Nancy Holt’s invitng us, in 1973, to pass through Sun Tunnels, aligned with the solstices on the horizon of the Great Basin Desert in northwestern Utah; Walter De Maria’s erecting The Lightning Field in New Mexico, four hundred steel poles that Colette Garraud has described as a “gigantic expectancy structure turned toward the sky’s capricious manifestations, and its silences.” Each of these works is an incitement to seize for a few moments the relationship to a site and experience a newfound awareness of the risk that it might disappear.” - Bernard Blistène