De Maria's Dirt: Visual Abstraction. Gardener's Dirt: Functional Substance
WALTER DE MARIA died on on July 26. He was 77. Despite his penchant for constructiing monumental outdoor installations out of shiny geometric shapes and mathematical configurations."The Lightning Field" epitomizes the grandeur of his reputation. DeMaria was known to be reclusive and uncomfortable with media attention. He seldom gave interviews, disliked being photographed, and often avoided participating in museum shows. Yet he became celebrated as "one of the greatest artists of our time" according to LA County Museum of Art director Michael Govan and many other influential contributors to contemporary art discourse. Govan described the singular quality of deMaria's work as "sublime and direct."
c
Meanwhile, Jerry Saltz summons a slew of ecstatic adjectives that seem more likely to appear in the work of a romanticist, not a minimalist like de Maria. He is particularly enraptured by The New York Earth Room. This permanent DIA installation fills the entire second floor of a large loft space in SoHo, NYC. This interior earth work consists of 250 cubic yards of black soil filling 3,600 square feet at a depth of 22 inches. Entry is barred by a sheet of glass only a few inches higher than the dirt. It weighs 280,000 pounds and has been exhibited in this location since 1980. Saltz declares the work fills him "with ecstatic quiet, and quivers of the surreal sublime, implacable force of nature, nobility of architecture, and acuteness of the human senses."
Saltz responds so exuberantly to this work, I believe, because earth is all but obliterated from the urban milieu in which he lives. De Maria has granted him a unique opportunity to observe and smell earth (touching is not permitted). It seems that concrete and asphalt has not only obliterated dirt, they have obliterated awareness of dirt. Thus, encountering the fecund smell of earth, its crumbly texture, and its rich hue and tonality must seem particularly wondrous to confirmed urbanites. Saltz reveals the satisfaction with exclusively aesthetic interactions with dirt.
My response, as a gardener and environmentalist,is frustration. This work is maintained, at great effort, by preventing life from intruding on the optical purity of de Maria’s aesthetic. I am not content to look at earth. I crave tactile and functional interactions with this miracle substance. My pleasure derives from crafting the organic molecules I can summon to create soil. Then I thrill at manifesting its magical powers to nurture botanical life. De Maria’s earth has been stripped of cultivation and wildness. What remains is “an affirmation of physical abstraction.” Salz is fully satisfied with with abstraction. Gardeners are not.