One sunny day in 1968, Walter De Maria went for a walk in the Mojave Desert. As he traveled, he made a thick line in chalk. On his return, De Maria laid down a second track. Perfectly straight and spaced precisely twelve feet apart, the parallel lines boldly stood out against the featureless desert playa. Although they were each only half a mile long, they extended farther than the eye could see. From the point of view of someone standing between them, they might as well have been infinite.
Mile Long Drawing was Walter De Maria’s first work of land art. Although the chalk soon blew away, it still stands out as one of the most successful works in the land art genre, rivaling Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s City, and his own Lightning Field, works that permanently altered vast tracts of land and that can be visited to this day. A new exhibit at the Menil Collection in Houston and a monograph published by Gagosian provide illuminating context that helps to set Mile Long Drawing and Walter De Maria in their rightful place.
Most of De Maria’s earliest works appear to be unrelated to the land art for which he’s most famous. Hand-crafted in wood and inviting hands-on interaction, they seem to have more in common with the Fluxus event scores of George Brecht and Yoko Ono.
For instance, Boxes for Meaningless Work (1961) comprises two open cubes, next to which De Maria placed the following text: “Transfer things from one box to the next box, back and forth, back and forth, etc. Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless.” On first glance, the directions bring to mind some of the instructions in Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, such as her contemporaneous Cough Piece, which reads simply “Keep coughing a year”. What makes Boxes distinctive – beyond the self-conscious intrusiveness of the directive to “be aware” – is the overtly indefinite duration. The etc. could be shorthand for eternity.
De Maria made ad infinitum repetition more explicit in a pair of paintings from the same year. Hung on opposite sides of a gallery, the paintings took the form of signs, each of which referenced the other: “A: Walk to Sign B,” read the first. “B: Walk to Sign A,” read the second. At least on a conceptual level, this diminutive pair of paintings covered more ground than Mile Long Drawing or any other work of land art. The obedient viewer was destined to walk forever.
However, De Maria appears not to have been satisfied with abstract indications of the infinite to be enacted by others. Much of the work that followed sought to compress great distances and to present them in ways that could be directly apprehended.
One of De Maria’s most audacious attempts was first presented in 1969 and has been meticulously recreated by the Menil. Ocean Bed invites museum visitors to lie down with a pair of headphones, and to listen to the sounds of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The two-channel audio compresses the full length of the United States into the space between your left and right ears. The impossible is made visceral.
Installation view of Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work, the Menil Collection, Houston. … [+] Photo by Daniel Ortiz.
Daniel Ortiz
Ocean Bed can be construed as a bemusing attempt to reconcile the vastness of Earth with the confined space of human experience. A decade later, De Maria gave physical form to this idea in Broken Kilometer. Maintained by the Dia Art Foundation in New York, Broken Kilometer comprises five hundred polished brass rods, each precisely two meters in length. The rods are installed in a room, lined up in five parallel rows, with more space between those in the back than those in the front to give the illusion that they’re equidistant: The kilometer of solid brass has been modified and distorted to accommodate the physical scale and perceptual apparatus of human viewers.
Mile Long Drawing could be thought of as the opposite. Delineated in evanescent chalk, the distance never could be fully taken in, and was destined to vanish without a trace, persisting only in name. Knowing what we know, we perceive what we cannot see.
Together Broken Kilometer and Mile Long Drawing challenge our all-too-human predisposition to be the measure of all things, confronting us with our physical and perceptual limitations. We can break down reality into neat two-meter-long segments. But what lies beyond our reach might as well be infinite, as interminable as the act of shuffling objects between identical wooden boxes. In the gallery and out on the Mojave, De Maria compellingly proposes that meaning is finite, a temporary illusion in an indefinite expanse of meaninglessness.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
