The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alberto Burri · Grande Cretto, over the ruins of old Gibellina, in the Belice valley of western Sicily · the rubble of a hill town destroyed by the earthquake of January 1968, gathered into blocks and cast over with white concrete, each block standing roughly where a block of houses stood, the old streets and lanes running between them as fissures that can be walked · made at the invitation of the town, which was rebuilt on a new site some distance away as Gibellina Nuova · begun in 1984, halted unfinished, and completed in 2015, the centenary of Burri’s birth and twenty years after his death · the unit scored is the whole work as it now stands, the first campaign and the completion of 2015 taken as one work, the completion credited and charged to the work
Mode
A land work and a memorial at the scale of a town: the ruins of a destroyed place sealed where they lay, on their own plan, so that the work is at once a burial, a map and a walk
Mythos
The shroud laid over the dead, made literal by the rubble inside the casts; the city of the dead, its streets walkable; the cracking of the earth matched to its cause; the labyrinth evoked by walkers and not built
Phase
The town destroyed in January 1968 and rebuilt elsewhere; the work begun in 1984 and halted unfinished; completed in 2015, the centenary of Burri’s birth, twenty years after his death
Presentation
Blocks of rubble cast over in white concrete, each roughly where a block of houses stood, at about the height of the body, the old streets and lanes running between them as fissures, on a slope seen whole only from the hills opposite or from the air
Register
Grand and cold from a distance, silent and enclosed within; dreadful and beautiful together, with a serenity that can lay a peace over the wound
Scale
One whole hill town, its plan kept and its matter sealed, walked at the width of a body
Governing Proposition
The town of Gibellina, on a hillside in western Sicily, was destroyed by the earthquake of January 1968 and rebuilt elsewhere. Invited by the town to make a work, Alberto Burri chose the ruins of the old one. The rubble was gathered into blocks and cast over with white concrete, each block where a block of houses stood, and the old streets were left open between them as fissures. The wager of the work is that a dead town can be neither rebuilt nor left to rot but held: its plan kept as the one thing that survives of a community, its matter sealed, its streets still walked. From the opposite hills it lies across the slope like a cloth over a body; inside, a walker moves between white walls near eye level, under the sky, along streets that now lead nowhere. It was halted unfinished, stood so for a generation, and was completed in 2015, twenty years after Burri’s death.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The town of Gibellina stood on a hillside in the Belice valley of western Sicily until the earthquake of January 1968 destroyed it. It was not rebuilt where it stood. A new town, Gibellina Nuova, was built on another site some distance away, and the old one was left as rubble on its slope. When the town invited Alberto Burri (1915 to 1995) to make a work, he chose not to make it in the new town but to treat the ruins of the old one. The work was begun in 1984.
The rubble was gathered into blocks and cast over with white concrete, so that each block stands roughly where a block of houses stood, and the old streets and lanes run between them as fissures that can be walked. The blocks stand near eye level, so that a walker inside the field sees white walls, the hill and the sky. The whole lies on a slope and can be seen entire only from the hills opposite or from the air. The first campaign was halted with the work unfinished. It was completed in 2015, the centenary of Burri’s birth, twenty years after his death, and the work scored here is the whole of it as it now stands.
The parts are few, and each is required. Each white mass stands for a block of houses that stood there, and each fissure is a street that was walked. Take away the plan of the town and the work is a pattern on a hill; take away the rubble inside and it is a monument laid on a site rather than a burial of it; take away the walk and it is an image seen from the air. Take away the whiteness and the shroud goes. Raise the blocks above the head and the walker loses the slope and the sky; lower them to the knee and the town is only a map. What gives a little is the extent of the field, which the town sets but which is not argued at every edge.
Movement II
In the early 1970s Burri began the Cretti, crackled paintings in kaolin, pigment and vinyl glue, whose surfaces dry and split into an irregular net of fissures, as clay splits in the sun. The form was his own, and it was proven in the studio for more than a decade before Gibellina. What he did here was to carry it to the scale of a town and to a use it had never had: the crack of a painting laid over the ruin of a place.
On the hillside the crackle is matched to its cause. A studio form made by drying becomes the earth’s own wound, made by an earthquake; the streets of the town become the cracks of the cretto, and the cretto’s irregular net becomes a real plan, so that the streets read as fissures and not as a grid. That matching is structural, and it is the work’s deepest stroke. It is also where study returns: to the relation of the crackle of a painting to the fracture of a hillside, which is not exhausted by being seen.
The inheritance was double. The memorial tradition raises a figure, a column or a name over loss; the land art of the late 1960s and 1970s in America worked earth in empty places. The work turns from both. It has no figure and no name, rebuilds nothing, and seals the ruin where it lay; and it carries the working of land into a place with a history and a grief, a place empty because of a catastrophe. The departure has a stake, paid in the long years the work stood unfinished. It is held below the highest rank because the form was Burri’s own and already proven, and because the scale belongs partly to the commission.
Movement III
From the hills opposite, the white field lies across the brown slope like a cloth over a body, and the old town’s shape is visible whole. This is the image most reproduced, and it is grand and cold. It shows the plan of a community entire, as no one who lived in the town could have seen it, and it shows it sealed. Only the size of the real town lets the aerial image be the whole of a community; a smaller field would be a model.
Inside, the experience changes. The fissures run at about the height of the walker, between white walls in Sicilian light, with the hill and the sky above and no sound; the walker goes along a town’s streets that now lead nowhere. The work rises at both scales, from the air and in the body, which few works of its kind do. The height near eye level makes the walk enclosed but not entombed: higher, the slope and the sky would go, lower, the walls would no longer hold the walker. The whiteness holds the field as one in the light.
These decisions are exact, and the making rests on them. The hand is the engineer’s and the contractor’s, and the execution is poured concrete; the making is not refined at the scale of the surface, as Burri’s sacks and plastics are refined, and its command is of the whole, not of the detail. The elevation has its limits too. Over so wide a field the walk can turn monotonous, and the aerial sublime belongs as much to the photograph as to the visit. What remains is dreadful and beautiful together.
Movement IV
The shroud is not only evoked by the whiteness. The rubble of the houses is inside the casts, so the work is a burial and its masses are tombs of houses; the city of the dead, the necropolis whose streets can be walked, is built by the plan. The labyrinth is evoked by those who walk it more than built, since the plan is a town’s and not a maze’s. Burial and shroud are what a memorial supplies, and Gibellina itself, its people, its saints and its feasts, is kept as plan alone: the particular does not rise past being a buried town.
What the work brings into the open can be stated. A town that was destroyed is neither rebuilt nor left to rot but held, its plan kept as the one thing that survives of a community, its matter sealed. A place is its streets; memory can be a form laid over loss rather than a figure raised above it; the dead town is still the town. The condition shown, a population displaced and a place abandoned by those who rebuilt elsewhere, is a social one. But much of this is carried by what the visitor knows of the earthquake and its slow, contested reconstruction, of which the work says nothing: not the state, not the delay, not the emigration. And the whiteness can turn disclosure into serenity, a peace laid over a wound. Whether the seal is a mourning or a forgetting, a healing or an erasure, is the question the work keeps open, and it names something the work discloses: the choice between rebuilding and sealing.
A monument in the new town would know loss as a subject; this knows it as a place, and the knowledge, that the plan survives and the life does not, is had by walking. The orders it holds are many: the earth, as geology and as catastrophe, by the crack; the town as a community, by its plan; the dead, by burial; the household, since each block was houses; the sacred, by shroud and tomb; memory and history, by the act of sealing; the landscape of the Belice, by the field’s lying in it. One act touches all of them. Most are held as that act’s implications, not in articulation: there are no persons, no labour but the work’s own, the life of the town only as its streets. And the field, uniform by design, gives what it knows at once and then repeats it.
Movement V
The first campaign was halted with the work unfinished, and for a generation the memorial over a ruin stood as a ruin itself. It was completed in 2015, the centenary of Burri’s birth, twenty years after his death, by other hands. The completion is part of the one work and is credited and charged to the work. It obeys the work’s law: mass where life was, void where it moved, all of it white, all of it cast over the ruin, from the aerial image of the whole to a single fissure walked at noon. That is the test of a law, that others could continue it without breaking it; narrowness of material and treatment is also what makes it easy to keep.
The work is forty-two years from its beginning and eleven from its completion. Its form is whole and legible, the plan carried entire since 2015. For the years it stood unfinished in a depopulated valley it was little known abroad, and it has been wide in images over the last decade; fame is not proof. Its fabric is poured concrete in the open, under Sicilian sun and on a seismic slope, and the state of its surface and the extent of its repair are not settled here. Its force is considerable, a memorial that is the site; its documented reach is thinner. It is often set beside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, but no line of influence can be named, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, earlier, did more to redirect the practice of memorials. The writing on it is real and its questions are open, whether the completion is faithful or a monument to the artist among them, but return to the work itself yields chiefly the walk.
Beside it on this desk stand Spiral Jetty, at 8.5, older, the first to swerve and the work that redirected its field; The Lightning Field, at 8.3, which stands higher on six axes and is level with the Grande Cretto but for the breadth of what a buried town holds; and House, at 8.1, the nearest in kind, a cast over a lost dwelling, itself now destroyed. The Burghers of Calais, at 8.7, raises the memorial as figures; Woodland Cemetery, at 8.6, makes a landscape of the dead; Akhmatova’s Requiem, at 8.8, mourns in a form of restraint. The Grande Cretto stands in Tier IV: its form, its law and its necessity are of a high order, and its disclosure, its archetype, its survival and its reach stand short of the bar the summit requires. On a hillside in the Belice valley a town lies under white concrete, and its streets can still be walked.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to take. Each white mass stands for a block of houses that stood there; each fissure is a street that was walked. Remove the plan of the town and the work is a pattern on a hill, a crackle enlarged; remove the rubble inside and it is a monument laid on a site rather than a burial of it; remove the walk and it is an image seen from the air. Remove the whiteness and the shroud goes. Raise the blocks above the head and the walker loses the slope and the sky; lower them to the knee and the town is only a map. The parts are few, and the few are required. What gives a little is the extent of the field, which the town sets but which is not argued at every edge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Disclosure through image and place is credited in full, and what the work brings into the open can be stated. A town that was destroyed is neither rebuilt nor left to rot but held, its plan kept as the one thing that survives of a community, its matter sealed. A place is its streets; memory can be a form laid over loss rather than a figure raised above it; the dead town remains the town. The condition disclosed, a population displaced and a place abandoned by those who rebuilt elsewhere, is social, not a mood. What holds the axis: much of this is carried by knowledge of the earthquake and its slow, contested reconstruction, of which the work does not itself speak; and its whiteness can turn disclosure into serenity, a peace laid over a wound.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is the work’s strongest register, and it recurs at two scales. From the opposite hills the white field lies across the brown slope like a cloth over a body, the old town’s shape visible whole; this is the image most reproduced, and it is grand and cold. Inside, the experience changes: fissures at about the walker’s height, white walls in Sicilian light, the hill and the sky above, silence, and the sense of walking a town’s streets that now lead nowhere. Few works of its kind rise both from the air and in the body. What holds it below the top: the walk can turn monotonous over so wide a field, and the aerial sublime belongs as much to the photograph as to the visit. Dreadful and beautiful together.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Partly built. The shroud laid over the dead is not merely evoked by the whiteness: the rubble of the houses is inside the casts, so the work is a burial, and its masses are tombs of houses. The city of the dead, the necropolis whose streets can be walked, is built by the plan. The cracking of earth, the crackle taken from drying clay, is matched here to its cause, an earthquake, so that a studio form becomes the earth’s own wound; that matching is structural, and it is the work’s deepest stroke. The labyrinth is evoked by walkers more than built, since the plan is a town’s. What holds the axis: burial and shroud are what the memorial type supplies, and Gibellina itself, its people, its saints and feasts, is kept as plan alone.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is double: the memorial tradition, which raises a figure, a column or a name over loss; and the land art of the late 1960s and 1970s in America, which worked earth in empty places. The swerve is from both: no figure and no name, no rebuilding, the ruin itself sealed where it lay; and land art carried into a place with a history and a grief, a place empty because of a catastrophe. Burri took a studio form, the crackle, to the scale of a town and to a use it had never had. The cost was real: the work was halted unfinished, stood incomplete for a generation and was finished only after his death. Held below the top because the form was his own and proven in the studio, and the scale belongs partly to the commission.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. A monument in the new town would know loss as a subject; this knows it as a place. Only this form lets the walker move through the old streets with the town’s mass at the height of the body, so that the knowledge, that the plan survives and the life does not, is had by walking. Only the cretto makes the streets cracks, and so ties the town’s pattern to the earthquake’s wound; only the casting over the rubble makes the work a burial rather than a model; only the size of the real town makes the aerial image the whole of a community. Held just short of the top: part of the knowledge lies in the history one brings, and the field, uniform by design, gives its knowledge at once and then repeats it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is limited by age: forty-two years since the work was begun, eleven since it was completed. The return is real. The work has been taken up in writing on memorials and on land art, on Burri’s career, on Sicily and its reconstruction, and its questions are open. Is it healing or erasure? Is a white seal over a town a mourning or a forgetting? Is the completion of 2015 faithful, or a monument to the artist? Its formal well is the relation of studio crackle to geological fracture, which rewards study. What holds the axis: return to the work itself yields chiefly the experience of walking it, which is strong and not various, and much of the yield lies in its circumstances. Forecast more than shown.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is Italian art of the 1980s, land art, and the memorial art of the late twentieth century. Intrinsic force is considerable: a memorial that is the site, a ruin sealed rather than restored or replaced, a studio form taken to the scale of a landscape, which reorganises what a memorial over a catastrophe can be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: thinner than the fame. The work is often set beside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (2005) and the field memorials after it, but no documented line of influence can be named; Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) came first and did more to redirect memorial practice; and the long halt delayed the work’s reach. Strong force, modest named reach.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is mixed: forty-two years from the start of making, eleven from completion, with most of the field standing from the first campaign. Form: whole and legible, the plan carried entire since 2015. Presence: little known abroad for the years the work stood unfinished in a depopulated valley, wide in images over the last decade; fame is presence, not proof, and earns little here. Fabric is charged: poured concrete in the open, under Sicilian sun and on a seismic slope, is a material that cracks and stains and must be repaired, and the state of the surface and the extent of repair are not settled here. The figure stands below what the age of the first campaign alone would give, for the youth of the completion and the charge on fabric.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, here the scaling of a form across a hillside, to the same anchors as any medium. Credited, and load-bearing: the height near eye level, which makes the walk enclosed but not entombed; the whiteness, which holds the field as one in the light; the translation of the cretto’s irregular crack into a real plan, so that the streets read as fissures and not as a grid; the casting over rubble, which makes the matter of the houses the body of the work. These decisions are exact. Charged: the hand is the engineer’s and the contractor’s, the execution is poured concrete, and whether the two campaigns match is not settled. The making is not refined at the scale of the surface, as Burri’s sacks and plastics are refined: command of the whole, not of the detail.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the aerial image of the whole, a white shape on a brown hill, and a single fissure walked at noon, a corridor of white walls and sky. They obey one law: mass where life was, void where it moved, all of it white, all of it cast over the ruin. The same law governs every block and every street, the edge of the field against the uncast slope, and the relation of studio crackle to geological crack. The completion of 2015 obeys it too, and that is the test of a law: other hands, after the maker’s death, continued it without breaking it. The range is wide in scale, from a body’s width to a town, and narrow in kind. Held below the top because narrowness of material and treatment makes the law easy to keep.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held: the earth, as geology and as catastrophe, by the crack; the town as a community, by its plan; the dead, by burial; the household, since each block was houses; the sacred, by shroud and tomb; memory and history, by the act of sealing; the landscape of the Belice, by the field’s lying in it. They are integrated, because one act, casting over the ruins on their plan, touches all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of these are present as one gesture’s implications rather than held in articulation: no persons, no labour beyond the work’s own, the state and its failures only as context, the life of the town only as its streets. For a single field, a wide reach.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.9, then The Inner Law at 8.8, The Inevitable at 8.7, and The Sublime and The Swerve at 8.6. A form in which the town is known as a place and the knowledge is had by walking; one law, mass where life was and void where it moved, kept from the aerial image to a single fissure and by the completion after the maker’s death; few parts, each required, so that the plan, the rubble, the walk and the whiteness cannot be taken away; an elevation that rises both from the opposite hills and in the body; and a studio form carried to the scale of a town and matched to the earthquake that made the ruin.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the earth, the town, the dead, the household, the sacred, memory and the landscape held by one act, but as its implications, with no persons and the life of the town only as its streets. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: considerable force, a memorial that is the site, with modest named reach, delayed by the long halt. Then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.2: open questions whose yield lies much in the work’s circumstances, and a making exact in its decisions and plain at the scale of the surface.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Imperishable at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, against 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 100.7, an average of 8.392 that displays 8.4, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, where the work’s disclosure, archetype and survival stand a step below the bar and its reach further, and the aggregate, short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work’s plan, history and making, through photographs, aerial views, plans and the literature on Burri; the work was not walked for this reading. The engineering, the sequence of the halt and of the completion, and the state of the concrete are known only in outline, and where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is the Grande Cretto, also called the Cretto di Gibellina or Cretto di Burri, by Alberto Burri (1915 to 1995): the whole work as it now stands over the ruins of old Gibellina, in the Belice valley of western Sicily, the rubble of the town destroyed by the earthquake of January 1968 gathered into blocks and cast over with white concrete, begun in 1984, halted unfinished and completed in 2015. The completion, made by other hands after Burri’s death, is weighed as part of the one work, credited and charged to the work and not to Burri. Burri’s Cretti paintings and the new town of Gibellina Nuova are context and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the area of the field and the height of the blocks in metres, how the rubble is held within the casts, the year of the halt and its cause, how closely the blocks and fissures keep the old buildings and the widths of the old streets, whether the completion followed Burri’s plan, the cracking and repair reported of the concrete and any difference between the surfaces of the two campaigns, the earlier versions of the cretto in ceramic, the officials who brought the work about, the theatre later staged in its fissures, the criticism of the commission, the names of the American land artists before it, and any ranking of its size among works of art.