The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Walter De Maria · a permanent site installation: four hundred polished stainless steel poles, two inches in diameter, with solid pointed tips, set 220 feet apart in a grid of 16 by 25 that measures one mile by one kilometre · Catron County, New Mexico, on a high desert plain near Quemado, at about 7,200 feet · completed in 1977, commissioned and maintained since by Dia Art Foundation · one work: the installation as made and as it is still shown, the poles in their grid, the land they stand on and the sky over it, and the terms of viewing De Maria fixed as part of it, a small group driven out from Quemado, left at the site with the log cabin beside the field and collected the following day · nothing of the work is lost: the grid, the level plane of the tips and the terms of viewing stand as made
Mode
Land art; a permanent site installation, sculpture made an instrument of time and weather and met under terms the artist set
Mythos
The thunderbolt and the god who throws it; a precinct marked off from ordinary land to receive the sky; the pilgrimage, a journey, a small company, a vigil and a return
Phase
Completed in 1977; shown in the warm season, roughly May to October, under Dia Art Foundation, which commissioned it and maintains it; forty-nine years in its site
Presentation
Four hundred polished stainless steel poles, two inches across, with solid pointed tips, on average a little over twenty feet high, in a grid of 16 by 25 at 220 feet; a log cabin beside the field; a stay of about twenty-four hours
Register
Cold, slow and vast: the sublime of light and weather, the grid appearing and dissolving with the hour
Scale
The land’s: one mile by one kilometre, four hundred acres for four hundred poles, more than the eye can hold from any point within it
Governing Proposition
Four hundred polished steel poles stand in a grid one mile long and one kilometre wide on a high desert plain in New Mexico, each cut to its place so that all the pointed tips lie in one level plane over ground that rises and falls. At noon the thin steel all but vanishes; at dawn and dusk the rows ignite in sequence and go dark again. The visitor is driven out, left beside the field with a small company and a cabin for a day and a night, and collected the following day, with no photographs of their own. The wager of the work is that a human measure, laid over land at full scale, will make the land, the light and the sky visible by contrast, and that a sculpture can be an event of time and weather, met in isolation, rather than an object taken in at a glance.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In Catron County, New Mexico, on a high desert plain near Quemado, at about 7,200 feet, four hundred polished stainless steel poles stand in a rectangular grid. Walter De Maria completed The Lightning Field in 1977; Dia Art Foundation commissioned it and has maintained it since. The grid is sixteen poles by twenty-five, the poles 220 feet apart, and the rectangle they make is one mile long and one kilometre wide. It is a permanent site installation, and the land and the sky over it are part of the work.
The work is met on terms De Maria fixed. In the warm season, roughly May to October, a small group is driven out from Quemado and left at the site, with a log cabin beside the field, and collected the following day: a stay of about twenty-four hours. Photography by visitors is restricted, and the work’s public image is almost wholly the authorized photographs by John Cliett. The cabin and the night are scored as parts of the work, because the work is made to be met over a whole day and night, and De Maria fixed that as its terms.
He stated the principle in his text on the work in Artforum in April 1980: “The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work.” The site was chosen high, flat, open and prone to storms, and far from everything else. In the same text he wrote: “Isolation is the essence of Land Art.” De Maria, born in 1935, died in 2013; he made other works for Dia in New York, but this is the one that has to be travelled to and stayed in.
Movement II
Each pole is two inches in diameter, with a solid pointed tip. The poles stand on average a little over twenty feet high; 20 feet 7 inches is the published figure. Their heights differ, because the ground beneath them rises and falls, and each is cut to its place so that all four hundred tips lie in one level plane. The plane is the instrument. Against it every dip and rise of the ground becomes visible, pole by pole, as a difference in the height of steel.
The arithmetic coheres exactly. Fifteen intervals of 220 feet make 3,300 feet, the kilometre; twenty-four make 5,280 feet, exactly one mile. The rectangle covers four hundred acres, one acre for each pole; seventy-eight poles stand on its edge and 322 within it, and its diagonal runs a little over 6,200 feet. That the imperial and the metric measures meet on one rectangle is a fact of the grid, not an interpretation. Behind the grid stands the surveyor’s grid of the American West, the measure by which this land was divided.
The command is of siting, survey, measure and material. The fabrication was by engineers and contractors under De Maria’s direction, as the medium allows, and the decisions are his: polished steel, thin enough to vanish at noon and bright enough to burn at sunset; pointed tips; a scale beyond the eye. It is one decision carried out four hundred times with great precision. The particular number is the output of a system, not each pole’s necessity: sixteen by twenty-five is required by the mile and the kilometre, and a grid one row and one column smaller would know almost the same thing.
Movement III
At noon, standing in the field, the visitor sees almost nothing. The thin steel all but disappears against land and sky, and the field is an open plain with a few glints in it. The work is not there. It comes at dawn and at dusk, when the low sun catches the poles and they ignite one row after another and go dark again, so that the grid appears and dissolves with the hour. The work is an event of light that happens every day, not an object that is always there.
This is the work’s highest claim: the sublime of the Romantic tradition, Burke’s terror at a safe remove, made literal by steel rods raised toward lightning on a high plain. A storm over the field, when one comes, is spectacle on the scale of the sky. But lightning is rare and not promised, and the work stands complete on days when it does not come. What is promised, and repeated, is the light at either end of the day: the rise comes in every visit, and comes twice.
The form is the knowledge. Smaller, the field could be seen whole and would become an object; it has to exceed the eye, so that no one standing in it can see all of it at once. With tips that followed the ground, the land would not be measured. In a gallery there would be no weather and no horizon. A photograph shows a storm, the one thing the work does not promise. Without the night, the dissolving and reappearing of the grid, the work’s chief event, would go unseen.
Movement IV
The visit has the shape of a pilgrimage: a journey to a remote place, a small company, a vigil through the night, a return. The title summons the oldest of sky myths, the thunderbolt and the god who throws it, and the field is a precinct marked off from ordinary land to receive it. The ritual is built, and without it there is no work. The thunderbolt is evoked: light stands in for fire, and the archetype is carried more by atmosphere and by the frame of the visit than by a structure in the steel.
The cabin is the other pole of the work. Visitors eat and sleep in it, a domestic wooden shelter beside a mile of steel. The two most distant things in the work, the cabin and a strike of lightning on a pole, obey one law, measure set against the unmeasured: the cabin holds the visitor still for the duration the measure requires, and the strike is the unmeasured answering the measure. Everything between them, the grid, the plane of the tips, the light, the walk through the rows, obeys the same law, and the law is simple enough that keeping it costs the work little.
De Maria inherited the grid and the industrial unit of Minimalist sculpture, the New York work of the 1960s in which he took part, and the new practice of land art, in which Heizer’s Double Negative of 1969 and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty of 1970 had already taken the decisive step out of the gallery. His departure was to make a work whose material is weather, light and duration as much as steel, and to fix the terms of its viewing as part of it: in a small company, over a day and a night, without one’s own photographs. Against an art world that ran on the reproduced image, that was a real turn, and it cost years, a patron’s fortune and a site whose survival rests on one institution.
Movement V
Forty-nine years after its completion the work stands as made: the grid, the level plane of the tips, the isolation and the terms of viewing, under the institution that commissioned it. Stainless steel in a dry climate holds, and in a field of identical industrial units the resetting or replacing of a single pole would take almost nothing from the work. The risk lies in the site: the work depends on an open horizon and on one institution’s care.
Its fame is wide and its presence narrow by design. A few visitors at a time, for half the year, have stood in it; most who know it know Cliett’s photographs. The restriction of images has itself become a subject, and the work is central to every account of land art, to the debates on site-specificity and on the photograph, to the sublime in postwar American art and to the history of Dia’s patronage. With Dia’s other commissions it set the model of the permanent, patron-maintained, single-site work that later projects followed. Yet the critical yield has settled into a few readings, which the austerity of the work does not multiply.
Land art as a practice contracted after the 1970s, and the work’s reach runs through an idea, time-bound and site-bound experience, more than through works made in its likeness; Spiral Jetty, at 8.5 on this desk, reached further in the field. The orders the work holds are the natural order, time, measure, the body and, faintly, the sacred; history, society and the state are absent. What it holds, it holds in one structure: a level plane of steel over uneven ground, in a place chosen for its isolation, met through a day and a night, where the land is not the setting but a part of the work.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by subtraction on the system. Take away the stay and the work becomes a view of poles at noon, when the thin steel all but disappears; the work exists at dawn and dusk and under weather, so the duration is required. Take away the level plane of the tips and the land’s relief is measured against nothing. Take away the isolation and the field becomes a sight among sights; De Maria made isolation essential, and the site was chosen for it. The scale is compelled: the field must exceed the eye. What holds the axis is the count: 16 by 25 is the output of the mile and the kilometre, and a grid of 15 by 24 would know almost the same thing.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Disclosure through space, credited in full. What the work brings into the open can be stated and holds: a human measure, the surveyor’s grid laid over land at full scale, makes the land’s relief, the day’s light and the sky’s violence visible by contrast. The level plane of the tips discloses the ground’s unevenness pole by pole; the land, in De Maria’s words, is “not the setting for the work but a part of the work.” It discloses the time of perception too: the field is not there at noon and is fully there at sunset. What holds the axis below the gate: most of what is disclosed is a condition of perception, light and attention, not an articulated human or social meaning. The grid read as the survey of the American West, and so as its settlement, is available and true, but the work does not insist on it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The work’s highest claim, and the axis it was built for: the sublime of the Romantic tradition, Burke’s terror at a safe remove, made literal by steel rods raised toward lightning on a high plain. The height is documented in every account of a visit: as the low sun catches them the poles ignite one row after another and go dark again, the grid appears and dissolves, and a storm over the field, when one comes, is spectacle on the scale of the sky. Frequency is answered well: dawn and dusk come in every visit, so the rise is repeated, not single, though lightning itself is rare and not promised. The figure rests on the daily event of light, not on photographs of storms.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The title summons the oldest of sky myths, the thunderbolt and the god who throws it, and the field is a precinct marked off from ordinary land to receive it, four hundred rods raised toward the sky. Part of the myth is built: the visit is a pilgrimage made physical, a journey to a remote place, a small company, a vigil through the night and a return, and that ritual form is load-bearing, since without it there is no work. The thunderbolt itself is evoked rather than built: the work stands complete on days when no lightning comes, and light stands in for fire. The particular acquires archetypal weight through atmosphere and the frame of the visit more than through a constructed archetypal structure, and that holds it below the gate.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is double: Minimalist sculpture’s grid and industrial unit, the New York work of the 1960s in which De Maria took part, and the new practice of land art, with Heizer’s Double Negative of 1969 and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty of 1970 before it. The departure: to take the grid out of the gallery and the cut out of the earth, to make a work whose material is weather, light and duration as much as steel, and to fix as part of the work the terms on which it may be seen, in a small company, over a day and a night, without one’s own photographs. That last is a real turn against the reproduced image the art world ran on. The stake was large: years, a patron’s fortune, a remote site whose survival depends on one institution. Held below the gate because it swerves within a tradition already swerving; land art had taken the decisive step before it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely, at every point tested. Make it smaller and it can be seen whole and becomes an object; its knowledge depends on exceeding the eye. Let the tips follow the ground and the land is no longer measured; the single level plane is the instrument by which every rise and dip becomes visible. Put it in a gallery and there is no weather and no horizon. Photograph it and the photograph shows a storm, the one thing the work does not promise. Take away the night and the dissolving and reappearing of the grid, the work’s chief event, goes unseen. Held at 9.0 because the cabin and the arrangements of a visit, though necessary, are administered conditions as much as form.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: forty-nine years of return. Each visit meets a different object by design, since the light and the weather differ, and the work yields on return more literally than most. The literature is large and still active: the work is central to every account of land art, to the debates on site-specificity and on the photograph’s place in work that restricts it, to the sublime in postwar American art, and to the history of Dia’s patronage. Its restriction of images has itself become a subject. What holds it back: the critical yield has largely settled into a few readings, the sublime, perception, duration, isolation, the grid against the land, which the work’s austerity does not multiply as a dense image or a long text does.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is American sculpture and land art of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what a sculpture can be, an instrument of time and weather rather than an object of form, met in duration and under conditions the artist sets, with the viewer’s isolation part of the work. The discount: land art as a practice contracted after the 1970s, the work’s influence runs more through an idea of time-bound, site-bound experience than through works made in its likeness, and Spiral Jetty reached further in the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: canonical in its field and the work every account of land art turns to, it set, with Dia’s other commissions, the model of the permanent, patron-maintained, single-site work that later projects followed.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over forty-nine years. Form is whole: the grid, the level plane of the tips, the isolation and the terms of viewing stand as made, under the institution that commissioned the work and maintains it. Fabric is stainless steel in a dry climate, and in a work of identical industrial units the resetting or replacing of a single pole would take almost nothing from it. Presence is restricted by design, a few visitors at a time for half the year and an image held to authorized photographs; the work’s fame is wide, but presence earns nothing above the usual figure. The remaining risk is the site itself: the work depends on an open horizon and on one institution’s care.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Read to the same anchors as every medium: here siting, survey, measure and material, and the command is exact. The survey sets four hundred tips in one level plane over ground that rises and falls, so that each pole’s height is computed for its place. The spacing makes the mile and the kilometre meet on one rectangle. Polished stainless steel is thin enough to vanish at noon and bright enough to burn at sunset; the tips are pointed; the site is high, flat, open and prone to storms. The fabrication was by engineers and contractors under De Maria’s direction, as the medium allows. What the axis cannot credit is variety of means: the making is one decision executed four hundred times with great precision.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the cabin, a wooden shelter where visitors eat and sleep, and a lightning strike on a steel pole. They obey one law, measure set against the unmeasured. The cabin is where the visitor is held still for the duration the field’s measure requires, and the strike is the unmeasured answering the measure. Between them the grid, the level plane, the open land, the changing light and the walk through the rows obey the same law, and nothing in the work breaks it. The range is wider than it looks, from steel to weather, from survey to night, from body to sky. Held below 9.0 because the law is so simple that its coherence costs it little; narrowness is not coherence, and the work stands near that line without crossing it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, land, sky, weather, light and the day’s cycle; time; measure and the human ordering of land, with the surveyor’s grid of the West behind it; the body, walking the rows and keeping a vigil; and, faintly, the sacred, through the precinct and the ritual of the visit. They are integrated in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history except as the grid implies it, society, labour, the family, the state, and consciousness as anything but perception. For a single site work this is a large holding, larger than most single paintings or objects; the form sets the ceiling, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Sublime at 8.9 and The Inner Law at 8.8. A form in which every substitution, smaller, in a gallery, photographed, without the level plane or without the night, removes the knowledge entirely; a grid that ignites and dissolves at dawn and dusk in every visit, the sublime made daily rather than promised; and one law, measure set against the unmeasured, holding from the cabin to the lightning strike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: the natural order, time, measure, the body and, faintly, the sacred are held in one structure, with history, society, labour, the family and the state absent, and the figure describes the form. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0: what the field discloses is a condition of perception more than an articulated human meaning, and its myth is built in the ritual of the visit but evoked in the thunderbolt. Next above them, Pressure on Tradition and The Bottomless Well at 8.3: the work swerved within a field that had already turned, its reach runs through an idea rather than through works made in its likeness, and its critical yield has settled into a few readings.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 by two, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 by five and The Unconcealment at 7.8 by seven. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 99.9, an average of 8.325 that displays as 8.3, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 the summit also requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object: its documentation, the authorized photographs, De Maria’s text and the critical literature. The field was not visited for this reading, and its height, which belongs to a day and a night in it, is judged from the accounts of those who have stayed. The work scored is the installation in Catron County as made in 1977 and as it is still shown: the four hundred poles in their grid, the land they stand on and the sky over it, and the conditions of viewing De Maria fixed as its terms, the drive out from Quemado, the small group, the log cabin beside the field, the overnight stay and the return the following day. The cabin and the stay are scored as parts of the work. Nothing of the work is lost: the grid, the level plane of the tips and the terms of viewing stand as made; any resetting or replacement of single poles since 1977 bears on survival only, and in a work of identical units takes almost nothing from it. The 1974 prototype in Arizona, the photographs by John Cliett, De Maria’s text in Artforum (April 1980) and his other commissions for Dia in New York are context and evidence, and are not scored. The words quoted are the title and two sentences from that text. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the size of the prototype, the number of visitors in a group and in a season, the frequency of lightning strikes on the field, and the history of the poles’ maintenance.