THE PRINCIPLE OF IMPERMANENCE

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, which had been closed for a monthslong period of maintenance, was reopened to the public. Officially known as The New York Earth Room, the work is owned and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation. It became a permanent installation in 1980 and—but for annual summer closures and, of course, a pandemic shutdown—has been open continuously since then. Although boosted in recent times by the work’s appearance in guidebooks and online journalistic accounts, visitation is scant. News of its hiatus barely made it into the press. Nonetheless, the existence of the Earth Room is something of a miracle. And in keeping with the impression that it appeared as if by fiat or decree, the very act of closing it for conservation invites us to reflect on its relation to time and place. 

One way to begin is to unpack the work’s circumstances and terms, including the language used to frame it early on. The Earth Room is a loft space filled with soil up to several inches below the windowsills. The 1980 Dia press release describes it as “a minimal, interior, horizontal earth sculpture.” The statement goes on to explain that the New York iteration is the third such installation by the artist. In fact, all three were produced in coordination with gallerist Heiner Freidrich. The first two were sited, respectively, at Friedrich’s gallery in Munich in 1968 and at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1974, both versions no longer extant. The location of the now-permanent site is the second floor of 141 Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan, which originally served as one of Friedrich’s gallery spaces. The New York Earth Room was first shown there in 1977. Friedrich, one of Dia’s founders, transferred ownership of the work to the foundation and closed the gallery to renovate the space for a new installation, which opened in 1980 on New Year’s Day. 

A minimal, interior, horizontal, earth sculpture. The characterization is concise, in keeping with the work itself and, more broadly, with the seemingly fact-based aesthetics of some artmaking in New York during this period. These qualities obviously also motivated the decision, for the initial announcement of the work’s appearance in 1977, to provide vital statistics in the form of a list:

_{222 cubic yards of earth 
3,600 square feet of floor space
21″ depth of material 
220,000 lbs. weight of material}

The composition of “earth and soil” is also listed, being made up of “peat and bark” and “earth,” with transportation and delivery credited to Cityscape Landscaping. 

In that it fully occupies available space, the Earth Room is dependent on a given site. But because it is replicable elsewhere, it is not site-specific. Described in 1977 as being “for sale” (as it had been in Munich and possibly Darmstadt), it was also said to be subject, if relocated, to certain modifications. The press release explains that “subsequent installations . . . may be various depths as long as the cubic yardage, 222, remains the same,” making cubic quantification the statistic according to which the identity of the Earth Room stays consistent despite change. Even so, depth and therefore weight were increased when the work was remade and reopened in 1980: twenty-two inches and 280,000 pounds. Finally, while the installation at 141 Wooster Street offers a single vantage, with viewers gazing into the room from a small adjacent space, variants could permissibly possess two or more viewing points, “providing that, if more than one room is used, the earth flows contiguously throughout the space used.” The installation is separated from the viewing area by a pane of glass whose height just exceeds the level of the earth.

The work’s first incarnation was not called an earth room, although it would be referred to later as Gallery Earth Room, Munich. On the poster for the show, its title is dryly matter-of-fact: 50 M³ (1600 Cubic Feet), Level Dirt.  In addition to a plan and elevation of the gallery space (showing that the installation could be viewed from any of three doorways in a hall that ran along one side), the poster contains the following dicta: PURE DIRT · PURE EARTH · PURE LAND / NO OBJECT ON IT / NO OBJECT IN IT // NO MARKINGS ON IT / NO MARKINGS IN IT // NOTHING GROWING ON IT / NOTHING GROWING IN IT. The inscription, which may well have been composed with Friedrich (who wrote a related gallery press release), constitutes a tell, since the terms dirt, earth, and land implicate a set of value-based distinctions—raw material, organic matter, and territorial location. By the time of the New York installation, De Maria had abandoned language of this kind, which he must have come to feel was overworked. 

Practices of preservation and remaking possess their own relation to deep content. Is a room filled with dirt historically specific?

Physical and material details may seem marginal or banal. But by invoking them, De Maria clearly intended to avoid symbolic claims, even if encountering the work’s obvious tonnage and impassive, monolithic form makes recourse to such claims almost unavoidable. The list of properties is a cue, in that it means to characterize the work as a sum of parts. 

The basic components of the Earth Room are uninflected quantities of medium and space. This austerity has a direct bearing on methods of conservation, which respond to the installation’s material demands. In turn, practical concerns illuminate historical and conceptual ones. Dia has only briefly referred to the work done on the Earth Room while it was closed. Indeed, the artist believed questions of maintenance were distracting, a position now held by his estate. (For the sake of full disclosure, I must acknowledge that I briefly served as director of the foundation in 2008, where I participated in discussions concerning the care of various sites under Dia’s jurisdiction.) In a recent press release, however, reference was made to “upgrading the infrastructure,” including the addition of an HVAC system. The dirt gives off moisture, resulting in the growth of mold and even mushrooms, and central air mitigates that. (Fungi still grow, and they are still routinely culled.) It surely also provides a level of comfort for visitors and staff. Installing the system meant removing and replacing the soil that fills the room, which sounds startling but, while onerous, is permitted by the work’s original principles of iteration and renewal.

Despite its purported facticity, the Earth Room wants to appear fully formed and, as such, to be a source of wonder. Most visitors will surely spend at least some time imagining the process of its making, their rumination encouraged by De Maria’s list of dimensions and weight. But publicity for the work often shows a rhetoric of candor facing off with a bid for permanence. “Now more than forty-three years old,” we were told on the occasion of the reopening of the site following Covid, “the installation appears timeless and unchanged.”

GIVEN THE DISTINCTION after around 1960 between the artwork as concept and the work’s multiple realizations as an object or site, invocations of perpetuity are easy to take for granted. But iterative fabrication is a technical procedure; it does not necessarily imply timelessness, a transcendent value. The first Earth Room belonged to the early history of installations—by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra, among others—that engage the space of an entire room. With works of this kind, the status of each version of a given installation could be unstable. Over time, a version—or variant—might be characterized as either an iteration of the same work or an instance of one that is new. This duality was practically (and to be sure, commercially) useful, but it also represents a kind of working paradox: Renewal is a means of longevity—even, by implication, of permanence. Accordingly, terms are often elastic, if not ill-defined. Early statements about the Earth Room refer to it as ephemeral. Once acquired, it became subject to stewardship and preservation as a “permanent” site. 

Closer to home, Jane McFadden, in her recent book on the artist, isolates the principle of “meaningless work” that informed De Maria’s early production. The concept implicates the artist’s close association with composer La Monte Young, whose work with “static” sound was the model for a kind of sculptural practice. Indeed, “Meaningless work”is the title of a foundational text by De Maria that was included in Young’s An Anthology of Chance Operations, published in 1963. Repetition and boredom were defining elements. For example, De Maria produced a variety of wooden boxes, “clean, quiet, static, non-relational sculptures,” as he described them in his 1972 interview for the Archives of American Art. These were made for simple kinds of interaction: dropping a ball through a hole or moving it slowly down a channel. Other activities were unrelated to made objects. “Digging a hole, then covering it,” is one, reminding us that the premise of the Earth Room is partly derived from a pointless act. De Maria once referred to the first Earth Room as “all of the dirt in the room in Munich.”The task-based and freely propositional nature of the installation—its qualification as meaningless work—is easy to overlook.

The Earth Room intensifies the role of the encounter in aesthetic beholding, as if to make the sensation of seeing feel urgent and elemental. This form of experience was a topic of discussion in early criticism. Morris, for example, wrote of the “interaction between the perceiving body and the world” in the process-based work of his contemporaries. With reference to the installation of raw materials, both he and Robert Smithson identified an opposition of form to anti-form and of “containment” to “scattering.” Though such formulations were anathema to De Maria, who resisted theoretical language, the Earth Room turns on a dialectic of this kind. Here, particulate matter, unbounded and without intrinsic form, assimilates itself—given massive quantity and an uninterrupted lateral spread—to the strict shape and dimensions of the room.

But while the Earth Room is a room, its early relation to Land art is explicit. The medium is, of course, from and of the earth, as De Maria made clear in 1968, which makes it deliberately jarring in contrast to the Wooster Street loft. Moreover, the work’s initial appearance in Munich came just before De Maria’s move to outdoor sites, above all the deserts of Nevada, California, and New Mexico—remote places of great, flat, open expanse. The way he tells it in the AAA interview, the Munich installation was a rupture, marking the pursuit of new means. In any case, the sites of Land art, which implicate the sublimity of archaeological and geological time, occupy their own order of permanence versus change. Yet it is through those sites’ conjunction of expansive flatness and absence of incident that the spatiality of the Earth Room also summons rapt attention.

The work’s correspondence to Land art is underscored by the smell of the dirt, which is a pronounced part of one’s experience on Wooster Street. Or rather, it used to be. The new HVAC system, which lessens moisture in the room, has greatly diminished its once-pungent scent.  In fact, while the installation remains astonishing, it looks and feels more decorous than it did. (As part of routine maintenance, the soil is still watered, though the effect appears to dissipate more rapidly than before.) Moreover, like the scent, ambient sound has also been unintentionally suppressed; it used to include traffic from the surrounding streets that was noticeably dampened by the absorbing effect of the soil, but, thanks in part to replaced windows that improve the seal to the outside, is now largely limited to the hush of the artificial circulation of air. By choice or by circumstance the conditions have changed. Whereas the atmosphere of the installation was once thick, it has now become thin.

How significant is this factor, given that the demands of preservation often justify change? After all, the iterative nature of the work implies a new audience, not repeat visitors for whom the work’s past belongs to living memory. In other words, the impact of drier air raises a contradiction, perhaps even a conundrum, of preservation. If, as his Munich pronouncement shows, the artist preferred to keep the soil clear, then the change could be said to lessen the “problem” of organic growth. Yet, intentions notwithstanding, in its long history in New York the Earth Room had acquired a sensate identity of its own. Recurrence makes nostalgia at once beside the point and inevitable. Part of the paradox of permanence and change is that acts of preservation and renewal often lead to consequences of loss.

PAMELA LEE WRITES that the rise of communication and information technologies and the promise of instantaneity after the middle of the past century instigated a fear—intrinsic to certain tendencies in American art—of the accelerated passage of historical time. Perhaps the implications of this condition reach far into the material life of the art we tend to take for granted. That words and actions on behalf of the temporality of the new work are conflicted only reveals the significance of the debate. In Smithson’s 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” the artist said that “every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time even though it is static.” It is the commodification of the artwork that plucks it out of time. But Smithson’s pronouncement disregards the long-term care of the work, which was itself a cause for concern among his colleagues. In turn, practices of preservation and remaking possess their own relation to deep content. Is a room filled with dirt historically specific? In his discussion of the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form (Works, Concepts, Process, Situations, Information),”organized by curator Harald Szeemann in Bern, Switzerland, in 1969, art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh describes Szeemann’s effort as an attempt to establish Post-minimalism’s “transhistorical immediacy of pure process,” opposing it to the obvious historicity of Minimal and Pop art. Likewise, during the 1960s and ’70s, artists themselves often awarded an atemporal, even ahistorical status to the presumed purism of Minimalist and post-Minimalist form. By extension, in the interest of maintaining art over the long term (Dia’s original goal), Friedrich has compared sited artworks to medieval or Renaissance chapels, where murals on permanent display can be viewed repeatedly over time. Of course, murals decay, and since they are unrenewable without risk of falsifying the artist’s hand, the comparison is flawed on a basic material level. But it is also loaded. The nature of the chapel as a specifically sacred site begs scrutiny on the occasion of a renewed Earth Room.

The chapel is not a museum for the display of art but a place of worship. My remark about the religious fresco takes as its premise that the mural’s modern aesthetic value supersedes its value as an object of religious veneration—that some chapels have become, in a manner of speaking, museums. Yet comparing the permanent aesthetic site to a chapel also endows the installation with aura, as if the aesthetic encounter were an elevated form of experience that transcends historical time. (In some cases, such as that of the “ecumenical” Rothko Chapel in Houston, devotional experience and aesthetic beholding are meant to be thoroughly collapsed.) The complexity of this problem cannot be explored through shorthand references. In the present context, it is enough to say that while the metaphor of a sacred site was not De Maria’s but Friedrich’s, it does reflect the close correspondence between Dia’s early support of “permanent” display and the spatial and temporal ethos of the art.  

One way to recast the language of timelessness and transcendence is to draw from alternative models of the philosophy of preservation. Such a model, which well predates the postmodern era (and, for that matter, the modern, for which Alois Riegl’s “Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origins” of 1903 is generally cited as a touchstone), can be traced back to the seventh or eighth century, possibly beyond. This is the method of architectural preservation that historian Maurizio Peleggi calls “devotional conservation.” Far in advance of the development of conservation as a professional discipline, refabrication was used to resolve a fatal discrepancy between the “eternal aspiration” of monuments and their “impermanent constitution,” which is subject to decay. An object of sacred or cultic distinction in ruinous condition is not restored but remade. In this way, it attains an “uncorrupted state befitting eternal time,” thereby sustaining its “thaumaturgic efficacy,” or power. One sub-practice of this kind is “cyclical re-edification,” the chief exemplar being the Ise Jingu, a Shinto shrine at Ise, a coastal city in Japan. For centuries, the shrine has been rebuilt every twenty years, in a ritualized undertaking called shikinen sengu. Cyclical or “preemptive” rebuilding applies as well to numerous other shrines, and as a means of redressing the decomposition or diminished integrity of relics and artifacts, it recurs across multiple traditions apart from Buddhist Japan.  

The point of the comparison is not that preemptive restoration, never mind cyclical re-edification, openly applies to the conservation of the Earth Room or other sites of the period. Rather, with respect to the Earth Room, it is that the language of ephemerality and permanence is rhetorical in a deep sense, demonstrating how values that condition the origin and then future preservation of the work do or do not correspond. The three iterations of the Earth Room were each dated to the year they were produced, but no double date is awarded to The New York Earth Room now that it has been remade. This is fairly common practice among artists of the era, for whom a work’s date is claimed to be the year of its conception, regardless of when or how many times it was realized. But while it is commonly accepted, it is not without significance. Morris said refabrication supports an “ontology of newness.” As with the shrine at Ise, the implication is that, contrary to an antiquarian bias, an aged object is not venerable. The work’s intangible efficacy requires it to be tangibly clean and intact. 

The role of the camera is surely relevant. While, as McFadden has discussed, De Maria used photography and film, after the early period of his work on the land he came to prefer that his sited works not be disseminated in that form. With due diligence in this regard, signage on Wooster Street asks that visitors refrain from taking pictures, though the prohibition is virtually impossible to enforce. The artist’s resistance seems to lie with the opposition between representation and encounter. As he said in 1972, the extreme remoteness of a Land art site suggested to some that the work “exists only for the photograph and not for itself.” This was clearly not De Maria’s intention. When speaking of Land art as being the only kind of work that incorporates the space “behind your back,” he is referring to a form of immersive spatiality that depends on firsthand experience, something the camera cannot show. But sites were—and remain—difficult to visit; the situation is sometimes accounted for with reference to destination and “pilgrimage,” another figure of speech drawn from the language of devotion.

Other related implications apply. To see the Earth Room is to gaze at it from just outside its perimeter, since there is no question of walking on or through the soil. Ironically, this is the view that appeared on the poster in 1980, one of the few official photographs released for general circulation. The photo does not account for the in-person act of leaning over the glass partition to scan the rest of the room. Nonetheless, the door is a viewing aperture that compresses, even pictorializes, what we see. From far enough back, it also crops the installation, as if to imply an infinite extension beyond the frame. Something similar is true for De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer, 1979, which was a Dia commission originally installed in Friedrich’s West Broadway gallery space, where it remained as a permanent site. (Both final installations were produced with the close on-site participation of architect Richard Gluckman.) The Broken Kilometer consists of five hundred polished brass rods that together total one kilometer in length. They are arranged in five parallel rows of one hundred elements each, and the space between the rows increases as the work recedes into the back of the enormous room. This configuration creates a reverse forced perspective, in which perceptual compression produces the illusion of an evenly spaced grid. Highly lit, the reflective surfaces of the brass rods belie their weight. The Broken Kilometer is an exercise in linear measurement, while the Earth Room is a demonstration of the quantificationof mass. But both deploy a measure of illusion: They want to be more, in a material sense, than they are—a gap that the artist would close when he began producing work outdoors, where actuality is enough. (For example, his Lightning Field, 1977, in New Mexico, comprises four hundred stainless-steel poles arrayed in a precise, not attenuated, grid.) Yet illusion demonstrates the origin of a quasi-numinous dimension in De Maria’s later work on the land, the subliminality of its faith in the sublime.

As Christine Mehring writes in her contribution to a new book on the artist (published by Gagosian and prepared under the aegis of the estate), the Darmstadt Earth Room did not contain earth, which was prohibited by local authorities due to moisture—something that, indeed, would instigate the need for maintenance and renovation on Wooster Street. The material was local sandstone gravel, which was directly relevant to the eclectic collections of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, where works of high art and objects of natural history reside together. In turn, an early custodian of The New York Earth Room, the artist Haim Steinbach, wrote—apparently against De Maria’s conviction—that the organic identity of the medium, in which things grow and must be removed, was fundamental from the outset: “Whether the experience beheld is material, spacial [sic], political, or of the sublime[,] the esthetic circle appears to be complete with the ascertained knowledge that what is beheld is truly earth.” In fact, he also remarked that correcting for this by adding chemicals to prevent organic change—as if this had been considered—would not only “transform the quality of the earth” but would “amount to the substitution of one kind of meaning for another.”

Location is a further, complex factor. It certainly was—if partly by coincidence or default—in the cultural climate of postwar Munich and in Darmstadt. And the history of SoHo, with its shift in occupancy from light manufacturing to vacated lofts to artists’ studios to failed collectives to commercial art galleries to high-end fashion boutiques and luxury real estate, has now undeniably heightened the material and sociocultural incongruity of the Earth Room in New York. (If the Earth Room ever succumbs to a force bigger than art, it will be the market for loft space.) Both openly and by default, implications of this kind are consonant with the ambivalent imperatives of preservation. 

The Earth Room seeks transcendence, but its identity cannot be detached from its actual spatial and material means. Would it be wrong to address it not as three autonomous works but, by conceit, as one work composed of three episodic parts produced over twelve years? As such, its relation to time—to history, natural history, and durational beholding—would demonstrate an accrual of implications deriving from the same-but-different iterability of the installation across multiple sites. 

Which is to say that while the Earth Room is not a thaumaturgic site, it does possess a poetics: of repetition and difference as well as setting, medium, and form. The installation’s implacable raw presence is decidedly unnerving—arrestingly still. Its literalism is so irreducible that it becomes a figuring device, and intimations of mortality emerge: The Earth Room incarnates acts of deposition and elevation, terms of lateral and vertical measure that imply ritual passages of life and death. The physical and material practicalities of making and change are inseparable from the work’s many mythologies of boredom, beholding, and awe.