EXTREME MEASURES

WALTER DE MARIA (1935–2013) almost never gave interviews. In a rare one from 1972, he mentioned that he had conceived twenty-four three-dimensional works based on the structure of the box before he left California for New York in 1960.¹ He went on to say that he built almost all of them in the first two years after his arrival. I had read the interview before, but the reality of this critical mass of boxes, all on the record by 1962, had never struck me as it did now. If there were so many, why had we never seen them? Why had no account of the artist and his peers, of Minimalism or Conceptual art, attempted to figure these sculptures into the larger history? It was hard to imagine that De Maria had worked his way through this de-skilling—from sculptor to carpenter—as his friend Robert Morris had, and produced so many spare wooden placeholders for the recalibration of subject-object relations, and undertaken the shift into phenomenological presence aptly characterized by Morris as “aesthetic withdrawal.” An irrepressible mix of curiosity and skepticism led me to contact the scholar who has, to my knowledge, done the most work on De Maria to date, Jane McFadden, who quelled all doubt with one photograph: the artist’s first New York studio, filled with boxes.² This, I thought, changes everything.

The Menil Collection in Houston has been gathering works from the full span of De Maria’s career for decades.³ Yet it was not until after the artist’s death that the institution managed to secure the pivotal selection from the beginning of the 1960s. In its quality and quantity, this was a truly rare, history-making acquisition. Long ago, De Maria made a decision to hold on to a cluster of his most historically significant works, to let the world reckon with his whole oeuvre only when it was truly final. By dint of the Menil’s long-standing commitment to the artist and the different priorities of other museums, the institution’s De Maria holdings now amount to twenty-seven three-dimensional works, most of the early wood pieces already mentioned, a film, ten paintings, and more than five hundred works on paper (drawings and notes). It is an expansive field of thought and execution with major implications for the understanding of De Maria, his generation, and of what we have for so long parsed as Minimalism and Conceptual art. The exhibition “Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work,” curated by Michelle White and Brad Epley,was a thrilling first step toward sharing these treasures with the public and illuminating multiple avenues of new research. Another extraordinary resource appeared concurrently: Walter De Maria: The Object, The Action, The Aesthetic Feeling, a monograph weighing in at a hefty 476 pages, edited by Elizabeth and Michael Childress and published by Gagosian.

One of the great revelations of the show came immediately, with an array of the earliest box constructions, all dated 1960–64—that is, the formative years of a landmark decade. In this period, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Morris, et al. were grappling with the same basic form. De Maria “regards boxes as being almost the archetypal form of the ’60s,” David Bourdon noted in 1968.⁴ This is not the place to ask why. Suffice it to say that the box is, among other things, a unit on which to build. Moreover, in sidelining the visual address and foregrounding the functional (you ponder what the box is for, you want to open it) this new form broke the spell of aesthetic appeal that had for so long governed the experience of art. 

De Maria’s boxes—columnar, compartmentalized, or perfectly plain—all carry direct addresses to the spectator, structurally and verbally. In-person viewing delivered many rewards. Up close, one could make out handwritten prompts inscribed in pencil directly on the wood. Humble to the point of disarming, each object beckons the perceiver in familiar terms. Absent the conventions of art, it is this everyday language that anchors the encounter. Short or long, De Maria’s notations do double duty as titles and prompts (Ball Drop, 1961/64; Move the Ball Slowly Down the Row, 1962). Like a game or a musical instrument, the object breaks through the barrier of passive contemplation. Each spur to cathexis involves some active engagement. The first grouping of works in the exhibition, laid out fairly densely across a whitewashed, stepped platform about fifteen feet wide, seemed intended to evoke the cramped situation in De Maria’s early Bond Street studio. This impulse to conjure an “authentic” arrangement, always tempting to curators, competes with the alternate mandate to isolate works, underscoring the significance accrued in the half century since they were made. Standing out in this cluster was a highly original piece comprising two canvases and three balls (one of a small series the artist made but never showed). Abutting each other like the covers of a book, the canvases form a ninety-degree angle, one against the wall, the other flat on the floor. Handwritten letters on the wall-bound canvas instruct: MOVE ANY BALL TO ANY OPEN SPOT. The canvas on the floor supports three balls and is marked up with four circles indicating the possible spots. 

Also in this first gallery were two painting-plus-box pieces from 1961 (Walk Around the Box and Put One Box on Top of Another Box, Wait One Minute, Then Place the Top Box Back on the Floor). Walk Around the Box has been shown just three times.⁵ It debuted in January 1963 in a two-person exhibition with Robert Whitman in a project space the artists were renting at 9 Great Jones Street.⁶ Out of some fifteen box piecesin De Maria’s installation, Walk Around the Box—with its clunky painterly lettering, its bold imperative WAlK, and its surprising range of olive greens—was the most colorful piece in the show. Put One Box on Top of Another Box had never been shown before the Menil exhibition. These two works cycle through logic and linguistics, semiology and phenomenology—flat letters indexing an experience in three dimensions—as they split the field into realms of signifier, signified, and referent. If De Maria’s childlike lettering de-skilled painting, his key countermodernist move was to make the artwork nonautonomous. The boxes to which the paintings refer stand in actual space, outside the domain of the canvas, on the same floor as the viewer. In addition to the box pieces of 1961 and ’62 in the show, scores more exist in the form of notes and sketches. One would have liked to see more of those he built. In any case, the curators’ selection gave a taste of how De Maria deployed boxes and bases, columns and floor space, to support active encounters—how he staged the object for a subject.

If any of the early plywood pieces is familiar to scholars and curators, it is the one that gave the show its title: Boxes for Meaningless Work, 1960/61.⁷ Two boxes of equal size, filled with rough pieces of wood, sit on a wooden platform. The visitor is prompted to move the contents from one box to the other.⁸ The apparent simplicity of the situation is deceptive. We first have to understand what De Maria meant by “meaningless work.” It is no longer sufficient, if it ever was, to take the phrase in the most literal sense. Sadly, this does not seem to stop people from doing so. (We have learned not to take John Cage’s “silence” in the common sense of the term; to acknowledge that he meant virtually the opposite: a world of unintended but valued sound.) A March 1960 text by the artist on “Meaningless Work” is illustrated by short descriptions of possible objects that could exemplify the concept; this appeared, a little forlorn, among some other items in a display case.⁹ When one attends to this mini-manifesto, it becomes clear that it set up the premise of the works that followed. Notwithstanding the necessary skepticism as to the exactness of dates (given the rivalries of that moment), the tense De Maria used in March 1960 makes it clear that the idea came first: “PROJECT FOR BOXES / Boxes for Meaningless Work / I will have built two small boxes.”¹⁰ This tract, along with a handful of textual propositions for objects and actions, was printed in La Monte Young’s An Anthology (1963). 

De Maria was still in California for much of 1960.¹¹ The following year, he made several key additions to the body of work based on the box form. These included Column with Ball on Top (on view at the Menil) and Surprise Box, each of which was accompanied by a text (also published in An Anthology). The text for Column announced a fait accompli: “I have built a box eight feet high.”¹² (Note De Maria’s use of the word box, rather than column.) Each work in the growing series of boxes appears as something on the order of an essay, a tentative “solution” to a line of inquiry that another form, conceived with the same focus, might equally have supplied. Cracking the code of postmedium, postdisciplinary art forms was a highly competitive game, fueled in this case by Young as editor, if not gatekeeper. From the moment in 1961 when the contributions to An Anthology started coming in—scores, instructions, protocols for chance-based sound poetry, etc.—through its publication in 1963, works that had been submitted were adjusted, substituted, supplemented, and withdrawn. The stakes changed almost monthly as new models of “composition” were invented and refined.

This, I thought, changes everything.

The year 1961 also saw the publication of Silence, Cage’s writings and lectures, which had a clear impact on De Maria and his peers. An excerpt from a singularly performative lecture, “45′ for a Speaker,” became Cage’s one-page contribution to An Anthology. The second text of the three Cage wrote on “Experimental Music” (1957), reprinted in Silence, harbors some distinctly plausible sources for De Maria’s turn to “nature” and for “meaningless work.” Regarding the latter, there is Cage’s advocacy of “purposeless play.”¹³ The composer also evoked the power, drama, and emotion that nature arouses, with examples (far from anodyne for De Maria) like a mountain and flashes of lightning.¹⁴ Cage’s Buddhism-inflected “purposeless play,” like De Maria’s “meaningless work,” is clearest in relation to the “non-function” by which Marcel Duchamp’s readymade redefined art. Equally important in the present context is the French artist’s concept of the “anti-retinal,” which Cage tested by reversal, asserting the visual as a part of the experience of music: “We have eyes as well as ears.” For De Maria and his peers, developing the anti-retinal critique meant extending the art object’s address to the other senses—auditory, tactile, even olfactory. 

The Menil show’s second gallery conducted the viewer through a dramatic transition from the scale of boxes to that of architecture (unusual for De Maria). The towering centerpiece, The Columns, The Arch, 1964, had not been on public view since the show at Paula Johnson Gallery (later Paula Cooper Gallery) in 1965. Moreover, it is reproduced for the first time in the new monograph. The elements were installed at the Menil in a hieratic, processional lineup, similar to their arrangement at De Maria’s studio in recent years. In the 1965 installation, site–specific avant la lettre,the columns lined the corridor entrance to the gallery, conducting visitors along a passageway culminating in the arch. People walking through described feeling as if they were about to enter a temple. The medium, too, was significant: All the elements are mahogany plywood.¹⁵ We therefore have to figure in the strong scent of mahogany as a factor in the original installation. That the space between the columns is wider than that beneath the arch adds a phenomenological aspect to this work’s particular challenge to the retinal. Nearby, the Menil curators included two more pieces from the Paula Johnson show, The Gold Frame and The Silver Frame, both 1964— handsome, wall-bound boxes with empty rectangular niches at their centers. Painted in the eponymous metallic colors, they augmented the ritualistic atmosphere.¹⁶ What was missing at the Menil was the announcement De Maria created for the Paula Johnson Gallery. “He considers all his flyers to be integral parts of his shows,” noted David Bourdon in one of his interviews with the artist.¹⁷ That document identified all the elements as an ensemble:“The Columns / The Arch / The Gold Frame and The Silver Frame / The Invisible Drawings / Her Beautiful Lips.” (There is no space here to explore the question of how the gold, the silver, and the lips might relate to those devices in Warhol, but it is worth doing.) 

At the other side of the gallery, another pair of “paintings” set up a relay for the viewer from A to B and back again. Two whitewashed canvases—A: Walk to Sign B, B: Walk to Sign A, 1961—sported familiar industrially produced signage, white letters on a black ground, akin to that on the doors of public restrooms. Each painting directed the viewer to about-face and go to the other on the opposite wall. If the date is correct, these works are among the earliest in a wave of proto-Conceptual “sign painting” (or the equally tongue-in-cheek “action painting”). De Maria’s pair debuted in a 1963 group show, “Hard Center,” at New York’s Thibaut Gallery (later Fischbach Gallery), with a now-surprising mix of artists including Morris, Robert Breer, George Brecht, Jasper Johns, and Robert Watts.¹⁸ 

Two more of the earliest works at the Menil, in the following space, were Statue of John Cage, 1961/84, and Calendar, 1961. The latter consists of two equal lengths of wood joined at the base with a 365-link chain. The two wood parts expand into a V shape and snap together like oversized chopsticks. At the start of January, the parts are flush. As the year unfolds, the piece does as well, one link/day at a time. At the opposite end of this gallery was one of De Maria’s first “chrome” (stainless steel) pieces, High Energy Bar, 1966. The concept for the Bars, seemingly contrary to their rarefied elegance, was as an unlimited edition ending with the artist’s death. For each one, De Maria issued a certificate—that would have been nice to see—laying out the conditions for ownership and declaring, “This certificate will be incorporated as part of the whole work of art, to be known as the High Energy Unit.” Not often acknowledged as such, the contract-like stipulations De Maria outlined for prospective collectors are likewise quite early as a device of artistic control and anticipate those conceived and applied in Conceptual art in the years ahead.

De Maria imagined anew some of the most difficult Duchampian premises: the electricity in the Glass; the unit of energy, of conventional measurement, of experience.

This third gallery, falling roughly at the center of the exhibition, was dominated by a vast yellow monochrome with a metal plate dead center on which the work’s title, The Color Men Choose when They Attack the Earth, is inscribed.¹⁹ Created in 1968 for “Earthworks,” the show Robert Smithson curated that year at the Dwan Gallery, New York, the painting was something of an outlier in that context amid maps, raw materials, even actual earth. The concept behind The Color Men Choose . . . , not to mention its title, mystified viewers then as now. There are several layers to the story of how it came into being. De Maria was in Europe at the time of the show, so he phoned it in, as it were—not, László Moholy-Nagy style, to a factory foreman to have the piece fabricated according to precise instructions, but to another artist. Ironically enough, it was his earth-attacking friend Michael Heizer. 

The color De Maria required was not just any yellow. It was identified with great specificity as John Deere yellow, which forever tied the painting to the agricultural machinery for which that company is known. As to the art rationale: Rarely in the twentieth century do we find this kind of reference to a color. A longer investigation might also discuss the Munsell color system first tested on soil. For now, I will hazard two of the most compelling, and apparently untapped references, both from a single source: “a world in yellow” (un monde en jaune) and “agricultural machine” (machine agricole). These phrases appear in the opening pages of Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton’s English translation of The Green Box, Duchamp’s notes for his Large Glass, published in 1960 (and promptly reviewed by Johns). While we are on this subject, it is surely no coincidence that Richard Bellamy decided to call the white cube he inaugurated in 1960 the Green Gallery. Needless to say, De Maria is far from the only artist who seems to have noted and applied Duchamp’s anomalous references. The most prominent example is Robert Rauschenberg’s term Combine. For city slickers: A combine is another agricultural machine. 

In late 1968, De Maria, still in Europe, penned a letter to Virginia Dwan with a return address c/o George Brecht at Ladbroke Grove, London. At the time, the two artists were developing macro-concepts/projects involving the theoretical movement of vast landmasses (Brecht) and the linear mapping of multiple continents (De Maria). This was the moment when De Maria decided to make a work based on audio recordings of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The result was Ocean Bed, 1969, an ensemble one might formally identify as a hybrid of Pop and Minimalism (fuchsia mattress and steel headboard, respectively). Lying on the mattress with the dual sound­track playing on headphones, the listener is suspended between the two vast bodies of water. Ocean Bed debuted in the 1969 exhibition “Op Losse Schroeven” (On Loose Screws)at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. More than half a century later, the Menil made an exact replica of the mattress as an exhibition copy so the work could be experienced as intended.²⁰

Nineteen sixty-eight was also the year De Maria made his first trek into the Mojave Desert to develop his concept for Mile Long Drawing. Versions of it had been on his mind since the early 1960s. Several drawings of lines in the desert exist from that period. Although this body of work is usually discussed with reference to De Maria’s friendship with Heizer—whose vast excavations to create “negative sculpture” remain a world away from De Maria’s noninvasive surface work—it is plausible that the original intuition for this mode of “drawing” had more to do with his earlier friendship and interaction with Young in 1960–61. This was the period in which Young’s Composition 1960 #10, dedicated to their mutual friend Morris, was being performed with creative interpretations of the instruction “draw a straight line and follow it.”²¹ What also comes to mind are Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (three meter-long pieces of string dropped from the height of a meter), 1913–14, and Sixteen Miles of String, 1942. To make Mile Long Drawing, 1968, De Maria put down two half-mile lines of chalk, the kind used to demarcate tennis courts—marks that, like the Stoppages, could be seen fully only from above. It is probably no coincidence that De Maria asked the pilot of the plane from which the work was to be photographed to maintain a height of one mile. Among the different perspectives of the on-site photographs, the Menil curators chose the now-classic image of the artist lying face down on the ground in between the two lines with his feet touching one (presumably to indicate scale). This was used for the poster announcing his 1969 solo show at Dwan; the only text was three D-words printed across the bottom edge: DE MARIA–DANGER–DWAN. Since he returned home safely from the desert, we have to think how or, better still, why De Maria wanted to signal “danger.” Let’s bracket the show this incongruous poster was meant to announce.²² I would argue that the function of the word on the poster was to lay a particular claim (beyond that of art) on the viewer’s attention, like public signage or a novel advertisement. This reasoning should help us at last to decode De Maria’s somewhat bewildering epigraph to Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art (1968): “I think both art and life are a matter of life and death.”²³

The exhibition’s last room, its quietest, was largely devoted to De Maria’s concept of “invisible drawing.” Initiated in the early-to-mid-’60s, these drawings have a score-like aspect in that they elicit particular behavior in the viewer. They do not supply verbal instructions, even if some deploy image-like words. Small Landscape, 1965–68, consists of eight framed sheets of paper, each featuring a single word: SUN, CLOUD, MOUNTAIN, TREE, GRASS, RIVER, SKY, FIELD.²⁴ These delicate graphite signifiers of nature are inscribed so lightly that they hover at the threshold of visibility, drawing the “reader” into an intimate proximity. The piece includes not only the individual paper sheets in their stainless-steel frames but also their housing: a highly polished stainless-steel box with eight internal grooves to facilitate the (quasi-performative) act of sliding each one in and out, as if from a miniature museum storage rack. The shiny exterior surfaces of the box capture viewers’ faces, as if to suture their thought processes to the landscape elements so laconically invoked. In the same gallery, opposite Small Landscape, was Untitled (Pure Polygon Series),1975–76, which comprises seven drawings hung adjacently in a long row. Though they are much larger in format, the three- to nine-sided polygons, extending to the outer limits of the paper, close to the frames, are equally “invisible”; you can discern the pencil markings only when you’re so close that your nose almost touches the paper. The paradox, of course, is that at this range, you cannot see the whole field. Apart from the poetics of floating an idea of pure form, an abstraction, this work and the premise of “invisible drawing” strike me, at least in part, as a further elucidation of the Duchampian “anti-retinal.” (And if they were that, in De Maria’s mind, then it would be reasonable to interpret the beyond-what-the-eye-can-seedesert drawings in a similar vein.) For the eye-level-scale work, the example in Duchamp is his “Small Glass” of 1918, with the instructive title To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918, which was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the ’50s and ’60s as it is today. If it clearly targets the conventions of perspective, painting as window and the “ideal” position assigned to the spectator, To Be Looked at should probably also be acknowledged as the first instruction piece of the twentieth century.

In closing, it is impossible not to touch on a few of De Maria’s most expansive projects, which, for obvious reasons, could only be alluded to in the Menil survey. Across vastly diverse formats, he dealt with measurement and with extremes, putting us on the spot by illuminating new modes of experiencing the limits of the perceptual field in which we find ourselves. De Maria made numerous works that address measure explicitly, foregrounding it in both title and subject. Many of these reflect on the meter. Then there are the two kilometer works. Vertical Kilometer, 1977, in Kassel, can be grasped only imaginatively, unless we are up for a journey toward the center of the Earth. Broken Kilometer, 1979, splayed laterally and tweaked at the far end, redefines that measure, through its striking five-part rupture. Given that the latter is on permanent display at 393 West Broadway, New York, why, we might wonder, did the artist opt for metric in a country where the imperial measure prevails. A possible explanation is that our attention is more piqued by the nonstandard measure than by the standard.

De Maria’s all-encapsulating statement, The Lightning Field, 1977, was represented at the end of the Menil show by Gold and Silver Lightning Field, 1993, a silver plate with gold inlay in the form of circles representing each pole on a stainless-steel base. The Lightning Field’s extreme measure is emblematized by its one kilometer by one mile outer perimeter, and the radically protracted duration of the piece (a visit requires a twenty-four-hour stay), not to mention the prior commitment required by this mythical work, to travel to a remote swath of the New Mexico desert to locate it. 

De Maria, like so many of his contemporaries, was initially drawn in by the profusion of sexual puns in Duchamp’s notes and works. The real achievement was to see through them, to grasp the vast chasm between language and its referents, the readymade indeterminacy of ambiguity, and, as shared ground, a set of conventions that could communicate in the hypothetical space of art. Inside this frame, the subject could find ways to contend with the otherwise ungraspable, whether it be modern art, modern physics, or the nature of subjectivity in the present. Terms that are at once sexual and technical, like attraction and fatigue, energy and magnetism, could cut through difference, distance, ramifying complexity, and sheer unfathomable abstraction. Neither a black square nor the permutation of a primary-colored grid could stand in for abstraction in perpetuity. De Maria’s otherwise perplexing decision to define and demarcate the Lightning Field with two noncorresponding units of measurement confronts all that is simultaneously arbitrary, incommensurable, and conventional about the units that order everyday experience. He might also have been processing Cage’s mediation of measure, most succinctly articulated in his landmark 4’33”. It will be obvious to some, perhaps mostly those who use imperial measurement, that the humble intervention of what in regular grammar we call an apostrophe and quotation marks (or inverted commas) signifies not only minutes and seconds but also feet and inches. And the multiple metrics, in both Cage and De Maria, is Duchamp’s redefinition and defunctionalization of the meter, as he sought a new, ideally unfamiliar unit of measurement. All systems of measurement are arbitrary, Duchamp and Cage seem to insist, but we need them, like air, money, traffic laws, rules of the game. In his oeuvre as a whole, but especially with the Lightning Field, De Maria imagined anew some of the most difficult Duchampian premises: the electricity in the Glass; the unit of energy, of conventional measurement, of experience; the thematizing of the timed action and the momentary record inherent in the conditions of the photographic (or extra rapid exposure, as Duchamp invoked it). At the mesmerizing sight of lightning, how can we not think back to that innocent moment when we simply counted how many seconds (miles) it would take for the sound of the thunder to follow the light, fascinated that it could be a measure? In a line that starts with Rauschenberg and runs through to Andre, De Maria posits exposure of the elements and exposure to the elements simultaneously. The Lightning Field brings all this and more into play in a guise so original that it is hard to recognize its full conceptual scope. De Maria even managed to include Duchamp’s protocol that the readymade will “later be looked for (with all kinds of delays).”

Exploring the show, and thinking how best to evoke the potential it brought into view, I did not expect to run into Duchamp. I end on this note not only because De Maria’s project reveals new aspects of Duchamp’s impact on his generation, but also because of an energetic note to self the artist penned (circa 1961): “Write to Marcel Duchamp *how important he is!!! [my god].”²⁵ 

NOTES

1. Walter De Maria, oral history interview by Paul Cummings, New York, October 4, 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. I wish to acknowledge Jane McFadden for her scholarship on De Maria, her book Walter De Maria: Meaningless Work (Reaktion Books: London, 2016), and her generosity.

3. The Menil’s efforts, and the resulting collection of De Maria’s work, are to my knowledge rivaled only by all the prime pieces the late Germano Celant progressively acquired for the Fondazione Prada. The other major repository of De Maria’s work is of course the estate.

4. David Bourdon’s notes from a telephone conversation with Walter De Maria, dated March 28, 1968, folder 4, box 27, Walter De Maria, 1968–93, pp. 16–28, David Bourdon Papers, 1941–98, Archives of American Art (hereafter cited as Bourdon Papers).

5. The three outings on record for Walk Around the Box are 1963, 1970, and 1984. In 1970, it was exhibited at the Dwan Gallery. A decade and a half later, it was shown in Barbara Haskell’s “Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–64” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and reproduced in the catalogue.

6. At the time when his close friendship with Robert Morris was eroding into competitiveness, De Maria slid under the wire with his January “box show.” Morris would debut his Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961, Portal, 1961, and Untitled (Cloud), 1962, and a couple of other works the next month (February 1963) in a group show called “Boxing Match.”Most obviously, the title underscored the prevalence of the box format, but it also evoked the one large sketch/plan for Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass then on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Combat de boxe. Not to be outdone, De Maria contacted some actual boxers from a gym at Union Square and refereed a bout as a scheduled event at 9 Great Jones Street.

7. Boxes for Meaningless Work was reproduced in the “Blam!”catalogue like Walk Around the Box and a three-dimensional work titled 4’ × 8’, all 1961. See Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–64 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 98–99.

8. The Menil made copies of all the wood works it owns, and, with the help of University of Houston Fluxus scholar Natilee Harren and artist Gabriel Martinez, organized a day of activity (March 4, 2023) giving the public the chance to become involved with De Maria’s propositions. 

9. De Maria’s format of concept-plus-examples echoes that of Robert Morris’s main An Anthology contribution, “Blank Form.” Unfortunately, he withdrew it in 1962, a few months before the volume went to print. The Menil exhibition was rather low on documents, given the implications of De Maria’s oeuvre for Conceptual art as well as Minimalism. Why is it, one wants to ask, that American museums are so often allergic to so-called printed matter, favoring artificially “pure” formalism over a productive contextualization? 

10. Walter De Maria, “Project for Boxes,” in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young (New York, 1963), n.p.

11. De Maria arrived in New York in late fall 1960.

12. Walter De Maria, section in An Anthology, n.p.

13. Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12.

14. The relevant passages are “Does not a mountain . . . evoke in us a sense of wonder?” and “What is more angry than [a] flash of lightning . . . ?” Cage, ibid., 10.

15. De Maria’s erstwhile friend Morris did a similar thing several years earlier with his Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. He chose maple, identifying it as a scent remembered from his youth. De Maria’s and Morris’s choices of wood share an “essence,” if not a whiff, of Duchamp. See the mention of this in the Jura-Paris Road note in the Hamiltons’ translation of Duchamp’s Green Box, five pages in (n.p.): “The pictorial matter . . . will be wood . . . [an] affective translation. . . . Perhaps see if it’s necessary to choose an essence of wood (the fir tree, or then polished mahogany).”

16. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but there were definite reasons for the cultivation of ritualistic elements in postwar art. As for De Maria’s deployment of gold and silver, if we take this as seriously as we should, we cannot but think of the focused exploration of such precious metals by artists in the 1950s and ’60s, starting with Rauschenberg.

17. David Bourdon, notes from a telephone conversation with Walter De Maria, folder 4, box 27, Walter De Maria, 1968–1993, pp. 16–28, Bourdon Papers.

18. The curators of “Hard Center” were Elena Calas and Nicolas Calas.

19. Originally a stand-alone painting; De Maria made it part of a trilogy called The Statement Series in 2011, coupling it with red and blue monochromes of the same dimensions. Thereafter, this work was known by an even longer title: The Statement Series: Yellow Painting/The Color Men Choose when They Attack the Earth.

20. “Op Losse Schroeven”was one of several landmark exhibitions in this period. Two others that concern De Maria are Harald Szeemann’s “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Kunsthalle Bern, and Jan van der Marck’s “Art by Telephone,”at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. For those who have wondered why De Maria was represented by a clean black telephone and instructions in the former, a show dominated by made-on-the-spot, process-oriented art, this was the artist’s improvised solution when the latter show, for which it was intended, was delayed.

21. The surveyor’s plumb line used in the first performances might also have inspired De Maria.

22. The poster in question was made for the artist’s Bed of Spikes at Dwan, NY, in 1969.

23. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968).

24. I would like to express my gratitude to Emily Schecter for singling out Small Landscape for special attention, for being an invaluable interlocutor at every stage of preparing this essay, and for her supportive reading of many drafts.

25. Walter De Maria, notes, circa 1961, unpublished, Walter De Maria Estate.