Tag: walter de maria

Maybe Jonathan Monk had the same misremembering of Walter de Maria as I did. His series at Lisson Gallery at Frieze comes with various, built-in resale price caps. [via sarah douglas for artinfo]

See what happens when you just ask? My posts the last couple of days about [mis]remembering Walter de Maria’s 1966 stainless steel sculpture, High Energy Bar/ High Energy Unit, is shaking loose some interesting bits of information on the work and the burst of popularity of “multiples” as a democratic, anti-elitist, market-thwarting strategy for artmaking in the 1960s. [I’m sure there are enough unsupported assumptions packed into that sentence to make a whole CAA-ful of art historians’ eyes bleed, but whatever, close enough.]
First up, de Maria discussed High Energy Bar with Paul Cummings in 1972, in his interview for the Smithsonian Archive:

WDM: …But I mean there’s some relationship between being able to go smaller and smaller through the electron microscope and at the same time still not be able to see all the galaxies in outer space. But I do think that in ten or twenty years somebody will say, well, that’s a minimal situation, or that’s a minimal or that’s minimal art. I think that that will stand. The point was that in the development of these boxes and rectangles it wasn’t just making another piece of geometric sculpture, because there’s been a lot of geometric sculpture in the last fifty years, but of the relationship between this angle and that angle or this box and that box or even David Smith’s last sculptures, you know, the boxes and cubes which in a way was a sort of three-dimensional cubism some sixty or seventy years later, fifty years later, or whatever. But, it was the idea that you could take a perfect cube, perfect rectangle such as the high energy bar, the perfect rectangle and, well, I’ll show you a high energy bar in a moment, and the notion that its ideas and its lines were so perfect and so perfectly composed and self-contained that it was perfectly satisfying to look at that one object as a sculpture without having it confused with a lot of needless relationships. It was perfectly focused on itself and implied a lot more than it was.
PC: You still make those, don’t you?
WDM: The high energy bars, yeah. I’ll make those all my life.
PC: It’s an open-ended multiple.
WDM: That’s right, and I didn’t like the word “multiple.”
PC: Did you think of them in those terms?
WDM; Well, I would say when I started making them in ’65, ’66, the ideas of multiples was just growing about that time and I thought that if a person accepted the idea of a multiple that it should be open-ended, because why, if you have mass-produced technology, why should you limit it at fifty or a hundred or two hundred, because the technology is inexpensive to make . . . .
PC: You have to want that limitation.
WDM: Yeah, and so I sort of thought if I ever did that that probably multiples should be completely continuous.

So yeah, “make those all my life,” but I also like that part up top about these perfect, reference-free metal objects and the once-future convergence of science and minimalism. The latter, of course, feels like validation of what I already think, and the former seems completely undermined by his sculptures’ formal similarities to objects like the Meter–though the PKU’s conceptual conceit that a kilogram is equal to itself does kind of close the loop nice and tightly.
Anyway, onward and upward with the arts. From a reader far more learned than myself on these matters, Kathleen Campagnolo, who is just finishing her PhD on the 1960s sculptures of Walter de Maria, and who apparently has a Google alert set for all mentions of “High Energy Bar -triathlon,” comes this:
the artist’s statement from “3 → ∞ : new multiple art,” a 1970 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, which included Virginia Dwan’s example of High Energy Bar, No. 53:

High Energy Bar
Work on the High energy bar began in 1965. A summation of my minimal investigation in sculpture going back to 1961/62 – the nature of the rectangle.
First bar issued in 1966.
This is my answer to the multiple – not a multiple. I detest multiples (in art).
Differs from most multiples in several respects:
1st) Infinite edition – not limited. I shall make them all my life.
2nd) My personal connection with each bar. With each bar is issued a certificate.
I collect the following information:
Name of owner
Address
Number of bar
And after no. 50 photograph of owner.
3rd) Bars are not transferable. The bar always belongs to the person who gets it first, i.e., if after a person dies the bar were ‘given’ to someone else – that new person would have the first person’s bar – he would not have the bar for himself, i.e., it would not be his bar.
Records of the owners of the bars are kept in a Swiss bank. Needless to say the ownership of all bars is known only to myself and never divulged.

I love it, and not just because that last part, about the bars being non-transferable, makes me feel like I was kind of right all along. If anything, this just adds a new desirability factor to the High Energy Bar secondary market. They’re like Friends of Walter trading cards. Now it’s not just a question of how low the edition number is, but who the first only true owner is/was.
Also, Swiss bank!
You should be able to buy the catalogue for Three To Infinity: New Multiple Art more cheaply than these Amazon dealers [amazon]

And speaking of conceptually loaded minimalist objects of precision-crafted metal, here are a couple of early Walter de Maria works I was looking at a few months back:

Betty Freeman bought Melville [1967, above] in 1968. It’s a polished, book-sized tablet of stainless steel engraved with the opening lines from Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man:

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.
His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

As Christie’s noted when they sold Melville last May [$266,500, including premium], de Maria began producing industrially finished stainless steel sculptures in 1965, with the aid of collector Robert Scull. In 1966, he made Instrument for LaMonte Young , a 3 x 5 x 36 aluminum box with contact mics and an amplifier built in to pick up the sound of a metal ball rolling along inside the channel. Freeman picked that up in 1970. [And Christie’s sold it for $80,500.]

The early de Maria metal sculpture I’ve been most interested in over the years, though, is a little, 1-ft metal bar, an edition, which is engraved with a restriction that it can never be sold for more than $100. I first saw one in a collector’s loft in SoHo around 1992, and I’ve waited ever since for one to turn up for sale somewhere. So far, no. Go figure.

The contemporary art world’s three most [only?] prominent Mormon artists are Wayne Thiebaud, Paul McCarthy, and La Monte Young. Of the three, I’d have to say Young is at once the least well known, the most highly influential, and, surprisingly, the most intrinsically Mormon in his work and outlook. I suspect that most people who know Young’s work–and Young himself, for that matter–would agree only with the middle statement.
Young is best known for his minimalist musical compositions, which use extended harmonic tones to explore concepts like time and duration. His work sits alongside other major music figures like John Cage and influenced younger minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Technically, because he composes music, and because his greatest prominence comes from the minimalist classical music world he helped pioneer, you could argue Young’s not really an artist artist. He certainly doesn’t sell art in galleries for six and seven figure prices like Thiebaud and McCarthy. But Young does make and show work. For decades he has collaborated with Marian Zazeela to create light and sound installations that would be recognized as art in any contemporary art world sense of the word.
But that’s not all. By Young’s account, he was instrumental to the founding of Fluxus and conceptual art and Happenings as well. Young and Zazeela operate the Mela Foundation in Tribeca, which hosts performances and sound pieces in Dream House, an immersive, meditative light installation created by Zazeela. Like other permanent downtown art esoterica–i.e., Walter de Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer—Dream House has been supported by and/or affiliated with the Dia Center.
Young is also very clear about the Mormon environment in which he–and his work–developed. Most interviews with him include the story that the first sound he remembers was the drone of the icy wind whistling through the cracks in the wall of his Mormon farmer family’s log cabin in Idaho. From this mixture of elementalism and nostalgia, Young created music that aspires to the eternal, using just-tones and intervals that are some greater, universal, divine truth.
Almost every reference to spirituality in Young’s work is not to Mormonism, however, but to Indian music. Since the 1960’s Young and Zazeela have been both disciple and guru for the propagation of Indian sitar music, with its accompanying drones, tones, and ragas.
But a doctoral candidate and musicologist named Jeremy Grimshaw, who is also LDS, has made a highly persuasive study of La Monte Young’s concepts of the divine, time, and the nature of heaven, which grounds them in esoteric but orthodox Mormon doctrine. Grimshaw quotes Young on the just-intonation system he employs:

“The sensations of ineffable truths that we sometimes experience when we hear progressions of chords and intervals tuned in just intonation, may indeed be our underlying subliminal recognition of the broader, more universal implications of these fundamental principles.” In short, Young believes that intervals based on the harmonic series resonate with the macrocosm in a way that irrational intervals cannot. “When I hear intervals in equal temperament, it’s like they remind me of the truth,” says Young, “whereas when I hear intervals in just intonation, it’s as though I’m hearing the truth.”

In 2001, Grimshaw published a paper called “The Sonic Search for Kolob: Mormon Cosmology and the Music of La Monte Young” in the musicology journal repercussions. It’s available via the Internet Archive.] Heady stuff.

Here’s Walter De Maria describing his early land art work, Las Vegas Piece, to Paul Cummings in 1972. According to the Center For Land Use Interpretation, the piece is off Carp/Elgin Road in the Tula Desert, one exit north of Double Negative‘s Overton exit on I-15. The work is now “apparently” lost:

it takes you about 2 or 3 hours to drive out to the valley and there is nothing in this valley except a cattle corral somewhere in the back of the valley. Then it takes you 20 minutes to walk off the road to get to the sculpture, so some people have missed it, have lost it. Then, when you hit this sculpture which is a mile long line cut with a bulldozer, at that point you have a choice of walking either east or west. If you walk east you hit a dead end; if you walk west you hit another road, at another point, you hit another line and you actually have a choice. At that point you decide which way to go and so forth, then you continue, you walk another mile and at another point you walk another half mile so and at a certain point you have to double back. After spending about four hours, you have walked through all of the three miles of the thing and you would have gotten your orientation because the sun will also be setting in the west and this is lined up so that all the lines are either east-west or north-south. Now I did this piece in 1969 and I haven’t done an article on it because I didn’t find a way to photograph it properly. You can only photograph in multiple views, you know, like this is looking east and this is looking . . . .
PC: A satellite shot.
WDM: Well, that’s true, but that’s a different experience because that’s an experience like a drawing but this is an experience at ground level, it’s a different experience.
PC: How wide are the lines?
WDM: Ten feet wide, eight or ten feet wide.
PC: And they are how deep?
WDM: Oh, it’s about a foot deep, two feet deep and about eight feet wide. The point I’m making here is that the most beautiful thing is to experience a work of art over a period of time. For instance, architecture we know has always thought about this. You go into the palace, you go into the house, you experience the different floors, you sit in certain rooms for certain amounts of time and when, after an hour or half hour or four or five hours you walk out again. You’ve experienced all of the proportion and relationships; you’ve experienced something over a period of time. Well, most sculptures have always been confined to being a single object, no mater what the style of configuration — expressionist or figurative, whatever.
PC: You look at it from this point and that point.
WDM: You look at it and maybe walk around it and, basically, let’s face it. How much time does a person spend with a piece of sculpture? An average of perhaps less than one minute, maximum of five or ten, tops. Nobody spends ten minutes looking at one piece of sculpture. So by starting to work with land sculpture in 1968 I was able to make things of scale completely unknown to this time, and able to occupy people with a single work for periods of up to an entire day. A period could even be longer but in this case if it takes you two hours to go out to the piece and if you take four hours to see the piece and it takes you two hours to go back, you have to spend eight hours with this piece, at least four hours with it immediately, although to some extent the entrance and the exit is part of the experience of the piece. So what happened, though, which was very interesting in connection with the idea of theatre or film is that to build one of these pieces becomes a major logistical economic undertaking. Like if a person wants to make a movie, we all now that it takes sixty or eighty thousand dollars to make a feature film of any kind, black and white, not too much original music and not too many name stars, and it takes four or five hundred thousand dollars to make any medium size picture and a million to two million dollars to make any decent type of major film. Well, the notion that maybe a piece of sculpture might take an investment of forty or fifty thousand dollars and . . . but when it’s finished, it gives the person an experience with could take him several ours or several days to experience is something I’ve been fighting now for the last four years, starting now the fifth year.

The comparisons to architecture and cinema are both eye-opening. Minimalists like Judd and Flavin spoke of sculpture as space, but De Maria’s talking about sculpture as time. Which is worth remembering when you sign up for a 24-hour stay at the Lightning Field.