Artists & Works

STYLE: TOTAL ART,
HOMAGE TO PICASSO

Walter De Maria graduated from the University at California at Berkeley, where he met such fellow avant garde artists as the composer Lamonte Young, who participated in Happenings with de Maria in the San Francisco area. In 1960, de Maria moved to New York, where he continued to organize Happenings, and began to make his first sculptures. He was briefly a drummer in the group Velvet Underground. De Maria is best known as a leader of the earth art movement; his best-known installation in this genre is Lightning Field in New Mexico (1974-1977). De Maria also filled a gallery with dirt in Earth Room (several different installations).

De Maria felt that old forms and paradigms governing the definition of art-making and the activity of art-making needed to be broken and wrote a statement on the importance of "meaningless work." Yet, Lightning Field, his best-known work is a stunningly beautiful piece from even the most old-fashioned perspectives of artistic value. In it, de Maria created a relationship between abstract, manmade forms and the power of nature. De Maria's print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio is a minimalist portrait in which De Maria comments on Picasso's debt to African art, creating a map of Africa from the face of Picasso.

Walter De Maria, "Meaningless Work," in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young, 1960
"Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today. This concept is not a joke. Try some meaningless work in the privacy of your own home. In fact, to be fully understood, meaningless work should be done alone or else it becomes entertainment for others and the reaction or lack of reaction of the art lover to the meaningless work cannot honestly be felt."

Cornelia Field, New York Times, 9/21/03
"'The Lightning Field' is supported by the Dia Art Foundation, which came into being in 1974 and which focuses, more or less, on the work of relatively few artists -- usually in isolated installations maintained for the long term -- or, as Dia itself puts it, on "art projects whose nature and scale exceed the limits normally available within the traditional museum or gallery."
Mr. De Maria is one of their major contributors and Dia maintains several of his works. One is the strangely captivating 'Earth Room,' 'an interior earth sculpture' -- a 3,600-square-foot loft filled to a depth of 22 inches with 250 cubic yards of dirt -- at 141 Wooster Street in New York. Another is "The Broken Kilometer, strands of metal, a kilometer in total, laid out in segments on the floor of a loft space at 393 West Broadway. But there are plenty of other Dia sites, by Mr. De Maria and others.
All the Dia installations I have seen stun those who encounter them with their wild artistic ambition and their imaginative flights. They hold the gaze. "The Lighting Field" does the same, and then some. Its enormous size and its vast setting compel reflection on the nature of nature and what it means to make art in a natural environment.
Mr. De Maria, a Berkeley-trained painter who was born in California in 1935, was a pioneer in what came to be known as land art, the use of bulldozers and other equipment to excavate and shape works in isolated landscapes, many in the American West. (He was also at one time, it seems, a drummer for the Velvet Underground.)"