Walter De Maria Essay

Essay by Michael Govan

The Equal Area Series (1976–90) is one of several large-scale works by Walter De Maria in Dia's collection. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Dia commissioned and now maintains for visitors some of De Maria's most significant permanent site-specific installations, including The Lightning Field (1977), on a remote desert plateau near Quemado, New Mexico, and The Broken Kilometer (1979) and The New York Earth Room (1977), both in downtown Manhattan, New York.

De Maria's early work of the 1960s included music, performance, and writing as well as sculptural and conceptual works. The principal pieces of the latter kind, such as 4' x 8' Box (1961), also in Dia's collection, and the proposal for Mile-Long Parallel Walls in the Desert (1964), foreshadowed much of the Minimal, Conceptual, Installation, and Land art movements, which would radically change aesthetic practice through the next two decades.

The Equal Area Series comprises twenty-five pairs of circles and squares that are formed by highly polished solid stainless-steel plate, 5 inches wide by 7/8 of an inch thick. The works are installed flat on the floor. Each pair differs slightly in size from each of the others and is considered an individual sculpture. As the title of the work implies, each circle in a pair defines an area of the same size as its corresponding square. The smallest pair in the series, for example, is made up of a square 6 feet wide and a circle with a diameter of 6 feet 8 inches; the area inscribed by each is nearly exactly the same—3,844 and 3,848 square inches respectively. The next largest square is one inch wider, at 6 feet 1 inches; the circle that corresponds to it, in order to maintain the same area, has a diameter of 6 feet 9 1/8 inches, or 11/8 inches larger than the circle in the smaller pair. The squares increase incrementally in size by the same measure— one inch—for each subsequent pair in the series. The largest square is 8 feet wide and the largest circle is almost 9 feet in diameter (see chart).

The first thirteen pairs, their squares running from six feet to seven feet wide inclusively, were made from 1976 to 1977 and first exhibited at a temporary rented storefront on Waverly Place, New York City, October 1977 to January 1978. The second, larger twelve pairs were fabricated in two phases—pairs fourteen through nineteen were made in 1983 and pairs twenty through twenty-five in 1990. At Dia:Beacon the artist has placed the first twelve pairs of the series in a continuous line through the museum's two symmetrical central galleries. The polished geometric perfection of the circles and squares, and the subtly increasing size of each pair in the installation, focus the eye equally on the individual pairs and on the breathtaking scale of the overall arrangement. The pairs increase in scale against the force of diminishing perspective in one gallery and, turning the corner, increase with perspective in the other, leaving the smallest pair and the largest pair installed on either side of the threshold of the gallery and providing a subtle but perceptibly different feeling in each of two mirror-image rooms. The polished steel geometric outlines incorporate the building's dramatic architecture into their presence, nearly dematerializing in certain light. From some angles they can appear dark, and from others they channel the light of the skylights onto their bright surfaces on the floor.

The precise mathematics of The Equal Area Series are unavailable to even the most observant eye, but measure and number are essential to most of De Maria's sculptures. The Lightning Field, for example, is made up of 400 poles (also of stainless steel) in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer. The Broken Kilometer, true to its name, comprises 500 solid round bars each two meters long, so that together they total one kilometer in length. In its companion piece, The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1976), also commissioned by Dia, a brass pole one kilometer long has been driven into the ground in Kassel, Germany, so that only its top, two inches in diameter, is visible on the earth's surface.

Counting and arithmetic progressions also feature prominently in much of De Maria's other works, such as A Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World/3–12 Polygon (1984). It comprises seventy- five stainless-steel polygonal bars, each of them one meter long, arranged in rows on the floor. Each row differs from the others in the number of sides on its bars, a number that in turn corresponds to the number of bars in the row: the first row contains three three-sided bars, the second contains four four-sided bars, and so on through twelve rows. Also, although the bars vary in the number of their sides, they are all of equal area and weight. A Computer . . . , like The Equal Area Series, suggests an infinitely expandable progression. That same progression was further extended in another work, 13, 14, & 15 Meter Rows in 1985.

The particular numerology and geometry in each of De Maria's sculptures offer a starting point for expanding consideration of the artwork beyond its immediate visual gestalt, but by no measure exhausts the work's layered meanings and its visceral effect. Within the powerful sense of dramatic scale and seemingly absolute geometric perfection commanded by De Maria's installations, there are many dynamic relationships, for example, the play between the universal underlying cosmic continuum of natural abstract mathematics and our arbitrary culturally defined units of measurement.

In The Equal Area Series, within the continuous expansion and progression of measure, De Maria poses the opposition of the circle and the square—the perfect curve versus the perfect rectangle—perhaps the most essential of geometric contrasts. The pairing of the circle and the square suggests a binary opposition—like male and female, 0 and 1, black and white, or yin and yang—that underlies the essence of our world—procreation, counting and computing, light and visibility, and so on. This totalizing binary conjunction is integral to other of De Maria's works in Dia's collection, including the two versions, one white and one black, of the 360° I-Ching (1981), that are intended to be exhibited together in an arrangement of sixty-four elements in a square grid surrounded by sixty-four elements in a circle.

Many qualities of De Maria's work—their large scale, the serial, gridlike arrangement of simple but precisely shaped individual elements, the use of pure materials— are shared by the work of some of his contemporaries, particularly Dan Flavin and Donald Judd as represented in Dia's museum in Beacon. De Maria, Flavin, Judd, and their peers have been labeled Minimalists because of their use of simple, geometric, serially repeating forms and unveneered materials, but they are anything but minimal in their complex intentions, the spectacular nature of their work's phenomenal effect, and the far-reaching conceptual implications that may be gleaned from close observation and sustained thought.

Perhaps most clearly in The Lightning Field, precise design and measure serve, among other things, to channel the sublime cosmic scale and explosive power of the natural environment into the artwork. As defined in large part by eighteenth-century artists and writers concerned with reconciling our human-dimensioned existence with overwhelming qualities in the natural world and the greater universe, the sublime is a function less of scale, grandeur, or even beauty, all of which might be measured or comprehended, than of the transcendent implications of the incomprehensible. The sublime is sensed, but not grasped, through emotions of awe or terror in the face of nature. The philosopher Immanuel Kant described the "supersen-sible" quality of things beyond the grasp of the senses and the imagination as a kind of infinity, which he called "the mathematically sublime." As such, the subtly expanding dimensions of each pair in The Equal Area Series might suggest larger phenomena, perhaps even the notion of the infinitely expanding celestial universe. But that metaphoric description would have to be counterpoised against absolute, specific facts of the artwork, facts that correspond with our own centered, if fleeting, experience of viewing it: the absolute eternity of the universe versus the absolute human now.

In sum, the notion of the sublime suggests a continuum between the experience given to us by our senses, the thoughtfulness given to us by our minds, and some other zone inaccessible to us. The immediate visual sensation of De Maria's sculpture withholds another reality of calculated mathematical measure that must be understood in the mind and that, in turn, may refer to some unknown universal order. As is implied by the title of a recent work of De Maria's, Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown, an installation in Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Japan, the visible is only one aspect or layer of the aesthetic experience, and hence of our existence.