Walter De Maria | |
|---|---|
 De Maria in 1968 | |
| Born | (1935-10-01)October 1, 1935 Albany, California, US |
| Died | July 25, 2013(2013-07-25) (aged 77) Los Angeles, California, US |
| Known for | Installation art,sculpture |
| Movement | Minimalist,Land art |
Walter Joseph De Maria[1] (October 1, 1935 – July 25, 2013)[2] was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New York City. Walter de Maria's artistic practice is connected withminimal art,conceptual art, andland art of the 1960s.
LACMA directorMichael Govan said, "I think he's one of the greatest artists of our time." Govan, who worked with De Maria for a number of years, found De Maria's work "singular, sublime and direct".[2]
De Maria was born in 1935 inAlbany, California. His parents were the proprietors of a local restaurant in Albany and were socially very active, while their son was mostly concentrated on music.[3] Walter De Maria's first academic interest was music—first piano, then percussion. He also took to sports and cars, of which he made drawings.[1] By 1946 he had joined a musicians' union.[1]
De Maria studied history and art at theUniversity of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Trained as a painter, he soon turned to sculpture and began using other media. In 1960, De Maria and his friends, the avant-garde composersLa Monte Young andTerry Riley, participated inhappenings and theatrical productions in the San Francisco area.[4] From his exposure to the work of La Monte Young and dancerSimone Forti, among others, De Maria developed an interest in task-oriented, game-like projects that resulted in viewer-interactive sculptures. For example, hisBoxes for Meaningless Work (1961) is inscribed with the instructions, "Transfer things from one box to the next box back and forth, back and forth, etc. Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless."[5][6]
In 1960, De Maria moved toNew York City where he married his wife Susanne Wilson (later Susanna) one year later.[7][8]
His early sculptures from the 1960s were influenced byDada,suprematism andconstructivism. This influence led De Maria into using simple geometric shapes and industrially manufactured materials such asstainless steel andaluminium – materials which are also characteristic ofMinimal art. With the support of collectorEthel Scull, De Maria started making pieces in metal in 1965.
Also in the mid-1960s, he became involved in various artistic activities. His piece,Cage, forJohn Cage, was included in the seminal 1966Primary Structures exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. He appeared inhappenings, composed two musical works (Cricket Music, 1964;Ocean Music, 1968), and produced two films (Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert;Hardcore, both 1969).
De Maria briefly ran a gallery onGreat Jones Street in lower Manhattan with his wife Susanna, showingJoseph Cornell's collection of rare films,Robert Whitman's Happenings (he was then married to and created with dancer/artistSimone Forti), and exhibiting De Maria's Minimalist sculptures made of wood.[1]
In 1965 De Maria became the drummer in the New York-based rock group the Primitives and an artist/musician collaborative group calledThe Druds. The Primitives includedLou Reed andJohn Cale and was a precursor toThe Velvet Underground.[9] In 1980, De Maria bought a four-story, 16,400-square-footCon Edison substation at 421 EastSixth Street, and an adjacent lot at No. 419, betweenFirst Avenue andAvenue A.[10] In February 2014, this property was selling for $25 million.[11] Businessman and art collectorPeter Brant purchased De Maria's studio for $27 million. Brant's plans for the space were unknown.[12]The building was developed into the "Brant Art Center," part of thePeter Brant collection.https://www.brantfoundation.org/visit/
De Maria went to California in May 2013 to celebrate his mother's 100th birthday and had a stroke there a few days later. He remained there for treatment.[1] He died in Los Angeles on July 25, 2013, at the age of 77. He was survived by his mother, Christine De Maria; his brother, Terry; four nieces; four nephews; and four grandnieces and two great-grandnieces.
From 1968 De Maria producedMinimalist sculptures andinstallations such as theMunichErdraum of 1968. He realizedLand art projects in the deserts of the south-west US, with the aim of creating situations where the landscape and nature, light and weather would become an intense, physical and psychic experience. In his work, De Maria stressed that the work of art is intended to make the viewer think about the earth and its relationship to the universe.
The Lightning Field (1977) is De Maria's best-known work. It consists of 400 stainless steel posts arranged in a calculated grid over an area of 1 mile × 1 km. The time of day and weather change the optical effects. It also lights up duringthunder storms.[13][14] The field is commissioned and maintained byDia Art Foundation. It has been speculated thatThe Lightning Field influenced the imagery of authorCormac McCarthy's epilogue in his 1985 novel,Blood Meridian.[15]
In the 1960s and 1970s, De Maria created enduring urban works. As complementary pieces,Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), andThe Broken Kilometer (1979), address the idea of unseen or abstracted distance.Vertical Earth Kilometer is a one-kilometer-long brass rod, two inches in diameter, drilled into Friedrichsplatz Park in central Kassel, Germany. The rod's circular top, flush to the earth's surface, is framed by a two-meter square plate of red sandstone.[16] In 1979, De Maria meticulously arranged five hundred brass rods forThe Broken Kilometer, a permanent installation at 393 West Broadway in New York.
In contrast to the hard metal of both Kilometer pieces, the third of these urban works,TheNew York Earth Room (1977), is a 3,600-square-foot room filled to a depth of 22 inches with 250 cubic yards of earth (the New York work is a permanent iteration ofMunich Earth Room, 1968, a temporary installation in Munich). Also in 1977, the artist recreated the work at theHeiner Friedrich Gallery in New York, which was then permanently reinstalled in 1980 at 141 Wooster Street, New York.
The Broken Kilometer is also part of De Maria's series of monumental sculptures using a horizontal format, which feature groupings of elements ordered according to precise calculations. This series includes360°/I-Ching (1981),A Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World/3-12 Polygon (1984),13, 14, 15 Meter Rows (1985),Apollo's Ecstasy (1990), andThe 2000 Sculpture (1992).[citation needed]
In 1989 De Maria completed a sphere of polished granite for theAssemblée Nationale in Paris,[17] followed in 2000 and 2004 by works for two museums on Naoshima Island in Japan, the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum and theChichu Art Museum. A comparable, 25-ton sculpture entitledLarge Red Sphere (2002) was installed in theTürkentor, Munich, in 2010.[18]
One Sun/34 Moons (2002), conceived by the artist in collaboration with architectSteven Holl, was opened 2007 at theNelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. In 2010,The 2000 Sculpture (1992) was the first work of art to inaugurate the Resnick Pavilion at theLos Angeles County Museum of Art.[19]
De Maria andRobert Whitman opened the 9 Great Jones Street gallery in New York in 1963; the same year, De Maria's first solo show of sculpture was presented there. He had his first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery in 1965, at the Paula Johnson Gallery on New York'sUpper East Side. (Its owner soon became better known with thePaula Cooper Gallery)[1]
De Maria avoided participating in museum shows when he could, preferring to create his installations outdoors or at unconventional urban locations.[20] His work was more widely shown outside the United States, and he had major exhibitions in Japan and Europe.[20]
In 1968 and 1977, De Maria participated inDocumenta in Kassel; he installed his permanent public sculptureVertical Earth Kilometer in the city's Friedrichsplatz Park. In 1977, a major exhibition of De Maria's sculpture was held at theKunstmuseum Basel in 1972. He has also since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions organized byCentre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1981),Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1984),Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1987),Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1988),Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (1998), andChichu Art Museum in Naoshima (2000 and 2004).[21] Organized by theMenil Collection in 2011, "Walter De Maria: Trilogies" was the artist's first major museum exhibition in the United States.[16]
In 2015, filmmaker and art historian James Crump produced and directedTroublemakers: The Story of Land Art.[22][23][24][25][26][27] Set in the desolate desert spaces of the American southwest, this feature documentary film contains rare footage of De Maria and the artist's extant and non-extant works.Troublemakers was one of twelve documentary films selected by the 53rd New York Film Festival, September 25–October 11, 2015.[28][29] The film released theatrically at IFC Center, New York, January 8, 2016.[30]
