Today in 1935, the birthday of Walter De Maria, an artist behind one of the most unusual art installations you’ll ever come across: a loft in New York that he filled with dirt.
It’s called the New York Earth Room, and it’s one of a series of installations De Maria put together in the 1970s.
At the core of these works is almost a contradiction: they’re built on a grand scale, but they’re also pretty minimalist.
Maybe the best known work is called The Lightning Field, a 1977 work which features 400 stainless steel poles covering a vast stretch of desert in western New Mexico.
The poles don’t actually get struck by lightning as often as the name might suggest, but the New York Times described the installation as bringing “a striking sense of order to the desert.”
The Dia Art Foundation manages that installation today, and it does the same for the New York Earth Room, which also opened in 1977.
It is an actual second floor apartment in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, 3600 square feet in all, and it’s full of dirt.
There’s over 200,000 pounds of it, so that every bit of the space is covered with 22 inches of earth.
De Maria made three Earth rooms; the other two were in Germany and were eventually cleared, so the New York Earth Room is the last dirt-filled apartment standing.
He apparently never said what the work was supposed to represent, or even if it was supposed to represent anything at all.
Maybe, as its longtime caretaker suggests, it’s a calm natural oasis in the middle of busy, loud, crowded New York City.
Or maybe, because the soil was treated so that nothing would grow in it, a landscape that stays the same even as everything around it changes.
Actually, it takes some work to make sure the New York Earth Room stays the same.
The caretaker waters the soil once a week and rakes it out regularly so that it stays level and doesn’t end up with any mushrooms or mold or whatever.
Visitors are welcome, it’s free to see.
You’re supposed to look, not walk through, though I did find a video online of people mud wrestling in there (!)
And you’re generally not supposed to take photos, because it’s meant to be experienced in person.
So just keep the phone in your pocket or the camera at home, and just take it all in, all that dirt in all that space.
The Morris Arboretum and Gardens at the University of Pennsylvania is now home to an immersive audio installation by artist Richard Hamilton.
Auscultation Points is 24 minutes of sounds recorded in the gardens.
It’s meant to show how when we’re having a “quiet” moment in nature, there’s actually a lot of sounds going on around us.
Maybe he could do a similar soundscape for the New York Earth Room?
Inside The SoHo Apartment That’s Been Filled With Dirt Since 1977 (Gothamist)
Take a Journey of Sound Through the Morris (Morris Arboretum & Gardens)
