{"id":117594,"date":"2017-11-02T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=117594"},"modified":"2017-11-08T16:10:04","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T21:10:04","slug":"the-un-changing-ever-changing-earth-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/02\/the-un-changing-ever-changing-earth-room\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unchanging, Ever-Changing Earth Room<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. \u00a9 The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: John Cliett<\/p><\/div>\n

On SoHo\u2019s cobblestoned Wooster Street, tucked above North Face and Lululemon boutiques stocked with neon athleisure, there is an otherwise empty, white, second-floor thirty-six-hundred-square-foot loft filled with\u00a0140 tons of dirt. It\u2019s open to visitors from Wednesday through Sunday, noon to six P.M.<\/small> The surreal aspect of its very existence is undercut somewhat by the normalcy of public access and consistent hours, as if it were a store selling nothing. Walking up the stairs and into the space on a recent late morning, I was first struck by the sensation of hush. It was not just the quieting of the sounds from the street but an enveloping cocoon of warmth and musty scent, like a field after summer rain. Around the corner, a raked expanse of soil two feet deep filled the loft from edge to edge, occupying what might otherwise be a bedroom and rising up to meet wide exterior windows.<\/p>\n

This is\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Earth Room<\/em>, an installation by the New York\u2013based artist and musician Walter De Maria, who died in 2013. De Maria was part of the 1970s Land Art movement that included such compatriots as Robert Smithson, of Spiral Jetty fame, and Michael Heizer, whose City is an enormous monument complex in the Nevada desert still under construction. Their work deals with massive scales, both in time and space. In October 1977, the German art dealer Heiner Friedrich hosted\u00a0The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em>\u00a0as an exhibition at his gallery, which then occupied the Wooster Street space, where the dealer also lived in a front apartment. The installation was meant to last for three months, but it never left, and in 1980, Friedrich helped found the Dia Foundation, an art organization that has pledged to preserve De Maria\u2019s work in (more or less) perpetuity. This year marks the\u00a0fortieth\u00a0anniversary of\u00a0The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0quiet persistence, which Dia is marking with commemorative events and ongoing exhibitions of De Maria\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

De Maria might have created\u00a0The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em>, but its public face is Bill Dilworth, a sixty-three-year-old abstract painter who has been caring for the installation as its curator for the past\u00a0twenty-eight years. Walk into the back office room past the glass-protected aperture that opens out onto the field and most days you\u2019ll find Dilworth behind a high\u00a0wood desk. Tall, gregarious, and preternaturally youthful (a result of dirt therapy?), he has thought more about this particular piece than just about anyone. \u201cMy life and my experience here is immersed in art, earth, quiet, and time,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a continual growth of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

At least it used to be quiet. Over the past decade\u00a0The Earth Room<\/em> has seen an explosion of visitors. \u201cThere are days when not\u00a0ten minutes go by without someone,\u201d Dilworth explained. \u201cWhereas in the early days we\u2019d get\u00a0thirty-five hundred people a year, the last few years it\u2019s been sixteen\u00a0thousand.\u201d Every time someone shows up at the door, their image appears on a console screen at his desk, and Dilworth pushes a button to let them in\u2014sometimes with a white wooden plank so he doesn\u2019t have to reach so far. He chalks the increased traffic up to New York City\u2019s larger changes\u2014going from \u201cwild to wealthy,\u201d as he put it\u2014as well as The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em>\u2019s inclusion in the Lonely Planet<\/em> guides starting around 2008. \u201cThey look at the book and they look at that and they just don\u2019t get it,\u201d he said, gesturing toward the installation. \u201cA lot of people will walk right by it not knowing that\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>\n

De Maria himself stayed silent on the work\u2019s significance, though it came at the peak of the artist\u2019s career. In 1977, he also created the Lightning Field<\/em>, a grid of four hundred stainless steel poles installed in New Mexico, and in 1979 the Broken Kilometer<\/em>, five hundred two-meter-long brass rods laid in rows, installed at 393 West Broadway. Both are under the purview of Dia as well. De Maria described\u00a0The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em> as a \u201cminimal horizontal interior earth sculpture.\u201d Accurate, but possibly unhelpful for those seeking a deeper message. Dilworth would rather let the piece speak for itself, too: \u201cWhen people come up and ask me what it means, I really just turn them back to\u00a0The Earth Room<\/em> so they can look for that answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Celebrating\u00a0The Earth Room<\/em>\u2019s anniversary exposes a particular paradox as well. The piece is static and permanent, a place visitors can, and do, return to over the course of decades as a pilgrimage.\u00a0Dilworth is at pains to keep it stable, watering and raking the earth (the same organic material installed forty\u00a0years ago) on a weekly basis. \u201cIt\u2019s very much a Zen garden. You maintain it and nothing grows,\u201d he said. In fact, mushrooms and grass have sprouted, large dragonflies have hatched from subterranean nests, and a visitor even once threw a can of black beans on the dirt. Vigorous raking takes care of most intruders. Yet the context of the work is always shifting. As Bill says, \u201cThe Earth Room<\/em> is meant to be unchanging; nevertheless it evolves.\u201d<\/p>\n

One such evolution is the texture of the earth. Dilworth began working for Dia in 1979, on projects with artists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and the board member Lois DeMenil. In 1989, he noticed the desk job at The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em>; two months later, it opened up and he nabbed it, despite the fact that it paid half his previous carpentry gig. The previous caretaker raked the dirt smooth; on his first day, Dilworth decided to do it with a cultivator, a spiked tool used for tilling farms. \u201cIt was just an effort to make it look more like earth,\u201d he said. Initially, the piece had electric lights on above it, but Dilworth got into the habit of leaving them off, since\u00a0natural light makes visitors stay longer. \u201cIf there are times I feel I\u2019m getting inundated, I\u2019ll flip the lights on.\u201d<\/p>\n

De Maria\u2019s work is about sensory experience: the sheer feeling of being in the presence of so much earth. It\u2019s grounding, in a literal and metaphysical sense. Dilworth sees a particular message coming to the fore more recently, however, about our increasing isolation from earth and our impact on the planet as climate change becomes more blatant. The way The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em> shelters a small parcel of dirt, keeping it fresh and protecting it, draws out our ancestral connection to the material. \u201cIt\u2019s like a flag for preserving Earth,\u201d Dilworth said. \u201cIt\u2019s important that people understand it\u2019s worth preserving, and this can remind them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as his job has stayed the same, Dilworth\u2019s life has changed. He and his wife, Patti, who watches over De Maria\u2019s Broken Kilometer<\/em>, have raised two children in the Lower East Side loft they\u2019ve occupied for decades and recently became grandparents. They\u2019ve endured struggles for tenants\u2019 rights and a luxury renovation when the building fell into the hands of developers. In 1996, the couple bought a house in the Adirondacks, where they stay for three months every summer while the installations close for maintenance. \u201cI\u2019d love to see an Earth Room<\/em> out in the country,\u201d Dilworth said. \u201cThat\u2019s where the real balance is.\u201d<\/p>\n

No photos are allowed of The\u00a0Earth Room<\/em>, repelling what might otherwise become a\u00a0horde\u00a0of Instagrammers making their way up the stairs. What you take away from standing in front of the dark, musty expanse is what you bring to it. You leave knowing that you can always come back and the earth will be there just the same, only different.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kyle Chayka is a writer living in Brooklyn. His first book, on minimalism, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2019.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On SoHo\u2019s cobblestoned Wooster Street, tucked above North Face and Lululemon boutiques stocked with neon athleisure, there is an otherwise empty, white, second-floor thirty-six-hundred-square-foot loft filled with\u00a0140 tons of dirt. It\u2019s open to visitors from Wednesday through Sunday, noon to six P.M. The surreal aspect of its very existence is undercut somewhat by the normalcy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[31459,31458,31456,31457,8715,914,6409],"class_list":["post-117594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-bill-dilworth","tag-dic-foundation","tag-michael-heizer","tag-new-york-earth-room","tag-robert-smithson","tag-soho","tag-walter-de-maria"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Unchanging, Ever-Changing Earth Room by Kyle Chayka<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For the past forty years, a loft in SoHo, now worth millions, has been filled with dirt.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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