Measure and Substance


When the metric system of weights and measures was originally founded bye the French Academy of Science in 1791, the meter was intended to be a natural constant- one ten-millionth of the polar quadrant of the earth passing through Paris. A six year survey carried out during the French Revolution culminated in the creation of an "International Prototype Meter," a solid bar of platinum-iridium alloy which was deposited with full diplomatic and legislative ceremony in French National Archive. Exact copies of this bar were then made available to all countries adhering to the convention of the Meter. For over 160 years these inert metals bars, carefully maintained in conditions of atmospheric constancy, represented the collateral against which the apportioning of space, hence our position within the world, could be tested. Conceived as a function of the relationship maintained between metric culture and a material object, it was a notion of distance that was richly anthropomorphic. But the sanctity of the object as a standard of measurement rested precisely on its ability to conceal or disguise the anthropological dimension. The objectivity of measurement had, after all, been invested in the objectivity of the object and, like the minimal art object; the platinum-iridium bar appeared resolutely and even tautologically empirical- self referential and capable of measuring nothing other than itself and the precision of its own dimensional properties. Appearing to partition the world according to the laws of "scientific determinism" the objective standards embodied in the bar actually reproduced the same pre-enlightenment anthropocentrism that positioned man as the measure of all things.

In the mid 1960s, changes in our understanding of the physical universe, specifically the space-time relationship derived from developments in quantum theory and particle physics, produced a corresponding revision in the calibration of measurement. The development of interferometric techniques based on the precise measurement of the speed of light in a vacuum finally rendered the object redundant, introducing in its place and atomic standard, easily realized in any well-equipped laboratory. The empirical attachment to the object gave way to a system of measurement based on wavelength and thus of time. With no investiture in the visible world, the effect of this development was to strip the concept of measurement of anthropomorphic resonance, directing our understanding of physical universe and the calibration of space away from the solid state Euclidean geometry of the object and toward its dematerialization, its place within the new system on conceptual reckoning.

Positioned at a similar juncture of epistemologies, the work of Walter de Maria offers a parallel meditation on the relationship of the phenomenological to the metaphysical. Calibrating a psychological as well as a physical space, de Maria's mathematically inspired object-poetics propose a latter-day aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, originating in the philosophical discourses of the Burke, Kant, and more recently Lyotard. Suggesting a separation of the space and the object from that of the concept, the distinction of the two types of aesthetic experience belonged to a conception of the world based not on inter-relatedness- the inheritance of modern physics- but on the mechanistically inviolate laws cause and effect. Combining aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime, the astonishing intellectual and experiential power of de Maria's best work lies in its ability to take measure of our place within a world from which such determinacies have been withdrawn. Historically, the work spans minimalism and conceptualism while belonging to neither. In physical appearance and description it would appear affiliated to a well-established minimal credo- one that valorizes seriality and geometric uniformity, commercial fabrication, and an industrial aesthetic of machine polished surfaces- where the sheen of modern technocracy in returning the gaze announces the silence of the object. Apparently void of content, de Maria's sculpture would appear then to belong to an episteme of "object empiricism," describing as they do a solid state of geometry stripped of incidence and inspired by dry numerology. Yet, for anyone who has experience the Lightening Field, spent time in New York with Earth Room or Broken Kilometer, circulated around the 5-7-9 Series, or handled early works such as the High Energy Bar, the fissure that opens up between the specificatory language of dimensional computations and the experience of the works themselves suggests an aesthetic melded at the juncture of epistemologies- of the way that we know the world (through ourselves) and the way we know ourselves (through the world). Matter is abstracted and abstraction materialized, and between these two poles, de Maria offers an assessment of measure, magnitude, and order as an aesthetic experience divided between the two types of pleasure outlined by Kant in the introduction to the First Critique: "There," Lyotard summarizes, "it is said that if aesthetic pleasure is possible, it is not only because the object can offer a finality to reflective thinking (as in the beautiful which is nature 'in' thought) but also because conversely thinking can feel its own finality on the occasion of a form , or even formlessness: this is the case in the sublime which i 'the subject' without nature.01

Two related works from the late seventies, the Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Basel and the Broken Kilometer (1979) in New York, seem to exploit more or less explicitly many of the tensions that animate the experience of the work. Consisting of five hundred solid brass rods, two meters in length and laid out in five parallel rows of one hundred, the Broken Kilometer appears to offer an image of measure and order accessible to observation and thus subject to Kant's "finality of thinking.: The kilometer as a conceptual entity normally unavailable to a person as eye-level is here rendered as a visual gestalt. Just as distance is objectified by measurement, so measurement itself is objectified in the form of the brass rods. Simultaneously defining and withholding the definition of distance that it purports to represent, Broken Kilometer relies on the concept of the totality to give meaning to the individual forms. Manipulating the image and appearance of objectivity, de Maria demonstrates the immateriality of conceptual form, returning the notion of distance to those mental structures which impose limits and finitude onto understanding.

Perfectly formed and identical, the cadenced repetition of the rods in each of the five rows has a curiously devotional quality, arising perhaps from their presence as material corollary to the mental imposition of limit. Signifiers of mortality as well as materiality, death as well as transcendence, the initial impression of silence and immobility soon evaporates, and as one moves around the limited space available to the spectator the play of reflected light on the cylindrical surfaces dissipates the mass of metal and the image of stasis and order gives away to one of fugue- structured around limited mutability and harmonic variation. The analogy is not without significance. De Maria's association with the experimental music of people such as la Monte Young, as well as his understanding of the serial compositional structures inherited from Stockhausen and Boulez can be seen reflected in the visual organization of works such as Broken Kilometer. Ordered as if in tone-rows, the visual dematerialization that takes place with the shifting viewpoints corresponds perhaps to Boulez's technique of "Chromatic duration" which employed a means of connecting "time-value" with "pitch" in a permutational manner analogous to that of the tone-rows. Using movement and time to animate measurement and to choreograph the reception of the work, de Maria implies a sort of relativism made explicit in the I-Ching piece of 1981. Here, the object vocabulary is similarly reductionist, consisting simply of two parts of the yin and the yang, the broken and the solid line. Out of this binary emerges a complex grammar and metaphysic in which observer and the observed are continually interconnected. The dynamic patterns formed and dissolved in the Tao are never static but always stages in a continuous flow linking order and chaos, movement and rest, complication and simplification. As with all of de Maria's work, pared-down visual simplicity yields conceptual complexity.

Where the gestalt of Broken Kilometer departs significantly from the strictly minimalist insistence on objecthood is that the visibility of the kilometer in its entirety is based on an illusion engineered to the scale of the body and the presupposed eye-level of a viewer. The appearance of regularity is here the product of mathematical irregularity. As the rods recede into the back to space, de Maria overcomes the problem of exponential spacing by incrementally increasing not only the relative space that separates each unit but also the height of the rods as they rise progressively from floor level to an elevation of approximately six centimeters above. In this sense the work suffers from the precisely the sort of "theatricality" that Michael Fried famously riled against in "Art and Objecthood." Quoting Robert Morris's claim that, "the concerns now are for more control of the entire situation. Control is necessary if the the variables of object, light, space, body are to function." Fried went onto remark that "the entire situation means exactly that: all of it- including it seems, the beholder's body.02

The insistence on control – that for Fried represented the degenerative element in the minimal aesthetic- was one that appeared to run contrary to the blankness, neutrality, and mechanical impersonality of the minimal object. It was a means of anthropomorphizing, or, to take it further, consecrating the space of the object and its relationship to the beholder. Activating this space, the presence of the viewer, whether palpable or merely implied, becomes an implicit part of the order of measurement being proposed. As a materialized abstraction based on math and geometry, Broken Kilometer, far from being coherent in its own right, has the presence of the human body implicit to it's very structure.

If measure of Broken Kilometer belongs to the body, Vertical Kilometer occupies a conceptual space voided of anthropomorphic connotations. Sunk into the ground in front of the Musuem Fridericianum in Kassal, it consist of a single brass rod, one thousand meters long and weighing nearly 18 tons. Freed from the conditions of objecthood or visibility, the vertical kilometer of brass is represented only by a five-centimeter diameter end-section of the rod set into a square sandstone plate. Few sculptures of this scale have been so intentionally hermetic, forcing the spectator into acceptance of work as transcendent, non-visible form. Silent and all but invisible, Vertical Kilometer stands in for a notion of measurement voided of the anthropomorphic dimension found in the phenomenology of object viewer relations. A brutal subterranean gesture, the kilometer of brass remains always remote and unverifiable, resonant only of it own self-imposed exile from the visible world. For all the homage paid to the reality of the invisible, Vertical Kilometer, unlike the Lightening Field (under construction at the same time), fails to map the space of the absented object. Offered purely as a feat of realized ideation, the object itself can speak a little more than its own condition of muteness and paralysis – never of the space on the other side of this condition where, to paraphrase Kant, beyond the absolute of presentation, thinking encounters the unpresentable.

Enfolded in distance and immensity, the Lightening Field embodies the extremes of the paradox that haunts our understanding of space and human relativity. As witness to Maria's claim that "Isolation is the essence of land art," it is both intensely beautiful, cruel and remote, positioned on a semi-arid plateau high on the North-West plains of New Mexico. No other existing contemporary work of art offers such a combination of breathtaking beauty and intense intellectual focus. It is a focus that precedes the work, the conditions of isolation being met not just in the remote geography of the site but also predicated in the physical and psychological elements of the journey there- a journey that takes on many of the characteristics of a pilgrimage. Passing through the various rituals of air an ground travel that precede the twenty four hours alone in the Lightening Field, notions of space, time, and scale are successively deculturized, the reframing of experience prior to the apprehension of the work of art being integral to it. Arriving in the midday light, the grid of stainless steel poles that map the space of the field itself seems like a spectral mirage, disembodied from either the math of their placement or the solidity of their form. The grid, like the lightening, is addresses as a condition not of determination but of potentiality- primary structure belonging not to the physical attributes of the work but to the abstract conceptual limits imposed in its apprehension/ "Sublime violence" says Lyotard, "is like lightening. It short-circuits thinking with itself. Nature, or what is left of it, quantity serves only to provide the bad contact that created the spark. The teleological machine explodes.03

Consisting of four hundred polished stainless steel poles arranged in a rectangular grid measuring one mile by one kilometer, the spatial organization of the Lightening Field contains within it the blueprint for the entire Western system of measurement and demarcation. The tension of the grid, the emblem of modernist ambition, here lies in its reconciliation of two opposing impulses. On the one hand it acts as an instrument of spatial colonization, orienting the self in its superimposition of the mathematic and human figures. At the same time it announces modern art's will to silence, acting as the declaration of a space time that is at once autonomous and autotelic- a hostility to nature manifest in the diffuse sadism of the sharpened poles, their highly polished surfaces and denial of topographical variance thereby denying the alignment of the two figures (human and mathematical) that it appears to propose. An abstraction separating the perceptual screen from the world that it renders visible, the grid, like any system of measurement based on pure relationship, is structured around the implicit possibility of extension. As John Beardsley has pointed out, the Lightening Field has this possibility built into it at a mathematical as well conceptual level: "The number of poles on the kilometer side is equivalent to four squared: on the mile side five squared: the total number of poles is twenty squared. One can extrapolate and endless grid from this."04 But if the grid is indeed the armature of modernist spatial organization, the fundamental abstraction through which we endlessly divide and measure the world, it also serves a dual function as described by Rosalin Krauss: "The grid's mythic power is to make us able to think that we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion or fiction)."05 The duality of materialism and abstraction that gives Lightening Field its power is thus presages in it very structure. Emblematic of modern art's ambivalence toward secular and sacred space its mythic power lies in the rearrangement of narrative experience across a spatial field thatallows both views-material and metaphysical- to be held in what Krauss has termed "Para-logical suspension."

Between the visible an the invisible, order and chaos, matter and energy, de Maria offers a meditation on the nature of the physical world at the point which the old mechanistic understanding, based on classical notions of solid objects and deterministic laws of nature, dissolves into wave-like patterns of probabilities, understood not as isolated entities but rather as interconnections.

Walking around the Lightening Field becomes a process of orienting the self in relation to these changes. Here, the invocation of the sublime seems to have as much to do with comprehension of energy and matter derived from quantum science, as it has to do with the pantheistic or romantic inheritance of the C19. Standing as perhaps the greatest monument to our changing understanding of the physical universe, the power of the Lightening Field, its extraordinary beauty and intellectual challenge, is also born of a Para-logical suspension in which thought and matter, short-circuited by their own descriptive substance, are held like an electrostatic- charge in the rarefied atmosphere above a plain in New Mexico.

Notes:
01. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) p52. 02. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" in Gregory Battcock, ed.. Minimal Art (New York, E.P. Dutton, 1968), pg 127
03. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ibid, pg 54.
04. John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond (New York, 1984) pg 63.
05. Rosalind Krauss, "Grids." October 9(Summer 1979) pg 54.





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