Neville Wakefield

Walter de Maria: Trilogies
Yale University Press, 2012
ISBN: 9780300175783

High in the Sistine chapel is our most famous image of transference, in which God, or so we are told, reaches out for Adam. His outstretched hand, not quite touching Adam’s, indicates both mortal communion and divine separation. The current that passes between the two is indisputable, even as the direction of its travel is open to the interpretations of a post-religious era. But whether we see Michelangelo’s creation as an image of a Promethean God creating out of his likeness man, or of man, in all his spiritual listlessness, conjuring an image of a vital God, The Creation of Adam is first and foremost about the space in between. This is a synaptic space; viewed through the scripture of neuroscience, it takes as its metaphor the firing of electrons and neurons, of thought itself. But whether we think in terms of science or religion, Creation proposes the measure of our being as belonging not to the object and entities in which we invest our faith but rather to the interstitial space between.

High in the desert of New Mexico, an altogether different artwork examines a similar interval. In many ways The Lightning Field can be regarded as the civic counterpart to the Creation, albeit one that is separated from the other by epistemic shifts and slides of half a millennium.  Like the famed fresco, Walter De Maria’s sculpture offers an image of a world born of abstract energy. Communicated in the post-Enlightenment language of the late twentieth Century, the transmission of energy is no longer between God and man but between earth and sky, between the known and the unknown; the grid that quantifies our terrestrial awareness and the celestial vault above.

Lightning connects the two, but only rarely. To experience the work is to understand both nature and landscape as a being in a state of potential; as thought held in the static of possibility or discharged in the momentary image.  And just as the direction of the energy that passes between deity and man may be open to interpretation, so the passage of this thought is also ambivalent. After all, the lightning that appears to descend from the heavens is, in a sleight of physics, actually the return stroke from a stepped leader of charged electrons, that travels upwards from the earth. The sublime is evoked at the moment that energy leaves the bounded field of the four-hundred pole grid. The body, like the map, is left behind, and for just a moment, in the infinitesimal gap between conscious thought and pure sublimation, we experience ourselves not for what we are but what we can be.

It has been argued that every creation implies a superabundance of reality, an eruption of the sacred into the world. The belief that such an eruption defies representation is demonstrated in those great works that define the gap or interval between two realities. This occurs in time as much as space. “Actuality,” wrote George Hubler in The Shape of Time, “is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.”

Giving form to these voids may be the job of artists as much as analyzing their interval may be the job of physicists and theologians. The Lightning Field fulfils many of the conditions commonly held to mark the disruptions of so-called sacred and profane space. Its grid marks a break in the homogeneity of the surrounding landscape. The communication between realms—heaven to earth, earth to the underworld, and visa versa —is figuratively marked by the axis mundi of the poles, whose distribution carries with it the cartographic struggle between order and chaos, and the passage between the two that we as humans must navigate.

But the axis mundi is not the only axis on which geometry is deployed. The Bel Air Trilogy evokes the same mythic landscape mapped by The Lightning Field. Here the instrument of acculturation is not the cartographic grid, but the streamlined symbol of Detroit’s automotive fantasy of conquest and exploration. Landscape is no longer to be experienced in the manner of the pioneers staking out the ground for future generations. Rather it is to be witnessed as an endlessly unraveling, cinematized vision played out on the windshield of progress, and experienced in the upholstered comfort of soft-sprung aspiration.

Weighty doors with the heft of a refrigerator seal in the details of this dream conflation of travel and social mobility. Their mission, to preserve both prosperity and self, is written in chrome, spelling the exclusion of threat, of elements natural and otherwise that pass from scorched road to charged sky. Up front, the hood ornament indicates a desire to be  unleashed from the bondage of terrestrial form, with its tenuous contact patch of tarmac and tire. The airplane that flies ahead leads the promise of travel in another axis. Resembling a softened, domesticated version of the fierce lances that mark out the territory of The Lightning Field, its flight does not recall the spiritual passage between heaven and earth but rather an altogether more prosaic form of travel communicated through the industrialized longings of people for things.

Yet both are in some way cathedrals to grandeur. The vehicles themselves were born of a golden age of imperialist expansion. Their lineage tracks from the frontier days, through the empty, romanticized cowboy-landscapes of the American West to the sculpted steeds of an industrial belle époque. But as in De Maria’s 1969 film Hardcore, the landscape of territorial expansion is never empty, it is always punctuated by the subliminal flash of the gun and its intolerable consequences. The three cars carry with them this ambivalence. Riven by geometry, each vehicle bears its pure form as if a cross. Immaculate and visually weightless, the circle, triangle, and square appear to hang suspended in the interval between roofline and body, between the promise of mobility and absolute stasis. Like The Lightning Field, the sculptures of the Bel Air Trilogy appear poised at ineffable interstices.  Regardless of whether one chooses to characterize this moment in terms merely formal, or those of the sacred and profane, what remains indisputable is that while the strange trinity of recent works are hard to get to know, they are at the same time, impossible to forget.