Cover, Arts Magazine, May 1972 (artwork © The cover of the May 1972 issue of Arts Magazine features
gazine features only the name, “Walter
1972 Walter de Maria)
Jane McFadden
Earthquakes,
Photoworks, and Oz:
Walter de Maria’s
Conceptual Art
Special thanks to Bruce Hainley for his editorial
suggestions and to Everett Lakey for providing
new perspectives on this entire endeavor.
1. “On the Cover,” Arts Magazine 46, no. 7 (May
1972): 5.
2. I use the terms essay and photoessay here based
on De Maria’s own use of them in an interview
where he described these pieces as “photo
essays.” But he then recanted: “The word essay
is wrong, but . . . photo conceptual pieces.” In
turn I have also chosen to employ the broad term
“photowork,” although this too may be inad-
equate for describing the distinct nature of these
pieces. See Walter de Maria interview, October
4, 1972, Archives of American Art/Smithsonian
Institution, 130.
3. The photographs are by Bob Benson. In the fol-
lowing issue of Arts Magazine, a letter to the edi-
tor from O. K. Harris (the name of a gallery run
by Ivan C. Karp that championed artists whose
mode of working was distinct from the-process
oriented and conceptual practices that the editor,
Gregoire Müller, supported) challenged the work
as “enigmatic.” Müller responded: “Modern art
has made ample use of photography and blank
space. All art deals with enigma. Keeping in mind
the importance of process in contemporary sculp-
ture, one is entitled to ask if smoking isn’t part of
the process.” Arts Magazine 46, no. 8 (1972): 71.
4. De Maria interview, Archives of American Art,
112. In the context of this interview, De Maria
also questions whether he has said too much and
whether he will ever release the interview.
5. For example, in the September 1971 issue
of Art in America, the cover bears a striking
photograph of the American West (taken by
Dean Brown), The Valley of the Gods in Southern
Utah. The photograph is meant as an image to
accompany Dave Hickey’s essay in the issue,
“Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz,” after which
the present essay is titled and which I discuss in
the coming pages. Art in America 59 (September
1971): 40–49. What is striking in this instance is
that the photographic image becomes neutral and
69
de Maria” in small, black, sans-serif capital letters. The notation highlights the
long-standing historical value of the artist’s name as a site for authenticating
skill, value, and authorship, just as the expanse of white on the cover reflects
long-standing sites for art—both the wall and the page. The
starkness of the layout also reminds us of what we might expect
to see that is not there—color, representation, documentation,
the face of the artist or his work—those images we still instinc-
tively look for as, and in relation to, art when we pick up a
magazine. The cover features both the artist, and by association,
his art, in plain view, while presenting neither. In doing so, it
stakes out the unusual territory that De Maria’s published work
occupied in this period. In the 1970s, De Maria produced a
series of photographic essays that neither represented his other
practices, nor reflected contemporary expectations for how
artists might publish themselves; thus, while in plain sight, they remained invis-
ible. As a group, these essays suggest a distinct interpretation of the site of the
publication and an astute understanding of the growing influence of media at
this time.
De Maria labeled his contribution to the magazine as “conceptual”—infor-
mation noted only in the table of contents. He simultaneously resisted any limit-
ing notion of the term. In the entry for the traditional explanatory blurb about
the cover on the same masthead page, we are given this additional information:
“Walter de Maria. The artist known in the underground for his 1961/62 minimal
work has since 1968 been working in the deserts of the world on large earth
sculptures. From Nevada he writes: ‘Conceptual art need not be dependent on
words or language.’”1
De Maria’s essay, “Conceptual Art,” in turn contains no words.2 It consists
of three photographs, spanning four pages with wide white margins, that depict
the artist lighting and then inhaling from a pipe, without any further accompa-
nying text or caption. A final blank white page distinguishes the essay within the
magazine and emphasizes the silence of the piece—a refusal further reiterated in
the images themselves, where De Maria’s mouth, one source of words, is other-
wise occupied.3 De Maria’s reticence within this discursive space is a particularly
potent choice in an era in which artists’ voices had proliferated in publishing; it
is a choice that De Maria navigates in varying forms. As early as the 1960s, stories
of the difficulty of speaking with the artist circulated, and he has been notori-
ously silent about his work in the decades since—noting in the same year of the
Arts Magazine piece that “any artist who explains his work is a fool.”4
Explanation, for De Maria, is not only explication or critical interpretation,
but is also linked to visual documentation and presentation. By 1972, artists had
been working in the vast regions of the American West and beyond for several
years, so we might logically assume that De Maria’s contribution to the maga-
zine would represent his recent stay in Nevada, perhaps a dramatic image or
two of the West.5 Instead, he presents a metaphorical image of the “trip,” get-
ting high—the artist smoking hash.6 Rather than offering an “explanation” of
his work for the magazine, De Maria uses his essay to conceptually configure
the magazine as a site that distances and limits experience—conditions that De
artjournal
Walter de Maria, “Conceptual Art,” 1972,
as published in Arts Magazine, May 1972 (artwork
© 1972 Walter de Maria; photographs by Bob
Benson)
illustrative, even within the critical context of an
art magazine.
6. In “Hard Bop,” the introductory essay to a
1976 issue of his publication Vision, Tom Marioni
reports that De Maria is smoking hash. Marioni’s
piece is one of the only mentions of De Maria’s
published photoworks. In the same issue, De
Maria contributes another published work: four
sheets of blank orange paper, which Marioni
describes: “It is direct use of material in a publica-
tion, not a reproduction, making it an original art
work.” Marioni, “Hard Bop,” Vision 3 (November
1976): 13; and Walter de Maria, untitled, Vision 3
(November 1976): 37–44.
Maria then explores. Although these images do not document work that is else-
where, they still allude to an experience that we cannot access—the landscape of
the other’s stoned mind. This space (tripping, high) connotes the blank, the spa-
cious, the expansive—antithetical to the spaces of information of the magazine,
and resistant to them. “Words” can only circle around the experience, as they do
here, pointing to the tactics of the work, rather than delivering meaning for it.
Like the stark presentation of his name across the cover, these self-portraits both
reveal and mask the artist and his art. To those whose expectations are unmet by
his “essay” on conceptual art, or for those who want to know about his trip, he
suggests, perhaps, that they put it in their pipe and smoke it.
···
At the time, De Maria’s work in more distant sites (like Nevada and elsewhere)
was defined by terms of extensive experience: isolation, duration, distance from
the gallery, and also, importantly, from the realm of photography:
It takes you about two or three hours to drive out to the valley and there
is nothing in this valley except a cattle corral somewhere in the back of
the valley. Then it takes you 20 minutes to walk off the road to get to the
sculpture, so some people have missed it, have [become] lost. Then . . .
you hit this sculpture which is a mile long line cut with a bulldozer, at that
point you have a choice of walking east or west. If you walk east, you hit a
dead end, if you walk west, you hit another road, at another point you hit
another line. You actually have a choice—at that point you decide which
70 fall 2009
7. De Maria interview, Archives of American Art,
54–55. De Maria is describing one of his earliest
desert pieces, Las Vegas Piece (1969). In this dis-
cussion, we see De Maria grappling with the limits
not only of photography but also of text.
8. De Maria, quoted in Calvin Tompkins, “Maybe a
Quantum Leap,” in The Scene: Reports on Post-
modern Art (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 140,
first pub. in The New Yorker, February 5, 1972, 42.
9. As Thomas Crow later noted in a defense of
the category: “The ‘withdrawal of visuality’ or
‘suppression of the beholder’, which were the
operative strategies of Conceptualism decisively
set aside the assumed primacy of visual illusion as
central to the making and understanding of the
work of art.” Crow is referencing in particular
the critical arguments of Benjamin Buchloh and
Charles Harrison regarding Conceptual art. Crow,
“Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art,” in
Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 213.
Crow further notes in the preface to the volume:
“And one yield of this investigation is to show that
the inheritance of Conceptualism, ignored if not
derided by the majority of art historians, pro-
vides the field of art history with its best current
resources of theoretical understanding” (viii).
10. Walter de Maria, “column with a ball on top,”
in An Anthology of chance operations, concept art,
anti art, indeterminacy, plans of action, diagrams,
music, dance constructions, improvisation, meaning-
less work, natural disasters, compositions, math-
ematics, essays, poetry, ed. La Monte Young and
Jackson Mac Low (New York, 1963). n.p.
11. Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine
(February 1964), rep. Donald Judd: The Complete
Writings (Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, 1975), 114
12. De Maria’s work as a musician also strongly
influenced his understanding of experiences that
could be formally presented but remained invis-
ible. See my “Towards Site,” Grey Room 27 (Spring
2007): 36–57.
13. De Maria interview, Archives of American
Art, 72.
14. De Maria, quoted in Malcolm Winter,
“Interview: Malcolm Winter talks to the man
whose sculpture reaches out into space—or
exists only in the mind,” London Times, March 16,
1969, 59.
way to go and so forth, then you continue, you walk another mile and at
another point you walk another half mile and at a certain point you have to
double back. After spending about four hours you have walked through all
of the three miles of the thing and you would have gotten your orientation
because the sun will also be setting in the west and this is lined up so that
all the lines are either east-west or north-south . . . . I haven’t done an article
on it because I didn’t find a way to photograph it.7
The experience of the work is extensive in both spatial and temporal terms.
It is one of miles and hours, or even days. It resists the limits of photography: it
can’t be photographed, and therefore it can’t be published. The result would be
extreme: “Maybe only twenty or thirty people would see my work in a year, but
that was better than a lot of people partially seeing it through photographs.”8 Such
sentiments were, however, simultaneous with De Maria’s experimentation with
various forms of mediation in his work, including photography. In exploring both
realms, De Maria often presented work at the limits of visibility itself. Indeed, we
are left wondering of the work described above: what exactly does it look like?
Questions of the visual resonated with contemporary critical discussions in
art, many of which posited a shift from optical primacy to other forms of
object-viewer engagement. This shift occurred in particular in conceptual prac-
tices, and was pivotal to the critical potential of the work associated with the
term.9 At stake was the cognitive and philosophical potential of art and its differ-
entiation from visual culture at large. De Maria, attuned to the exchange between
art and media, and wary of the reduction of art to linguistic systems, challenged
the visual through an embrace of the “invisible”—those experiences that are
present but not visually articulated in art. Aligned less with the logical processes
and linguistic theory of some contemporary conceptual practices, and more with
the resonant relationships of belief or faith in art, this choice had broad applica-
tions for the artist. In early sculptural or text pieces, balls would disappear inside
of structures or be hidden from view, as in “column with a ball on top” (1961).
“I have built a box eight feet high. On top place a small gold ball. Of course no
one will be able to see the ball sitting way up there on the box. I will just know
it is there.”10 This practical if also absurd arrangement treats visibility literally
(now you see it, now you don’t), clearly valuing the invisible (gold) in the pro-
cess. Such gaming machinations would cause at least one critic, Donald Judd, to
declare these early works “[not] much to look at.”11 Yet for De Maria, the fact
that the material forms have always mediated a realm that we cannot see, whether
sublime or pedestrian, is crucial.12 Drawings, in particular, offered De Maria a
realm to explore the limits of material, one in which “what was put on the page
was so light, it was just on the threshold of visibility and . . . the idea of the
drawing was as important as the drawing . . . and you doubted your senses.”13 By
the late 1960s, De Maria grounded the invisible in even more tenuous material
terms: “One of the great theoretical breakthrough [sic] of the Sixties is that
sculpture can exist as light, air, or possibly even in just the form of ideas.”14
But what of media—photography in particular—that were relentlessly
tractable to the visible? One sense of the invisible here stems from the indexical
quality of the medium that reflects the inherent “here not there” foundation of
site-related practices, while also distantly alluding to the even more simplistic
71 artjournal

Gianfranco Gorgoni, photograph of
Richard Serra, 1969, as published on the cover
of Grégoire Müller, The New Avant-Garde: Issues
for the Art of the Seventies, New York, Praeger,
1972 (photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni, cover
provided by Henry Holt and Company Publishers)
15. The photographic was key to a variety of
conceptual practices and had varying relation-
ships to language within this realm. For a broader
discussion of these relations and the categori-
cal difficulties of the conceptual itself, see Liz
Kotz, “Language between Performance and
Photography,” October 111 (Winter 2005): 3–21.
16. Exemplary of this practice is the Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in 1969. The catalogue
for the exhibition included photographs by Robert
Fiore of the artists in the exhibition-in-process.
Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, ed. Marcia
Tucker and James Monte (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1969).
17. The implied machismo of the artists at work,
in the clothes and processes of the working class,
are conspicuously absent from De Maria’s pho-
tographs. Indeed, when he does depict himself
in Arts Magazine, he engages in a process (getting
high) that would be considered antithetical to the
temporal linearity of task and accomplishment
demanded of the labor class. Further, although
these images portray De Maria in shirtsleeves, the
shirt is one with formal French cuffs.
18. Grégoire Müller, The New Avant-Garde:
Issues for the Art of the Seventies (New York,
Washington, London: Praeger, 1972), 150–57.
Carl Andre also avoided documentary images
of his working process in the volume, although
he allowed one close-up portrait of himself. The
other photographs for his section of the book
were of: “materials, as they happen to have been
abandoned in the streets of New York City,”
which “were taken under the instructions of the
artist.” These photographs reify the link of art
and its processes to that of construction, that is,
working-class labor. Müller, 60–67.
b/w
machinations of “now you see it now you don’t” found in De Maria’s earlier
sculptural practices. Yet De Maria further manipulates the tensions among vis-
ibility, accessibility, and invisibility in his photographic work by creating experi-
ences specific to the published medium, or by referencing experiences that we
cannot easily see, even when photographed—for example, getting high, or the
ambiguous idea of an artist’s process.15
At the time, artists’ processes seemed to be visible everywhere, and gener-
ally in photographic form.16 In 1972, Grégoire Müller (the editor of Arts Magazine)
published The New Avant-Garde, a volume intended to examine the practices of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Including only a short introductory essay by
Müller, it is composed of photographs taken by Gianfranco Gorgoni, with short
fragmented statements by both artists and author as captions. Müller’s book is a
tribute to the idea of process within the avant-garde, and the photographs dis-
play twelve artists at work in many forms. Some general themes emerge from
this visual record, through which we might understand this new avant-garde as
male, hands-on, and evoking a tradition of the labor class. The cover of the book
displays the now-iconic photograph of Richard Serra throwing molten lead—an
image that echoes (and upstages perhaps) Hans Namuth’s depictions of Jackson
Pollock at work.17 The visualization of a rough-hewn American work ethic that
Namuth had helped produce is presented here with a growing air of risk and
machismo: Pollock’s cigarette is muscled out by Serra’s gas mask.
De Maria’s contribution to Müller’s book is an exception within the vol-
ume.18 Instead of documents of his material processes, De Maria’s section con-
sisted of photographs (by Gorgoni) of the six art dealers with whom he had
worked—one per page, centered and framed with a black border. Two pages
introduce the photographs (and his contribution to the book). Here, De Maria
thanks his dealers for “representing” him within the catalogue: “I would like
to thank them, for our past association and for representing me here, for I do
72 fall 2009
19. Lynne Cooke discusses the various manifesta-
tions of “Verb List” and its implications as text
and work her recent essay on Serra, “Thinking
on Your Feet: Richard Serra’s Sculptures in the
Landscape,” Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke,
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 77–79.
20. Walter de Maria interview, Archives of
American Art, 127–29.
not like to be photographed,” and thus introduces a complex interplay of the
visible and invisible within representation itself. De Maria is represented by
the photographs, while of course not visibly present. He does “not like to be
photographed,” we learn, but in his control of the layout, becomes the subject
of these photographs through “association.” The dealers represent De Maria in
other terms as well—in the art world, as an artist. They “deal” for him in matters
he may not “like” such as money or image, and the series of photographs draws
attentions to the links between one form of representation and another, and the
invisibility of such “associations” in the rest of the volume. For De Maria’s piece
also reveals to us other aspects of artistic process and institution that the book
does not readily acknowledge. Most notable is that his contribution represents
the only women—Virginia Dwan and Paula Cooper—in the volume. That each
is legendary in art world, and that Cooper still remains one of its most powerful
constituents, is telling of how De Maria’s resistance to standard forms of repre-
sentation unmasks the seemingly transparent, but actually occlusive, structures
on display in the rest of the book. Indeed, the question of representation is both
absent from this book and everywhere in it: many representations, although no
representational practices are discussed.
De Maria’s choice of text is also quite distinct both within the book and
within contemporary practices that employed “words.” Just as materials in this
period were often subsumed to physical processes, and photographs to revela-
tion of that process, so too were words often relegated to the pragmatic and
literal in Conceptual art and beyond. One prominent example, now canonical,
was first published in Müller’s volume: Serra’s “Verb List” (1967–68).19 A list of
mostly transitive verbs, Serra’s text encompasses sculptural process in textual
form: “to roll, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten . . .”—some of
which we then see documented. De Maria rejects such practical employment.20
Accompanying a list of his dealers names—Richard Bellamy, Cooper, Arne
Ekstrom, Nicholas Wilder, Heiner Friedrich, and Dwan—is a list of eighteen
adjectives, subjective and poetic in form:
religious, sensitive, good
warm, loving, helpful
professional, elegant, intelligent
dashing, flashy, witty
possessed, energetic, crazy
moody, mystical, minimal
This list of adjectives points away from the material realities of making to
the complexities of human personality—those crucial but invisible aspects of
identity and process. The layout encourages the reader to flip back and forth from
one page to the next, matching name with image with adjectives. We find our-
selves not viewing “process art,” but instead engaged in the process of reading,
exploring the inherent potential and limitations representation in multiple forms.
···
At the time, contemporary vision was extending its reach—across national
boundaries, into outer space—and many distinct experiences took on similar
form through mediation and documentation. Art was not immune to these
73 artjournal
Walter de Maria, untitled photowork,
1972, as published in Grégoire Müller, The New
Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies,
New York, Prager, 1972 (artwork © 1972 Walter
de Maria; photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni;
cover provided by Henry Holt and Company
Publishers)
21. Many other artists of this moment chose
to resist documentation, as did De Maria. For
example, Robert Irwin refused to publish photo-
graphs of his work for the 1965 São Paulo Bienal
in Artforum. [June 3, 1965]. See Richard Shiff ’s
discussion of this choice in Doubt (New York and
London: Routledge, 2008), 19. In a 1970 issue
of Avalanche, Carl Andre described photography
as “just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.”
Quoted in “Interview by Willoughby Sharp,”
Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970): 24.
22. Kynaston L. McShine, “Acknowledgements,” in
Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1970), 1.
23. McShine, “Essay,” in Information, 138.
24. “Art,” Time Magazine, May 2, 1969, 54, rep.
McShine, Information, n.p. The chosen review,
from his exhibition of Bed of Spikes (1969) at
Dwan Gallery, shows a picture of De Maria with
the caption “The High Priest of Danger”—a
manifestation of the role of the artist that is quite
distinct from the emerging stereotype of the
artist as a more systemic, calculating producer
of conceptual information. Two versions of the
page were included in the exhibition—one for the
catalogue and one, in larger scale, for the wall.
forces, and the question of documentation was intertwined with any consider-
ation of art at this time.21 Accordingly, the Information exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art in 1970 turned attention, as the curator Kynaston McShine noted,
to the contemporary conditions where “communication systems such as televi-
sion and film, and . . . increased mobility” have affected art. The result was that
“photographs, documents, films and ideas, which are rapidly transmitted, have
become an important part of this new work.”22 Although the exhibition covered
a wide array of practices, curatorial choices tended to conflate the conditions in
which the art emerged and the art itself—each as information.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the catalogue, which ends with a fifty-
page montage of photographs culled from visual culture—shots of the moon from
NASA, portraits of rock-and-roll stars, and reproductions from print media and
film, as well as documentation of artists in process. Within this context, art and
other images of culture are equated through the photographic medium, and the
eliding of these visual sources questions the potency of any one visual image to
communicate at all through the din of cultural production. Indeed, for McShine,
the decision had been made, for in a realm of cultural production, where “after all,
Time magazine is available almost everywhere on Wednesday mornings,” art must
concede its place in the system: “An artist certainly cannot compete with a man
on the moon in the living room.”23 Such a curatorial judgment prematurely posi-
tions “communication” rather than experience as the role of art, and in doing so
embraces the inevitability of documentation not only of work but also as work.
In such a realm, De Maria’s contribution to the exhibition was also direct and
scathing: he submitted a reproduction of a page from Time itself in which he was
reviewed.24 For if it was information that McShine wanted, De Maria would oblige,
74 fall 2009
25. On the failure, see Alexander Alberro, “The
Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and
the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition,”
October 80 (Spring 1997): 57–84.
26. Diane Waldman, “New Dimensions/Time-
Space: Western Europe and the United States,”
in Guggenheim International Exhibition 1971 (New
York: Guggenheim Museum, 1971), n.p.
27. De Maria’s use of the swastika relates to his
exploration of a variety of symbols and shapes
in similar form (aluminum floor pieces) during
this period. However, its title, Museum Piece,
certainly resonates with De Maria’s growing sense
of unease about the gallery system and other
art-world institutions during this period. See my
“The Practice of Site: Walter de Maria and Robert
Morris, 1960–1977” (PhD diss., University of
Texas, 2004).
presenting a bit of circulating media “available everywhere on Wednesday morn-
ing” for the viewer’s consideration, rather than put his sculpture into the fray. A
photograph in the review, which shows De Maria’s body obscuring his sculpture
in the background, reiterated the distinctions among information, artist, and art.
The following year, the Guggenheim International Exhibition of 1971, meant to
reflect the state of the contemporary art world, focused on sculptural and site-
related concerns. As a result, the institution had to consider the role of the
museum in presenting such work (a challenge which it lavishly failed, resulting
in the controversial removal of Daniel Buren’s work from the show), as well as
grapple with the issue of documentation.25 According to one of the curators,
Diane Waldman, documentation was necessary but inadequate under these cir-
cumstances: “Documentation is fragmentary, incomplete and an inadequate sur-
rogate for the reality of the work, leaving the viewer totally unequipped to do
more than just barely comprehend the actual experience.”26 Although a year later
than the Information show, this exhibition was not ready to embrace the realm of
communications as central to art. In Waldman’s view, documentation was to be
overcome by the viewer, understood in its inadequacy. But what of artists who
refused these conditions? For the exhibition, De Maria presented Museum Piece,
an aluminum swastika on the floor, between two photo panels of the work,
allowing the viewer to grapple with the differences between sculpture and pho-
tographic reproduction. A second work for the show, Angel (1970), included two
magazine covers; a book of poetry titled Angel Hair 5, and an anonymous photog-
raphy book, Angel; the work riffs on the limits and possibilities of representation
in a variety of forms.27 Journalism, poetry, photography—angel upon angel—
where was Waldman’s “reality” here? De Maria’s contribution to the catalogue
75 artjournal

28. Although there is no documentation of the
piece in the exhibition, the checklist descrip-
tion reads: “Two magazine covers and plastic
case; Angel Hair 5, a book of 22 poets edited by
Anne Waldman; Angel, an anonymous photo-
graph book. Lent by the artist.” See “Installation
Checklist for the Sixth Guggenheim International
Exhibition,” A0003, exhibition files, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York, NY.
29. Walter de Maria, untitled, Avalanche 4 (Spring
1972): 52–63.
30. The photographs are of De Maria’s loft. See
Walter de Maria interview, Archives of American
Art, 129.
31. The Newlywed Game, which began in 1966,
premiered in the context of the mediation of the
Vietnam War (opposite a press conference with
Robert MacNamara) and was founded on the
premise of shared knowledge collapsing even in
the most seemingly intimate of circumstances,
that is, marriage. An early manifestation of our
current cultural obsession with viewing the “real-
ity” of others, this show was an example of the
extension of cultural vision and, simultaneously,
its limits.
32. Rautert is not credited in the layout of the
piece, although he is named in the layout of a sec-
ond piece he photographed for the same issue of
Avalanche for Franz Erhard Walther. The invisibility
of the photographer in De Maria’s photoworks
emphasized his authorship of these pieces, while
the use of photographers also distanced him from
the camera as tool.
33. For a discussion of the literalist nature of the
Essen school from which Rautert emerges, see
Timm Rautert, When We Don’t See You, You Don’t
See Us Either: Photography 1966–2006 (Göttingen:
Steidl, 2007).
34. For a discussion of the interview in Avalanche,
see Gwen Allen, “Against Criticism: The Artist
Interview in Avalanche Magazine, 1970–76,” Art
Journal 64, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 50–61. De Maria’s
piece appeared in an issue of Avalanche that
thematically addressed the conceptual. It includes
pieces with extensive use of text by Lawrence
Weiner (whose portrait is on the cover of the
issue), Hanne Darboven, Sol LeWitt, Stanley
Broun, and Howard Fried. De Maria’s use of
photography here again distinguishes his under-
standing of the conceptual from that solely having
to do with “words.”
35. Although De Maria has not publicly referred
to Ruscha’s work, he traveled on the West Coast
throughout the 1960s and exhibited at Nicolas
Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles as well, so it is likely
that he encountered Ruscha and Ruscha’s books
in various forms during that period.
only further confused the terms.28 Here he presented a variety of images, none
of which coincided directly with the work in the exhibition, including a photo-
graph of “My Brother Jim, his Wife Sue and their Daughter Lisa.”
At the time, De Maria was deeply engaged with the questions of site-related
practice, having created numerous works at distant locales, and was well into the
early stages of his most famous sculpture, The Lightning Field. His choices for these
exhibitions, as well as his production of autonomous photoworks for publica-
tion speaks to his understanding of the crucial role of media in his work; yet a
disconnection remains in historical commentary on this era between extensive
site-related work and larger cultural trends of mediation. De Maria both pro-
duced reminders of their interdependence, and also marked their distinctions .
The Spring 1972 issue of Avalanche magazine featured a series of twelve pho-
tographs contributed by De Maria (Fig. 6-9).29 The photographs, presented with
wide, light-gray margins (again a layout that distinguishes them from the rest of
the publication), depict a semidomestic setting of a studio or loft.30 They refer-
ence material processes of the artist: a stack of canvases leaning against a wall,
a flat file, a drum. Some present more immaterial considerations of art as well:
a poster of a Hindu deity, a burning fire, a safe. Other images explore the links
between the material and immaterial: a map of Nevada, a stereo, buckets for
fighting fire. Or they relate to facts of the life of the artist: a bed, two chairs, a
TV on the floor (with a broadcast image of The Newlywed Game)—although each
also relates to more immaterial and social aspects of existence.31 The twelve pho-
tographs could be categorized in other ways, as well.. What, in fact, the images
seem to be asking, does a photograph of a site or space relay in the absence of
lived experience? Taken by Timm Rautert, a young German photography student
on one of his many trips to New York in this period, they are strikingly straight
shots: but of what?32 Without the artist or his art, this literal style presents the
space as a series of austere walls and floors, broken by forms that become sculp-
tural through the camera’s lens.33 The photographs document and transform
space, drawing attention to their medium and the ways in which how we see, in
this case through photography, affects what we see and what we do not.
The artist’s name, “Walter de Maria,” is printed in the lower right hand
corner of the last page of the piece, so that we must look through the photo-
graphs before encountering this information—by which time, we find ourselves
shut up in his empty loft, the artist absent. In Avalanche, this choice of absence was
particularly pronounced. Edited by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, the maga-
zine provided an alternative venue for presenting work of the period, roughly
organized around several types of contributions: “ramblings” (news from the art
world), interviews, and photographs of artists and artists’ projects.34 De Maria’s
contribution is deadpan in its refusal of each of these. No one is there, and noth-
ing happens. Art is invisible: shut up in drawers, against the wall, in Nevada.
Neither the information-based work that McShine described, nor the impover-
ished documents of Waldman’s concern, these images are something else.
The deadpan nature of the photographs resonates with the use of photog-
raphy by many artists associated with conceptual explorations, from Douglas
Huebler to Eleanor Antin, but particularly important within this realm was
Edward Ruscha.35 Between 1962 and 1972, Ruscha produced a series of photo-
graphic book projects, many of which present places—parking lots, the Sunset
76 fall 2009
36. David Bourdon, “Ruscha as Publisher [Or
All Booked Up],” first pub. Art News 71 (April
1972): 32–36, 68–69; rep. Ed Ruscha, Leave Any
Information at the Signal (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002), 41.
37. Ruscha’s book in general seemed to encour-
age critical confusion and blindness. See Ann
Reynolds’s discussion of this problem in Robert
Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 110–11.
38. Eleanor Antin, “Reading Ruscha,” Art in
America 61, no. 6 (November–December 1973):
66–67.
39. Ruscha quoted in Bourdon, 41.
40. Some of the sharpest research I have encoun-
tered on Ruscha’s books is in Chris Balashak,
Ed Ruscha’s Ghost Town (MA thes., Art Center
College of Design, 2005).
41. Hickey, 46. This essay remains one of the
most insightful to date regarding the questions of
site and its mediation.
42. Ibid., 49.
Strip, gasoline stations—in series. Quite matter-of-fact in presentation, these
series provide a glimpse of contemporary American experience and the spaces
in which it occurs. Aerial views of parking lots in Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967) and
of swimming pools in Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) draw attention
to specific modes of seeing space from above; shots of gasoline stations Twentysix
Gasoline Stations (1962) from Oklahoma to Los Angeles draw attention to a society
in motion. In each case, the photographs share a sparseness and a deadpan deliv-
ery. As Ruscha noted: “It was just a simple straightforward way of getting the
news and bringing it back.”36 Embracing a journalistic tenor, he claims to con-
centrate on the delivery of information, but his photographs do not merely doc-
ument. They also present a tension between site and representation—between
floating in the swimming pool and floating above it.
Ruscha’s carefully controlled and flatly delivered images avoid as well the
mythologizing of the American landscape, while remaining rich with potential
for thinking about this same place (the identity of particular American spaces
and lifestyles and their relation to mediation itself), although few took notice
at the time.37 As Eleanor Antin noted in one of the most thoughtful early analy-
ses of the work: “His structure is deliberately sparse and casual and filled with
holes, and it is here that the actual experience resides. Suggestions are offered
by the material he does give and spaces are left for us to enter. There is actually a
good deal of information, but it’s there as a kind of initiation if you care to read
it . . .”38 Antin’s analysis draws attention to how Ruscha’s photographic practice
resides between the visual record and its potential associations, between infor-
mation and experience. The images are a starting point, “a training manual for
people who want to know about things like that.”39 They require a careful read.40
A reader of Avalanche searching for a representation of De Maria and his
work would similarly find a photographic constellation of objects, clues perhaps.
Rather than documenting the artist or his work, this photographic essay reflects
on photography as a site itself, for which we have a certain kind of access. In
turn, the photographs form a map of both the practice and identity of the artist
and the sites in which these occur, leaving them rich with holes.
···
In 1971, at the time of De Maria’s photographic works, Dave Hickey produced
an insightful essay on the exchange between site and mediation, “Earthscapes,
Landworks and Oz,” in which he suggested that a “a good rhetorician could also
make a case for [Ruscha’s] Nine Swimming Pools as an earthwork.”41 Hickey’s chal-
lenge here was to think across categorical distinctions of work of this period to
the broader processes of art and culture:
Probably the most illuminating “cut” which could be made would be to
distinguish the arts of location and dislocation according to their specific-
ity. That is, to distinguish those arts concerned with the semantic idea of
“place,” those concerned with the cultural ideas of “art” and “non-art”
space, and those concerned with actual cartographic “location.” This would
make a cut which would group [Douglas] Huebler’s conceptual pieces and
[Claes] Oldenberg’s monument proposals and Ruscha’s books with the
other works [including De Maria’s] that I have been discussing.42
77 artjournal
Walter de Maria, untitled, 1972, as pub-
lished in Avalanche, Spring 1972 (artwork © 1972
Walter de Maria; photographs © Timm Rautert;
pages © Avalanche, provided by Liza Béar)

78 fall 2009 79 artjournal


Photograph of Walter de Maria’s The
Lightning Field, 1971–77, as published on the
cover of Artforum, April 1980 (artwork © Walter
de Maria; photograph by John Cliett, © Dia Art
Foundation, New York; cover © Artforum)
43. Ibid., 48. Hickey’s comments not only reflect
the mediation of art, but, in his reference to the
famous combat correspondents, Pyle and Davis,
allude to the mediation of war as well.
44. Walter de Maria, “The Lightning Field,”
Artforum 18, no. 8 (April 1980): 51–59. No
page numbers are included in the layout of the
spread, another anomaly within the normative
structures of the magazine. Although I cite this as
a “last” photoessay by De Maria, his interest in
the photographic continues in various forms. For
example, a 1999 catalogue for his exhibition at the
Fondazione Prada included six series of photo-
graphs of the city of Milan, where the exhibition
occurred. Walter de Maria (Milan: Fondazione
Prada, 1999).
45. In a 2003 interview, John Cliett, the photogra-
pher of the published Lightning Field images who
worked in close collaboration with De Maria,
reiterated: “The problem from the beginning was
that the people at Dia [which provided the finan-
cial support for the work and maintains it as well]
and Walter did not want the pictures to represent
the work. . . . I’m sure Walter would appreci-
ate it if you make it clear that the relationship of
artwork and photography is a difficult relation-
ship.” Quoted in Jeffrey Kastner, “The God Effect:
An Interview with John Cliett,” Cabinet 3 (Summer
2001): 91–92. The interview was followed by a
segment in which artists were asked to “Please
draw that famous photograph of The Lightning
Field from memory”—a request that plays on
both the omnipresence of the photographs of the
work and the fact that one is not allowed to take
photographs of the work itself, and thus must
rely either on published photographs or memory
to reconstruct the work. See “Please draw that
famous photograph of The Lightning Field from
memory” Cabinet 3, 93–99. The publication of
these two pieces constitutes a creative and crucial
contribution to the critical discourse surrounding
this work.
end b/w sig
color
For it is not the manipulations of material (earthworks, land art) that best
determine relations between works, but emergent cultural concerns about how
we experience both place and art. Works in the land produced a particularly
acute set of conditions for reception, as Hickey knew:
Now there is an art form ideally suited to presentation via magazine. Work
consisting of photographs and documentation is not presented by journal-
ism but as journalism—a higher form, needless to say. . . . Should these art
forms flourish and develop, we shall soon need a kind of National Geographic
for Esthetes. . . . Already Philip Leider and Diane Waldman . . . have returned
with (literally and figuratively) breathless accounts. New styles of criticism
are evolving: it’s goodbye Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, hello Ernie
Pyle and Richard Harding Davis. . . . An artist who makes documents needs
an editor, not a dealer.43
Hickey’s tongue–in-cheek account of new forms of images entering the art
world astutely cuts to the issues at stake in art’s play with mediation: a possible
shift in the way art will be seen or read as image, as well as the ways in which
it may be talked about, especially art involving the land. Here, critical rigor
becomes journalistic adventure, or at least sunstruck giddiness, as was and is the
case with so much of the reception of earthworks and land art.
Hickey himself wondered about his own ability to critically assess art that
embraced the complexities of the American landscape and its images, for the
history of representation for this particular realm of culture plays off “resonant
mythologies,” while constantly constructing new ones as well. The American
landscape is layered with cultural images—from manifest destiny to the esca-
pades of Oz—dense with myth and meaning. If work made in this site is going
to overcome such difficulties, to be more than a simple rehashing of the same
cultural forces, then attention to the forms of representation is key. It is within
this context that De Maria produced his photoessays, even as he explored
extensive experiences in distant sites. Although the two are inextricably inter-
twined in his practice, as I have argued, rarely are they directly related—in fact,
only once.
De Maria published one last photographic essay in 1980—a nine-page
spread in the April 1980 issue of Artforum of the now-famous images of The
Lightning Field.44 Completed in 1977, construction on The Lightning Field had begun
in 1971, simultaneous with his earlier photoworks. Consisting of 400 precisely
positioned, vertical, stainless-steel poles arranged in a grid, the work is perma-
nently installed in a remote landscape of the high plateaus of New Mexico. The
work is to be experienced over the course of twenty-four hours, and the dura-
tion of an experience of the work allows for prolonged consideration of the
form as it changes over time. The photographs are something else entirely.45
The Artforum spread begins with a monochromatic, sky-blue page that dis-
tinguishes the series from the discursive contents of the rest of the issue—an
anomaly within the history of the publication and a marker of the distinction of
these images. The first double-page spread presents two photographs taken from
the same position with different strikes of lightning. Through the doubling of an
image of place and the freezing of time in the captured images of lightning, this
introductory spread, framed in black margins, immediately invites us into the
80 fall 2009
color color

Photographs of Walter de Maria’s The

Lightning Field, 1971–77, as published in
Artforum, April 1980 (artwork © Walter de
Maria; photographs by John Cliett, © Dia Art
Foundation, New York; spread © Artforum)

82 fall 2009 83 artjournal


46. De Maria consulted with various engineers
to determine the most appropriate methods for
capturing lightning in photographic form. He used
a trigger to capture lightning developed by NASA
scientist Richard Orville. Kastner, 91.
47. Walter de Maria, “Some Facts, Notes, Data,
Information, Statistics and Statements,” Artforum
15, no. 8 (April 1980): 58.
48. Ibid.
49. Narratives of visits to The Lightning Field
are recurrent in the critical literature. See, for
example, most recently Laura Raicovitch, “At the
Lightning Field,” X-tra 10, no 2 (Winter 2007):
57–63. As my own present essay was in process, a
long-awaited monograph on the work by Kenneth
Baker was published, featuring an extensive
narration of his visits to the work based in the
“personal and particular.” Baker, The Lightning Field
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2008).
realm of technological reproduction—the manipulation of space and time by
the camera that is impossible at the site.46
Even as these photographs of The Lightning Field exist in the realm of media,
they, like De Maria’s other photoessays, resist the tropes of these spaces. In par-
ticular, the photographs both resonate with a sense of the American West and
veer from our cultural understandings of this space—avoiding the aestheticized
images of landscape photography and the cinematic expanses of the Western. A
second double-page spread presents a full-bleed, panoramic image of the land-
scape that dwarfs the poles of The Lightning Field within it; the photograph, with
a high horizon line dissecting the page, flattens into a limited field of blue and
green. Here, sculpture morphs into plane as the grid of The Lightning Field disap-
pears and the grid of the page emerges. The image of the expansive landscape
lacks specificity and, instead, in its flatness, its openness, demarcates a relation-
ship to American space in general. Ready, waiting for our projections—the
sublime, the natural, the nuclear, the cinematic, whatever we may conjure to
be grounded here—the images reflect and refract, streaks of light in a darkened
box, like photography itself.
Despite the obvious signs of representation and its tropes that this photoes-
say provides, these photographs have become ubiquitous images of De Maria’s
practice and the larger category of land art—repeatedly presented as documents
of the work without any discussion of them as images as such. De Maria warned
against such conflation. In a one-page text accompanying the photographs, he
includes subtle reminders of what we are not experiencing in the magazine:
“The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work. . . . The sum of
the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics. . . . The invisible
is real. . . . Isolation is the essence of Land Art.”47 Presenting certain values that he
associates with his extensive sculpture and an experience of it (invisibility, isola-
tion), De Maria creates distance between the page and the field. These thoughts
are interspersed between longer notations about the impressive feats of material
and physical manipulation that building The Lightning Field entailed, for example:
“An aerial survey, combined with computer analysis, determined the positioning
of the rectangular grid and the elevation off the terrain. . . . Each measurement
relevant to foundation position, installation procedure and pole alignment was
triple checked for accuracy.”48 Process, defined by the extensive navigation of
the physics of the field, exists in stark contrast to the physics of the photograph,
where the viewer can, as perspective indicates, float above the ground.
That images are the currency of land art is both obvious and obfuscated
within a history of the work. At stake is not only the economics of representation,
but also the confusion of public and private experience, and the contemporary
dissolution of the latter. The photographs of The Lightning Field are about the repre-
sentation of landscape, which we share, rather than an experience of it, which we
don’t. They function as a tactic in the face of overwhelming visual culture—a daz-
zling distraction from the more personal strangeness of stepping away from
representation, reaching beyond mediation, however tenuous and fleeting this
experience may be. In response, critics and historians of The Lightning Field load it
with explication, writing repeatedly of their private experiences. These tales are
always accompanied by the same dramatic images, that in turn, perform their
transformation of the work into public representation, undermining the words.49
50. Cliett quoted in Kastner,92.
51. De Maria speaks of the importance of the
photographic works for a “mass audience
. . . actually using the mass possibilities of the pho-
tograph and magazine and book” in the Archives
of American Art interview, 130.
52. Walter de Maria, “On the Importance of
Natural Disasters” (1960), in An Anthology, n.p.
53. See for example John Beardsley’s scathing
critique of The Lightning Field as “authoritarian”
in “Art and Authoritarianism: Walter de Maria’s
Lightning Field,” October 16 (Spring 1980): 35–38.
Many accusations against De Maria seem to stem
from issues of critical access, as De Maria does
not participate in an interpretation of his work.
In the years that I have been researching his
work, I have never spoken with the artist directly;
however I see this silence as constituent to his
process. The richness of the photographic work
discussed here clearly speaks to the possibili-
ties of such silence, but their absence from the
historical record reveals as well the ways in which
his choices have resulted in critical and scholarly
blindspots.
Once De Maria had the photographs, he explored various venues that would
emphasize their public nature against the private experience of The Lightning Field:
At the time this all happened, we [John Cliett and De Maria] had two goals.
One was Life magazine, and the other was a big billboard in Grand Central
Station. And we had the deal with Life. . . . But Walter pulled the plug on the
whole thing. Life were [sic] really pressing Walter. They wanted him to pose
with the piece, they wanted to send their own photographers. And he felt
like the people from Life were just looking at it from sort of a sensationalis-
tic point of view. Life magazine had a picture in the back called the Endpaper,
and there was one of a moose standing on the hood of a car. And it said at
the bottom of the thing what happened to the moose—everybody was try-
ing to get the moose off the car on the freeway, and the moose freaked out
and ran in front of the car and was killed. And Walter saw the picture and
said, ‘I’m not going to be a moose on the hood of a car.’. . . He pulled the
plug on seven pages of Life magazine.”50
Each venue, or either venue, promised a distinct life for the work—one in
which it would enter the undifferentiated chaos of visual culture. These were not
spaces in which only twenty or thirty people a year could see the work, but ones
for a “mass audience.”51 These were where De Maria would render his strategy
public, where he would emphasize the distinctions between walking through a
field and reading the plane of the page, where he could remind us of the stakes
of believing in everything we see (lightning frozen in time, for example) at the
expense of the invisible. Yet to present the images at all was to risk the photo-
graphic equation of one experience for another—to risk being like a moose on
a freeway, out of place, just another piece of sensationalistic information. Thus,
in the end, he chose a slightly more refined venue in Artforum, one in which he
could control the images and their presentation; where he could provide careful
markers to remind us that these images were something other than documents
from the field, and that their difference was crucial and expansive itself—for
those who cared to read it.
De Maria’s photographic practices, both invisible and ubiquitous within the
history of this period, reveal the process of a thinking artist at work, even as they
resist staid forms of representation of the artist in process. How was an artist,
who hoped for an art of profound experience—“If only all of the people who
go to museums could just feel an earthquake”—to navigate an emerging ava-
lanche of visual information?52 Stories abound regarding De Maria’s elusiveness,
his authoritarian control, yet few have noticed the complex ways in which he
grappled with the terms of mediation, or the questions he asked about how we
know what we know when we see a work of art, or when we don’t.53 Reveling
in the invisible as well as in the material, he urged his viewer to engage beyond
the din of cultural mediation. In doing so, he set the terms for an art that would
not merely be swept along, but might instead produce a distinct space of experi-
ence, whether on the page or in the field—amid our medicated minds and our
mediated landscapes and all of the institutions in between.
Jane McFadden is an assistant professor and the director of art and design history, at Art Center College
of Design in Pasadena, California. She is currently working on a book, Walter de Maria: Meaningless Work.
color color

Photograph of Walter de Maria’s The

Lightning Field, 1971–77, as published in
Artforum, April 1980 (artwork © Walter de Maria;
photograph by John Cliett, © Dia Art Foundation,
New York; spread © Artforum)