Walter De Maria was an American conceptual artist who died three years ago this summer.   Here’s how I reflected on his passing.

The American artist Walter De Maria died late last month at the age of 77.  Originally trained as a painter, the California native emerged from the San Francisco avant-garde scene in the early 1960s and went on to become one of the most celebrated artists of the next two decades.  His output was varied, but he was mostly affiliated with the artistic movements known as minimalism, conceptualism, and earth art.

The New York City gallery that represents him said his “remarkable installations…gave fresh impact and new meaning to our experience of looking at art, while enhancing and expanding our appreciation of the world around us.”  With De Maria, the use of the word “installations” is fitting because most of what he was famous for doing was creating site-specific works that couldn’t easily be moved, whose very existence became part of their surroundings.

Over the course of a couple years in the late 1970s, De Maria created the four installations that were his best known. In the town of Kassel, Germany he made “Vertical Earth Kilometer,” a brass rod one full kilometer long stuck straight down into the ground.  All that’s visible is the very top, which just looks like a brass circle about two inches across.  The rest is buried beneath, accessible only via the viewer’s imagination.  Entirely visible on the other hand is his “Broken Kilometer,” installed in a building on lower Broadway in New York City, which is simply 500 brass rods, each two meters long, precisely laid out in an otherwise empty room.  A few blocks away is perhaps his most famous or notorious piece, the “New York Earth Room.”  The title pretty much says it all: what one finds here is a 3,600 square foot second floor loft filled with rich, dark earth (that is, dirt) to a uniform depth of 22 inches.  They water it once a week to keep it moist. The New York Times calls it “a sight so surreally, deliriously startling as to be simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.”  My hunch, however, is that most people probably choose one or the other descriptive term, not both.

Finally there’s “Lightning Field,” 400 stainless steel poles an average of 20 feet tall, all spaced 220 feet apart in a 1 mile by 1 kilometer grid in Western New Mexico.  It doesn’t attract lightning very often but the poles lend an other-worldly aspect to the landscape, particularly at dawn and dusk.

Any time you begin a sentence about art by saying “In the late 1970s…” there’s a good chance that whatever follows is going to confuse and annoy a great many people. For critics like Roger Kimball, De Maria’s work represents the triumph of empty showmanship over skilled art, and, moreover, reveals the total and willing gullibility of contemporary art audiences.

Quite simply art like this doesn’t make a lot of sense to most observers.   Those who seriously classify things like this as art (as opposed to the spectacle chasers) do so with an appreciation of the broader trajectory of artistic endeavor over the last 70 years, roughly De Maria’s lifetime, as it relentlessly sought to move away from anything that was traditional. Artists abandoned traditional subject matter, then traditional forms and styles, then traditional size, all in an attempt to let art be art, and not mere imitation of reality. Finally the act of creating something memorable itself took the place of any remaining traditional concept of art.

Whether all this has been good for art is an open question, however. And such historic explanations often make little headway against a room full of dirt.

Walter De Maria, New York Earth Room, 1977.  (141 Wooster Street, NYC)