WHERE LIGHT AND LIGHTNING RULE
That night they rode through a region electric and wild. . .
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
QUEMADO, NM — Just down the street from the town’s only gas station, the old cowboy picks you up promptly at 2:30 p.m. You ride in his pickup across the high New Mexico desert. There is nothing out here, nothing but earth and mountains and sky, nothing but loneliness and mystery.
And then a small hut looms. The pickup stops beside it. You step out, stand and stretch in the warm sun. That’s when you notice the art.
Walter De Maria sculpted with ideas, with landscapes, with what ifs. What if you filled an ordinary room with two feet of topsoil, bringing the outside inside? What if you buried a pillar, 1000 meters long, so that its few inches above ground forced viewers to think about all that depth? And what about a field of shiny poles, standing in the desert. . .
“All I wanted out of my own work,” DeMaria said, “was that if you ever came to an exhibition, that you’d know, just absolutely know that you’d never forget it.”
Lightning only strikes “The Lightning Field” a few times a year, but no one who comes this far, in this heat, to this spot ever forgets this masterpiece. “The Lightning Field,” the New York Times wrote, is “a work of art so immense and so changeable that is occupies the desert landscape like a living thing.”
The design is simple. 400 poles on a grid a mile long and a kilometer wide. Pole lengths vary according to the dips in the desert, so that all tips are level, “like a fakir’s bed of nails,” Robert Hughes wrote.
The poles stand baking in sun, freezing in winter, alone, waiting for the lightning that rarely comes.
“A full experience of ‘The Lightning Field’ does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning,” writes the Dia Art Foundation, which commissioned and cares for the work. “And visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise.”
So forget lightning. This is about light. At sunrise, critic Geoff Dyer noted, “the tips of the poles began to blink and twinkle.” And at sunset “the pointed tips took fire first, like candles, but soon the spikes themselves lighted up, top to bottom, as if glowing from within.”
Growing up near Berkeley in the 1950s, Walter De Maria dreamt not of art but of music. Learning piano, then drums, he played in bands at various “happenings” in Beat San Francisco. Moving to New York, he joined a snarky rock band, playing with Lou Reed and others destined to become “The Velvet Underground.” But before Andy Warhol made the band famous, De Maria drifted into art.
“I said to myself, do I want to go to rehearsal every day and night, you know, take all these drugs?”
By the mid-Sixties, rebel artists were rejecting the “New York art world” of celebrity, money, and trend after trend.
“If art doesn’t even give you the feeling you’d have swimming in the ocean or riding a horse or any of the heavy drug experiences you might have,” De Maria said, “if it doesn’t match any very important powerful experience you’ve had in your life, it isn’t a real work.”
Seeking bigger landscapes, DeMaria found the budding Earth Art movement that was making art out of the earth itself.
Sculpting with metal and wood, running his own gallery, De Maria began to stretch the already stretched limits of Sixties art. “The Earth Room” filled a Soho room with dirt. People who stood on soil, indoors, found it “unsettling.” “The Broken Kilometer” laid steel poles wall to wall. Then in 1971, De Maria hit the road in search of a site for his latest idea.
He spent five years driving across the Southwest. One site was too rocky, another too vertical. Finally, along the Arizona border, in the middle of the West’s ever-present nowhere, he found the field that he and the lightning had been looking for.
Quemado, New Mexico (pop. 309) was hardly on anyone’s art map. But with funding from the new Dia Art Foundation, De Maria and his crew went to work. They dug 400 holes, perfectly spaced. They filled each with cement and planted poles, 15-29 feet long, precisely calculated to top out at the same prickly height. They built a hut for visitors. And, drawn by an iconic photo, people came.
Each afternoon between May and November, Robert Weathers, who helped build “The Lightning Field,” takes visitors from Quemado to the site. “I figured it’d be a job for as long as it lasted,” Weathers said. “I wasn’t sure there’d be anybody coming out here for long but I was certainly wrong there.”
Reservations for overnight stays open each February 1. At midnight, the Dia Foundation is inundated with e-mails from around the world. Most end up on a waiting list, but lucky visitors are given a date and directions to Quemado. Be there by 2 p.m. Once Weathers drops each group of six at the hut, they are on their own.
No photography is allowed. Food provided in the hut is sparse and vegetarian. Visitors can sit inside and brood — no Internet or TV or radio — but most spend hours roaming the field.
Not everyone finds a flat field of poles to their liking. The buildup, one critic wrote, “insures that one will fully expect to see God at ‘The Lightning Field.’ Needless to say, He doesn’t appear. No artwork could live up to this hype.”
Most disagree.
“Of course, God does not appear,” Geoff Dyer wrote. “There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. ‘The Lightning Field’ offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only — or most conveniently — within the language of religion.”
When Walter De Maria died in 2013, his wish for the unforgettable was fulfilled. “The Lightning Field” now seems eternal, like some modern Stonehenge that will cause future generations to marvel. The lightning may not come, but the light never fails.
The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up. . .