We want something that grabs our attention, something that can be easily understood and digested as we move swiftly from place to place. Conventional museums showcase works that have been carefully constructed by artists such that the viewer will interpret the piece in a specific way. Walter De Maria sought to challenge this convention in the 1970s with his creation of the abstract exhibits, ‘The Broken Kilometer’ and ‘The New York Earth Room.’ Funded by the Dia Art Foundation, the exhibits remain in their original locations in New York City’s SoHo, continuing to push the limits of contemporary art.
De Maria (1935–2013) was a key figure in the birth of minimalism and conceptual art. Born in Albany, California, he studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to New York City in 1960. He began exploring themes of geometry, spatial awareness, and the sublime in his art, while also integrating himself in the punk rock realm. In 1965 De Maria became a drummer for a rock group called the Primitives which included Lou Reed and John Cale and was a precursor to The Velvet Underground. Engrossed in New York City’s art scene, it was only a matter of time until the rebellion surrounding De Maria manifested itself in the form of radial art.
De Maria’s first exhibit opened in 1968 in Munich Germany where he displayed his first minimalist sculptures and installations. He later opened ‘The New York Earth Room’ in 1977, and ‘The Broken Kilometer’ in 1979.
The New York exhibits are maintained by the Dia Art Foundation, an organization that was founded by Friedrich, Winkler, and Philippa de Menil in 1974. Dia was founded with the intent of funding artists who were creating unique works on smaller scales, and who were not easily supported by funding sources at the time.
In late December, on a night when the sun had begun to set long before five p.m., I approached the small walkup at 141 Wooster Street behind a man who had just taken his dog for a walk. As he got in the elevator to his apartment, I walked up a flight of stairs to the second floor and into what might have been an ordinary loft apartment, but is instead labeled ‘The New York Earth Room.’
I viewed the entire loft through a limited window with a glass barrier at the bottom preventing dirt from spilling onto my feet. I looked into the space that would ordinarily contain a bed, a kitchen, a couch, a dining table, a rug, and maybe a bookshelf with cherished photos and literature, and felt a strange nostalgia. The space that one might regard as their first apartment or family home, the location where hundreds of cherished memories might be created and protected, was instead filled with a thick, unforgiving brown substance.
However, within the dirt, there is a different kind of growth. As I learned from the exhibit’s caretaker, Aida Garrido, a variety of weeds tend to grow in the room with the aid of minerals and bacteria. The organic growth that occurs in the Earth Room mirrors, to some extent, the life and the relationships that might have existed in the room. The mutually beneficial relationship of a mother and her child is paralleled in the relationship of the plant and bacteria, whereas a toxic relationship between siblings might be seen in the competitive nature that exists between different bacteria.
The Earth Room is located on Wooster Street, a quiet stretch a few blocks off Spring Street, so the audience consists mostly of tourists and wealthy people. “You can tell just based on what they wear and the amount of rings on their fingers,” Aida told me when I approached her at the front desk. She also mentioned that many of the frequent visitors are people who had some kind of relation to the late caretaker, Bill Dillworth. He passed away the week before I visited the exhibit, so many of his close friends were coming to honor his legacy and pay their respects to the art that he loved.
Dillworth was the caretaker of the Earth Room for thirty years, a job which is now fulfilled by Aida and one other co-worker. He passed away in early December of 2024. Yet evidently, the art he loved lives on.
Aida mentioned that a common reaction to the art was laughter, even though “you don’t see people laughing in museums,” she recounted. People often respond with laughter to things that are out of the ordinary, and both Dia and De Maria’s ultimate goal was to create something original and innovative. While idiosyncrasy comes with its price, this price has never endangered the vitality of the exhibit. Although the foundation experienced a shift in ownership and near bankruptcy in the 1980s, since this era, there has never been a doubt that the exhibit would stay open. The exhibit is “supposed to exist in perpetuity,” Aida told me. “As long as Dia exists, so will the exhibit.”
Prior to 2022, the Earth Room closed during the summer months because the dirt generated heat which was intensified by the lack of air conditioning in the building. However, in recent years, this problem was solved by installing air conditioning, and the exhibit is now open year around.
In accordance with the necessary addition of air conditioning, maintenance is a large part of an exhibit that consists solely of earth. The dirt is raked every week by the caretakers, and reviewed by an exterminator twice a year. They perform a process called tilling, in order to circulate the dirt without having to water it. The maintenance in ‘The Broken Kilometer,’ just around the corner from the Earth Room, is less hands-on, and only requires polishing. The Broken Kilometer is made up solely of brass rods and, as they tend to tarnish, the gallery closes for one month every two years as a team hand polishes each rod.
When I told her I was on my way to the Broken Kilometer next, Aida told me, “it’s the opposite of this.” When I asked her to elaborate, she told me I would see for myself, leaving me in suspense as I made the five minute walk through a bustling SoHo to ‘The Broken Kilometer’ located directly on Broadway.
Aida was right in the sense that the ‘The New York Earth Room’ was more understated than ‘The Broken Kilometer.’ While the ‘Earth Room’ was in a loft amongst other apartments, ‘The Broken Kilometer’ held its own gallery-like space. The room was quite expansive, yet there was only so much space designated for visitors. When I walked in, the room was silent except for the quiet murmur of a couple who sat on the floor right behind the rope dividing the art from the visitors.
De Maria worked immensely with optical illusions, a concept that the Broken Kilometer distinctly explores. The rods are held in place by various stabilizers, each one changing in size and shape as you go farther back into the room. The rods in the back of the space are lifted 3 centimeters off the ground, a number which decreases the closer you get to the front of the room. Likewise, the space between each rod increases by 5 millimeters the farther they get from the audience. These various manipulations create the illusion of the aisles being straight and the rows being parallel to one another. “If they didn’t get farther apart and get higher, you wouldn’t be able to see the last rod,” Nina Gong – the Kilometer Room’s caretaker – detailed, referring to the importance of perspective.
The caretakers, tranquil and easy to talk to, knew much about every detail of the exhibit as well as the history of Dia. Since there’s no words on the walls of the exhibits as is typically found at a museum, the visitor service acts as an ethos of Dia, answering questions about the foundation’s history or anything else that may arise during someone’s visit.
Although there seemed to be more visitors on my trip to ‘The Broken Kilometer’ than there were when I was alone in the Earth Room, on average the Broken Kilometer experiences 30 percent less visitors than the Earth Room. I considered this difference to be a consequence of the relative absurdities of the exhibits.
Needless to say, both rooms are abstract. However, the concept embodied in ‘The Broken Kilometer’ is more commonly seen: the use of man made objects to depict illusion, or to give a sense of wonder to visitors. ‘The New York Earth Room,’ on the other hand, is something that many artists do not dabble with. Merging artistry with organic materials, and hoping nature speaks for itself is a concept that is uncommon, relative to abstract sculptural art.
However, the distinct man-made and natural aspects of the rooms have something in common: they both require maneuvering to maintain their desired states. As I stared down the aisle of ‘The Broken Kilometer,’ I realized that uniformity arises from manipulation. To keep something constant as the world around it evolves, certain aspects must be tweaked as time progresses. To that extent, it’s entirely impossible to keep something from growing, from changing, and perhaps from tarnishing, without the quiet influence of something external.
“If they didn’t get farther apart and get higher, you wouldn’t be able to see the last rod,” Nina Gong – the Kilometer Room’s caretaker – detailed, referring to the importance of perspective.