Since ancient times, man has made great efforts to erect something huge and very noticeable – whether it be numerous megaliths, the great pyramids in Giza or drawings (geoglyphs) in the Nazca desert. The passion for this has not weakened to this day, only if previously it was built for some purpose, now it is for admiring and to prove to itself and posterity that this is possible.
The size in antiquity, apparently, had a certain significance: if you want the gods to hear you or become equal to the gods, speak louder – create objects of divine proportions: multi-kilometer drawings, rows of stone blocks, gigantic idols, pyramids, etc. in this spirit. Honestly, we do not know why, with incredible difficulties and obscure technologies, these or those structures of antiquity were created. But one thing can be asserted almost certainly: it was not art for the sake of art and a demonstration of technological capabilities as such – such structures always had some kind of practical purpose: cult, navigation, astronomical, etc.
Another thing is the gigantic structures of our time, and especially of the 20th century. If you have a lot of money, technology and support from the local population, why not build a gigantic monument to, say, the four presidents of your country to mark its anniversary? This is exactly what they did in South Dakota in 1927–1941, carving sculptural portraits of J. Washington, T. Jefferson, A. Lincoln and T. Roosevelt, each 18 meters high, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the United States on the side of the mountain.
Mount Rushmore, named, by the way, in honor of the main sponsor of the project, millionaire Charles Rushmore, has become today one of the main symbols of the United States along with another giant, the Statue of Liberty. The sculptors’ tools included, among other things, dynamite, pneumatic hammers, sledge hammers, wedges and nails. Despite the complexity of the work and not the most favorable climatic conditions, nobody was killed during the construction of the monument – it’s a rare thing for large-scale projects of that time to recall at least the construction of the Hoover Dam, which claimed the lives of 96 people
But there are no questions about Mount Rushmore about what it was and why it was built: it is a monument, albeit a very large one. With other works created later and in the same USA, there are already much more questions. And if we turn to samples of land art that appeared in the 1960s (from the English land art ) – a direction in art in which a work, often a huge one, is part of the landscape, then often without reading a lengthy author’s comment it’s completely not clear or the explanation looks, let’s say, far-fetched.
Arch in st louis
Take, for example, the 192-meter-high steel arch in St. Louis, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, also known as the Gateway Arch , or “Gateway to the West.” Officially, the arch is a monument to the Americans who have mastered the western part of the present United States. And in combination with the highest arch in the world and the highest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere. Its construction took five years, from 1963 to 1968, cost $ 14 million (about $ 81 million in today’s money, taking into account inflation). The author of the project was the designer and architect Eero Saarinen, who built, in addition to the arch, a lot of iconic structures in the 1950s and 1960s, for example , the TWA airline terminal at Kennedy New York Airport.
But why, you ask, a thin arch lined with steel plates became a monument to the conquerors of the West? Wouldn’t it be more logical to build something traditional, in granite, marble and bronze, with sculptures, representative columns and abundant fountains? Probably something like this was presented to Luther Eli Smith, a lawyer from St. Louis and a city activist, on whose initiative the study of the monument project and other actions and work began, which eventually led to the appearance of the arch. It was in 1933, Smith was returning home from a trip that included visiting another monument – in honor of the American military commander, hero of the US War of Independence George Rogers Clark – a completely classical structure, just in granite, with a rotunda, columns and other usual attributes.
Looking out of the train window at a part of central St. Louis along the Mississippi densely built up with warehouses, offices and other buildings, Mr. Smith thought: it would be great to build a memorial complex in honor of some president, and along with the conquerors of the West, to attract tourists to the city and also reduce unemployment (in the USA, we recall, then the Great Depression was raging).
In less than a year, the idea was picked up by the city authorities, and then by the federal government, they found considerable money for the project and approved a work plan. The plan included, among other things, the demolition of three parallel Mississippi city streets, that is, nearly five hundred buildings. In 1935, the demolition began, in 1939 it was completed, and the final clearing of the territory was completed by 1942. But here the United States was suddenly not up to the monuments: on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the country entered World War II.
They returned to the project only in the late 1940s, and construction began even later, and all this time in the middle of the city a vast wasteland gaped. So why is a thin shiny arch – a gate to the West and a monument to its development? Why not? Stylish, powerful, unprecedented and very beautiful – that’s why. Again, a symbol of a bright future and progress.
There are a couple of questions left: why is the arch a gate and why are they located in St. Louis? Eero Saarinen preventively answered the first question, calling his project “Gateway to the West”. And the second is best addressed to Luther Ely Smith (died in 1951), and if he could, he would probably answer this way: because it was a way to give the beloved city world fame and an impetus to development. What happened.
| Unrealized projectsPeople tend to enter competitions – and competitions in the size of monuments are essentially no different from competitions in size, for example, naval forces, gold reserves or biceps. So, quite a bit of time has passed since the official completion of the construction of the monument on Mount Rushmore, and in America there was already the idea of building an even larger similar structure in the same South Dakota: an equestrian monument to the Indian leader Crazy Horse. Under his leadership, the Dakota Indians in the second half of the 19th century put up almost the most serious resistance to the whites in their advance to the west. The leaders, like the four presidents before, decided to carve in the rock, only to make larger. Noticeably larger: the finished figure, as planned, will be 195 meters wide and 172 meters high (if it is ever finished, it will become the second largest in the world). True, since 1948, when work began, progress was not much achieved: by 1998, only the 27-meter (!) Face of the leader was completed. The fact is that the whole project is the work of one architect, Korczak Zyulkovsky, who ordered the monument by the Indians. Moreover, the monument did not find its Rushmore, and the architect and customers, naturally, refused to take money from the state or country government, After the death of Korczak Zyulkovsky, construction is managed by a foundation in which his descendants play the main roles. The question of what Mad Horse would say if he knew that they were going to spoil the mountain for the sake of his monument (the Indians revered the Black Hills mountains where the work is going on, sacred), remains openBut there is, perhaps, one project that, if implemented, would overshadow all previous structures and monuments and, possibly, give rise to unprecedented competition, whenever it remained only on paper and in small models. We are talking about the Tatlin Tower – a rotating structure of 400 meters in height with a load-bearing structure made out of two inclined metal spirals and located one above the other (also moving) buildings of different geometric shapes, but at the same time harmoniously interconnected. It was supposed to be built in the 1920s in Leningrad as a monument to the Third International and at the same time the headquarters of the highest organs of world workers and peasants ’power – the Comintern.The construction project, which became a symbol of the Russian revolution and constructivism, was developed by Soviet architect and artist Vladimir Tatlin. But no one even undertook to realize it: they settled on moving models (up to 5 meters in height), which, however, were also lost over time. Reconstructions of models can be seen today at the Tretyakov Gallery and atrium of the IFC “City of Capitals” in Moscow, at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, in the exhibition hall of the K.A. Art School Savitsky in Penza and at Oxford University, as well as on the roof of the Patriarch’s house in Moscow (15 Yermolaevsky Lane). |
“Spiral pier”
If everything is relatively simple with the St. Louis Arch, then with land art, as a rule, no. Land art is contemporary art, and it is rarely easily understood. One of the most famous works of this style of art – the work of American artist Robert Smithson’s “Spiral jetty» ( Spiral Jetty, another translation – “Spiral Dam”) – simply exists in shallow water in the northern part of the Great Salt Lake in Utah (the same lake on which the city of Salt Lake City stands), and it is not known for certain how the author explained his work. But art critics practiced eloquence, one wrote like this: “A spiral dam is a runway to Nothing <…> in a spiral dam, time has been curtailed, which is more than human <…> it’s that spring which, having straightened up, he fixes his eyes on the field of thinking, and it constantly stays with this riddle-mystery, and then calms down like the fire of a candle in endless calm ”, and so on.
Bob Philips, a construction contractor who helped with his team to create Smith’s Wharf, said that this spiral was the only one he created in his life that does not serve any purpose other than looking at it. And Smithson himself was a big fan of entropy and did not mind at all that his work would change, collapse and, in the end, disappear. And yet, according to some reports, Smithson was very pleased that the viewer, reaching the end of the spiral, finds nothing there
If we leave the eloquence of poetically-minded art critics and move on to the prose of life, then it will be necessary to note that the “Spiral Pier” really is a counterclockwise wrapped spiral, starting from the coast and protruding 170 meters to the center of the lake. The length of the spiral is 457.2 meters and the width is 4.57 meters. It was built from 6,500 tons of black basalt stones using two dump trucks, a large tractor and a mining truck, as well as a team of workers led by Bob Philips from the neighboring city of Ogden – he and his workers can be considered co-authors of the work.
It took six days to build the pier in April 1970, and the author was unsatisfied with the result, and two days later he called on the Bob Philips team to redo everything a bit, it took another three days. Initially, the spiral was black against the background of the reddish bottom of the lake – bacteria and algae capable of living in salt water gave the color to the latter. At the same time, the water level in the Great Salt Lake varies greatly, and in 1970 it was at a very low level. A few years later, the water rose and completely absorbed the spiral, however, soon retreating. In recent decades, the structure is mostly accessible and visible (including from a satellite ), although now, due to salt deposits on basalt and changes in water levels, it has become black and white against a pink background.
“Double negative space”
Large-scale constructions of human hands, or rather technology, including land art, are usually clearly visible, but some with all their size are so successfully disguised that if you do not know that you are standing in the middle of a work of art, you can not guess. An example of such a case is another American land art work, Double Negative , or Double Negative Space. If you are lucky (although can you call it luck? ..) to be in the middle of the desert in the US state of Nevada, ten kilometers east of the town of Moapa Valley, then, moving along a dusty country road (certainly on an SUV) along the Virgin River Canyon on a flat table mountain called mesahere, in the end you will find a trench rectangular in cross section 9 meters wide and 15 meters deep, cutting the edge of the mountain, interrupted by a natural cliff and continuing on its opposite side. Its total length is about 457 meters. This is not a natural formation or a by-product of industrial or construction work, but an art object, the very “Double negative space” created in 1969 with the help of dynamite and excavators in about two months. To get the construction, it was necessary to move (mainly to pour from the cliff) 224 thousand tons of rock.
The author believes that his work can only be understood in the process of direct interaction with her, that is, standing on the ground, and a photograph or a photograph from space is completely unsuitable for this. That is why Michael Heyzer opposed the placement of even photographs of his work in the museum. Moreover, access to it is completely free, and the author welcomes the natural erosion, destruction, disappearance of this and other works and considers the completion of their existence cycle
The author of the work is a living (unlike the early deceased Robert Smithson) classic of land art Michael Heyzer. And the meaning of the work is this: the absence of an object in space, or negative space – is also an art object. This is a bit reminiscent of the idea of avant-garde musicians of the 20th century that the lack of sounding instruments and sounds that fill the formed silence are also music.
The work is neither the first nor the only “negative” work of Hazer. In addition to her, he also created, for example, a series of works by Nine Nevada Depressions – large winding, zigzag trenches with a total length of approximately 800 km, as well as many other works. And since 1972, the artist has been working on his main work entitled “The City” – the largest sculpture in the world (2.0 × 0.4 km in size), composed of a number of structures resembling Central American pyramids. Like Double Negative Space, the City is located in Nevada on a desert plain. It is planned to open to the public in the next, 2020 – do not miss.
Field of Lightning
Trenches, embankments, thousands of tons of soil and dynamite instead of a brush – this is how a person makes art from rocks and earth. But you can go further and try to force the air to create a work of art. This is exactly what American artist Walter de Maria and his assistants Robert Fosdick and Helen Winkler did in 1977. On a plateau in the state of New Mexico at an altitude of about 2200 meters above sea level, they installed 400 stainless steel rods, each on an individual concrete foundation, and the artists placed them at an equal distance of 67 meters (220 feet) from each other so that they formed 1 mile (approximately 1.6 km) grid per kilometer. The rods have a diameter of 5.1 cm (2 inches) and different lengths (from 4.57 to 8.15 meters) so that their tops are at the same level – to compensate for uneven terrain. The rods are made so
The rules for visiting the facility do not imply free access to it. To get to the “Field of Lightning”, a lover of modern art needs to submit an application on the site’s website and, if accepted, pay from 100 to 250 US dollars. Then at a certain time (the object is open from May to October) the visitor will be taken from the appointed place, taken to a small hut for six people and left there until the middle of the next day. In this house, watching how light and sky change, especially at sunset and sunrise, and experiencing almost complete loneliness in a vast space, guests will be able to get unforgettable experiences, even if during their visit a thunderstorm does not happen
What is all this for? The pad and rods, called The Lightning Field , are one component of a work of art. Another major component is lightning. It is they who, falling into the rods (and where else can they find themselves on a deserted plateau, where there are no trees or even bushes), create for those few spectators who will be present at the same time a unique and unique picture in the air.
By the way, by the name of the object, it could be assumed that thunderstorms in this area are a frequent occurrence and lightning strikes the rods regularly, but this is not at all so. The hit occurs every few years, and the atmospheric discharge melts the rod and has to be replaced. However, according to the opinions of the audience, the field without a thunderstorm makes a great impression.
Фото: Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr
