constellations #116: of earth & time
Hi again.
On a cold, drizzly day earlier this month, I visited the “New York Earth Room,” an installation by Walter De Maria.
De Maria called the piece “an interior earth sculpture,” and that’s as good a description as any. It takes up 3,600 square feet of floor space in a gallery in SoHo; the room is filled with dirt nearly two feet deep. (That much dirt weighs, if you were curious, 280,000 pounds.) To visit it, you have to buzzed into the building, and then climb a couple flights of stairs, and then peer down a small hallway, where you’ll see it: all that dirt held back by a short, transparent wall. I’d show you a picture, but you aren’t allowed to take photos in the exhibit.
Matt and I had been meaning to visit the Earth Room for ages, ever since we moved to New York. In the early days of this month, bitten by a New Year’s resolution bug, I guess, Matt turned to me, out of the blue, and said: Let’s go to the Earth Room on Saturday. He needed to return a pair of pants in the city anyway. So we went.
The New York Earth Room (so called because De Maria has installed Earth Room sculptures in two other cities) was first installed in 1977; originally, it was only supposed to be open for a few months, but eventually the Dia Center for the Arts took it over and opened it to the public, for free, starting in 1980. You can go see it Wednesday through Sunday, from noon til 6 p.m. (except for a break from 3 to 3:30).
A little less than a decade after it opened, a man named Bill Dilworth took a job as the attendant at the Earth Room. Other people had held this job before Bill, but no one lasted as long as he did: 35 years. (He retired in 2024, and died last year.) He watered the soil and raked it, so its color would stay consistent. He pulled out weeds and mushrooms if they popped up. He was an artist himself, and working in this room made him feel connected to the art world, whose commercial nature was otherwise unappealing to him. (The quiet, relatively uninterrupted nature of the job also gave him time and space to work on his own art.)
In his spare time, Bill Dilworth also helped operate a church clock tower in the Lower East Side. Because of these two occupations, he made business cards that said “Keeper of Earth and Time.” (Perfect, obviously.)
Dilworth kept a tally of every visitor who came to the room. Sometimes they’d ask him questions, too—like: What does this mean? What’s it about? Dilworth would tell them that the artist hadn’t given one specific explanation, so they should feel free to trust their own interpretations. And maybe to wait. And return. And see if their interpretation changes after some time.
That question—what’s the point of this?—has occurred to many visitors, I suppose. Years ago, the writer Daisy Alioto started chronicling Yelp reviews of De Maria’s work. Lots of reviewers fixated on the real estate aspect: taking a room in such an expensive neighborhood and using it for nothing but dirt. She quotes one reviewer from 2013: “I had to see this just to experience the extravagant wastefulness of a dirt filled room in pricey Soho.” They go on: “I guess the whole concept of it is mind boggling, like those art installations that consist of burning Hermes Birkin bags or smashing iPhones.”
(I have to imagine the Yelp user didn’t know, for example, that when the piece was first installed, the space was an artists’ co-op, and before that, a manufacturing building. The neighborhood was not yet a shopping destination; there was not an Apple Store around the corner. “The idea that 250 cubic yards of earth is somehow more perverted than the pink blush pouring from the Mansur Gavriel store across the way,” Daisy writes, “is really a matter of whether one prefers present or future dust.”)
When I visited, it didn’t seem like “extravagant wastefulness” to me. It didn’t seem like it was trying to make a point about wealth. Dirt doesn’t usually make me think about money. It felt like a kind of oasis. It made me feel very calm, and very still.
When Dilworth was the room’s attendant, sometimes a visitor—unsatisfied with the response they got to what’s the point of this?—would keep pushing him for an explanation. So he’d say, “It’s about earth, art, and quiet,” as he told The New Yorker. And, he said, it’s about time: “People look at it, and they think nothing’s growing, and I say, ‘Look at it again, time is growing out there.’ ”
Standing in that room did make me think about time. And earth, and art, and quiet. Overcast light shone through the windows. Matt and I kept craning our necks, trying to see as much of it as we could.
After we looked at the dirt, Matt asked the attendant—Dilworth’s replacement—if she got to rake it. She said yes, sheepishly. He said, That’s awesome! with a big smile. I had been curious, too, but I never would have thought to just ask her. I felt warm and delighted, looking over at him. I love being around people who ask the question that occurs to them.
As we went to leave, Matt realized there was another De Maria piece nearby: “The Broken Kilometer,” just a few blocks away. So we ambled over, weaving around tourists. That piece is made up of 500 brass rods, each of them two meters long, arranged on the floor of the gallery in parallel rows. They looked magnificent all spread out on the floor—radiant, shimmering into the distance.
(Matt talked to the attendant there, too, asking her if the rods were secured to the floor in any way. She said yes, though a very strong earthquake could disturb them.)
Bill Dilworth’s wife, Patti, is also an abstract artist. And as it turns out, she was the attendant at “The Broken Kilometer” for many years, retiring in 2020. Every day at 3 p.m., Bill and Patti would close their respective installations and go for a walk through the neighborhood together. Then they’d each return to their desks by 3:30. Have you ever heard of anything more romantic?
(I wish I had learned about Bill and Patti’s neighborhood walks before we visited their respective installations; still, now, I’m superimposing my image of them over my memory of Matt and me, walking from gallery to gallery, holding hands in the rain.)
The Earth Room is static, unchanging—but also, it isn’t. Take, for example, the fact that in 2022—nearly half a century after the Earth Room was installed—Dia had to replenish the soil, because it had fallen below the level the artist had established. (Some of that was from Dilworth walking on it; some of that was from people grabbing covert handfuls when they visited.)
An interviewer once asked Bill and Patti how their feelings about their respective pieces had changed after spending so much time with them. “What you realize,” Bill said, “as you start getting older, is that long time has a precious quality of its own. And there’s no other way to attain that sense of long time unless you’ve spent it.” Reading this sentence stopped me in my tracks, made my breath catch in my throat. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the inherent preciousness of the passage of time, tried hard to explain it to people around me. (This realization has been, I think, the defining feature of being in my thirties.) “Long time has a precious quality”—yes, I thought, exactly. In the end perhaps it’s right that I only visited the Earth Room recently, after meaning to for several years. Maybe that realization needed some time to sink in before I could confront it face to face.
But wait: one more story. Sometimes, when people questioned Bill about the Earth Room, they’d ask: “What is this for?” And he’d say: “It’s forever.”
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Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers; Women by Chloe Caldwell (and a book club discussion about it); Marty Supreme; the new Robyn singles; a lot of Ovlov; a lot of Life Without Buildings; a Perfect Martini at Hart’s in Bed-Stuy (that is its name on the menu & it lives up); a flu shot; something I am calling “Dry January but just for Diet Coke” (challenging for me, but nearly over!); “Louise Bourgeois: Gathering Wool” at Hauser & Wirth; this essay about beauty & aging; 10 writing prompts from Lucy Ives; three days in Mexico City with dear dear friends; a seven of cups, drawn on New Year’s Day, thinking about the year ahead—if you have an interpretation for me, please share
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This time last year I was: making a zine; and before that, making another zine; holding my grudges; reading about freedom; writing thank-you notes; and gossiping
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Thanks for reading, as always! See you next time.
xo,
M