Walter De Maria
The Lighting Field

LA RECENSIONE

"Land Heart" is the title of the film by Gerry Schum (1969) who merely compiled in a video the works of Walter De Maria, Robert Smith(son), Dennis Hoppenheim, and Micheal Heizer. With this tight-fitting label, those artists are defined who, having abandoned urban areas, focus on nature and large-scale interventions.

Christo and not Jesus Christ Superstar attracted the attention of critics (shark) when in the 60s he amused himself by wrapping monuments and natural sites; in Land artists, the focus is mainly on nature in opposition to the metropolis, modification of landscape through artificial signs destined to be absorbed by the erosion of Mother Nature, like Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," which today, even with all the maintenance, is almost disappeared.

These environments, thanks to the artist-genius-narcissist, are characterized by a strong sensory involvement, visual, emotional, and mental. The works are archaeological relics of a now vanished society, traces of a culture that is inexorably exhausting itself above an old Compaq keyboard clogged with pubic hairs.

Image: Sector of light.

From 1973 to 1979, De Maria photographed what happened to an installation of four hundred metal poles arranged in a rectangular area of an arid plain in New Mexico, a storm zone subject to lightning.

The relationship between sky, earth, and man is an existential dilemma. The fruition opens taps residing in the subcortical zone, to say it like Romeo Castellucci, a zone devoid of information on an intellectual level, taking us back to the season preceding our childhood and absorbed mass culture. These poles that attract lightning discharges and flashes of light reveal to the viewer the fury and greatness of nature.

Today there remain many video and photographic testimonies but being contemporary participants must have been one of the few proofs of the non-existence of God if not intended as Natural Made; the environmental intervention recalls the environmental intervention that generated us, the shift of attention to the space of nature awakens us from the warmth of alienation and takes us back in time.

Image: earth, sea, sun, and atmosphere.

Image: shelves of a supermarket.

Image: fish immersed in the aquarium and outside the window urban chaos.

Utopia, art as the ultimate freedom of spirit, purity of the immaterial cosmic essence with the direct involvement of the public.

Never Work...enjoy your life.