Exhibitions: The Earth Movers

Ever since artists took to proclaiming that anything is art if the artist says it is, critics have been wondering where the brush would strike next. The instrument they had to fear was the shovel. In Manhattan’s Dwan Gallery, the newest frontier is called “Earthworks,” and the ingredients on display include dirt, worms, rocks, photographs and written descriptions. “Our original idea,” explains the gallery’s earth mother, Virginia Dwan, “was just to show earth as a medium, but it’s difficult to know where to draw the line.”

That is exactly why many artists find the concept so irresistible. Dennis Oppenheim displays a photograph of a giant nebula made out of aluminum chips that he sprinkled on a field out side New Haven, Conn. Michael Heizer shows a photograph of five holes he dug in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. Robert Smithson exhibits his Non-Site, five trapezoidal woodbins filled with chunks of ore, plus an aerial photograph of the mines in Franklin, N.J., whence they came. This is meant to allow the viewer to contemplate the fact that “140 minerals” are found in the earth of Franklin.

Cascade of Grease. In many ways, the patron saint of the exhibit is Soft Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who last year got the City of New York to hire two gravediggers to dig a hole for him in Manhattan’s Central Park, then fill it in, thereby burying a nonexistent “underground sculpture.” His offering this time round: a Plexiglas cube stocked with night crawlers and humus, titled Worm Earth Piece. Minimal Sculptor Robert Morris, on the other hand, used the gallery as a site on which to build an earthwork out of 1,200 pounds of dirt and peat moss, trimmed with a four-foot cascade of jellied industrial grease, pipes and wire, and giant pieces of felt. “I have no idea what it will look like,” he said, resting on his shovel while the work was in progress. “But it seems old-fashioned to me to start controlling qualities. This earth is all part of moving out into the world.”

Dubious as this defense may sound, it is in part based on fact. Dennis Oppenheim was invited by the Yale School of Architecture to design ways in which earth evacuated for superhighways could be molded or mounded. Robert Morris has received a $10,000 commission from the students of Northwestern University to landscape a landfill between the campus and Lake Michigan. As for his mix at the Dwan Gallery, Morris has priced it at $3 a pound. If no buyers show up, he could not care less. Right now what rivets him is the beauty of the butterscotch-colored grease—and the fact that a small plant has taken root in the earth.