De Maria

Walter De Maria
High Energy Bar, No. 60, 1966
stainless steel
Kept by the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljan.

Walter De Maria is an American artist and composer. In 1957 he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and participated in happenings and theatrical productions there. In 1960 he moved to New York, where he continued to take part in happenings and multimedia presentations. In 1961 he made his first sculptures - wooden boxes and large frames with a niche. His ideas were close to "true minimalism"; he also exhibited together with minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Carl Andre at the Dwan Gallery in 1968-71.

In 1965 he changed wood for metal in his frame sculptures and started to produce serial objects made of stainless steel or aluminum, which he called "high energy bars." He talked about them in an interview: "It was the idea that you could take a perfect cube, a perfect rectangle and /.../ the notion that [the] ideas and lines were so perfect and so perfectly composed and self-contained that it was perfectly satisfying to look at the one object as a sculpture without having it confused with a lot of needless relationships. It was perfectly focused on itself and implied a lot more than it was."

He was not keen on the idea of calling these works "multiples," but if they were, he would insist on leaving them without a definite number, to be "open-ended." He said: "Multiples should be completely continuous."

Walter de Maria's later works in the 1970s mostly belong to land art. In August 1970 he visited the OHO group and also took part in some of their "schooling" projects. On that occasion he gave them one of his "open-ended multiples," the High Energy Bar No. 60.

Adela Železnik