July 14, 2025
"For 35 years, Bill Dilworth tended a Manhattan loft filled with dirt, otherwise known as 'The New York Earth Room,' a monumental artwork by Walter De Maria.... 280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep..."
"... on the second floor of an early artists’ co-op in a former manufacturing building on Wooster Street, in the heart of SoHo. It was installed in 1977, in what used to be the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, and it was intended to be temporary, a three-month-long exhibit.... [T]he artists who colonized the building and the area have mostly moved on, and the neighborhood, like the city itself, has evolved. 'That’s what makes the Earth Room so radical,' Mr. Dilworth said.... 'It’s here, and it remains the same.'... He watered and raked the soil, plucking the odd weed or mushroom. (The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.)... 'I found the art world to be something that doesn’t appeal to me.... This is about as close as I’m comfortable getting to it. But making art has been vital to me always. So how do you make art and not be in the art world? This job allows me to stay tuned to my own art-making — just by the freedom of thought and all that.'"
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63 comments:
35 years of dirt being watered on the second floor? Must have been a treat to rent out the first floor.
By my calculations, the room size is 2,268-sqft.
I wonder whether the artist who filled a second-story loft two feet deep with dirt intended to be kept most (and therefore heavy) looked into the load the floor could support. Maybe he did - not all artists simply believe that their art carries all before it. But I tend to think that in the modern day, the failure of that floor (and somebody else's ceiling) might be perceived as an expression of, I don't know, the patriarchy? Systemic racism?
help me!
isn't this JUST the book: "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" ???
A Manhattan loft covered with two feet of rich, chocolaty-colored dirt,
Hmmm, had expected the follow-on line to be, "which after years of holding watered collapsed the floor, and the corresponding ceiling below, killing an artist, his partner and their pet llama Zaza."
A sanctuary of silt.
A dust bunny collection is easier to care for.
Back in the day, Robert Smithson used a bulldozer to pile dirt on a cabin until the central roof beam cracked. That was about the same time, I think. A friend who studied sculpture at Reed College in those days told me the best part was learning to operate earthmoving equipment. Ah, ars longa, vita brevis.
The tree that grows in Brooklyn is a common name for Ailanthus, also known as a Paradise tree. In Arizona mining towns it was planted to stop erosion because the smelter fumes had killed off all the existing vegetation. I've also heard it called a Cancer tree because you can never get rid of it. My last house was located right next to an old smelter, and looking through the title documentation I discovered that I also was the beneficiary of a "smoke easement". I could legally emit smoke and fumes over my neighbor's properties. Sometimes I did just that.
280,000 pounds of dark, chocolaty soil, about two feet deep...
Coincidentally, at about the same time as DIA's work, me and another kid in middle school built a popsicle stick Fort Apache and used Ovaltine granules to cover the ground over the plywood base, about 1/8-inch deep.
Who pays for all this?
A manufacturing building likely has much stronger construction requirements and can hold all this dirt. I made it through the first few min of the video. Remarkable how serious everyone is about this room full of dirt! It’s kind of sad that people living in NY go to the earth room to celebrate dirt, have an experience with dirt. Surrounded by cement and buildings, it’s the last bits of the food of nature that they can experience. What about Central Park? Not safe? Alas, to each his own!
"The New York Earth Room seems awfully heavy to sit there on the floor all these years. Do we really know that the space is solidly filled with soil and that they didn't build a lightweight core and just put dirt on the outside? What proof is there that it is what it purports to be?... Did anyone witness the soil being brought up to the room?"
I asked ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/c/68752c90-c40c-8003-bfa4-820b65d76ad5
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
I'd release a bucket of live worms just to make it interesting.
Jamie said...in the modern day, the failure of that floor (and somebody else's ceiling) might be perceived as an expression of, I don't know, the patriarchy? Systemic racism?
Performance art, with an audience participation component.
I'd guess you'd say that the performance really brought the house down.
There is no art if a room full of dirt is art.
There was a short story I read as a kid in school called “Antaeus” by Borden Deal, published in 1962. It covered a kid from the south who moved to NYC and got the gang to carry dirt to the roof of a factory and planted grass, then it was found by the evil owner and the kids tore it up in defiance. But lots of buildings have lawns on the roof now, old news. In Stranger in a strange land the guys apartment had a grass lawn for a floor. My god, go to the park.
“ [T]he artists who colonized the building and the area”
What so colonization is good now? I can’t keep up.
Bill Dillworth tended a room full of dirt and fungi for years.
So did Richardson Dilworth, sometime mayor of Philadelphia.
I had a loft in Soho in the 1970s (it was a cheap place to live back then) and remember when Earth Room was first installed. Didn't know it was still there after all these years. For me, it held the imagination for about 10 minutes (so, about 5 minutes more than Cage's 4'33") -- it takes that long to run through all the metaphors (and jokes) that it calls to mind -- but I doubt that it would wear better today if I went back.
As with everything, one size does not fit all.
The video included a lot of tropes and, at times, felt like it was a parody. If you have the patience, it does actually explain a fair amount of how the "art" world works.
It reminds me of the kitchen at one (I had 3) of my grandmothers in DR. It was a separate shack structure at the back of the house and it had a dirt floor. This one is open. The one at my grandmas was enclosed
Why oh why wasn't the space cleaned out and made available for "affordable housing?" Or is that just for the tacky suburbs?
Not deep enough to bury him.
An inorganic or organic field of modern artifacts?
It reminds me of the kitchen at one (I had 3) of my grandmothers in DR.
My husband's best friend's mom grew up in Sherman, TX. When we moved to Texas the first time, in 1999, she and her husband were living in her childhood home, which has a summer kitchen - more or less a gas range, a bit of cabinetry mostly to provide counter space for preparation, and a cold-water sink, if memory serves, all out on a side porch.
In this the Year of Our Lord 2025, in our second go-round in Texas, we have an outdoor kitchen that we use frequently in the summer to keep from heating up the house, even though we of course have air conditioning, a luxury that little house in Sherman never had.
Retarded shit like this guy's art is why the fine arts community is so held up to so much derision. The same with academia. FTP. I hope to hell that no government grant money was involved in this.
Is it art if you fill a room with anything? How about furniture? Or does it have to be dirt? What if you fill a shoe with dirt? Is that art, too?
So many questions.
"art"
Josephbleau , you probably also remember that Antaeus was a titan who was impossible to beat while in contact with the ground. Hercules strangled him to death while holding him in the air. Most of the dreck they forced us to read in High School I have forgotten but that story stuck with me as well.
The big cities used to be alot nastier and with less actual plant life, much more concrete and waste, so I could see why it was interesting in the 60/70s.
I am with Deep State Reformer. When I think of artists I think of morons.
Good for a remote control truck race course.
Dead at seventy, having spent his life tending to 140 tons of dirt. Reminds me of the joke about a reporter interviewing the man who shoveled up after the circus's elephants. "What? And give up show business?"
Old and Slow: I've cut many a Paradise Tree. They suck around septic fields. I no longer have my copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but my mother read it to me many times. It was her favorite aspirational book, having lived in worse places in NYC. As I recall, perhaps wrongly, the tree was an ordinary NYC tree, a small oak or something else indigenous. Paradise Trees prefer tropical conditions.
And they also like screwing up your septic field, though not half as much as the poisonous Peppertree.
Which reminds me of another beloved childhood book: The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.
You can't call anything art if it rots the floorboards. Can we agree on this as a basic rule?
Quaestor said...
"There is no art if a room full of dirt is art." Exactly. That the NYT can write about this as "art" with a straight face should amaze me, but doesn't because the art world is just corrupt money laundering these days and the NYT is in on the scam,
This is also an excellent argument against rent control and a plethora of other tenant rights. Though the dolts at Reason Magazine would have to throw dice to decide which side they would take in such a fight, being the intellectual lightheads they are.
how does the floor not cave in?
"In Stranger in a strange land the guys apartment had a grass lawn for a floor. My god, go to the park."
I think it's just living furniture in "Stranger in a Strange Land" and you're mixing it up with "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," where there is real grass growing as the carpet inside but there's something quite unpleasant about it.
If I take a piece of modern art and simply remove it from the space or never execute it, can I call that art too? It seems to me the definition of art is like the definition of a woman. If I identify it as art, then you are Neandertal to disagree. Pretty convenient for the untalented.
Tina Trent at 141 and 152 - right on both.
Stop with the Platonistic "how can this be art?" reactions. The answer is simple. Just like with jokes, tweets, YA novels and any other products of the human mind, art can be good or bad or just stupid. It's all art.
This video about De Maria's "The New York Earthroom" made me think about the video you posted of Meade searching for potatoes the other day. At the time I was impressed by the way he was relishing in handling the dirt. It wasn't a big deal but it was heartfelt. Definitely it was in the "earthwork tradition." Reverence for the earth.
There used to be a car in L.A. that had live grass covering the exterior where paint should be.
I used to volunteer on hiking trail maintenance. What is dirt? Sandy, chalky, clay, loam, peat, mineral, silty? Dirt is not just dirt and it makes a difference.
"...art can be good or bad or just stupid. It's all art."
Most human endeavors require a minimum of quality or qualities, or they are no longer considered that thing. A piece of rawhide is not a shoe. A pile bricks is not a building. Art is the only one I can think of without such a requirement.
"...art can be good or bad or just stupid. It's all art." Except when it's corrupt money laundering (see Hunter Biden).
bagoh20 said...
Most human endeavors require a minimum of quality or qualities, or they are no longer considered that thing. A piece of rawhide is not a shoe. A pile bricks is not a building. Art is the only one I can think of without such a requirement.
You should watch me dance.
It's less than 1-psi
The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.
And how did he die? Heart? Dementia? Cancer? Hit & run accident? Or did he eat a mushroom that wasn’t edible after all?
I think it's art, but I would not buy it.
Idea for screenplay...
Disreputable land developer from Queens buys the New York Earth Room on the cheap, because nobody wants to spend money to buy a room full of dirt. He then tries to remove the dirt. Chaos ensues, with protesters and lawsuits. Definitely some kind of massive mud fight in the third act.
Also we need some hotties in there, in the mud fight. Maybe give the land developer from Queens a beautiful wife from Eastern Europe. And a beautiful daughter. You want to keep it classy, though. Classy and muddy.
Maybe the disreputable land developer from Queens bottles up the dirt, and sells bottles of Walter de Maria dirt for $9.99. Makes millions. And he's hailed for his democratic instincts and respect for the common man.
Also, Al Sharpton should somehow be involved.
PER Althouse: “I think it's just living furniture in "Stranger in a Strange Land" and you're mixing it up with "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,"
Per Grok, for reference of course:
where he mentions maintaining a living lawn indoors, a feat requiring significant resources and care. The exact quote describing the carpet is brief, from Chapter IX of the uncut edition:
“Jubal’s house was as unorthodox as he was. It had more the flavor of a country club than a home—except that it was a sybarite’s notion of a country club. Grass grew in the living room, not as a stunt but because Jubal liked it.”
This passage highlights the grass as a functional and aesthetic choice, reflecting Jubal’s hedonistic yet grounded personality.“
The carpet was where Jillian showed Mike the benefits of grass for sex instead of a mattress.
Perhaps the last line above is from the hallucinations of the 12 year old poorly trained AI I used to be when I read it but the grass carpet is in the book.
Here in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, we call the installation of friable soil over our local limestone "gardening" and generally throw in a crepe myrtle and some purple coneflowers. Doing it indoors might have the advantage of AC during the summer, gonna have to think about the electricity bills, though.
Good friend and GF of 55 years ago, had a loft at 120 Wooster (in SoHo) from about that time for maybe 20-25 years. Her husband was an artist of some renowned, and she started out as a (modern) dancer. The loft thus had a dance studio and an art studio. I attended several of her dance recitals there in the late 1970s. I would take the train from DC to Grand Central Station, then subway, and back afterwards - until her parents made sure I got back to the train by taxi, because, even then, the subway was problematic after midnight.
Their son is working on his dissertation for a PhD in Art History on the history of art and music in that part of SoHo during the last quarter of the 20th Century. He has a lot of original material, and, with this guy, so many of those living there in the late 1970s, into the 1980s, in those communities have died off.
They put a lot of money into the 2nd story loft. Then lost it a quarter century later. It was rent controlled, so the landlord wanted to turn it over. Their daughter had developed asthma from the bad air in NYC by the time she started kindergarten. Mother and kids ended up N of Phoenix, and the father split his time between their SoHo loft and his family. Ultimately, the landlord was able to prove that the father was spending more time in AZ with his family, than in NYC, and evicted them.
You can have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
Not surprised Mr. D beat me to it. It seemed obvious.
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