The Earth Room is an interior earth sculpture
made by Walter De Maria in 1977,presenting in the same spot at Soho for over 30
years. This is not the first Earth Room Walter has made, but it is the only one
maintained by the Dia Foundation.
The
sculpture takes up about 3600 square feet of floor space, 22 inch earth, with a
weight 280000 lbs. The whole room is filled evenly with soil but has an amazing
clean and tidy white wall. The space has been partitioned in up and down, like
a ground and the sky. Visitors are not allowed to go through the room and stand
on it. People can only stand outside and look. There are some small rooms
inside the big room. Sometime you feel like there is no end to the room. When
you come closer to the Earth Room itself, you can feel the air and the moisture
differences compare to the outside space. The temperature is a lot lower in the
room, like natural air conditioning in the hot summer. Outside the building, busy
people walking by, and time is passing. However, inside the building, I feel
time is frozen at the moment in 1977, the time when the sculpture had been
made.
The location of Soho, Manhattan can specially emphasize the contrast of busy life and still moment. Besides, it is sarcastic to see the artist trying to save a beautiful nature of land inside a building in the jam-packed New York City.
The location of Soho, Manhattan can specially emphasize the contrast of busy life and still moment. Besides, it is sarcastic to see the artist trying to save a beautiful nature of land inside a building in the jam-packed New York City.
I enjoyed this piece so much, even some may debate that it is too straight forward. The way it shows does not allow the viewers do much with this sculpture, but take a look of it on the only one side, which you also mentioned in this review. I see it as a down side of this show. I really like how you have the basic background introduction at the beginning of the review. It gives a very clear sense of what this is before it goes farther on the description. I also agree that the location of this piece is important and should be mentioned.
ReplyDeleteHi Yen, I think your review provides enough background information to really provide some context to the audience to understand this piece. I definitely agree on the temperature difference inside the space, and I like how you contrast with the busy outside world, while this space feels like time has frozen. With a couple grammatical revisions, I think your review is great.
ReplyDeleteYen, I so much enjoyed your review of The Earth Room. Actually, my review was about this piece as well! haha We connected with this art work some how. Overall, you greatly mentioned about entire environment of this exhibition and work it self. Especially, I like you commented about temperature and air of the gallery space. It is exactly what there is. Personally, if you revise some of grammatical matter, this is successful review. If you want to work deeper way later, it would be helpful to mention about aesthetic point which is related with beauty of nature for improving your review to high level. But for this assignment, this is enough I think.
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