The Paradox of Permanence

Abstract

This article considers sculpture parks through the lens of temporality, focusing on select outdoor artist projects of the 1970s and 1980s: a permanent installation by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas; and ephemeral works by Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Jody Pinto, and Michelle Stuart at Artpark, in Lewiston, New York, and Manhattan’s Battery Park City landfill. While Judd intended to ensure permanence for his works, Aycock, Miss, Pinto, and Stuart created important early works that lasted for shorter periods of time and endure only through documentation, or “ephemera.” These examples, I argue, illuminate permanence’s inherent paradox: sculpture parks and the art in them must change to stay the same under fluctuating environmental, institutional, and social conditions. Placed in sculpture parks distinguished by varying relationships to matters of duration, each artwork discussed in this article also engages forms of enclosure—especially walls, natural or manmade—and openness to heighten a viewer’s situated sense of space and time. Crystallized in artworks consisting of crumbling walls, punctured fences, and dissolving paper, the paradox of permanence requires critical rubrics that can bring permanent and ephemeral work together on a spectrum of impermanence, enabling scholars to generate a fuller and more inclusive history of sculpture, “parked.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Jody Pinto, and Michelle Stuart for generously sharing their ideas and images, and for their friendship; the Nasher Sculpture Center and Leigh Arnold for the opportunity to assist in realizing Groundswell: Women of Land Art; archivists, particularly Allison Chomet, at New York University’s Fales Library, and Heather Gring, at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo; Judd Foundation, for nurturing me intellectually, professionally, and personally in Marfa and New York; and to those that read drafts of this article and offered valuable feedback: Francesca Balboni, Ann Reynolds, Marin R. Sullivan, Claire Taggart, and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Harper Douglas, “Etymology of Park,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed Jul. 13, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/park.

2 “park, n.,” Mar. 2023, OED Online, accessed Jun. 25, 2023, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/park_n?tab=meaning_and_use. Oxford University Press.

3 “park, v.,” Mar. 2023, OED Online, accessed Jun. 25, 2023, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/park_v?tab=meaning_and_use#31984286. Oxford University Press.

4 “paradise, n.,” Mar. 2023, OED Online, accessed Jul. 13, 2023, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/paradise_n?tab=meaning_and_use#31855744. Oxford University Press.

5 Leigh Arnold, Scout Hutchinson, Jana La Brasca, Anna Lovatt, Jenni Sorkin, and Anne Thompson, Groundswell: Women of Land Art (Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center and Delmonico Books, 2023), which bridges histories of land and public art that are often separated in the literature. One major Land art survey, Miwon Kwon and Philipp Kaiser’s Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Munich: Prestel, 2012), closes with Land art’s “institutionalization” in 1974. However, Kwon’s earlier One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) links the two discourses. Curator and public art consultant Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz articulates links between Land and public art in her entry “Public Art” in the Encyclopedia of Architecture: Design, Engineering, and Construction, ed. Joseph A. Wilkes, Vol. 4 (New York: The American Institute of Architects, 1989). See also Harriet Senie, Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

6 Judd even claimed, late in life, to be the inventor of installation art: “In its invention an idea is clear and in its diffusion it is vague. … A new idea is quickly debased, often before the originator has time and money to continue it. In general I think this has happened to all of my work, but especially to the use of the whole room, which is now called an installation, which basically I began.” Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” 1993. In Donald Judd Writings, edited by Caitlin Murray and Flavin Judd (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2016), 839.

7 Judd Foundation, “Donald Judd Chronology,” last modified Nov. 2022. 

https://juddfoundation.org/chronology.

8 In his 1983 essay “Art and Architecture,” Judd wrote, “My work has the appearance it has, wrongly called ‘objective’ and ‘impersonal,’ because my first and largest interest is in my relation to the natural world, all of it, all the way out.” In Donald Judd Writings, 347. See “Donald Judd Chronology” for details on Judd’s efforts toward land conservation, his philanthropic support of the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, and his participation in protesting the creation of a nuclear waste dump near Fort Hancock, Texas.

9 The Chinati Foundation is a contemporary art museum established by Donald Judd during his lifetime, and it maintains permanent installations as well as a temporary exhibition program. Meanwhile, Judd Foundation is the artist’s estate and is dedicated to preserving Judd’s living and working spaces in Marfa and New York, supporting research, and other activities, including the Donald Judd catalogue raisonné, to which I contributed as a research fellow from 2016 to 2018.

10 Donald Judd, “Statement for the Chinati Foundation,” in Donald Judd Writings, 486.

11 I borrow the word “conquest” from these lines in “Statement for the Chinati Foundation”: “Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it’s made, since it’s first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort.” The irony here may be obvious, considering that Judd has been critiqued for reinscribing colonial patterns of westward expansion and land ownership; he purchased numerous buildings and thousands of acres of land in west Texas between the 1970s and 1990s. Judd also filled his summer and winter bedrooms at the Block with Indigenous art from the Southwest, Mexico, and South America, as well as the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

12 See note 9.

13 For further details on Judd’s building in New York, see https://juddfoundation.org/spaces/101-spring-street/ and Donald Judd Spaces (New York: Judd Foundation, 2023).

14 By the time Judd arrived in the 1970s, Marfa was already part of a romanticized cultural image of the Wild West. The 1954 desert epic Giant, starring Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Elizabeth Taylor, was shot on a ranch west of town, and the yet-unexplained celestial phenomenon of the Marfa Lights had been known for centuries throughout the region. For more on Marfa’s history, see Lonn Taylor, Marfa for the Perplexed (Marfa, TX: Marfa Book Company, 2018).

15 Judd’s piece at Western Washington University was removed due to serious corrosion and reinstalled five years later at a new site on campus, approved by Judd Foundation, in 2019 (https://westerngallery.wwu.edu/donald-judd-untitled-1982). Judd also created outdoor works for Northern Kentucky University and the Kröller Müller Museum.

16 Donald Judd, “Marfa, Texas” (1985), in Donald Judd Writings, p. 426. Other works with this “topographic” aspect include those created for the private estates of Philip Johnson (circular) and Joseph Pulitzer (rectangular), a piece (square) for Sonsbeek ’71, a temporary exhibition in an eighteenth-century park in Arnhem, Holland, and an object (elliptical) at the Guggenheim, which took the principle to one of the ramps in Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic circular building. Judd first developed the idea of working with a level surface and natural incline for an unrealized, round architectural structure in Baja California, Mexico. See Judd Foundation, “Local History: Donald Judd and Baja,” https://juddfoundation.org/research/local-history/local-history-donald-judd-baja-california-mexico/.

17 Judd, “Marfa, Texas” (1985), in Donald Judd Writings, 430.

18 See, for example, Judd’s “Complaints: Part I,” 1969, in Donald Judd Writings, 200–9.

19 There are four of these prefabricated hangar structures in Marfa. The other two are now the Arena, at the Chinati Foundation, and the Capri, connected with the Hotel Thunderbird. See Marianne Stockebrand, Rob Weiner, and Rudi Fuchs, Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, (Marfa, TX and New Haven, CT: The Chinati Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2010), and Urs Peter Flückiger, Donald Judd: Architecture in Marfa, Texas, 2nd ed. (Birkhäuser, 2021, originally published 2007).

20 For recent preservation projects, the foundation used the earth displaced during the installation of underground drainage cisterns to create new adobe bricks and reconstruct the most compromised walls at the Block. Peter Stanley, Judd Foundation’s director of operations and preservation, in conversation with the author, Jul. 13, 2023.

21 Peter Stanley in conversation with the author, Jul. 13, 2023.

22 The foundation is now in the process of establishing protocols for repairing the walls that acknowledge the sacrificial nature of the outermost adobe surface.

23 The since-repaired collapsing wall borders the Block’s winter garden, whose careful restoration was unveiled during Chinati Weekend 2023. The original bamboo grove has been replaced with a native garden and all original architectural elements have been restored. Turtles no longer live in the water feature.

24 See Hilarie M. Sheets, “What Would Donald Judd Do?” New York Times, Aug. 12, 2022.

25 See Donald Judd, “Judd Foundation” (1977), in Donald Judd Writings, 284–7.

26 Tom Finkelpearl, “Andrea Blum and the Buchens at Artpark and Art on the Beach,” Images and Issues, 3, no. 3 (1982); Creative time Archive; MSS 179; box 1; folder 38; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

27 Beverly Buchanan’s work could easily have joined this discussion of sculpture, walls, and complex relationships to permanence, but she typically worked in outdoor spaces that are not sculpture parks, and therefore falls outside the scope of this special issue. For more on Buchanan, see Park McArthur and Jennifer Burris Staton, Beverly Buchanan: 1978–1981 (Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2016); Amelia Groom, Marsh Ruins (London: Afterall Books, 2021); and Andy Campbell, “We’re Going to See Blood on Them Next: Beverly Buchanan’s Georgia Ruins and Black Negativity,” rhizomes 29 (2016). doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e05.

28 Leigh A. Arnold, “Exceeding the Field of Vision,” in Groundswell: Women of Land Art (Nasher Sculpture Center and Delmonico Books, 2023), 23.

29 See Sandra Q. Firmin, “Have You Artparked?,” in Artpark: 1974–1984 (Buffalo: University at Buffalo Art Galleries, State University of New York, 2010).

30 Firmin, “Have You Artparked?”

31 Clipping from The New Yorker, Sep. 8, 1975, 26. Artpark Archival Collection A2013.107; Box 63, folder 1; Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York.

32 Lucy R. Lippard, “A is for Artpark,” Art in America 62, no. 6 (1974): 37–8.

33 Artpark promotional material, c. 1982, Artpark Archival Collection A2013.107; Box 3, folder 3; Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York.

34 See chronology in Artpark: 1974–1984.

35 Sharon Edelman, ed., Artpark: The Program in Visual Arts (Lewiston, NY: Artpark, 1976), 124.

36 For more on Stuart’s work, see Anna Lovatt, ed., Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2013).

37 René R. Gadacz, “Travois,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada. Article published Feb. 7, 2006; last edited Mar. 8, 2021, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/travois#:∼:text=The%20travois%20was%20a%20type,short%20distances%20using%20the%20travois.

38 Jody Pinto in conversation with the author, summer 2022.

39 Pinto in Artpark: The Program in Visual Arts, 98–9.

40 Miss in Artpark: The Program in Visual Arts, 160–1.

41 Sarah Hamill, “‘The Skin of the Earth’: Mary Miss’s Untitled 1973/75 and the Politics of Precarity,” Oxford Art Journal 41, no. 2 (2018): 276.

42 This project was executed on land seized from the Tuscarora Nation through eminent domain. The construction of the dam was extremely unsafe—no fewer than twenty workers lost their lives on the operation. See “Niagara Falls: History of Power,” http://www.niagarafrontier.com/power.html.

43 Documenta 6 also included Walter de Maria’s controversial Vertical Earth Kilometer, which remains buried in Kassel. Neither of Aycock’s built realizations of the complex survive.

44 Aycock, Project Entitled “The Beginnings of a Complex…” (New York: Lapp Princess Press, 1977), n.p.

45 Aycock, Project Entitled “The Beginnings of a Complex…”, n.p.

46 Marilyn Mizrahi, “A Sculpture Garden by the Sea,” The Villager, Jul. 8, 1982, 9. Creative Time Archive; MSS 179; box 1; folder 38; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

47 Mizrahi, “A Sculpture Garden by the Sea.”

48 For more on the history of Creative Time, see Anne Pasternak and Ruth A. Peltason, eds., Creative Time: The Book, 33 Years of Public Art in New York City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007) and Michelle H. Bogart, Sculpture in Gotham (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).

49 The doors, which Aycock had taken with the help of assistants and a truck, did not last as long as the rest of the installation. Most were stolen not long after they were added to the installation, which was never completed. Alice Aycock in conversation with the author, Jun. 30, 2023.

50 Robert Hobbs, Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 284–91.

51 For further discussion of this work, see Christine Filippone, Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (New York: Routledge, 2017).

52 Shortly before its destruction, The Large Scale Dis/Integration stood briefly next to Jody Pinto’s Widow’s Perch, which she created for Art on the Beach #4 in 1982. That season overlapped with Agnes Denes’s iconic Wheatfield—A Confrontation, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, sited in a different section of the landfill.

53 Slides documenting the destruction of Aycock’s installation, Creative Time Archive; MSS 179; box 111; sleeves 3–13; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

54 Lucy R. Lippard, “Mary Miss: An Extremely Clear Situation,” Art in America 62, no. 2 (1974): 76. Emphasis original.

55 Mary Miss, email to the author, Jun. 28, 2023.

56 Battery Park City Authority, “North/West Battery Park City Resliency Project,” press release, 2023, https://bpca.ny.gov/nwbpcr/.

57 See note 10.

58 Emily Conover, “The Kilogram Just Got a Revamp. A Unit of Time Might Be Next,” May 20, 2019, Science News, accessed July 13, 2023, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/kilogram-just-got-revamp-unit-time-might-be-next.

59 Here I refer to Monument to the Last Horse (1991), by Claes Oldenburg and van Bruggen, and Horn’s Things That Happen Again (1986–8). Emilia Kabakov also collaborated with her husband Ilya Kabokov on School No. 6, although she is not formally credited.

60 Permanent projects by these artists are too numerous to list but notable examples by Aycock include East River Roundabout, in Manhattan (1995/2014), and installations at Washington-Dulles, JFK, and the Des Moines airports. Miss’s major extant public works include Field Rotation (1981), in Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park, in Illinois; South Cove (1984–7); and an untitled work at the University of Washington, Seattle (1990). Since her first public commission for Fingerspan bridge (1987), Pinto has been involved with many landscape and public art projects, such as Tree of Life/City Boundary (1992) in Phoenix, Arizona, and Land Buoy (2014) in Philadephia. Stuart’s permanent projects include Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1979) in Oregon, as well as Tabula (1989–92) at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site at the Des Moines Art Center, commissioned with the promise of permanence in 1989, was slated for destruction in early 2024. This has provoked understandable public outrage and an outpouring of support from artists and art workers. For more on these efforts, see The Cultural Landscape Foundation. https://www.tclf.org/feature-type/greenwood-pond-double-site-letters-support.

61 These are his projects at Eichholteren and his works purchased by Giuseppe Panza. See Donald Judd, “Una Stanza per Panza,” Donald Judd Writings, 630–99.

62 See note 6.

63 Jenni Sorkin, “Structured Power,” in Groundswell: Women of Land Art, 69–77.

64 See Bogart, Sculpture in Gotham.

65 Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (1989): 331–5.

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Notes on contributors

Jana La Brasca

Jana La Brasca is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin and was curatorial researcher for the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Her dissertation, focused on Alice Aycock’s early work, draws on the artist’s archive and develops a theoretical framework focused on matters of scale. Previously, she was a curatorial fellow at the Blanton Museum of Art and the catalogue raisonné research fellow at Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and New York. In the 2024–2025 academic year, she will hold predoctoral fellowships at the Menil Drawing Institute and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.