The Lightning Field, 1977, Western New Mexico
Source here
''The Lightning Field,'' an enormous and astonishing installation of 400 lightning rods, a work of art so immense and so changeable that is occupies the desert landscape like a living thing.
The installation, completed in 1977, comprises 400 highly polished stainless steel poles with pointed tips, set 220 feet apart, in a grid. Because the land undulates slightly, the poles vary in height: the shortest is 15 feet and the longest is 26 feet 9 inches. The tips of all of them lie on a plane; a giant pane of glass could rest on all of them.
The grid is 25 poles (5,280 feet, or one mile) long and 16 poles (3,300 feet, or one kilometer) wide, and it takes about two hours to walk the perimeter,
''The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work,'' Mr. De Maria writes in the cabin notebook. He and his assistants -- Robert Fosdick and Helen Winkler were the principal associates -- scoured California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas by truck over five years before settling on the site, 11 1/2 miles east of the Continental Divide, elevation 7,200 feet.
Lightning must occur within about 200 feet of the installation, Mr. De Maria says in his notebook, before it can ''feel'' the poles and come down to earth there, something he says happens about 60 times a year, most often in August and September, when storms are most common.
Text source New York Times. Excerpts taken from an article written by Cornelia Dean, Sept. 21, 2003
Image of Walter de Maria sourced from telegraph.co.uk
Last image - Walter de Maria and Robert Fosdick in field car during The Lightning Field installation, New Mexico, October 1977. Photo: Helen Winkler Fosdick, DIA Art Foundation.
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