ABSTRACT

Benglis had asked, How big? This question nagged all the artists struggling to insert themselves in the tradition that began with the immensities of Pollock, Newman, and Still. The usual answer was: The bigger the better. When Robert Barry liberated a vial of argon on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, he invited the imagination to follow its dispersion through the world's atmosphere. This work was as big as all outdoors, literally. In 1969 Robert Morris proposed that heaters and air conditioners, the largest available, be buried here and there in a square mile of undeveloped land. "One could wander around," he said, "and come upon these local changes in temperature—a cold wind blowing out of an otherwise still tree or stones radiating heat." Had the project been funded, weather stirred up in a rural neighborhood would have flowed into regional currents and onward, to join continental and eventually global patterns. And Morris had meshed the structure of his Observatory with the motions of the solar system.