Walter De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer (1979) Reopens

Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979. © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: Jon Abbott

By Alexis Lowry
Curator, Dia Art Foundation

In the spring of 1979 Dia Art Foundation (then the Lone Star Foundation), announced the opening of a new sculptural installation by Walter De Maria: The Broken Kilometer (1979). It was conceived as a companion to The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), which consists of a brass rod of the stated length inserted vertically into the ground in a park in Kassel, Germany. The Broken Kilometer is made up of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each.

Dia’s original press release positioned The Broken Kilometer as the culmination of many of De Maria’s sculptural interests. The document notes the work’s material relationship to the highly polished metals the artist used in earlier sculptures, as well as De Maria’s continued emphasis on carefully constructed viewing experiences.

Perhaps most evocatively, the press release also addresses the artist’s interest in allowing some of his sculptures to visibly age and therefore keep time in their own way. De Maria first explored this idea in his Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray (1965), a little-known work that consists of a silver plate framed by a curtain. A reference to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a parable of age and vanity, De Maria’s sculpture accumulates the passage of time across its surface as the silver oxidizes and tarnishes.

He envisioned The Broken Kilometer within its own temporal cycle: the work ages over ten years and is then cleaned, resetting the aging process anew. Though he originally intended for this to happen every decade, after allowing the sculpture to tarnish, De Maria realized that it was no longer reflecting the light as before. The reflection of light is vital to experiencing the sculpture and, as a result, it was concluded that the rods should be polished more often. The length of this cycle is now periodically adjusted in consultation with conservators in order to further extend the longevity of the rods.

Another noteworthy detail in the original press release is De Maria’s plan to produce a second edition of The Broken Kilometer. Though that did not come to pass, Dia did commission the artist to make a different, though formally related large-scale, rod-based work in 1981: The 360 degree I-Ching/64 Sculptures.  

The Broken Kilometer is now a permanent Dia site and, following its closure due to COVID-19, it reopens for visitation on September 16, 2020. As well as The Broken Kilometer, Dia also maintains a number of other permanent De Maria sites including The New York Earth Room (1977) in New York City, The Lightning Field (1977) in Western New Mexico, and The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany.

Press release, Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation Archives.