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This article originally appeared here
Why, you might ask yourself on Friday (Nov. 20) afternoon, is a museum guard dutifully patrolling the apparently empty meadow beside the New Orleans Museum of Art?
To answer, we have to travel back 45 years to the height of the earth art movement, when avant-garde American sculptors such as Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, and Dennis Oppenheim focused their creative energies outside of galleries and museums.
It was an era where minimalist abstraction had gone about as far as it could go (think of the 1963 Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Mo.). It was the era of the first moon landing (1969). And it was the era when science fiction visionaries imagined the pyramids were made by aliens (Erich von Daniken’s book “Chariots of the Gods” was published in 1968). Artists like Smithson, De Maria, Oppenheim, and others created abstractions in the wilderness that were meant to be timeless, cosmic, almost mythological, man.
The folks at NOMA tell me that Oppenheim was invited to exhibit at the then, Delgado Museum of Art in 1970, as part of a popular show titled “Moon Rock and Earthworks“ that featured an actual rock retrieved by Apollo astronauts, alongside photographs of massive outdoor artworks.
For his part in the exhibit, Oppenheim created an ambitious earthwork titled “Concentration Pit” somewhere in the New Orleans region, which is described as a “100-by-100 foot pit dug deep in the swamp and fully visible only from the sky.”
Does anyone remember where it was (is)?
Inside the museum, Oppenheim displayed photos of his earthwork projects, and immediately outside the museum he instructed a museum guard to patrol the meadow as if it were a precious object.
From a 21st century perspective, the performance would seem to have ecological implications. From a 1970 perspective it may have been intended more as a theatrical challenge to conventional art traditions. Oppenheim called the conceptual performance “Guarded Land.”
To recall Oppenheim’s 1970 visit to NOMA, the museum is re-enacting “Guarded Land” from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Friday, as part of the exhibit “Visions of US: American Art at NOMA.”
The exhibit opens with a panel discussion on Oppenheim’s work at 6:30 p.m. led by Katie Pfohl, NOMA’s curator of modern and contemporary art, with Amy Plumb Oppenheim, director of the Dennis Oppenheim Studio, and Aaron Levy, executive director of the Slought Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Guarded Land” also will be performed from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Friday and Nov. 27, Dec. 4, 11, and 18; and Jan. 8, 15, and 22; weather permitting.