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Behind the earth movers: the adventurous support of dealer Virginia Dwan allowed earthwork artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson and others to realize their pioneering projects - Patronage - Biography
Art in America, April, 2004 by Suzaan Boettger
We did an enormous poster for [Michael Heizer's] Double Negative [1969]. I think it must be about 48 or 50 inches, which was in keeping with the mammoth endeavor of this work. It wasn't just giganticism for its own sake; it really did relate to the work and get it across. So that communicated to people everywhere--collectors all over the country and in Europe were receiving this enormous poster. Primarily what we had were just photographs for the exhibition, but the intention was to communicate that the real exhibition was in Nevada. All right, it was under the auspices of the Dwan Gallery; Dwan Gallery's main facility was in New York, but we also had this space out there which was a work of art, and if you really wanted to see the show, you should be out there. And t/tat was revolutionary, to my knowledge.
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--Virginia Dwan, interviewed by Charles Stuckey, May 1984 (1)
All right, in the American art world of the late 1960s, size did matter. In 1969, Michael Heizer initiated his eventual displacement of 240,000 tons of earth and rock into a ravine to make the facing notches of his Double Negative, thus extending the Dwan Gallery 2,500 miles west. Coincident with Heizer's January 1970 show documenting that work, Peter Hutchinson placed 450 pounds of wetted generic white bread along the rim of a Mexican volcano, covered it with 300 feet of plastic sheeting and grew a corona of lurid mold (Paricutin Volcano Project). A little over a year earlier, Robert Morris's Earthwork, an unruly 1,200-pound, 6-foot-diameter mound of earth, peat, remnant metal pieces, felt, grease and brick had dominated the October 1968 exhibition "Earth Works" at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In 1970, Robert Smithson moved 6,650 tons of earth from hillside to lake bed to make his 1,500-foot-long dirt roadway Spiral Jetty. These works used scale to create experiential environments.
Such massive undertakings were very much in keeping with the spirit of optimistic expansiveness that characterized U.S. aspirations of the time. In his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy had spoken of the "New Frontier" on which the country stood poised and proposed a program that by the end of the decade would send astronauts to the moon and back. The postwar baby boom was in full swing and the economy buoyant. One product of this prosperity was the National Endowment for the Arts, whose Art in Public Places program played an important role in pumping up the scale of sculpture.
The size of earthworks also reflects the fact that the first phase of earth art was a "guy thing." That is, the earthen works and environments represented in that debut "Earth Works" exhibition were solely by men, 10 of them: Carl Andre, Herbert Bayer, Walter De Maria, Heizer, Stephen Kaltenbach, Sol LeWitt, Morris, Claes Oldenburg Dennis Oppenheim and Smithson. Several of the works displayed or represented in that show, as well as other large earthen excavations and mounds produced subsequently, were located in the deserts and mountains of the western U.S. While the dominance (if not the exclusivity) of male artists working in this new genre was consistent with art-world norms of the period, the particular kind of physical activities involved in moving those masses of earth in wilderness terrains also required the strength, muscularity and stamina traditionally associated with masculine power.
Yet the bold sculpture made by these artists did not result from their efforts alone. Although it is rarely acknowledged in discussion of this work, behind the hiring of earth-moving equipment and workers, at the forefront of the earthworks genre, was dealer Virginia Dwan, whose adventurous patronage and widespread promotion were key to its development.
Consider the sequence of advertisements heralding the October 1968 group show "Earth Works" at the Dwan Gallery. In the September 1968 issue of Artforum, a half-page black-and-white photograph showed a close-up of the deep imprint of rugged tire treads on a soggy dirt road. The advertisement's sole text, in small type below the photograph, read "Photo: Virginia Dwan." It was a credit line, but because the photographer was the owner of a prominent 57th Street gallery, the reader could also infer that the image served as a teaser for an upcoming exhibition at the Dwan Gallery. The next issue of Artforum carried a full-page enlargement of the same photograph. A line of text in bold capitals added along the lower edge of the photograph read "EARTH WORKS OCTOBER DWAN NEW YORK."
But there is another significance to that first photograph's three little words. Beyond identifying Dwan as the photographer, they more importantly indicate that she had been present on that first jaunt of discovery down this muddy road. Dwan was not a silent partner who wrote checks but an active contributor, one who went along for more than the ride.
After graduating from high school in Minneapolis, Dwan went to Los Angeles with her mother in 1950; her father was dead. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, majoring in studio art and minoring in psychology, but she married, had a daughter and left school before getting her degree. With the support of a substantial family inheritance, Dwan opened her first gallery in the Westwood section of Los Angeles in 1959, using her own family name. Initially, hers was not a gallery showing regional luminaries or up and-coming locals. Rather, Dwan soon became an important source in Southern California for work by major New York- and Paris-based postwar artists, such as Arman, Philip Guston, Yves Klein, Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg. Borrowing work from Leo Castelli, she gave Rauschenberg his first West Coast exhibition. The visiting European and New York artists often stayed at the guest accommodations of the Malibu home she shared with her husband and daughter. She has recalled, "I was able to get to know the artists quite well personally that way, and have wonderful dinner conversations. It was a wonderful growing experience for me...." (2) In turn, her artists were devoted to her, and in later years Heizer, Edward Kienholz, Larry Rivers and Jean Tinguely made portraits of her.
