As one of the four elements in alchemy, earth is associated with birth, creation and manifestation. The potentiality of the buried cube is not that it might one day be dug up – as a related work by LeWitt was in the year 2000 – rather, its conceptual power is rooted precisely in its inaccessibility to perception.

Another project of the same period dealing with notions of burial and secrecy was Nancy Holt’s series of Buried Poems, dedicated to five of her friends and buried in various locations in the Utah Desert in the early 1970s. The content of the poems remains private, but each location was chosen according to physical, spatial and atmospheric qualities which – according to Holt – evoked the person to whom the poem was dedicated. These works therefore engage in a particularly subtle and imaginative form of site-specificity: aligning the geography of a specific location with the character of a particular person. Indeed, we might call these locations ‘found sites’ – in the manner of Surrealist ‘found objects’ – in that they appear to be the physical manifestation of unconscious questions or desires. If Holt’s work involved matching the site to the person, the recipient of each poem was invited to embark upon his own voyage of discovery; armed with a map, drawing, photograph, specimen or description of his gift’s location. This is Barthes’ active readership in the most literal sense: a reader forced to scavenge and dig, to physically break open a vacuum container in order to gain access to a potentially revelatory text. Earth is cast here as a bearer of secrets – not just because of the hidden treasure buried beneath its surface, but because of the private references to individuals encoded in the psycho-geography of Holt’s chosen sites.

Excavation
Around the time that LeWitt was fantasising about encasing the Empire State Building in cement, Claes Oldenburg was planning to entomb two other symbols of the American Dream. Kennedy Tomb of 1965 was a hypothetical statue of the assassinated President the size of the Statue of Liberty, hollow, inverted and buried underground. Colossal yet invisible, this subterranean cavity turned the phallic logic of the monument on its head, memorialising the loss of an American icon by means of a gargantuan void. Two years later, Oldenburg was invited to participate in “Sculpture and the Environment,” an exhibition of public sculpture organised by the New York City Administration of Recreation and Public Affairs. Having proposed a series of projects rejected by curator Sam Green as “preposterous” – these included a scream monument, to consist of an amplified scream resounding through the city late at night – Oldenburg proposed to dig a grave-sized trench in Central Park, to be officially titled Placid Civic Monument (1967). Professional grave diggers were hired for the task, and paid the going rate of $50 per grave a man. A photograph shows a group of boys who had been playing nearby watching with a mixture of puzzlement, scepticism and boredom as this mundane yet labour-intensive task was gradually carried out. The grave diggers then stopped for lunch, and subsequently returned to fill the grave, before smoothing over and trimming the ground. In the face of public ridicule, officials of the Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration described the work “an invisible sculpture.” Oldenburg referred to it simply as “the hole.”

Unlike the artists previously mentioned, Oldenburg buried no object in his hole – his interest lay in the excavated space, and in the earth itself. In a statement issued at the time he explained: “by not burying a thing, the dirt enters into the concept, and little enough separates the dirt inside the excavation from that outside… so that the whole park and its connections, in turn, enter into it.” Yet it seems that something did separate the dirt inside the hole from that surrounding it. In his journal, Oldenburg added: “this is the first clean dirt I’ve had my hand in in New York, and it took enormous pressure for me to rupture the surface and get my hands clean-dirty with the damp red soil under the soot superstructure.” Dialectics of dirt and cleanliness, purity and pollution run through Oldenburg’s vocabulary, echoing the logic of digging and filling, presence and absence that structured the work and its critical reception. Oldenburg’s use of the word ‘dirt’ as opposed to ‘earth’ is also suggestive here. Sometimes described, in a quotation attributed to Lord Palmerston, as “matter in the wrong place;” the word ‘dirt’ implies a transgression of boundaries, something I’ll return to later under the theme of displacement. But for Oldenburg, the boundary transgressed was the skin of the earth itself, or should I say, herself. In his journal Oldenburg wrote: “I felt great excitement at the moment of first incision of the shovel. The first shovelful was surprisingly red and accounted ‘virgin’ by the diggers.” In case the none-too-subtle gendering of such an account was missed, Oldenburg rammed the point home by locating his “hole” next to Cleopatra’s Needle, the granite erection that dominates the area of Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.