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A line snaked along Wooster Street the other day, for a designer sample sale. A few doors down and one floor up, Bill Dilworth stood in a large room filled with two hundred and eighty thousand pounds of dirt, wondering how the two days of watering that he’d just finished had affected the soil.
“Just to get it back to this moist state is gratifying to me, because this is the state that I relate to, that I maintained for decades,” Dilworth, who had the knee-high rubber boots of a farmer, the trim-cut jeans of an urbanite, and the eyebrows of a mad scientist, said. He has spent the past thirty-four years caring for “The New York Earth Room,” an installation by the artist Walter De Maria which is part of the Dia Art Foundation’s permanent collection. His chief duties are watering and raking the soil, to keep its color consistent.
Dilworth and his wife moved to New York from Detroit in 1979, and one of his odd jobs was sweeping the basement stairs in a Dia building. When he took over the Earth Room, in 1989, all he was given by way of instruction was a photograph of what it looked like when it was installed, in 1977, for an intended three-month run. (Photographs are not permitted; that image is the only sanctioned one.) The room is thirty-six hundred square feet, filled with dirt twenty-two inches deep. Visitors view it from behind a knee-high glass barrier.
Last year, Dia replenished the soil, which had fallen below the height that the artist wanted—owing to a combination, Dilworth said, of natural causes (“the weight of me walking on it”) and visitors sneaking out with handfuls. The new soil was too dry, so, in January, Dilworth gave it a thorough watering with a hose. The humidity inside interacted with the cold air outside, making the windows stream with condensation. After that, he let the soil dry out for a spell, then watered it again.
Now he was ready to see what the color looked like beneath the surface. He started in with a clawlike tool called a cultivator. “Oh, my God, it really saturated,” he said, delighted. The earth he was turning over had a uniform dark-chocolate hue. Next, he would try a rake with broad, short tines. (Both tools were on site when he started.) For his first three decades, he had mostly used the cultivator. (“I thought it looked a bit like a rug, so I tried to make it look more like earth.”) Last year, he switched to the rake after Heiner Friedrich, a Dia founder, suggested that he “smooth it out.”
Visitors often ask Dilworth what the Earth Room means, and he usually gives them the same answer: “Walter didn’t speak about it, so, whatever your impressions are, that’s valid. Don’t worry about what it’s about. There is no explanation.” He adds that on a return visit “you might have a different take.” In the winter, the dirt is likely to be drier and lighter. In the summer, after watering, it can be “black and loamy.” He likes “the idea that it’s not static.”
If a visitor keeps pushing for an interpretation, Dilworth will say, “It’s about earth, art, and quiet.” It is also about time: “People look at it, and they think nothing’s growing, and I say, ‘Look at it again, time is growing out there.’ ”
This is Dilworth’s last season with the Earth Room; he plans to retire next spring. (His wife, Patti, recently retired, after decades of caring for another De Maria installation, “The Broken Kilometer,” a couple of blocks away.) In addition to overseeing the dirt, Dilworth buzzes in visitors and supplies Dia with a tally. For years, he kept track using a handheld metal clicker. When there were no visitors, he would retreat to a back room and work on his own art. (One reason he took the job was the free studio space it offered.)
Over the years, the number of visitors increased. Dilworth needed to find a way to pursue his art while sitting at the front desk. In 2003, he made the process of tallying his new project, creating a visual map of the day, each person marked by a curling black stroke. At one point, he experimented with color: red and green in December; a brief stint of pink for women and blue for men.
He might try color again for his final season. But first he had to decide how to rake the newly moistened dirt. He eyed two patches he had already raked: a smoother area, from the flat rake, and a textured one, from the cultivator. He opted for the cultivator.
“It’s meant to be unchanging,” he said. “But it’s always been changing.” For years, he had raked from right to left. “Then it occurred to me—why don’t I just rake it the other way.” Years later, another idea: front to back. “Instead of lengthwise, I would go widthwise. I always loved it widthwise, I always felt it was special that way.”
“The nice thing about duration and time,” he said, “is that you eventually get to things.” ♦
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