High Energy Bar and Certificate 1966

Walter De Maria made this stainless steel bar, probably sometime in the late 20th century. It’s hard to look at, it’s so matter-of-fact. I mean, it's just a rectangular block, right? But that almost unbearable simplicity is what gets under my skin. I start to wonder about the surface, what it would feel like to touch. It’s so sleek, smooth, with no incident. It's easy to imagine it as enormous, like a monolith, or tiny, like a paperweight. And that's where the energy comes in, maybe. Energy not in the object, but in the encounter, the questions it brings up, the different ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing the world. This gets close to Sol LeWitt's structures, or even Barnett Newman’s zips, where meaning emerges from the interaction of form and viewer, not from any overt symbolism. They get us to fill in the gaps, to participate in the art. They refuse to provide fixed meanings and embrace ambiguity.