From a Dream House to an Earth Room

Nine-year old Leo and I took an imagination-expanding subway ride into the avant-garde on Saturday, visiting two long-running works of art, both of which have important relationships to the early days of the Velvet Underground (if you know of my VU obsession, you know why I was into seeing these two things!).  First stop, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House installation. Leo was intrigued enough by my description of what I thought it would be to come on this adventure willingly, and neither of us were disappointed. The Dream House is Young’s indeterminant music — low, truck-like rumbles and higher pitched electronics beeps, in quadrophonic sound –  coupled with is wife Zazeela’s site-setting of purple and blue lighting, shades and shadows.  You move around, and the sound changes. It’s pretty hip -  all in a medium-sized, carpeted loft on Church St in Tribeca, a decidedly uncommercial remnant of avant-garde bohemia.

Then I remembered reading about Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, a fairly literal description of this installation dating from 1977: A large loft right on Wooster St., in Soho, in the midst of what’s now a street of expensive clothing and furniture stores, but in ‘77 must have been quite a bit more desolate.  There’s a hallway, and and then a 8 or so foot wide opening that looks into the big loft room. A two foot high glass wall separates this room of dirt. This photo’s a bit of an optical illusion, but that’s the big expanse of dirt behind Leo in the photo below.

One common theme we noted and appreciated was the almost complete lack of description at each of these locations, they’re both basically presented as is for each person to experience/enjoy/puzzle over without pre-conceptions.

As for the Velvet Underground connections, Young’s drones were influential to John Cale (who performed in Young’s Dream Syndicate) and Lou Reed, while De Maria was in a band with Reed and Cale that eventually morphed into the Velvet Underground.