Walter De Maria review – land art pioneer's work comes to ground

A founding figure of what has become known as land art, Walter De Maria is best known for his 1977 Lightning Field, the one mile-by-one kilometre field of steel poles driven into the ground in a remote part of New Mexico. Each pole in the grid is a slightly different length, to accommodate for the unevenness of the land, but their pointed tips are at the same elevation, describing an invisible plane. At certain times of the year, the rods attract lightning strikes from the thunderstorms that roll across the desert. Lightning Field, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, is a site of pilgrimage and wonder.

De Maria went on to insert a kilometre-long, two-inch-diameter brass rod into the ground in Kassel, Germany; and to fill a room on Wooster Street in New York City with 127,300 kilos of earth, to a depth of 22 inches. I have no idea why he mixed metric and imperial measurements in his quest for universality, but all of these works are permanent installations. How long is forever? De Maria’s works often aim to exist in geological as much as human time, their sense of permanence and endurance a call to the sublime. The idea of Lightning Field is as spine-tingling as the piece is actually electrifying, though I am inclined with it, as with all of his art, to feel the hot air of artistic heavy breathing on the back of my neck as much as an intimation of the absolute. I visited the Earth Room once, but haven’t felt the urge to return. That it is there is enough.

De Maria, who died in 2013, never held a show in the UK during his lifetime, but this current Gagosian exhibition is mostly a disappointment. I am a sucker for artist’s statements and lists, but his eight-page One Hundred Activities for Rich and Poor (1960-61), adds little to our knowledge of the development of his thinking. His injunction to “move every two years, no matter what”, “walk across Canada – there is a lot of room” and “encourage non-cultural activities – walking in deserts”, might at least encourage you to get out more, which is what, in his art, De Maria eventually did. His call to “end abstract art end figurative art” is bullish enough, but who knows what to make of “guard against turpentine” or his final activity: “geese”.

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These statements read like the kind of stuff people write when they’re stoned, which De Maria quite possibly was in the early 1960s, when he spent much of his time composing and drumming and flirting with avant-garde music. He became friendly with the minimalist composer La Monte Young in the 50s, played in jazz groups (including with trumpeter and Ornette Coleman sidekick Don Cherry), and then in the Primitives with Tony Conrad, John Cale and Lou Reed, before the latter went on to form the Velvet Underground.

Two of De Maria’s compositions form the soundtrack to his film, Hard Core (1969), originally produced by a public TV channel in San Francisco. The camera circles the horizon in a 360-degree pan on a dried-out lake bed in Black Rock desert, Nevada. Across the desiccated, crazed earth, the mountains hang blue in the distance. At one point we venture into an area of vegetation, but mostly all we hear is the ocean. This gets replaced by drumming, and, late in the film, sudden shots of a wild-west gunfight fired by fellow land artist Michael Heizer.

Hard Core is a strange hybrid. The music, based on field recordings, with De Maria drumming to an accompaniment of the ocean, both lulls and heightens the tension as the film progresses. It is intended to make us think not only of cowboy movie backdrops, but also the landscape and genocide of the native American people. At the end we see a glimpse of a young Vietnamese girl’s face. This was, after all, at the height of the Vietnam war. It has often been noted that De Maria’s Lightning Field may have been the inspiration for the enigmatic epilogue to Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic, endlessly violent scalp-hunting 1985 novel Blood Meridian. Who knows – McCarthy isn’t saying – but he and De Maria share a vision of America steeped in a kind of violence of human and natural forces.

In another gallery are four stainless steel polygons, each with a channel running round the perimeter, in which sits a shiny steel ball. Excerpted from a larger work, De Maria intended these to be played with, though the pleasure to be gained from rolling the ball round these shapes seems pretty meagre to me. In any case, you are no longer invited to touch. Near the sculptures hang seven pencil drawings so faint they barely register on the eye, hanging like mirages on the paper.

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Arrangements of stainless steel rods, seated on low slabs of polished granite engraved with the words Truth and Beauty, fill the largest gallery. The rods are placed in an X formation on one slab, and on the other as chevrons. Nonetouch each other. The rods have five sides in the first pair, seven in the second, rising to 17-sided forms in the last pair,which look almost circular. The work has only been completed posthumously – one is aware of the craft involved in machining the steel and carving the words. The sculptures hug the ground.

The long wall behind is painted a flat mid-blue, I guess to pep the installation up a bit, and to remind us of the big American sky. But it is a sublime to make the heart sink. The rods of Lightning Field poke the air, the Vertical Earth Kilometer drills the earth. The precise arrangements of polished rods on their tombstone slabs expose themselves. I imagine picking them up and feeling their smooth heft, their threatening gravity. They’re hard and more than a little bit phallic, remorseless and unrelenting, and pretty much inert. Truth? Beauty? Do me a favour.

• Walter De Maria is at Gagosian gallery, London, until 30 July.