The Little-Known History of a Lost Earthwork

Every summer solstice—when the sun is its farthest north above the equator, creating the longest day of the year—a peculiar skylight known as the “oculus” captures the noon light and beams it down onto a circular pane of opaque glass that marks the precise center of the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center, designed by architect Richard Meier.

As midday approaches, staff often gather to watch the event. The sun’s rays provide a dramatic but ephemeral focal point, aligning the earth and heavens on the lowest level of the Getty Research Library; a gentle ritual on a quiet floor.

What many don’t know is that where there is now a glass plate, there was once a work of art.

“A deep cavity that would root the building to the earth below”

In the early 1990s, as the Getty Center was being planned and built, the newly formed Research Institute commissioned a site-specific work from the British artist Andy Goldsworthy, known for his use of natural and ephemeral materials in artworks often situated directly in the landscape.

If the new library building, with its helical shape, encouraged visiting researchers to circulate through its open stacks of books and interconnected spaces—a veritable well of information—Goldsworthy saw a parallel in his own work as “a well from which to draw energy from the earth,” as he wrote to his gallerist Cheryl Haines on January 14, 1989.

He envisioned a hand-formed spiral ring of earthen sediment, built using several tons of clay and dirt excavated from the Getty Center’s construction site, creating a deep cavity that would root the building in the earth.

As the light shone down through the oculus, Goldsworthy’s artwork would help align the heavens to the earth below.

The conceptual design for this installation generated a flood of anxious faxes and emails back and forth (now part of Getty’s Institutional Records and Archives), including some reservations about bringing “a pile of clay” inside Meier’s pristine white, geometric forms.

But, as Thomas Reese, then assistant director, later reflected, the final design would merge the new building with the earth and sky to symbolize its origins, including the labor that had transformed a natural hillside into a new center for advanced knowledge of art and its varied histories.

In the month leading up to the summer solstice of 1997, Goldsworthy put in long, 12-hour days to execute the piece, with a steady stream of visitors conversing with the artist and watching the wet mound of clay take shape.

Cracks over time

Goldsworthy’s earthwork invited the unpredictable passage of time to do its work. As the light through Meier’s oculus changed in keeping with the sun’s annual journey, Goldsworthy’s earthwork began to crack over the nine months it took to dry.

The cracks would “bond with the earth that lies below from where it comes,” he wrote to Haines. To study this artistic process, Getty conservators closely monitored the installation with a time-lapse camera. The unpredictable nature of the drying clay no doubt generated anticipation in the viewer and even risked failure, once set into motion, for the artist.

As the drying continued, some cracks grew larger, becoming crevices more than five inches wide. Although some shrinkage was typical of smectite (known colloquially as swelling clay), it was amplified by the additional presence of gypsum.

Nevertheless, Goldsworthy was happy with its progress. In another letter, written from his farmhouse in Scotland in March of 1998, he commented that this cracking and aging “emphasizes that although the building is new, the well of knowledge on which we draw is old.”

When notified a month later that a chunk of clay had actually dropped off, he enthused over “the ancient quality the work is taking on.” And after 11 years of planning together with the staff, architect, and builders, the piece had been formed and dried in its new shape. Getty staff were invited to send a list of suggested titles to the artist.

Après ça, le deluge (After the flood)

But external forces were still at play. In June of 1999, an unexpected failure in the sprinkler system caused water (under the same pressure as a broken fire hydrant) to flood the library. It took 11 minutes for the water main to be turned off. In that time, 33,000 gallons had flowed.

While staff successfully dammed the water to protect library books and the sculpture, moisture found its way below the floor into the base of the installation, muddying its characteristic features in the following days and kickstarting a new process of decay.

Ultimately, the decision was made to decommission the sculpture, which the Institute staff undertook ceremonially on the occasion of that year’s winter solstice. Faced with the job of removing around seven tons of clay, staff also distributed pieces of the earthen artwork to take home with them.

The cavity was then covered with the existing glass plate, which still shows a frosted outline of the original sculpture’s footprint.

Despite its unforeseen fate, the making and unmaking of the sculpture fulfilled a vision that Goldsworthy had set out for his artwork. In an interview he gave in 1997, he said: “The most tangible, permanent thing that I will leave there is the story of something that was made in that place and that people saw it being made, knew that the materials came from the site…even when the object’s gone.”

Once again, this year, the solstice light hovers over the installation site, right into the heart of the former clay mound, as an invitation to pause and reflect on the passage of time, on what was made here, and on a new beginning.