‘Earthwork’ Aspires to Connect Man to Heavens : Art: Monumental projects in New Mexico reflect prehistoric artistic traditions, but with a decidedly modern twist.

Two New York sculptors chose New Mexico’s remote cowboy country to create monumental works reflecting prehistoric artistic traditions, but with a decidedly modern twist.

Their “earthworks” are set in a world of desert scrub, high mesas and big skies. They are meant to connect the Earth to the heavens, and man to both.

In 1977, internationally known minimalist Walter de Maria rammed 400 stainless-steel spikes into a basin ringed by distant blue peaks northeast of the Catron County town of Quemado.

“The Lightning Field,” resembling a giant bed of nails or a sparse forest of thin, barren trunks, was installed in an area known for frequent thunderstorms. The land supported a working cattle ranch when it was bought by the New York-based Dia Center for the Arts, which commissioned the piece and owns it.

In another part of New Mexico, Charles Ross has carved a 76-foot wedge out of the top of a sandstone mesa on the western edge of the Great Plains in San Miguel County.

Out of the chasm he is creating “Star Axis,” a naked-eye observatory based on precession--Earth’s 26,000-year wobble on its axis--and its relationship to the star Polaris.

When the work is finished, a walk up a staircase inside a buried 11-story stainless-steel tube aligned to the Earth’s axis will reveal ever-widening circles of sky and the location of Polaris at various times in history from 11,000 BC to AD 15,000.

“It’s a walk backward and forward through time,” Ross said during a recent tour of the site. “It’s about experiencing our alignment with the stars.

“It’s from here,” he says tapping his chest, “to out there,” pointing to the sky.

Part of the tube will run through a 55-foot-tall red granite pyramid atop the mesa. A chamber inside will offer another view of the night sky.

Stairs will line an outer wall of the pyramid for a third perspective, and a “shadow field”--a bowtie-shaped area surfaced with white caliche--will contain the moving sun shadow created by the pyramid.

“My job is to focus sky geometry down into a human scale,” says Ross, who has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in sculpture from UC Berkeley.

“Our society has launched the greatest exploration of space ever known and yet there is little in our daily lives to remind us of our personal connection to the stars.”

The artwork sits on a 76,000-acre working cattle ranch and the corrugated dirt road leading to the crest of Ross’ mesa is a gantlet of glowering longhorn bulls.

The 53-year-old artist says he searched the Southwest for four years for land that would complement his vision.

He had found what he considered the perfect site in 1976 and phoned the owner of the land, W.O. Culbertson Jr., former state representative, gubernatorial candidate, cattle rancher and charter member of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

After explaining his concept, Ross says Culbertson told him, “That sounds like just the sort of thing we need around here. How much land do you need?”

“I told him a square mile. And he said, ‘Hell, we’ve got plenty of those. Drive around the ranch and pick one out.’ ”

Culbertson has since died, and the rest of his land has been sold.

Ross has asked that the precise location of Star Axis be kept secret until the work is finished and is opened to the public.

Ross has paid for much of Star Axis with the proceeds from his other works: prism sculptures that cast large shafts of pure color into architecture spaces and “dynamite drawings,” which represent the behavior of light at the subatomic level.

Ross earned international prominence in 1972 when he used a lens to burn a yearlong record of the sun’s path onto a series of wooden planks. The finished image serendipitously revealed a double-reverse spiral.

Star Axis, which is a decade and a half in the making and about three years from completion, has cost $700,000 so far. Ross expects to spend $1.2 million before he is finished.

Ross says the process has been slow because funding, which now is growing, had been sparse.

“In the clamor to possess, the real purpose of art--which is to reveal aspects of the larger natural order--has often been forgotten,” he says. “The Earth can’t really be owned and there’s too much emphasis on art solely for investment.”

The Earth Art movement, which began in the 1960s, rejects collectible art and gallery settings. It often evokes the creations of ancient man: Stonehenge, the lines on the Plains of Nazca in Peru, the Anasazi sun dagger at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

“Earth art installations are integrated into the environment,” says Suzanne Jamison, administrative coordinator for Star Axis in Santa Fe.

“They resonate with the qualities of everything that’s around them: the changes in light, as well as the trees, the bushes and the birds. In most traditional languages, there is no word for art. That’s because you can’t talk about it as separate from the creative process, from digging in the garden, from what you do in daily life.”

But Ross says his work only coincidentally reflects ancient man’s efforts.

“I don’t have any ancient images, but I am making a place to remember our connection with the stars,” he says.

De Maria will not explain his art.

“He doesn’t want to limit the interpretation” of “The Lightning Field,” says Charles Wright of the Dia Center.

The same year work was finished on “The Lightning Field,” De Maria dumped 280,000 pounds of dirt into a New York City studio and called it “New York Earth Room.” In 1987, he laid 325 tons of hard white stone from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas on a floor in Stuttgart, Germany, to create “5 Continent Sculpture.”

“The Lightning Field,” which reportedly cost about $500,000 to build, is a play of light, color, perspective and illusion. At various times of day, depending on the angle of the sun, the poles can virtually disappear from sight or appear in full as dancing shafts of brilliant white light.

They can seem uniform and symmetrical, or as randomly thrown javelins of varied sizes. Backed by mountains, they are white; against the sky, they are black.

A visitor walking through the forest of steel finds poles that appeared to be on a straight line are suddenly discovered to run diagonally.

The poles, an average 20 feet and 7 1/2 inches tall and 2 inches in diameter, are planted in a rectangular grid 1 mile by nearly two-thirds of a mile. Because of the land’s rolling contour, the tallest pole is 26 feet 9 inches, while the shortest is 15 feet. The poles are placed 220 feet apart, and their lathed, pinpoint tops form a perfect plane.

“The invisible is real,” De Maria, 56, wrote in his sole public comment on the piece. “The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its aesthetics.”