Fourth Installation: On Rachel Mannheimer's "Earth Room"

Rachel Mannheimer | Earth Room | Changes Press | 2022 | 100 Pages

At the Earth Room exhibit—Walter De Maria’s interior earth sculpture made from 250 cubic yards of dirt and 3,600 square feet of floor space—no photos are allowed, admission is free, food and drink should be nowhere near the gallery. If you were to visit today, face coverings would be strongly encouraged for any visitor over the age of two. The installation, according to Rachel Mannheimer’s prose poem “New York,” might instinctively strike viewers as a terrible accident, just for a moment, because “a second-floor loft filled with dirt up to the windowsills could look like a disaster.” The potential for this first impression, followed by a nearly automatic shift through which the viewer must configure the space, shape the first moments of experiencing the installation, the way it wills forward self-correction. Mannheimer’s debut collection of poems is titled Earth Room—winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize from the new Changes Press—though to describe this book as after De Maria’s sculpture would misrepresent its figurative scope: these poems imagine how art can similarly motivate self-correction, reconfigured in aesthetic rather than calamitous terms, and how that aspiration often fails itself. 

Mannheimer’s Earth Room begins on “The Moon”—where, from that distance, one can observe rather than participate in human activity, in violence, in shifts of historical oppression—and ends in “Germantown,” regionally “The Catskills,” where families hike and get lost on their way to the falls. These poems associate their experience of aspiration (trying and failing to find the waterfalls) with a particular landscape, the symbols displayed to the poet, the iconography which the poems mirror back onto the place. This particular place in this particular moment stages the past, an imitation of memory arranged in verse, as in “Los Angeles”: “I, too, visited Los Angeles and sat in back while others drove and didn’t feel I knew it. I’d always accepted movies too easily as ‘real’—they overwhelmed me with emotion. I couldn’t critically assess the artistic decisions made, had no interest in their making.” The act of observation recurs as a memory, a habit formed in time; this act of observation, a manner of engaging with art and how it’s been made, marks how the poet imagines herself at a specific moment in time. The impression of being real, or of having consequence outside of that moment, precludes the ostensibly more sophisticated critical assessment, as if for the young viewer to acknowledge how this movie—or, later, an earth sculpture or a poem—operates formally would suffocate her immediate reaction. Mannheimer visits Los Angeles once more later in the collection, with a lineated poem in which a wedding is attended and a “theory of art” is articulated: 

My theory of art
is that there should be pleasure
in just hearing the concept,
but added pleasure
in seeing the thing itself.

The Sea World billboard said
Real Feels Amazing. 

Here, again, is “real”—and how the impression of “real” makes an affective response in the audience, how it makes one immediately feel, how it points to an immediate sensation overwhelming the viewer. Yet for it to work, this impression requires just the slightest, almost imperceptible mark of having been made.  

A systematic “theory of art” will not be articulated in a book of poems, no more than the book of poems advocates for its own making, that it could have been fashioned no other way. Yet for the poem to stage a person articulating a theory of art, especially one in pursuit of pleasure, dramatizes the desire to get it right, to state a theory in the first place. Traveling eastbound from Los Angeles, the poem “Chicago” begins, “I don’t know much about ceramics, I said, / slightly coy, to the first ceramicist. / Everybody has a toilet, she said.” The poem anxiously compartmentalizes itself as a manner of approaching art: here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, and here’s what I want to know. Everybody has a toilet: the ceramicist’s answer is nearly rehearsed, an exhausted repetition felt through its idiomatic quality. Just as everyone who has used a bathroom has some experience with ceramics, the language of a poem can only be understood contextually: what comes before that moment and what comes after, how the formal patterns of the poem situate that moment in the larger syntactical movements. 

Without context, one is likely to mistake the interior earth sculpture, raked daily, for some sort of engineering disaster. Driving through Montana the poet remembers passing the Big Hole Battlefield, where the United States Army slaughtered members of the Nez Perce tribe. “After that, we just assumed / historic sites we passed were sites of slaughter,” the poem reflects, just as before that moment the possibility for historic sites to be something else, a place where slaughter did not happen, perhaps seemed more generalizing: context makes the assumption realistic, probable. At times this seems like a particularly American experience, how the historical context for slaughter has been strategically embedded in the landscape, willfully concealed, and so becomes assumed if not entirely restated. In “Berlin,” for example, passing through Weißensee Cemetery, the poet finds a memorial at the entrance “for 12,000 Berlin Jews who fought / in the First World War and died.” Without that first memorial—the architectural metaphor for the historic event—the headstones might have become unremarkable if not for the way the living place situates them: “Inside, most of the stones are simple tablets. / Some rest on tree stumps also carved of stone, / like music on a music stand.” The living trees are not ahistorical. The headstone propped on the tree is almost like music on a music stand, but not quite; the 250 cubic yards of dirt raked in a room seem almost like a structural disaster, but not quite. 

Mannheimer does not travel alone: sometimes with “newish friends,” sometimes with strangers, often with her partner Chris. “I’d offer criticism when he came to me for help” and again the attention to knowledge—the potential for something abundantly real—and self-correction motivates the poem’s recognition of its own context. “He’d been loved so poorly in his past that the standard for me now felt both too high and deplorably low. I faltered when the man approaching stopped and turned to follow me the other way around.” Too high and deplorably low: both need to exist as alternating points of pressure in the poem’s sense of love—in the way that Earth Room imagines failure as aspiration, something closer to real. “Germantown,” where the book finally settles, where Mannheimer reflects that “sculpture is most pleasing at a human scale,” has everything anyone might need: “A museum, a deer park, / a family, / a dance troupe, / a cemetery. Company.” Sculpture is most pleasing at a human scale, meanwhile the human scale only ever begins to measure that experience; for all its suspicions, Earth Room shows a love of continued beginning. 

“A sign forbidding photography is being flagrantly ignored.” The New York Earth Room is the third installation of De Maria’s project and the longest standing, available to the public since 1977; the second Earth Room could be viewed in West Germany in 1974, while the first debuted in Munich in 1968. In her introduction to the book, Bergman Prize judge Louise Glück reflects, “Mannheimer’s subject is art. Not the art that endures unchanging in museums and libraries but the transient art of performance and installation, the mutable, perishable forms.” Just as it might endure unchanging in a library, poetry often feels perishable—productively resisting itself, ready to betray its own making. In “New York,” after imagining the miscalculation of imminent danger viewers might first assume, Mannheimer transcribes instructions for installing the Earth Room exhibit: 

No markings on it
No markings on it
Nothing growing on it
Nothing growing on it

At times it seems unrealistic to wish the same for poetry: for nothing to grow on it, nothing to mark it. Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, according to the Dia Art Foundation, will “close on June 19, 2022 for conservation work, and will reopen in spring 2023.”