The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

In 1969, the magazine Art in America devoted a feature to “Impossible Art,” declaring that it “paradoxically, is possible.”⁽¹⁾ Looking at categories as wide ranging as Earthworks, visionary architecture, and conceptual art, critic David Shirley identified that unrealizable works were not only reshaping how major figures of the art world—artists, dealers, curators, and patrons—related to one another, but they were adding new professions to the arts, namely architects, engineers, and even civic officials. This art was deemed impossible for a number of reasons: the scale was proposed to be of enormous physical proportions, the costs were prohibitive, and the technology required was advanced beyond then-available expertise. Yet for select individuals, these were not daunting hurdles. One such set were the bold and resourceful collectors John and Dominique de Menil, as exemplified in their call for proposals of “dream monuments” in the city of Houston. The commission of these large-scale, site-specific works, however, would remain one of the many “impossibilities” of the era.

Born of Dominique de Menil’s role in organizing the United States tour of 18th-century drawings by French draftsmen titled Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu, the display of “dream monuments” was to trace the history of the concept across eras and geographies using mainly drawings, photographs, and models. The couple actively worked on the theme, including an outdoor addendum for contemporary sculptures to the gallery display. The couple looked to New York’s John Gibson Projects for Commissions and its eponymous owner to engage a cohort of artists for the idea. Gibson’s business traded in what has been called a kind of “art futures,”⁽²⁾ selling not the physical works themselves but rather the stewardship of a custom project for interested patrons. Through Gibson, among other personal networks, the de Menils’ project caught the interest of artists including Carl Andre, Christo, Peter Hutchinson, Will Insley, Richard Long, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson, all of whom made proposals in some capacity (see fig. 2). As the project and the artworks proposed for it were never achieved, what remains of these so-called dream monuments are archival records like letters, receipts, and the papers that document their ambitious ideas.

A close study of a selection of the unrealized proposals considered for the original Dream Monuments exhibition, alongside the artist’s own perspectives on their work, reveals a substantial engagement with the disciplines of architecture and engineering. As their art grew in scale, a few of the commissioned artists—Christo, Will Insley, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Smithson—began working within and against the conventions of those fields. Freely borrowing from the technical drafting and documentary standards at the time, the drawings from Dream Monuments under discussion here propose sculptures that would have required an astonishing and rarely seen confluence of engineering feats, massive tracts of land, sky-high budgets, and indefatigable patrons and municipal advocates. Using the medium itself as the primary lens, this text explores how the provisional, prognosticative character of technical drawing, as well as its representational strategies, permitted these artists to visualize nascent ideas and solicit financiers, advocates, and partners for their projects. In the process, they tested the very limits of feasibility and even the definition of what constitutes a planning document or building.⁽³⁾

Though each of projects considered for Dream Monuments was formidable to construct in its own way, Christo’s proposition is referred to in the de Menils’ archival files as being the most expensive of them all.⁽⁴⁾ Some of the artist’s earliest projects, which he made in collaboration with his partner Jeanne-Claude, were stacks of oil barrels situated in public spaces across Europe; one work in 1961 even blocked a city street in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. The artists met the de Menils when one of their mastaba barrel sculptures, a flat-topped construction with sloping sides based on an ancient Egyptian funerary form, was on view in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968. According to Christo, it was John de Menil who proposed “a larger Mastaba between Houston and Galveston. That’s how the idea evolved.”⁽⁵⁾ Following a trip made to Houston at the invitation of the de Menils, Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed the project between 1969 and 1974 over the course of several drawings and models.⁽⁶⁾ According to Paul Wiggins, then a Rice University architecture student enlisted by the de Menils to accompany artists on site visits, Christo’s early verbalizations his project involved stacking oil barrels inside the city’s Astrodome, a newly built state-of-the-art sporting arena.⁽⁷⁾

Early iterations of his proposal however do not depict a particular locale, but a schematic drawing that details the material mass of the structure, heightened by the dramatic contrast of shadow. Fine perspectival lines used to draw the prism-like shape are still visible, with dimension and extension lines across the base of the mastaba. Also featured are inset shop drawings of barrels and a cluster of people to give a sense of relative size (fig. 3). Later drawings are more akin to location plans and separate the sheet into three registers. Maps and sometimes printed photographs are used to place structures into a proposed site, such as alongside a highway or in a city park. Christo’s drawings overlay multiple approaches to information display onto one sheet, and at a certain point scale models were made based upon these works.⁽⁸⁾

For Christo, “drawing is a path towards reality.”⁽⁹⁾ His archives are filled with permit applications and photographs from site visits for various projects that would never come to fruition, but it is his drawings that he has called “the history, the archives of a project,” as they show how his thinking developed.⁽¹⁰⁾ The artists made selections of their art available for purchase to support both themselves and their projects. The de Menils purchased one of these works in 1968, the drawing 4584 Tonneaux Métalliques, Project for the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, 1967, an acquisition facilitated by John Gibson (fig. 4).

While the de Menils advocated for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art through their collecting, they also actively tried to raise funds for the Houston project. Handwritten notes in the archives list Humble Oil, Gulf Oil, and Texaco as companies to possibly contact for sponsorship⁽¹¹⁾ and in a 1969 letter to Gibson, John de Menil wrote of a conversation with the resident of Shell Oil, Inc. where he was told that if the company sponsored the artwork “it would be interpreted as confirmation of undue affluence,” and adding “sad isn’t it?”⁽¹²⁾

Whereas Christo’s drawings for mastabas were entirely serious endeavors towards a project’s completion, the de Menils also looked to drawings where the schemes were fantastical. For example, Claes Oldenburg had begun a series of “Proposed Colossal Monuments” in 1965, a few years after discovering the work of Jean-Jacques Lequeu, the 18th-century draftsman and aspiring architect featured in Visionary Architects.⁽¹³⁾ By 1967, the de Menils had acquired three of these drawings, Proposed Colossal Monument for Central Park, N.Y.C. – Moving Pool Balls, 1967 (fig. 1); Proposed Colossal Monument for Park Avenue, New York – Bowling Balls, 1967; and Proposed Colossal Monument for Thames Estuary – Knee, 1966 (fig. 5), from Sidney Janis Gallery, potentially for the indoor display of Dream Monuments. The de Menils hosted Oldenburg for a lecture in 1968 at Houston’s University of St. Thomas, where they installed a selection of these works for his presentation (fig. 6). Oldenburg referred to these structures as his “obstacle monuments,” aggressive yet whimsical interventions into a cityscape that would make simple acts like crossing the street a dangerous undertaking.⁽¹⁴⁾ For each proposal, Oldenburg developed his animate and anthropomorphic forms in tandem with site selection. He envisioned the oversized pool balls, for example, as motorized and hosting small businesses that would peddle to customers as they whizzed around the park, equating the lush vegetation with the green cloth on a pool table. Oldenburg frequently has used drawing to explore visual affinities, and indeed the unexpected slippages and mutations of his sketches often lend themselves to free association. Additionally, drawing need not necessarily address the structural and bureaucratic hurdles of such works being actualized, not to mention the public safety hazards.

And yet, though Oldenburg stated for years that he was “pretending to be an architect,”⁽¹⁵⁾ he soon began to tackle the challenges and compromises inherent to constructing his previously unworkable, and explicitly so, monuments. In 1969, Oldenburg completed his first public sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, sited on the campus of Yale University.⁽¹⁶⁾ Archival documentation from that year suggests that Oldenburg was in conversation with the de Menils about pursuing a sculpture for Houston.⁽¹⁷⁾ Oldenburg would dedicate much of the subsequent decades of his career to realizing public commissions. These works, of course, could not engage the city in the way he envisioned in his drawings. For example, in partnership with Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg resuscitated his plan for giant pool balls in 1977 for a commission in Münster, Germany. In this version, however, the balls are fixed and made of solid, reinforced concrete.

While Oldenburg quipped about being an architect, artist Will Insley gradually left his professional training in that field behind. Within just a couple of years of receiving his master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University, Insley opted to pursue more theoretically driven investigations of pure form and of enormous scale. These ideas followed two lines of inquiry: O N E C I T Y, his vision for sprawling structures to house imaginary and borderline dystopic societies, and Abstract /Buildings/ that were to be sited near O N E C I T Y and designed for ritual activity. It was an Abstract /Building/ that Insley undertook with sincere plans to make for Dream Monuments.⁽¹⁸⁾

Insley initially conceived of /Building/ No. 5 Channel Space Reverse on paper in 1967 as a 360 ft. x 360 ft. structure of rising and falling planar surfaces with a sunken square in the middle. The isometric depiction (fig. 7) was done in graphite and with striking linearity. A related drawing provides an aerial view and section plan of the structure (fig. 8). Many standards of architectural draftsmanship are evidenced in these works, particular in the fine lines drawn with a straight edge and use of scale figures dotting the structure. Additionally, they are drawn on vellum paper, a substrate then overwhelmingly used in architecture and engineering drafting for its durability (given that it will be handled by many people in an office or construction site) and transparency (for ease in making reproductions). However, there is no indication on these drawings of a site or landscape that the artist had in mind for the structure; they were not site-responsive structures, but were envisioned for an area of vast emptiness.

In 1969, Insley made the trip to Houston at the de Menils’ invitation to discuss contributing a work to Dream Monuments. A letter from Insley to John Gibson, now held in the Museum of Modern Art’s Gilbert B. and Lila Silverman Instruction Drawing Collection, details dimensions, materials, and equipment needs for /Building/ No. 5 Channel Space Reverse (fig. 9).⁽¹⁹⁾ The letter appears to have been written in over the course of three separate engagements: an initial typewritten text in black, parts of which are spaced to label a diagram drawn in ink directly onto the sheet. Red typewriting strikes through certain lines and letters using the same forward slash found in his titles. Insley’s elaborate and at times humorous notions erupt across the page, including the idea to make the sculpture ephemeral so that he would have to build it again and thus collect twice the compensation. It is only in documents of candor, in this case to his dealer, that Insley showcases his more provisional ideas; his drawings are reserved for carefully executed, and decidedly fixed, concepts.

In a separate letter to the de Menils, Insley similarly tackles the logistical and the conceptual components of his proposal, but with a more considered approach to the text. Line breaks and indentations, for example, appear to be placed for effect and show Insley bridging his patron communications and planning documents with his writing practice.⁽²⁰⁾ The de Menils, as it turns out, were not intimidated by his plan, pursuing a bid from the engineering firm Cunningham and Lemus, which priced a 300 ft. x 300 ft. square of sloping planes to be $900,000 at the time (fig. 10).⁽²¹⁾ Whether it was for cost, practicality, or other unknown reasons, the project was never initiated.

Within a few years, Insley abandoned the notion of building entirely, preferring to keep the “open, filled with potential” quality of the drawing.⁽²²⁾ Insley personally termed architecture as a discipline with “moral” applications, which is to say that buildings should be safe, habitable, and aimed towards a public good; he felt that this “morality” placed limitations on his ideas, as opposed to art, which “serve[d] nothing beyond investigation.”⁽²³⁾ In an interview published years after this shift away from architecture in his practice, Insley said that he “felt it more important to go I N, into my own mental space, and deal totally in potential and thus bypass the hindrance of realization.”⁽²⁴⁾ Insley spent the remaining decades of his art career visualizing the numerous details of O N E C I T Y through drawings and prose alone.⁽²⁵⁾

Robert Smithson similarly developed his ideas through drawing and essays, though unlike Insley he understood deviations from the initial plan as acceptable. Smithson’s practice appears to be more iterative, responding to encounters and opportunities as they presented themselves. This way of thinking perhaps came out of his personal experience in the role of what he called an “artist consultant” for the firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton, Engineers and Architects. Beginning in 1966, he advised their development of an airport terminal between Dallas and Fort Worth. Smithson relays that over the course of their collaboration “problems disclose themselves, as we encounter them. Everything follows an exploratory path.”⁽²⁶⁾ Supporting this mode of working, instead of pointing to building recommendations the group made for the project, Smithson details research they did about the given site, from aero-surveying to material samples taken from the earth. He was particularly fascinated by the industrial methods and machinery that uncovered such material. This process informed his terminology for a mode of art making he called “Site Selection Study” where “one does not impose” a work onto a given location but rather “exposes the site,”⁽²⁷⁾ likening his art practice to one of industrial extraction.

This interest is evident in Smithson’s trip to Houston for Dream Monuments in 1969. One of the sites he is known to have viewed is a sulfur mine located in the nearby town of Rosenberg, an experience which constituted the basis for his forthcoming proposal. Smithson used photography to collect information at the mine during his visit. One photograph, held by the Museum of Modern Art and attributed to Smithson, depicts the towering chunks of sulfur that constituted the sides of the mine (fig. 11). Other related photographs possibly detail types of organic matter that can be made into tar, like wood, coal, and peat. (fig. 12).

Later that year, Smithson gifted two drawings to John and Dominique de Menil, Paleozoic Era, Cambrian Period, 1969 (fig. 13), and Cambrian Map of Sulfur and Tar, 1969, that proposed artworks based on the material studies he had conducted in the region. In this project, Smithson would outline a 400-foot long map centered on Gondwanaland–a supercontinent from 550 million years ago that consisted of what are today the land masses of the Southern hemisphere–directly onto acreage in the Houston area. Heaps of sulfur would represent land and pools of tar would denote the surrounding oceans and seas. In mapping a prehistoric continent atop the earth in its current geologic formation, Smithson stages a collision of time scales, bringing an era of prehuman history into the present. It also provides a visual experience of entropy, the breakdown of systems, structures, and energies over time, and one of Smithson’s preferred lenses to understand a wide range of events and landscapes, from the splitting of the supercontinents, as in this work, to the industrial blight of suburban New Jersey.

In Paleozoic Era, Cambrian Period, Smithson depicts the proposed artwork through two modes of visualization. The bottom register is a cross section drawing that shows the length and height of the sculpture, and the top is an aerial view of the entire work. Curiously, neither visual takes into account what a viewer’s experience would be like, unless one was seeing the work from an airplane.⁽²⁸⁾ As the height of the sulfur and tar deposits would be largely contiguous with the soil, the work would simply be too large and too flat for a viewer to comprehend from the ground level. Traversing it on foot would be ruinous to the work and potentially harmful to the viewer, given the low level toxicity of sulfur. However, in this first drawn conceptualization of the work, Smithson freed himself from addressing such issues.

In a subsequent development of the project, and its last known documentation, Smithson provided the de Menils with a rough process sketch embedded into a written letter. One sheet shows large blocks, potentially the sulfur, from which chunks would be mined and deposited into an in-ground cavity, with another sheet featuring trucks offloading tar into the pit (figs. 14 and 15). Later drawings show that Smithson continued to ruminate on the possibilities of sulfur for several of other proposals and works he made for Texas-based projects, including a ring of sulfur for the Houston area and an island of sulfur to be placed in a bay north of Galveston.⁽²⁹⁾

Though the drawings detailed ideas that would be indefinitely stalled and unlikely to come to fruition, Smithson treated these papers as an immensely generative part of this practice. Though Smithson utilized the tools of preparation, namely drawings, he understood the act as part of an unpredictable and possibly futile process. “I’m equally interested in the failures of my work,” he stated in a 1973 interview, “and in isolating them, as I am in the successes.”⁽³⁰⁾

As the scale of his endeavors grew, Smithson increasingly placed his approach to process and planning in relation to architectural and engineering practices, though he distinctly positioned himself in opposition to many of its procedures. For him, the primary problem with architecture in particular, was the undue allegiance practitioners had to the original concept. “Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics of entropic change.”⁽³¹⁾ To allow a concept to be open to alteration and interlocution, possibly even system failure, was the realm of possibility and how an ambitious project might actually be achieved. Smithson deemed ideals, with their narrow dictates, to be less capable of charting a path forward. In his proposed maps of Gondwanaland, the material apparatus to realize this art is only addressed in oblique ways because Smithson’s project development happened in discussion and in situ.

Many of Smithson’s ideas, as with so much of the so-called “Impossible Art” of the era, never found their three-dimensional forms, whether it be for reasons financial, structural, or interpersonal. However, their potential, and attempts at realization, remain accessible on paper. In the project archive, on drawings and letters, invitations and receipts, we find this group of artists and patrons embattling the very limits of the possible. In this way, Dream Monuments as a project will also always remain an idea, known largely through paper remnants. And it may well be that it is exactly this characteristic that captures the imagination: it is incomplete and will always remain so, its promise open and available to be plumbed anew.