Editor's note:

Sculptor Dale Eldred is hardly a household name in the United States. And yet, during his lifetime, his massive, light-responsive installations were featured in numerous publications, including Newsweek, Life, Omni, Metropolis, Places, Stern, and the Architectural Institute of America Journal. His large-scale, city-wide, solar-sculpture exhibitions were commissioned by institutions in the U.S. and Europe, including the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Helsinki (Finland) City Art Museum, and the Cankaya Cultural and Arts Foundation in Ankara, Turkey.

In collaboration with Todd Bolender, the State Ballet of Missouri's artistic director and choreographer, Eldred designed and produced the scenography for four original ballet works. Artist and art critic Antero Kare has said, "Dale Eldred is the most public artist. His tools are huge but his method is subtle and gentle. He brings the audience to the essentials and leaves us to a discussion with the seasons, and with the rhythms of nature and culture."

t the Sky Art Conference in Alaska in 1987, Dale Eldred heard his friend Otto Piene use the phrase "radio wilderness." Piene­artist, founding member of Group Zero, and, from 1974 to 1995, the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T., was talking about the back of the moon. He was discussing a recommendation that the moon's other side be maintained as a galactic nature preserve, free of man–generated wave lengths of light and sound. Piene pointed out that the moon's back side is, in fact, the last true wilderness in the earth-moon system.

This high–grade abstract came as another reminder to Dale that the sky is not empty. It is occupied by entities more startling even than clouds, drops of rain, and flakes of snow. The sky is filled with messages­massed and massless. The sky is a container and a conveyance, a kind of message plasma. Children's prayers and those of mothers at the end of their lives­all these float upward through AM and FM, citizens' band and ham, radar and sonar; through the range of visible light, X–ray, ultra–violet and ultra–red, alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Human dreams billow through this grid like steam.

If you want to make public art, and to put it in a place where people will look­a place they are accustomed to regarding as a source of inspiration and a harbor for large questions­the best place is the sky. Though that is not why Dale chose it as his medium and canvas; he chose the sky because that's where he looked when he strove to think beyond the edge of his imagination. And as any naturalist knows, if you gaze in one direction long enough, whether your vision is in focus or not, some kind of wonder will reveal itself

The relationship of time, light, and space revealed itself to Dale in the sky over Egypt. A series of 35mm slides records the place and moment. The terrain is dusty and flat, uniformly tan and utterly arid, with a vivid blue sky and blinding sunlight. You know immediately that it is Egypt. A path slopes down a channel cut into the earth, leading to a dark opening that looks like a mine shaft. Fifty feet from the opening, with its lower edge resting in the dust, is a square piece of mirror, 12" square, propped against a rock and angled 30 degrees from vertical. The dark opening is the entrance to a small tomb. Though this tomb doesn't appear on a formal tourist itinerary, it is visited often enough to make it worth one man's while to stay near its doorway and offer his services as guide. If you want to visit the tomb, the man checks the position of the sun in the sky and then adjusts the angle of the mirror propped against the rock. He carries another mirror with him into the tomb; once inside he catches the beam from the exterior mirror with the interior mirror and redirects the sunlight across whatever surface you wish to examine.

There are no carbon traces in many of the tombs in Egypt; it is believed that the tombs' interiors were illuminated for the workers by sunlight, reflected and directed into the space off polished copper plates that were frequently readjusted to follow the sun's arc across the sky. Illumination without the use of fire, utilizing a simple working knowledge of the relationship of earth to sun. This may seem a small revelation, but it served to summarize all Dale had seen in several years' travel across Central and South America, Asia, Africa, and southern Europe. It changed completely the course of his work. It lifted it off the ground.

efore his death in 1993, Dale chaired the Sculpture department at the Kansas City Art Institute for 33 years. Over the last two decades, he regularly asked his students what their work had to do with time. It's a difficult question for young artists. They are only barely aware of the material nature of objects, including themselves, and are struggling on the most basic level to connect the object with the subject. Young artists who have tentatively chosen the realm of revelation tend to work with metaphor and image that derive from feelings they trace to their hearts. (Dale used to ask, "Where do these feelings come from? Show me." The students' hands rose haltingly to cover the left sides of their chests.) The questions are inward, personal, difficult. Joy is generally absent from the works that result — of all our body parts, physical and ephemeral, the heart bears the heaviest burden.

Young artists search for powerful truth. They don't necessarily trust their intellects to guide them in this search. Their distrust isn't due to ignorance, or even naivete. Their age­this specific time of their lives­is one of tentative commitment to ideas; they are just beginning to focus and to select a point of view. They are students, after all, and have the privilege of more freedom of thought than they might ever know again. They see the blatant falsity of many of the empirically–derived truths that drive the machinery of the world's economics and politics. They don't believe the intellect has emotional capacity; they don't believe in a progression toward truth that begins with simple seeing. Or that awareness that comes by way of the mind — through seeing and then knowing — can rock the spirit with force equal to awareness conveyed by the heart.

The abstracts of love, ecstasy, pain, betrayal­these are made at human scale. Though invisible and dematerial we acknowledge that they have content, they are important. They pose dense implosive questions. Like sub-atomic matter we know them by the evidence they leave in passing, the trails they rake through our and others' lives.

n Delhi, India, Dale came upon by accident something he had never heard of before — not in any architecture or art history course, not in any course at all: the observatories of the Maharaja Jai Singh. A city block, carefully detailed and arranged like a park, with beautiful, mammoth structures, each of which, he discovered, was designed as an instrument to study the sky.

Jai Singh, born in India in 1686, was a passionate astronomer. He wanted to record and to predict the patterns of the earth, moon, sun and stars. He studied Ptolemy, Hipparchus, and Euclid. He consulted the astronomical tables in use during his time. Testing their predictions of specific events, e.g., the appearance of new moons, he found the computed predictions deviated slightly from his own observations.

He set out to develop instruments that would respond accurately to celestial events. Like his European counterparts, Jai Singh's first instruments were small and made of brass. He noted inaccuracies in their readings and determined that these must be due to the instruments' size and to a wearing away of their small, movable parts. His answer was to build massive-scale instruments out of polished stone, with increments delineated by light- and dark-colored surfaces. He believed that the size would allow for greater accuracy and that the stone would not erode away to any degree of significance.

He was apparently satisfied with the results obtained from his first construction in Delhi. To confirm the truth of his observations he constructed similar instrument gardens in Jaipur, Muttra, Benares, and Ujjain. It is said that another reason Jai Singh built these additional constructions is that he believed citizens all over India should have the opportunity to study the stars.

Thomas Jefferson worked with public space in much the same way. The section of the University of Virginia he designed is so clearly about shared knowledge­the grandeur of the rotunda, the connectedness of all the spaces, the gardens' dignity and human scale. An atmosphere is created, a philosophy is presented: This is where we come to learn, without aggression, without greed.

Dale Eldred's work was about simple principles, stunning in their revelation: Reflections pass across a wall, shadows lengthen and decrease, flowers bloom or don't. The earth rotates on an axis tilted at an angle of 23-1/2 degrees from vertical; it orbits around the sun in an elliptical pattern, with an average radius of 93 million miles. Dale was stunned by the elegant mechanics of our physical world, and he hoped through his work to share some of the wonder.

The son and grandson of immigrant builders, Dale prided himself on his Yankee ingenuity. He loved poetry, the sound of a grinder, and the smell of burning steel. He liked to say that his work existed at a point mid-way between vision and invention: the vision of the relationship of time to light to space, and the invention of a means to make that vision manifest.