The Massive Art Installation Hidden in This Grand Rapids Park

Grand Rapids — Belknap Park in Grand Rapids isn’t a typical tourist destination. It’s a big hill, with a power substation on top and baseball diamonds below. The view, looking down the hill and across the Grand River, is among the best you’ll find in the city, but even that isn’t a major draw. For the most part, it seems like a place that pedestrians use to walk from one neighborhood to another.

Unbeknownst to most GR residents, the park is also home to a landmark artwork—Project X, a 1974 land art piece by the sculptor and conceptual artist Robert Morris.

Project X is a paved path in the shape of an X, sprawled across the slope of the hillside. One span of the X traverses from the small park at the top of the hill, down to the sidewalk past the ball diamonds. The other span is a path to nowhere, the top ending in a gravelly field next to a large antenna, the bottom terminating unceremoniously in the grass below.

There are no signs to mark it, no plaques to commemorate it, nothing in fact to place or contextualize it as an artwork. It’s listed on a few obscure websites, but unmarked on Google Maps or any Grand Rapids tourism literature. The majority of people who walk the path have no idea it’s an artwork at all.

Morris preferred it that way, no doubt. His artistic milieu runs deep in modern art circles, abstract expressionism in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and a hard turn into conceptual minimalism, performance art, and earthworks by the 1970s.

By that time, artists were debating the nature of art, and pushing the boundaries of what it even was. Artists like Morris went so far into minimalism that the actual artworks became mere ideas and concepts.

In this case, Morris was pioneering a new trend in the art world of the time. Land art, otherwise known as earthworks. Shaping and forming the earth itself, building large scale sculptural and interactive spaces out of nature.

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a spiral outcropping of rocks plunging into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, is the most famous example.

For Morris, no doubt, even that work is too heavily symbolic. Minimalism led him to produce something more on the level of urban planning and infrastructure.

This hillside, previously deteriorating, was shored up with fresh dirt and drainage pipes were installed. The path was laid down both as a pedestrian causeway, and a sort of structural bandage keeping the hillside intact.

It was the first artwork of its kind to receive a federal NEA grant for its construction. The first piece of land art to receive public money, for the improvement of a public place.

Debatably, it’s not even art. Most viewers don’t encounter it as such. Walking along, it seems like any other pathway in a lonesome urban park.

We’ll forgo the debate about the nature of art, in this case, and simply say that artworks like this are actually an incredible use of government funding. Much more than drag shows, barbershop quartets, and social justice dance performances.

This artwork does something actually useful and puts public arts funding toward improving the commons in a functional way. It indulged the creative potential of the artist, and his own artistic philosophy, while also providing something practical that city residents benefit from.

If a return to 1970s conceptual minimalism is what it takes to put public arts funding to good use, then so be it. Someone needs to tell the art students that they don’t need to just make paintings, they can actually focus on public infrastructure too.

Filling potholes, paving sidewalks, and maintaining highways is art, actually. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—Project X proves it.