Four Corners, 

Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah,

1978

One mile written text; blue pigments, water

Still Live was a site work located at Four Corners, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah (1978). The work consisted of six large scale handwritten words. To create these works Vogel transformed elements of the previous works into new ones:   Death in Venice was constructed/ reconstructed from bricks that were left over when Blue Flame was torn down. For this desert piece she took all the pigment she had been using and had it ground up by a steamroller. She then loaded the tons of powder in the containers and took them into the desert and used them to draw the words she found very powerful, but sometimes seem to be empty or beyond understanding, or just of a ridiculous meaning.

 

always     survival      transcendence

forever   muscle        money

sublime conscience  power

 

Four Corners is where the dividing line of four states runs: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Vogel wrote that it is the oldest seat of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere. It's a strange place, with a mystical eroded earth that looks more like a Martian landscape than anything else she's seen before. Vogel did a survey to find out exactly where this confluence point of the four states is, and this is where she did her work.

In that particular location Vogel inscribed the words one after another on the desert sands, to be dispersed by the wind and rain - just like the imprint of Blue Flame that lasted on the floor of UCLA courtyard for a few months slowly dissolved in the air. As she recalls, when she was finishing one word, the wind would blow away all her work. Vogel was delighted with the situation, "it was wonderful!" - she said. Sometimes the words were left for a few days or weeks, and sometimes they disappeared after a few hours, but - as the artist emphasizes - "it was always known that nature would eventually take the piece away". Vogel points out that although her works were often huge in scale, they were always based on ephemerality and impermanence, and referred to the essence of all existence - birth, life, death. Her works were subject to natural entropy - they were blown away or were dismantled by the author herself. Nothing has survived, everything has passed with the wind - "like everything in life, even the rock of Gibraltar will melt in the wind with time" - points Vogel. In the artist's point of view, life is about change - as she keeps on repeating - “nothing is permanent!”. Still Life was a transitory work of art just like life itself.

 

The work doesn’t exist anymore and unfortunately no documentation remained - the only evidence of this event are the artists' own memories and photogrphas of tests taken in order to calculate how much pigment and water is necessary to create the work in the desert. Tests were made in a lot adjacent to 901 Pacific Avenue studio in Venice.