IMPRESSIONS FROM A DAY WITH NOT VITAL

I am looking at my friend as we sit on a bentwood cafe chair inside of a compact steel prism with a grass-covered roof, sinking beneath a hillside in the Engadin village of Sent. The mechanism that is lowering us into the ground, controlled by “up” and “down” buttons about 1,000 feet away, is loud like a construction site. I can see the grassy top layer slowly subside through one cut-out window until it slips out of site. Once submerged, the noise of the motor stops, and we are bathed in complete silence and darkness, our eyes and ears adjusting to the sensory deprivation. For a minute we keep still, and the interior of the “Josüjo” or “Disappearing House” begins to reveal itself again, enveloping us in a green phosphorescent glow that is growing stronger. It is breathtaking; the green light has rendered the depth between my body and the surfaces around me abstract. As I move, slowly touching the cold metal walls to reestablish a physical understanding of my surroundings, I am struck by the way that surrendering to this structure brings me a deep feeling of calm. I am quite content here, embedded in a verdant slope beneath a planted roof which, having now been dropped into its subterranean place, is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the hillside. We, and this little building, have effectively disappeared.

The rest of the time I spend traversing the Engadin Valley with the artist Not Vital, visiting his sprawling sculpture park, his library of precious Romansch books, his sprayed-concrete painting studio, his childhood home in Sent, and his castle, the Schloss Tarasp, I try in vain to glean what motivated his tremendous outpouring of work. It seems to me that he gathers strength from a tight knot of impatience and extreme determination. The sheer scale of his imprint on this place (and, indeed, all over the world, from the House to Watch the Sunset on the edge of the Amazon to House to Watch 3 Volcanoes on the Indonesian island of Flores to his marble island, NotOna, situated in a vast Patagonian lake) is beyond comprehension until one is here; walking, driving, riding on a boat, climbing endless stairs, opening trap doors, crossing bridges, hiking up mountains. It is staggering to consider his facility for conceptualizing these installations and then actually realizing them. As anyone building anything will know, the devil lies in wresting a physical product from its conception, requiring complex networks of human partnerships. Vital responds to my questions about this — the nitty gritty of his process — with the most oblique answers. “Drawings are not always necessary”; “Everything had to be carried into the valley with a helicopter”; “You don’t have to build something to make something….” He is known to not give too much away. As a visitor, I am invited only to partake in a deliberate exploration of his completed spaces, like an audience at a theater. There is a distinct absence of struggle and labor, as if all these places appeared at the moment he imagined them. I want to understand better what he means when he says, “As I am not an architect, I have freedom.”

Nearing the end of our walk around his sculpture park, Vital takes us to a polished stainless steel bridge over a gushing stream, which he explains was made offsite and dropped into place with a helicopter. It appears so fresh, like it was situated hours before, but Vital tells us it has been here for several years. The bridge is made from two polished steel sheets, one flat that traverses the stream, and the other upright like a wall, bisecting it at a diagonal. In the middle of the wall there is an opening, like a door, and to walk straight across the bridge a person moves along one face of the wall, through the door, and then along the opposite face of the wall, having switched sides. As Vital leads us over the bridge we see him and then we don’t — he disappears as he passes through the opening behind the reflective wall, as if folded into a Jacob’s Ladder. The steel wall, mirroring the woods around us, camouflages everything behind it. The gesture is powerful but still slight, sharp. Vital reappears on the far bank of the stream and we follow his lead.