Dave'n'Kathy's Vagabond Blog: Things You Never Knew Existed: Opus 40

So here we were, snugly moved into Rip Van Winkle RV Park in Saugerties, New York. It poured buckets last night, and the rain continued into this morning. Once the rain had passed and we had walked the cats, we wondered what we could do in the area with the half day remaining after lunch.

We finally decided to visit Opus 40, a large environmental sculpture created by sculptor and quarryman Harvey Fite, a sprawling series of dry-stone ramps, pedestals and platforms covering 6.5 acres of a bluestone quarry. It was listed as the best thing to do in our area by TripAdvisor.

Harvey Fite, then a professor of sculpture and theater at Bard College, purchased the disused quarry site in 1938, expecting to use it as a source of raw stone for his representational sculpture. Instead, inspired by a season of work restoring Mayan ruins in Honduras, he began creating a space to display the large carved statues he was beginning to create out of native bluestone. He built terraces, ramps and walkways to lead to the individual works, doing all the work by hand, and using the traditional hand tools that had been used by the local quarrymen before him. As the rampwork of his open-air gallery expanded, Fite realized that the statue, Flame, which had occupied the central pedestal --

-- had become too small for the scale to which his work had grown, and he replaced it in 1962 with a 9.5-ton bluestone pillar he had found in a nearby streambed:

Afterward, Fite realized that what he had originally conceived as a setting for sculpture had become a coherent sculpture in its own right, and a new kind of sculpture, in which carved representational work was out of place. Fite removed his other sculptures and relocated them on the surrounding grounds, and continued to work on this new sculptural concept for the remainder of his life.

In the early 1970s, after he had retired in 1969 from 35 years as a professor at Bard College, Fite built the Quarryman's Museum on the grounds, a collection of folk tools and artifacts of the quarrying era. We visited the Museum and found many quirky assemblages of old tools:

Fite finally succumbed to the pressure to give his masterwork a name. Stating tongue-in-cheek that “Classical composers don’t have to name things; they can just number them, Opus One, Opus Two, and so on,” Fite eventually arrived at what he felt was an apropos name. Opus is the Latin word for work, and 40 refers to the number of years he expected he would need to complete the work.

Fite died on May 9, 1976, in the 37th year of his creation, in an accidental fall while working on the ongoing project. His widow, Barbara Fite, created a nonprofit group to administer Opus 40, and opened the grounds to public access to help support its preservation. Brendan Gill, in the March 1989 edition of Architectural Digest, called Opus 40 "one of the largest and most beguiling works of art on the entire continent," and he has also called it “the greatest earthwork sculpture I have ever seen.” Though Harvey Fite was not associated with the Land Art or Earthworks sculptural movement of the 1970s, he came to be known as a pioneer of that movement, and was recognized in 1977 by the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, in a show entitled “Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects,” as a forefather of the earthworks movement.

We purchased a timed ticket and drove over at the appointed hour, where Kathy found the entrance sign and pointed the way in to the reception tent:

Our path followed an old farm road, along what appeared to be a colonial stone wall:

When we arrived, we were greeted with this view of the Amphitheater, where numerous events and performances occur. A Sonny Rollins concert was filmed at Opus 40 in 1986 for Robert Mugge's documentary, "Saxophone Colossus"; the band Mercury Rev recorded "Opus 40", a song about the site, on their 1998 album, "Deserter's Songs"; and musical artist Amanda Palmer made a 2017 music video cover of Pink Floyd's song, "Mother," at the Opus 40 Amphitheater.

Once we were checked in, we started exploring the site. Our first stop was a flat, white surface marked by parallel, straight grooves which were etched by pebbles etched by Ice Age glaciers:

Nearby, we could see, and then walked through, subterranean passageways:

Here is how the passageways looked from within:

We got a good look at the Fite home, which remains a private residence. Its design was fascinating, but we could not explore it because it was not open to the public:

Below the bluestone pillar was a circular platform overlooking the "his and hers" pools:

In the early days, when the house had no plumbing or electricity, the pools served as refrigerators. A mesh bag with milk, butter or eggs could be lowered into the water, kept cool, and pulled up when needed:

Here is a view of the pillar from the far side of the pools:

In the back yard of the home, we found the House Pool, which is a natural quarry pool that was excavated at the same time as the house was built. The statue, "The Bather," has stood watch over the pool since the house was built:

After exploring the quarry, sculpture and house and yard, we walked over to the Museum and Gift Shop. The upper floor of the Museum displayed old iron-forged tools. This room, on the lower floor, was a temporary exhibit of the work of Melora Kuhn:

We finished exploring the Museum and Gift Shop, and then returned to a quarry shelf above the Amphitheater, which is one area which visitors are allowed to play with the rocks. Most people have stacked rocks into inuksuks and other similar shapes. Kathy wanted to do the same: