Complex Two, City, © Michael Heizer.
Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation
Photo by Michael Heaizer
text by Hannah Bhuiya
Built by Heizer, alongside generations of workers from 1970 to today, this horizontal desert lithopolis is now the largest contemporary artwork in existence. With an imprint that is two kilometers long by half a kilometer wide, City (1970 -2022) is constructed almost entirely of the raw materials (gravel, sand, clay) naturally found on site in a remote, and somewhat radioactive, Nevada valley. Securing the location in his mid twenties, the younger Heizer—already a disruptive international art star—intuitively saw what could be realized here; for his purposes, the harsh conditions were a geologic jackpot. Now eighty, he’s devoted his life to wresting these shapes from the arid, mountain-ringed plain. In late 2022, the artist’s very personal vision was opened for strictly managed public visitation on certain days of the month and year. Satellite eyes get a more constant view, where, just like the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Giza and other emblems of national power, the graphic footprint of this (one) man-made monument is visible from space at all times. To comprehend City, it was essential to experience it.
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” 1855
“I am not here to tell people what it all means. You can figure it out for yourself.”
— Michael Heizer, to The New York Times upon the inauguration of City, August 2022
38.03000° N, 115.436111° W
Michael Heizer’s City (1970-2022),
outside Hiko, Nevada.
Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of City is that it is invisible. You have been told you have arrived. But as you approach, there is absolutely nothing to be seen above ground, no hint at all of the soaring, otherworldly landscape that had lured you there. Driven up together with others in that day’s entry group, you do see a working cattle ranch: a homestead, vehicles, fencing, a corral. The trees growing around the perimeter of the compound are the only ones so tall for hundreds of miles around. The one detail, which infers that this off-grid oasis belongs to one Michael Madden Heizer, contemporary artist, mover of monumental stones, creator of City, is a cache of extra-large boulders trussed up behind a dark green farm gate. No ordinary cattle-rancher would have megaliths like this lounging so casually in his backyard. Rather, these are future Levitated Masses, embodiments of the artist’s inimitable visual language. Only an ice-age glacier has moved more great stones across such vast distances
The glimpse of Heizer’s private enclave is brief. Further down the slim side road, the van cruises up to stop at a large mound of gravel, and you enter City proper. It is only when you are standing inside that City deigns to reveal its full breadth. To create the plateau spread out before you, millions of tons of material have been blasted away over fifty long years of labor, and it’s all still there, rearranged, refined, re-formed. Sunken in City’s core, you no longer see the Heizer homestead, or even the mountain ranges. All else disappears; your entire world is now this network of looped lanes, sloped stelae, and sculpted Euclidean solids. You will have three hours to explore before the Triple Aught Foundation (which administers City) returns to collect you.
Within City, there is only City. There is nothing here to sustain your physical body with its many inherent weaknesses: no shelter, no shade, not even a park bench seat. But to your spirit, it feels limitless. This is a muted primal state you’re pulled back from in dreams that evaporate upon waking. You can now feel limbically, your boundaries dissolved; you, too, are the landscape, from your soles to the ends of your hair shafts, now alert cellular antennae. There is no sound, no breeze. No extraneous stimuli to detract from your absorption of the continuum before you. There is only the sun above, and you; Fata Morgana mirages shimmer ahead as you walk the stony allées. Sharp angles versus textured gradient, faultless concrete, and unseen steel transmogrified into avatars of ‘Pure Form’ in the Platonic sense. It evokes the Futurism of The Lawnmower Man (1992) or Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” (1985) music video, when the geometric grid underlying all 3D form becomes visible. This is an architect’s blueprint made real, instant access to an aspect of the shadow world that lies behind every ‘normal’ city.
Michael Heizer —
City, Complex 1 Construction,
Garden City, NV – 1970
Photograph by Gianfranco
Gorgoni © Maya Gorgoni
Courtesy of The Estate of Gianfranco Gorgoni
In a normal city, being truly alone is impossible; here, all comforting supply chains are severed. Here, you are alone. The sole participant in a science fiction game, whose rules you sense in your ganglia, watch for airborne attack. Every moment you remain in City, you’re exposed to the full face of the elements, as if already lain on the sky-pyre of a Zoroastrian tower of silence for the eagles to pick your bones clean. A deliberately pre-ruined ruin that time cannot touch. The closest to nullity you can come while still alive, this is a hyperuranion, a portal into ‘Aletheia,’ the world of perfect forms beyond the river of Lethe. To stand within City is to confront your own death; to return from City is to survive it.
It’s a small club, those who have been allowed to breach this threshold. The public-facing ambassadors of City are Ed Higbee and Brent Holmes, who had met us at the Triple Aught Foundation office on the main street of Alamo, NV (pop. 822). City is cocooned within the 704,000 acres of the Basin and Range National Monument, off State Route 318, and the drive up is a scenic wonder. Ed, a Nevadan born and bred with a family background in ranching (his cousin Jeanne Sharp Howerton is a local historian), shares lore about rock formations, hot springs, and the silver lode still hiding in the mountains. He helped construct City back in the ’70s with others from his high school who’d ride out for a few days of hired labor. Holmes, who manages the visits, is an artist who writes on cultural aspects of the entity that is Las Vegas, which he knows well, being the son of a longtime Strip headliner. He’s wearing black cowboy boots from a recent road trip across Texas. Whereas Heizer himself is immaterial, a presence behind the curtain, Higbee and Holmes are friendly, present, human. Neither lecture on what to expect at City. But, intent on sparking a locally-rooted sense-memory at the final gate, Ed picks a sprig of sagebrush. Handing it over, he instructs me to crush the trefoil leaves—the smell is fresh, sweet, and as he wanted it to be, Proustian, unforgettable.
The aesthetic coherence of City is formidable. There’s not a rock out of place. Subtle ton sur ton gradations of sandstone on sandstone. Ecru on ecru. Russet to raw umber. With a sleek, industrial allure, as if engineered by an alien intelligence, the surface reads like ribbons of smooth concrete, a surreal skate park of dreams. Brent mentions that just after pictures of the completed City hit the press in 2022, an adventurous set of skaters made a trek out to what they imagined as the ‘El Dorado’ of skate spots. Turned away by workers who’d caught them on the camera feed that covers the preserve, had the youthful trespassers somehow gained entry, they would have been disappointed. Images can be deceiving. What looks like lanes of smooth cement is actually composed of loose, graded gravel, a detail that photography just can’t capture. Millions upon millions of stones have been crushed and combed out to create soft oblongs, curves, and mounds. Precious rubble. The raised concrete borders outlining the infinite ‘race track’ are around the same size and are shaped like any sidewalk curb. However, they rarely trace a straight line. Instead, they flow in logical undulation around the contours of the topology.
Complex One is comprised of a ‘T’ bracket set over an ‘L’ shape bar of the same width, resting upon a ramp of levelled earth bookended by wedges of sloped concrete. From afar, they seem to touch, creating a rectangular rune; when you stand before them, you realize that they’re set many meters away from any real connection. It’s a heroic trompe l’oeil. To the right, looking over the plaza below, the textured red cement pours that cascade down Complex Two are like shards of Mars. These and the further perimeter slopes are coated with a rough, crushed scoria utterly hostile to human flesh. Not only is injury inherent in the materials, any scuff marks on the gargantuan version of his ‘45º, 90º, 180º’ concept (several steep triangular blocks upon a thick rectangular base, and the only skateable platform) would surely have summoned a furious Heizer and a loaded shotgun. And if the interlopers had managed to broadcast the desecration as YouTube channel content, violating his strict image release policy, he’d probably have bulldozed it all and started over. In the austere fiefdom of Heizer, there is no graffiti, no fooling, and NO UNSANCTIONED PHOTOGRAPHY.
Because Erich von Däniken’s ‘Ancient Aliens’ did not build this. The Earthly and earthy American maverick Michael Heizer did. This City has one architect, one urban planner, one general contractor. He is the garrison commandant, chief engineer, generator technician, Mayor, and Sheriff. A ‘Wizard of Oz’ exerting a panoptic presence felt every moment you stand inside his borders. Defender and Protector of the ultimate gesamtkunstwerk, he’s Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, his hard-won skyscraper horizontal and built with negative space. While it’s true that the obdurate Heizer is adamantly resistant to categorization, always mortally determined to emphasize his independence of thought, agency, and originality, refusing to be part of any group or movement from the start, the following is also true: City is ‘Land Art’s Final Boss’. Because after this, the game is over. And Heizer has won.
There’s no mystery to how Heizer built his invincible City—sun-up to sun-down out there on the plain, sustained by gallery sales and private commissions. Anything garnered from a little gambling session down in Vegas went in the pot too. The total cost of City is cited as around $40 million, which, for half a century’s worth of yellow iron and manpower, as well as maintenance of the work far into the future, is not outrageous at all. It could have cost a lot more. Unlike the foreman of an extractive open pit mine, ripping the guts out of the earth for exponential profit, Heizer never had access to anything nearing the power of a Bagger 293 (the largest earth mover in the world). Or even the organized workforce of thousands marshalled by the viziers of antiquity. Aiming for, and achieving, totalitarian control of his own one-man city with only the resources at hand, Heizer has truly pulled off something impossible.
What only Heizer can explain, though, is the why. And as a professional enigma, he’s not going to, as he declined to commit more to the record than what he’s already said. But that’s okay. Because everything the artist has ever said, or ever made, says something about City. And vice versa.
40.72287° N, 74.00039° W
[former site of] Michael Heizer’s loft,
79 Mercer Street, New York.
Construction of the World Trade Center (Twin Towers) began on August 5, 1966; the North Tower was completed in December 1970, and the South Tower in July 1971. Within the same time frame, the career of young artist Michael Heizer was rising just as fast. Born in California in 1944 with family roots in Nevada, he moved to NYC in 1966 after nixing his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. Selling a few drawings here and there, he was getting by as a loft painter when he met the more established Walter de Maria on the job. A friendship was forged, and long nights were spent talking and drinking in Heizer’s Mercer Street loft, putting the world to rights. Mixing with the whole Warhol, Max’s Kansas City, downtown scene, he rubbed his shoulders with others wanting to make their mark on the ‘art world.’ Formally, the artist had been experimenting, moving from spraying geometric masonite panels with car paint to coating shaped canvases with layers of clear lacquer, as if not painted at all. Heizer was also exploring bold stylistic graphisme, as seen in the monochrome oblong Track Painting of 1967. But painting alone wasn’t physical enough for this active West Coast kid. As he explained to Julia Brown in their interview for his MOCA exhibition, Sculpture in Reverse (1984): “I was determined to be a contributor to the development of American art, not to simply continue European art. By European art, I mean painting on canvas and sculptures that you walk around and that look like Balzac or Moses.” He was setting himself up from the get-go as the‘anti-Rodin.’
34.64708° N, 117.60175° W
El Mirage Dry Lake, CA
For the Land Project events throughout 1968, Heizer was irresistibly drawn back to the origin points of his bloodline, to dry lake beds and tracts of desert land whose names speak to a rough past of conflict, clash, and mineral exploitation: Massacre, Coyote, El Mirage, Silver Springs. He dug and blasted and cut and kicked. There was no one out there to stop him. This was his true palette, the sun-baked salt-rock remnants of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, which had once glistened from mountain to horizon across the state. And here we learn that Heizer’s titles are literal terms that lock on each component and most exactly describe ‘what it is.’ Circular Surface Drawing (1968) is the surface of a dry lake bed upon which circles have been drawn (using earth thrown out of the open back of a moving truck). A sketch from a North Nevadan intervention, Sanguine Surface Seduction — Thanatopal Phantasmagoria Complex, shows a large square block entombed in an open excavation, sex and death, and telluric currents colliding. His Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) burned Heizer’s glyphic vocabulary into the aesthetic consciousness of the epoch, Nazca lines for the post-industrial society. Then, when he invited some of his New York City friends out West, Heizer ignited the Land Art/ Earth Art movement without even trying.
Dear Dick, Land project positive. Imperative underway. Death forces must be spent, spiritual waves felt. Thanks for route information. Don’t underestimate dirt.
— Walter [de Maria] and Mike [Heizer], Western Union Telegram to Richard Bellamy at Noah Goldowsky Gallery New York, sent from Williams, AZ on Route 66, on April 6, 1968.
40.76356° N, 73.97558° -[former site of] Virginia Dwan Gallery (1965 -1971),
New York.
Heizer had secured some key patrons and collectors by the late 1960s—New York taxicab mogul Robert Scull, West German art dealer Heiner Friedrich, well-connected curator Richard Bellamy (as per the telegram above), but his horizons were ever-expanding. Without gallerist and 3M heiress Virginia Dwan’s profound enthusiasm for this type of work, backed up with an effectively unlimited production fund, there would be no Land Art movement to study, only hazy ideas sketched out on the back of Stardust Hotel dinerplacemats. In October 1968, Heizer’s large-scale color transparency of Dissipate 2 (1968) was part of the seminal Earth Works group show at Dwan’s elegant Manhattan gallery, appearing alongside work from coevals Dennis Oppenheim, Claes Oldenberg, Walter de Maria and Roberts Morris, and Smithson. The scattering linear trenches he’d cut into the parched Black Rock desert crust, patterned after the random trajectories of dropped matches, connected with the in crowd. The content of this show cannot be divorced from the political and social turmoil of its era, with the Weather Underground and other student groups exploding in the daily headlines. Those who protested government hegemony, police brutality, or Vietnam, blew up buildings or robbed banks, were arrested and placed on FBI watchlists for life. Heizer and friends blew up some land out in the desert, and were lauded as leading avant-garde artists. Happening right in the belly of the beast, with Dwan Gallery perched near The Plaza and the Park, the exhibition marked a key ‘art world’ breakthrough that bolstered the nascent careers of everyone involved.
The much-reviewed presentation was made possible, at the most base level, because 3M doesn’t just make Post-its®. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, co-founded in 1902 by Virginia’s father, John Dwan, sought out minerals for use in industrial grinding machines. Varieties of sandpaper were 3M’s primary output until their “specialty chemical” labs began to transform compounds aimed initially at military, nuclear, and aerospace applications into a battery of products for the burgeoning consumer age. That handy can of Scotchgard™ found in every home came from tech developed for coating jet fuel hoses. 3M factories in the heartlands churned out water-resistant Per-and Poly-Fluoroalkyl substances, aka PFAs (supplied in bulk to DuPont, who had coined the catchy name, Teflon™), aka river-contaminating, cancer-causing forever chemicals. Perhaps it was a sublimated affinity for (or acknowledgement of) the chthonian source of her wealth that compelled Dwan to so open-handedly support the interventions of Heizer, Smithson, and de Maria, artists who boldly appropriated that self-same American land to yield independent, anti-commercial statements. Like an ouroboros, Dwan’s “clean” corporate cash had snaked back through systems of commodity exchange to become Earth Art, dirt again. Sight-unseen, Dwan had commissioned and underwritten Double Negative, and it was also from Dwan that Heizer received the initial loan needed to secure the land in Garden Valley, NV that would become City.
46.9443° N, 7.4494° E
Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. [former site of]
Cement Slotand Depression, (1969).
In 1968, the American tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris sent out an emissary from their New York PR agency to solicit art events to sponsor. When she found her way to curator Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern, one of the most powerful shows of the era, Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, was propelled into being. The inspired and inspiring curation was quickly pulled together as a ‘happening’ over March and April 1969. With airfares and shipment costs covered by the sponsor, erudite Europe was to welcome the radical Americans to compete with the best of their own conceptual and minimalist avant-gardists. Heizer was a key part of the vision, traveling to Switzerland and also to a similarly themed show, Op Losse Schroeven (On Loose Screws), at the Stedelijk Amsterdam, curated by Wim Beeren. At both, the artist hacked into the earth and smashed the cement of the towns hosting him. In some archive shots, Heizer jubilantly shatters craters into the Kunstahalle entrance concrete with a wrecking ball, smoking a cigarette, his other hand holds a stick of marking chalk. It was a super-grouping of practitioners of the ‘anti-form’ revolution: Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys, and Lawrence Weiner, who hand-chiseled a square ‘hole’ in the interior plaster. Heizer made an impression as a French-conversant, Claude Lévi-Strauss-quoting thinker who also knew how to operate heavy machinery. This was a new, unsettling language infiltrating and threatening to implode the city’s most august cultural structures. As Heizer wrote in his December ’69 Artforum cover story, captioning pictures of Cement Slot (Bern), a line in the grass aligned to the spire of the Munstertürm across the river, and Sidewalk Depression (Amsterdam): “One alternative to the Museum enclosure is to go beyond it. Both art and museums are victims ofthe city, which demands compliance with its laws and limits. Anything is only part of wherever it is.” He meant every word.
36.61586° N, 114.34455° W
Double Negative(1969-1970)
Carp Elgin Road, NV.
Double Negative ‘goes beyond’ in the most immense way imaginable. Cut into his familiar Nevada terrain, Heizer’s statement was an earthwork as it had never been attempted before. From 1969 to 1970, massive twin trenches were dynamited out by Heizer, and the ravines were cleared by an intrepid local tractor operator. The incisions sliced into opposing edges of a mesa cliff to expose raw and ancient sedimentary layers, removing over 240,000 tons of rock and earth. The two cuts create a gash approximately 30 feet wide, 50 feet deep, and 1500 feet long—around the height of a New York City skyscraper. You need a plane and an off-road vehicle to even attempt to go there, but it’s worth it. Viewed from above, it’s like a god dropped a thunderbolt before grabbing it back violently, ripping out the central void in the mesa. Standing within the work, you become a Rückenfigur suspended over the crests of the badlands valley tumbling before you, a Caspar David Friedrich of the West, wandering above an empire of dirt.The impact of Double Negative was seismic, especially so given that it was intractably installed in a place where almost no one actually could see it. The audacious ambition of the piece became known through the epic aerial imagery Heizer brought back to town, shot by chiaroscuro maestro Gianfranco Gorgoni (a photographic portraitist who had lensed an encyclopedia of artists from Giorgio de Chirico to Chuck Close).
35.78863° N, 115.25699° W
Jean Dry Lake, Nevada [former sites of]
Rift 1 (1968) + Circular Surface Planar Displacement (1970).
The visionary collector Sam Wagstaff comes into the picture at this explosive moment in Heizer’s career. His September 1969 Other Ideas exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he was employed as Curator of Contemporary Art, included drawings of Heizer’s Of/For Earth Projects, featuring pictures of the Moon surface annotated with his trenchant motto “Art before Life,” among a chaotic mass of interactive exhibits. When the East Coast blue blood of independent wealth (derived from family real estate holdings in Manhattan and Long Island) made his trip out to Nevada, he brought along an 8mm film camera. Through his lens, a mid-twenties Michael Heizer dazzles; he’s got the bone structure of a young Chet Baker with the ‘Western Man’ aura of playwright Sam Shepard, topped off by dark, windswept locks. Shirtless and sunglassed, in jeans and boots, Heizer guides Wagstaff to his previously made cuts and substrate insertions into cracked dry lake beds. The men survey the remnants of the death-defying, Evel Knievel stunts that carved raw circles with just a string pinned in the dirt, spinning the motorcycle like a kinetic compass needle. These works are the residue of thrilling recklessness: a tire blowout or a minuscule miscalculation, and it’s all over for both art and artist. As Heizer walks away from the camera, the frame widens; the figure of the artist melts into a slim silhouette, a man alone against the ring of black mountains enclosing the dusty arena of his labor.
45º, 90º, 180º’ City © Michael Heizer.
Courtesy of Triple Aught Foundation
Photo by Ben Blackwell
City, 1970 — 2022 © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo by Eric Piasecki
City, 1970 — 2022 © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo by Eric Piasecki
42.35947° N, 83.06461° W
Detroit Institute of Art, [former site of]
Dragged Mass Displacement (1971).
Another reel by Wagstaff captures the spring 1971 work-in-progress of Dragged Mass, whereby the full weight of a 30-ton block of Vermont granite became mired in the mud of the Detroit Institute’s Woodward Avenue lawn. Heizer himself drove one of the bulldozers. The museum show had been titled Photographic and Actual Works, and inside were images of the Munich Depression crater pit dug in May 1969. However, many saw the weighty actualization outside as a disturbing act of aggression and vandalism, not art at all. It seems staging unfiltered violence on a busy thoroughfare in the heart of an already hurting metro center provoked a louder voice of protest than the lonesome desert. The recent riots and rebellions that had taken place just blocks away were quashed with excessive use of force and led to multiple fatalities. These ‘massacres’ were fresh, not of legend, leading to a diametric conflict with the DIA board that prompted Wagstaff’s resignation from his position, but not before they forced him to pay $10,000 to resow the lawn. (The bronze cast of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ by the steps was more along the lines of what the conservative trustees appreciated.) The civic fury was so keen that later the stone itself was hauled away and dynamited to shards, never to drag its mass in that town again. Returning to his Bowery-view apartment and thrust back into the pulsating New York scene, Wagstaff was soon to meet Robert Mapplethorpe, his life partner and muse from 1972 on.
Michael Heizer’s Double Negative Morman Mesa, Overton, Nevada 1969 — 1970
Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni © Maya Gorgoni. Courtesy of The Estate of Gianfranco Gorgoni
37.17694° N, 116.04611° W
Sedan Crater, [former site of] Nevada Test Site
Proving Grounds.
[To see the nuclear shot scars, just zoom out from the Sedan blast crater, then scan south toward Yucca Lake.] By the early 1970s, the polarities of Michael Heizer’s universe had been firmly established. While his name was in circulation on the high-cultural currents of New York and Europe, his physical body spent most of its time isolated in Nevada’s nuclear-adjacent wastelands. In the desert, he was the master of his own enterprise, far from Gotham’s excesses, art dealer hustle, and staid museum boards. Here, he was head-down, boots on the ground, working on City: Complex One in earnest. Riding his motorcycle to town for supplies, to use the phone, to even see any other person, he was an arrow of rising dust along the road. He was breathing it in, sweating it out, on this land, his land. He had no neighbors. At first living in a trailer, later building an off-grid homestead ranch and studio, City became the primary focus of his energy, the ultimate ‘onsite’ base where he could ‘expend death forces and feel spiritual waves.’
No foreign nation has ever attacked the United States with a nuclear device. But the United States has, attacking itself over and over again, under the euphemism of ‘testing.’ For Nevadans, the Cold War was burning hot. Between 1951 and 1992, the US military joint forces carried out 100 atmospheric and 828 underground blasts, around 90 miles from City, depending on the position of the individual detonations. As Heizer was drawing up blueprints to fulfill his vision of a ‘world after time,’ the Baneberry test of December 1970 rocked the valley with a 10-kiloton bomb set off next to an active earthquake fault line, cracking the rock strata and venting a toxic cloud that drifted out on the desert breeze, poisoning ranch land and people inside their homes. These residents of Nevada, Arizona, and Utah who were able—much later—to apply for government compensation for certain types of cancer are called ‘Downwinders.’ Downwind? Heizer had decided to plant himself directly next door. With this perilous proximity, Heizer’s circles, lines, and pits are anarchic gestures that provide a subversive corollary to the military operations that intentionally and repeatedly scarred this defenseless terrain. This is a metaphysical nihilism fascinated by entropic destruction and enraptured by the beauty in each white-sky blast.
In Fondazione Prada’s Michael Heizer monograph (concurrent with a major show in their Milan space over winter 1996-7), I discover several images of City as a work-in-progress. One breathtaking series, spanning several double-page spreads, shows Complex One and its undeveloped surrounds blanketed in a layer of soft snow, a poetic obliteration perhaps hinting at the nuclear winter always hovering in the skies. In 1969, the book’s author, Germano Celant, always enamored of the foundational disruptors, had been present in Bern to witness those ‘attitudes become form.’ The influential Italian curator also included Heizer in his 1997 Venice Biennale statement, “Future, Present, Past.” Heizer was all three. In 2013, when Celant decided to reconstruct the When Attitudes Become Form exhibition at the Fondazione Prada Palazzo in Venice, Heizer’s 1969 interventions could not be restaged. In our play-it-safe, regulation-and-permit-filled age, you’re simply not allowed to smash the Stones of Venice. Lawrence Weiner was allowed to rechisel his square hole in the wall plaster, but exterior ‘vandalism’ was a no-go. In 1969, the show was an impromptu and unpredictable live happening of unchecked audacity with free cigarettes and no ‘health and safety’ reports required. Today, the electric charge of breaking ground, the ‘looseness’ of those screws, has been lost. The ecstatic truth delivered by the original Heizer work is irrestaurable.
I attended the reiterated 2013 show, where Celant, Rem Koolhaas, and Thomas Demand’s sensitive installation with its films from the era, transported viewers back to this lip of time, before any of these artists knew if success or obscurity was their fate. It’s a difficult task to live forever on the edge. But I feel that Heizer’s practice is still edgy, because it has never ceased to be riven with risk and confrontation. He’d already called it, telling John Gruen in 1977, “[W]hatever I was doing, I was doing it first. And whatever I was wishing, I was doing it myself. My area hasn’t changed at all, and this will become evident later. There will be no change.” I would hazard that this tight-rope tension is what keeps him alive to fight another day. As Celant perceptively observed in the documentary Troublemakers: the Story of Land Art (James Crump, 2015): “When I did the book on Michael Heizer, he was on the verge of dying, because his nervous system was collapsing. Dying in the middle of the work, not finished. This kind of divinity, the idea of creating something so big that you have to die for it. Being a slave of yourself, creating your pyramid, being buried inside. Making the nature of their work incredibly long, and kind of mythological.”
40.73175° N, 73.97782° W
Stuy Town, New York City
What kind of man builds his own city? Strikes out in pursuit of a ‘divinity’ that will last for centuries, his immortality encapsulated in the stones he has brought together? It’s been attempted before, by Baron Haussman in Paris, Judge Woodward in Detroit, Robert Moses in New York, Corbusier with his Plan Voisin and Ville Radieuse concepts. Or Albert Speer’s Germania, of which only the 13,000-ton concrete cylinder of the Schwerbelastungskörper (heavy-load-bearing-body) remains, and that was just a test to determine whether the muddy earth of Berlin could support the new city. It couldn’t. The complications of history meant that none of them were able to complete their urban redesigns with Heizer’s degree of autonomy. Contemporary times entertain grandiose hypothetical projects. Think of the futuristic NEOM and ‘The Line’ developments in the coastal desert of Saudi Arabia driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or the ‘Seasteaders’ who tried to take over islands in French Polynesia to start a techno-topian society with the support of Peter Thiel. Municipal planners hired big architects to create suburban mass-utopias, and they dreamed up monstrosities like Thamesmead (UK, 1968-) and Corviale (Rome, 1973-). The strategy was to create all encompassing concrete megablock ‘rat park’ complexes that their residents “would never need to leave.” Then there are his fellow mavericks, without any outside support or state mandate, who are seized by the same obsessive impulse to agglomerate on a grand scale. In Florida, Edward Leedskalnin levitated massive blocks of limestone to build his Coral Castleall on his own, without the use of construction machinery, not once but twice. Even today, no one knows how he did it.
Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time?
— Bertolt Brecht, from “A Worker Reads History,”
193525.6995° N, 32.6391° E
Luxor, Egypt
The ancient Egyptian city referred to by the Greeks as ‘Thebes of the Hundred Gates’ is today known as Luxor. Where Heizer’s father, Robert, an archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley University, was, in 1971 and 1972, working on a project funded by the National Geographic Society. His artist son visited him there, also taking a side trip to the Saqqara necropolis, where the crumbling step pyramid of Djoser remains; it is said that this is the prototype for the perfection of the Giza pyramids. It’salso been cited as a precursor to City. Many critics turn back to his family origins to explain Michael Heizer and his oeuvre—particularly, to the influence of his father, a specialist in Olmec colossal sculpture and the geology of the Great Basin. Then, there are both of his grandfathers: Ott F. Heizer, who was a mining engineer and manager of the Nevada-Massachusetts Company tungsten ore mine, and Olaf P. Jenkins, the chief geologist of California responsible for mapping the geologic makeup of the entire state. These were the kind of men who always weighed in tons. When interviewed by Phyllis Tuchman in 1971, who asked about the influence of his father’s practice, Heizer was dismissive: “It’s a very convenient way for some people to attempt to define my work. I’ve never been victimized by any sensibility, so for me to be victimized by some academic methodology ... I don’t think that the people who have seen my work think that.” And I agree with him. We don’t. His City speaks its own idiom. But I do envy the upbringing that formed the mind that made it. As an adolescent, he joined Robert Heizer’s expeditions throughout the Americas as a draftsman. It was like being Indiana Jones’ son, discovering the geodesy encoded into the snaking stairs of ‘El Castillo’ in Chichén Itzá or the plazas of Teotihuacan, engineered as precisely as a computer chip. There was also a year spent in Paris while the professor was researching at the venerable Musée de l’Homme, which looks out over the grandeur of the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower; inside, a treasury of artifacts illuminates’ the story so far’ of human existence.
36.0955° N, 115.1761° W
The Luxor Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas
There’s no logistical way to avoid staying a few nights in Las Vegas if you’re making the drive to Alamo from Los Angeles. Las Vegas itself offers up the simulacrum and spectacle others wish to find in City. These threads fuse the programmatic architectureof the Luxor hotel, where I chose to stay. Inside the Po-Mo black glass pyramid and matching cubed half-ziggurat tower, there’s also a scaled-to-size Mayan ‘Temple Of Kukulkan.’ A pillar of white light beams up from the dead center of the mass into outer space. Vegas is truly a harsh bookend to City’s transcendental peace, its chaotic signifier overload triggering the opposite sensory perceptions in every way. But this aligns with what the holy cities of the ancients have become—my own psycho-geographic paths and Heizer’s merge in these Egypts, real and remade. I’ve been to the Saqqara necropolis, where Djoser’s experiment was marred by modern scaffolding and a stack of rocks in front. The Giza Plateau was calm only on the morning after a massive sandstorm,which kept both tourists and touts away. The control of perspective and perception is not possible at any of these sites or any living conurbation. They are nothing like City, spiritual inheritor of their ruins, but not of their profoundly functional past. City has not been built to host mass gatherings, bloody ball games, or to enact harvest rituals. Set far from the madding crowd, it stands alone, facing off with eternity in immaculate solitude.
34.051612° N, 118.255050° W
North, East, South, West ( 1981),
444 South Flower St, Los Angeles
Heizer’s more publicly accessible works of sacred geometry and raw mass have become part of our contemporary power lexicon, placed carefully inside buildings and at sites that our culture deems important. Installed in the first years of Reagan’s presidency, Heizer’s set of four burnished steel shapes, commissioned by the Rockefeller Development Corporation, occupy the lower lobby of a towering corporate building in the part of DTLA closest to Manhattan’s vertical thrust. An expression of his ‘North, East, South, West’ motif, with each cardinal direction assigned a particular form (stacked cuboid, truncated cylinder, cone, wedge), the industrial steel polygons are finished with a hand-buffed texture, the kind you might find in a carpark elevator. In September 2001, the obliteration of the World Trade Center complex devastated New York City. This was the symbolic equivalent of a nuclear detonation, not in the ‘empty desert’ away from scrutiny, but in a densely populated business district with the world’s media transmitting every second of the horror. At the same time, Heizer was suffering physically, diagnosed with a debilitating polyneuropathy that attacked his nerves from within and made it difficult to use his hands: for such an active person, a crushing blow—all those years breathing irradiated desert dust had shattered the defenses of his own body. Through it all, despite the pain, he kept working. This was a war of attrition, against himself, like America’s atomic ‘tests.’ From these times of darkness emerged the most striking version of North, East, South, West (1967/2002), permanently excised from the flooring substructure of the new Dia Beacon building. (One of the original co-founders of the Dia Art Foundation is Phillipa de Menil, whose descent from Conrad Schlumberger, mining engineering genius -he devised a method to stab electrical currents deep into the earth to reveal its mineral secrets - ensured an enduring family legacy of cultural support). Visiting the upstate museum soon after it opened in 2003, I was astonished by the four ominous holes (and the natural standing stone encased so tightly in the wall). Just as his early ’80s iteration’s ‘positive’ expression of ‘NESW’ shone bright, the post 9/11 iterationwas literally negative, abyssal, Hadean. Heizer had been to the gates of hell and back, and lived to make sculpture of the tale.
34.06448° N, 118.35992° W
Levitated Mass, (2012) LACMA, Los Angeles
In 2006, at the Stone Valley Quarry in Jurupa, CA, Heizer was presented with a specimen of the kind of lithic power (size, mass, texture, shape) he had long been seeking. Pyramidical and pneumatic, this rock had movie-star presence; as Heizer exclaimed on the spot, “That’s the one.” During his 1969 attempt, the mega-boulder selected had broken the crane hoisting it, and the work had to be abandoned. But now, with a $10 million transportation budget and a plum site at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the configuration would rise again. Heizer drove his Airstream trailer down from Garden Valley to LA to meet the prized rock, which went on its own overground journey, watched in awe by thousands. The 340-ton granite megalith is now permanently balanced atop a custom concrete slot-ramp adjacent to 6th Street and the La Brea Tar Pits. The prime position guarantees this boulder will be seen by more humans in a few hours than City will over many years. On Olaf P. Jenkin’s Geologic Map of California (1938), a hand-drawn legend tells you what lies beneath each grid zone. Zooming in on an antique map seller’s listing, it’s beautiful, a work of art. Under the Fairfax District hides a base of ‘Qal,’ or quaternary alluvium, which is unconsolidated sediments of sand, gravel, and clay deposited by flowing waters during the Quaternary Period. A tectonic fault leaks the inky crude oil that preserves fossils and evidence of past habitation: the ideal subterranean underlay for his grandson’s big rock. LACMA’s Michael Govan (director at the Dia Foundation during multiple major Heizer commissions) was the force behind the high-profile project, which he expertly leveraged to persuade significant patrons and sponsors to furnish the funds that enabled Heizer to complete and ‘open’ City. I attended the June 2025 preview of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s Brutalist new LACMA building—an implacably grey Berlin bunker/bomb shelter/ freeway overpass hybrid that was also commissioned by Govan. A central strip of glass brings some levity to the raw concrete structure. Looking out the window, there is a vision: Levitated Mass resplendent, a solo-henge glowing against a liquid-gold LA sun.
33.96610° N, 118.45639° W
Displaced/Replaced Mass (1977) 4 Yawl Street,
Charlie Beach, Marina del Rey
There’s one more Heizer within my geographic reach. On the beach frontage of art collectors Roy and Carol Doumani’s (former) home lies a reiteration of Displaced-Replaced Mass #1, a Robert Scull desert commission of 1969. Four dark granite boulders have been laid into hazardous ankle-snapping concrete pits, like open tombs. A local woman gives passersby a rundown on the collection inside, but hadn’t known the provenance of the Heizer works, even though she’d seen the big rock at LACMA. I walk towards the Pacific to read my book—Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), which was with me in City. By the water is a family, their accents Antipodean, parents, a sister, and brother, California sun-kissed. The son has dug a large rectangular hole at the tide’s edge. The boy’s excavation is an exact echo of Heizer’s pits at the tall white house that I can still see by the path. He’s not copying, though. These are primal shapes. They are encoded into our inbuilt human urge to control and make a mark on our lived environments, with a form derived from the sacred mathematics whispering through the helical coils of our DNA. When their beach day ends, the family packs up. The boy lingers last. Running back to his creation, he yawps, “I’m the king of the hole.” Only then can the young artist leave his afternoon’s work to face its inevitable sublimation back to Nature. At the same time, someone’s speaker is playing Tears for Fears’ 1985 classic,“Everybody Wants To Rule The World.”
Michael Heizer — Circular Surface Planet Displacement, Jean Dry Lake, NV - 1970
Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni © Maya Gorgoni. Courtesy of The Estate of Gianfranco Gorgoni
The author would like to thank the Triple Aught Foundation, Brent Holmes, Ed Higbee, James Crump, Meagan Jones, Gagosian, Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Hirshhorn Library, Balch Art Research Library and Archives @ LACMA, and especially, Efe Ramirez, for their support of the Cityexpedition and this piece.
REFERENCES / SOURCES:
“The Art of Michael Heizer,” Michael Heizer, Artforum, December 1969.
Other Ideas, exhibition catalog, Samuel J. Wagstaff, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1969.
Michael Heizer interviewed by Phyllis Tuchman, audio recordings, c/o Getty Research Institute, 1971.
The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Pall Mall Press, London, 1972.
“Michael Heizer: You might say I’m in the construction business,”John Gruen, ARTnews, December 1977.
The Shock of the New. Vol. 8 -television episode, “The Future that Was,” presented by Robert Hughes, BBC Broadcast Archive, 1982.
Sculpture in Reverse, Michael Heizer, Julia Brown, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1984.
Primal Acts of Construction/Destruction: The Work of Michael Heizer 1967-1987, Dissertation by Patricia A. Fairchild, c/o Balch Research Library at LACMA, 1993.
Michael Heizer, Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, 1997.
Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy Lippard, Berkeley, University of California Press, reedition 1997.
Mono Lake, short film, 1968/2004 by Nancy Holt, c/o Holt-Smithson Foundation.
Hopelessness Freezes Time -1967 Detroit Riots, Detroit Techno and Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass, Edgar Arceneaux with Julian Myers, Kunstmuseum Basel, 2011.
Live In Your Head: When Attitude Becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, 2013.
Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer’s Monolithic Sculpture, documentary, director Doug Pray, 2013.
Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, documentary, director James Crump, 2015.
Michael Heizer: Altars, edited byKara Vander Weg, Gagosian Gallery/Rizzoli, 2016.