“Mike started the idea that you can go out in this landscape and make work that is sublime,” he says. Govan, who has been raising money for “City” for twenty years, sees it as one of our civilization’s greatest achievements. Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says that the site, which LACMA will help to administer, will admit its first visitors from the general public in 2020. I just became infatuated with the vision that he had.” Last summer, at Reid’s urging, President Obama declared seven hundred and four thousand acres of pristine wilderness surrounding “City” a national monument, meaning that it will be protected from development, including a nuclear rail line, for as long as the United States exists.Īfter decades of torment-“When’s it gonna be done, Mike?”-the piece is nearly complete. “I decided to go and look at it,” Reid told me. As it happened, Senator Harry Reid, a dedicated opponent of Yucca Mountain and an advocate for public lands, fell in love with Heizer’s crazily ambitious project and its quintessentially Nevadan setting. It is either perfect or perfectly bizarre that Heizer’s sculpture, a monument meant to outlast humanity, is flanked by an Air Force base and a bomb-test site in recent years, the land surrounding “City” was under consideration for a railroad to convey nuclear waste to a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain. When they come out here to fuck my ‘City’ sculpture up, they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.” Why do I think that? Incans, Olmecs, Aztecs-their finest works of art were all pillaged, razed, broken apart, and their gold was melted down. “My good friend Richard Serra is building out of military-grade steel,” he says. The use of valueless materials is strategic, a hedge against what he sees as inevitable future social unrest. “City” is made almost entirely from rocks, sand, and concrete that Heizer has mined and mixed on site. Heizer started it in 1972, when he was in his late twenties and had already established himself as an instigator of the earthworks movement, a group of artists, including Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, who made totemic outdoor sculptures, often in the majestic wastelands of the American West. “City” is a monumental architectonic work, with dimensions comparable to those of the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., and a layout informed by pre-Columbian ritual cities like Teotihuacan. Heizer once told Vander Weg he’d like his tombstone to read, “Totally Negative.” “Levitated Mass,” a three-hundred-and-forty-ton chunk of granite that since 2012 has been permanently installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is one of the few sculptures in the world designed to be walked under, an experience that strikes most visitors as harrowing. Throughout his career, in paintings and in sculptures, Heizer has explored the aesthetic possibilities of emptiness and displacement his voids have informed public art from the Vietnam Memorial to the pits at Ground Zero. You just wake up one day and you’re dickless.” “Chemical castration-doesn’t happen all at once,” he said. Heizer, who is given to playful lamentation, complains about what New York is turning him into: “A decaffeinated, used-up, once-was quick-draw cowboy, a sissy boy who eats at Balthazar for lunch.” At such moments, he is a cartoon roughneck, swatting at his own amusement like a housefly. He glanced down at the patent-leather flats on Vander Weg’s feet. In the eighties, Andy Warhol photographed him wearing plaid flannel, his hands raised like claws and a vague, suggestive smile on his lips: Am I scaring you, honey? Now, with his hat casting an elliptical shadow on the pavement, he looked ready for another portrait. He wore a felt rancher hat whose band was adorned with the tips of elk antlers, and a jackknife in a holster at his waist. He is seventy-one, and walking pains him.Īt a crosswalk, Heizer-ravaged, needy, fierce, suspicious, witty, loyal, sly, and pure-leaned against a lamppost to rest, thin on thin. With his dealer, Kara Vander Weg, of the Gagosian gallery, he shuffled down Spring Street toward Greene, where he’d been renting a loft since the fall. “I’m not sure how much I want everyone to know, but it’s all going to come out.” It was March in New York, a cold, long-shadowed afternoon, and Heizer, who has spent much of the past half century on a remote ranch in Nevada, working on “City,” a mile-and-a-half-long sculpture that almost no one has seen, had finished an omelette and a tarte tatin at Balthazar. “I’m trying to tell you the story of my strange life,” the artist Michael Heizer said to me.
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