The long-awaited public opening of land artist Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork City is just around the corner, and the Triple Aught Foundation, the group which manages its remote Lincoln County, Nevada site, has shared some amazing new photos that offer a sense of the scale and stasis of the massive sculpture which has taken 52 years and another $40 million to finish.
Critic Dave Hickey recently described it as "a gracious intervention in the desert...composed and complete."
LACMA Director Michael Govan reflected on its realization, stating: "Over the years I would sometimes compare Michael Heizer's City project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities. But now I only compare it to itself. It's an artwork aware of our primal impulses to build and organize space, but it incorporates our modernity, our awareness of and reflection upon the subjectivity of our human experience of time and space as well as the many histories of civilizations we have built. Working with Michael Heizer for more than 25 years to help him realize his City project has been one of the most important experiences of my own life and work."
An expansion on the concepts first explored in earlier works such as Double Negative (1969) and North, East, South, West (1967), City is supposedly meant to evoke ancient ceremonial structures and has been described by Heizer as a reflection of his interest in the non-inhabitable forms seen in Native American mound-building traditions, pre-Columbian Central and South American cities, and Egyptian devotional sites.
The completion of the project at times came under serious question, requiring a nationwide institutional fundraising campaign and later protective order from then-President Barack Obama to ensure its delivery, which Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art board member Olivia Walton characterized as "an American creation, possible only within this terrain."
"This is a masterpiece, or close to it," Heizer recently told the New York Times about its final status, "and I’m the only one who cares whether the thing is actually done."
City will officially be open to the public on September 2nd.
12 Comments
Probably it will be very hard to go there. Forming with grading at its best. I don't think there's anything flat here. This is arguably the best Michael Heizer I've seen. His early paintings are good clues to what's going on. I also think "land art" is an inadequate term.
*photo from
Here is a nine-foot tall monolith found in the Utah desert on public lands. It has since disappeared.
What do you mean with your post? Two different things.
That was aliens
It is similar to the monolith in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. What it means is......
I'm curious, in what way they are similar?
FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are working on it. Your inquiry has been noted.
your participation is really lame!
I see a lot of inevitable lawsuits
In 20 thousand years some poor bastard will spend his entire life studying this ruin. That’s the best part about land art.
No, it will in 20 years - it could a BS collaborative study between architecture and art history students from an Ivy league program.
I'm too lazy to google it and likely some of my fellow Means and Methods nerds here know the answer: are those dirt slopes stabilized with something like a binder?
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