The Size of City

Michael Heizer’s Masterpiece as Architecture

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Abstract

From the birth of Land Art, in the deserts of America in the early 1960s, a branch of

sculpture has existed that frequently crosses a size threshold to become so close to

imitating architecture it pertains classification as architecture. Michael Heizer has been

at work for almost four decades constructing the greatest example within the overlap

where Land Art replicates architecture, City; when complete it will be the largest

contemporary work of art ever created. In investigating the relationship between

art and architecture, distinctions of function and similarities of intent - the desire to

create something beautiful - were found. The works of Land Art and the career of

Heizer were both examined for trends that inform the questioning of whether or not

City can be regarded as architecture. The artwork was evaluated against the ideas

collected in a search for theoretically definitive divisions between the two disciplines

of art and architecture, the importance of size and scale, and the categories of

beauty in which it fits. James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth

Kilometre/The Broken Kilometre and Lightning Field, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s

Valley Curtain and works by Charles Simonds were also examined using the criteria.

City was determined to resemble architecture but was not architecture; it does not

function in the same way and its grandiose size is used twofold: firstly to effect the

sublime and, secondly, to make reference to Native American, pre-Colombian sites.

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Fig. 1 - Windows 2, Matchdrop, Michael Heizer, 1969

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The Size of City: Michael Heizer’s Masterpiece as Architecture

David P L Lewis

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilmentof the degree of MArch, 2010.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my tutor, Jacob Hotz-Hung, for his inspiration, guidance and

sense of humour throughout the research and writing of this dissertation.

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Contents

1 Introduction 11.1 Statement of Aim 1

1.2 Structure of Dissertation 1

1.3 Methodology 1

2 Between Art and Architecture 52.1 The In Between 5

2.2 Aesthetic Concurrence 8

3 Scale and Size 113.1 Scale 11

3.2 Size 12

4 A Brief Introduction to Land Art 154.1 Situation and Setting 15

4.2 Temporality and Tradition 19

4.3 Substance and Process 21

5 Michael Heizer 255.1 Early Works 25

5.2 Double Negative 30

5.3 During the Development of City 32

6 Size in Land Art 356.1 Michael Heizer’s City 35

6.2 James Turrell’s Roden Crater 43

6.3 Other Works 47

6.3.1 Walter De Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometre/The Broken Kilometer and Lightning Field 47

6.3.2 Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Valley Curtain 50

6.3.3 Works by Charles Simonds 51

7 Conclusion 55

8 Bibliography 588.1 Books 58

8.2 Periodicals Articles 59

8.3 Websites 59

8.4 Films 60

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Fig. 1 - Windows 2, Matchdrop, Michael Heizer, 1969 iiGermano Celant, Michael Heizer (Milan: Prada Foundation, 1997), p. 125.

Fig. 2 - Primitive Dye Painting (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1969 xiiCelant, p. 109. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Fig. 3 - Observatory, Robert Morris, 1977 4Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), p. 81. Photograph by Pieter Boersma, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Fig. 4 - Partially Buried Woodshed, Robert Smithson, 1970 6Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), p. 69. Photograph by Robert Smithson.

Fig. 5 - Conical Intersect, Gordon Matta Clark, 1975 6Tiberghien, p. 68. Photograph by Philippe Migeat.

Fig. 6 - Rosalind Krauss’s Expanded Field 7Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 38

Fig. 7 - Jared S. Moore’s table of aesthetic definitions 9Jared Sparks Moore, ‘The Sublime, and Other Subordinate Esthetic Concepts’, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 45, No. 2 (15 January 1948), pp. 42-47 (p. 47)

Fig. 8 - Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, 1970 14Kastner and Wallis, p. 59. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Fig. 9 - Ice Piece, Andy Goldsworthy, 1987 14Kastner and Wallis, p. 68.

Fig. 10 - Cross, Walter De Maria, 1968 15Kastner and Wallis, p. 56. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Fig. 11 - Endless Column, Constantin Brancusi, 1938 16John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond, 4th edn (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006), p. 81. Photograph by Herbert George.

Fig. 12 - Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Garden, Isama Noguchi, 1961-64 17Beardsley, p. 84.

Fig. 13 - Running Table, David Nash, 1978 17Beardsley, p. 48.

Fig. 14 - Himmelstreppe, Hannsjörg Voth, 1980-87 17Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Landscape Art (Boston: Birkhauser, 1996), p. 59. Photograph by Ingrid Amslinger.

Fig. 15 - Sun Tunnels, Nancy Holt, 1973-76 18Kastner and Wallis, p. 88.

Fig. 16 - Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Agnes Denes, 1982 18Kastner and Wallis, p. 160.

Fig. 17 - Sky Line, Hans Haacke, 1967 20Kastner and Wallis, p. 74.

List of Illustrations

Photographers have been included when stated in the sourced publication. Where there is no photographer listed, the copyright holder, if not the artist and if stated in the publication, has been included.

Title Page: aerial view of City (manipulated) as referenced for Fig. 48.

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Fig. 18 - Whirlpool, Eye of the Storm, Dennis Oppenheim, 1973 20Kastner and Wallis, p. 77.

Fig. 19 - Steam (second version), Robert Morris, 1974 21Kastner and Wallis, p. 102.

Fig. 20 - Wooden Waterway, David Nash, 1978 21Beardsley, p. 47.

Fig. 21 - The New York Earth Room, Walter De Maria, 1977 21Kastner and Wallis, p. 109. Photograph by John Cliett.

Fig. 22 - Ringdom Gompa, Hamish Fulton, 1978 22Beardsley, p. 45. Photograph by Hamish Fulton.

Fig. 23 - Standing Coyote, Hamish Fulton, 1981 22Beardsley, p. 45. Photograph by Hamish Fulton.

Fig. 24 - Planar Displacement Drawing (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1970 24Celant, p. 194. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Fig. 25 - Eccentric Painting, Michael Heizer, 1967 25Celant, p. 12. Photograph by Ivan dalla Tana.

Fig. 26 - Negative Painting, Michael Heizer, 1966 26Celant, p. 7. Photograph by Ron Marashiro.

Fig. 27 - Rectangular Painting 1, Michael Heizer, 1967 26Celant, p. 10.

Fig. 28 - Rectangular Painting 2, Michael Heizer, 1967 26Celant, p. 11.

Fig. 29 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1966 27Celant, p. 3.

Fig. 31 - Untitled 1, Michael Heizer, 1967 27Celant, p. 14.

Fig. 33 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1966 27Celant, p. 8. Photograph by Ivan dalla Tana.

Fig. 30 - Negative Painting, Michael Heizer, 1966 27Celant, p. 6. Photograph by Ron Marashiro.

Fig. 32 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1967 27Celant, p. 15.

Fig. 34 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1967 27Celant, p. 9. Photograph by Ron Marashiro.

Fig. 35 - Planar Displacement Drawing, Michael Heizer, 1970 28Celant, p. 196. Photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Fig. 36 - Circular Planar Displacement Etching, Michael Heizer, 1972 28Tiberghien, p. 246.

Fig. 37 - Dissipate (no. 8 of Nine Nevada Depressions), Michael Heizer, 1968 29Kastner and Wallis, p. 91.

Fig. 38 - Dissipate/Runic Casting/Matchdrop, Michael Heizer, 1968 29Celant, p. 97.

Fig. 39 - Windows 2, Matchdrop, Michael Heizer, 1969 29Celant, p. 125.

Fig. 40 - Double Negative, Michael Heizer, 1969-70 30Celant, p. 220. Photograph by John Weber.

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Fig. 41 - Double Negative, Michael Heizer, 1969-70 30Celant, p. 220. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni..

Fig. 42 - Double Negative, Michael Heizer, 1969-70 31Tiberghien, p. 89. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Fig. 43 - Platform, Michael Heizer, 1980 32Celant, p. 351.

Fig. 44 - Catfish of Effigy Tumuli, Michael Heizer, 1983-85 32Celant, p. 399.

Fig. 45 - Waterstrider of Effigy Tumuli, Michael Heizer, 1983-85 33Celant, p. 406.

Fig. 46 - Frog Effigy of Effigy Tumuli, Michael Heizer, 1983-85 33Beardsley, p. 96. Photograph copyright of Knoedler and Co., New York.

Fig. 47 - 45°, 90°, 180°/Geometric Extraction, Michael Heizer, 1984 33Celant, p. 393. Photograph by Tom Vinetz.

Fig. 48 - Aerial view of City, Lincoln County, Nevada 34Google Earth <http://earth.google.com> [accessed 15 December 2009]. Image copyright of Google, 2009.

Fig. 49 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76 36Celant, p. 267. Photograph by Tom Vinetz.

Fig. 50 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76 36Celant, p. 270. Photograph by Tom Vinetz.

Fig. 51 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76 36Celant, p. 271. Photograph by Tom Vinetz.

Fig. 52 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76 37Tiberghien, p. 72. Photograph by Michael Heizer, courtesy of the artist and Virginia Dwan.

Fig. 53 - Complex Two (models), Michael Heizer, 1980-88 38Celant, p. 440-441.

Fig. 54 - Complex Two (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1980-88 38Celant, p. 453.

Fig. 55 - Complex Two (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1980-88 39Celant, p. 453.

Fig. 56 - Complex Two, Michael Heizer, 1980-88 39Michael Kimmelman, ‘A Sculptor’s Colossus in the Desert’, New York Times, 12 December 1999, (slideshow accompanying online article), <http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/121299heizer-art.1.html> [accessed 29 May 2009]. Photographs by Tom Vinetz.

Fig. 57 - Complex Two (detail) of City, Michael Heizer, 1980-88 40Kimmelman, ‘Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy’, New York Times, 5 February 2005 (slideoshow accompanying online article) <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06heizer.html> [accessed 15 December 2009] Photograph by Simon Norfolk.

Fig. 58 - 45°, 90°, 180° (centre, in distance) of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005 40Kimmelman, ‘Arts Last, Lonely Cowboy’. Photograph by Simon Norfolk.

Fig. 59 - 45°, 90°, 180° of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005 40Kimmelman, ‘Arts Last, Lonely Cowboy’. Photograph by Simon Norfolk.

Fig. 60 - 45°, 90°, 180° (artist in foreground) of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005 40Kimmelman, ‘Arts Last, Lonely Cowboy’. Photograph by Simon Norfolk.

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Fig. 61 - Dome-shaped earth mound of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005 41Kimmelman, ‘Arts Last, Lonely Cowboy’. Photograph by Simon Norfolk.

Fig. 62 - Complex Two (left) and Complex One (right) of City, Michael Heizer, 1972-88 41

Kimmelman,‘A Sculptor’s Colossus in the Desert’ Photograph by Tom Vinetz.

Fig. 63 - Roden Crater (process artwork), James Turrell, 1974-present 42Robert E. Knight, Debra L. Hopkins, Valerie Vadala Homer, James Turrell: Infinite Light (Scottsdale, Arizona: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), Foldout 4

Fig. 64 - Gasworks, James Turrell, 1993 43Knight, Hopkins and Homer, Foldout 3.

Fig. 65 - Roden Crater (detail), James Turrell, 1974-present 43Knight, Hopkins and Homer, Foldout 4.

Fig. 66 - Roden Crater (interior Skyspaces and connecting tunnel), James Turrell, 1974-present 44

Knight, Hopkins and Homer, Foldout 4.

Fig. 67 - Roden Crater (view of crater centre), James Turrell, 1974-present 45Knight, Hopkins and Homer, Foldout 4

Fig. 68 - South Space of Roden Crater (model in two parts), James Turrell, 1998 46Peter Noever (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon (Vienna: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999), p. 167. Photograph by Theodore Coulombe.

Fig. 69 - Vertical Earth Kilometre, Walter De Maria, 1977 47Kastner and Wallis, p. 107. Photograph by Nic Tenwiggenhorn.

Fig. 70 - The Broken Kilometre, Walter De Maria, 1979 47C4 Contemporary Art Gallery <http://www.c4gallery.com/artist/database/walter-de-maria/walter-de-maria.html> [accessed 17 December 2009]. Photograph copyright of C4 Contemporary Art and JW Dewdney.

Fig. 71 - Lightning Field, Walter De Maria, 1974-77 48Beardsley, p. 60. Photograph copyright of Dia Art Foundation.

Fig. 72 - Lightning Field, Walter De Maria, 1974-77 49Beardsley, p. 61. Photograph copyright of the British Tourist Authority.

Fig. 73 - Valley Curtain, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1970-72 50Kastner and Wallis, p. 82. Photograph by Harry Shunk.

Fig. 74 - Dwelling, P.S. 1, Charles Simonds, 1975 51Beardsley, p. 55. Photograph copyright of Sperone Westwater Fischer.

Fig. 75 - Landscape - Body - Dwelling, Charles Simonds, 1973 51Beardsley, p. 56.

Fig. 76 - Age, Charles Simonds, 1982-83 51Beardsley, p. 56.

Fig. 77 - Land - Body - Dwelling, Charles Simonds, 1971 52Kastner and Wallis, p. 120.

Fig. 78 - Antiquus bivii viarum Appiae at Ardeatinae (Ancient intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina), Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1756 54

Luigi Ficaccia, Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (London: Taschen, 2000), p. 216.

Fig. 79 - Newton’s Cenotaph, Etienne-Louis Boullée, 1784 54Dominique de Menil (ed.), Visionary Architects (Houston: University of St. Thomas, 1968), p. 26.

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Fig. 2 - Primitive Dye Painting (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1969

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1 Introduction

1.1 Statement of Aim

The dimensions of Michael Heizer’s ongoing, lifelong artwork and arguably his

masterpiece, City, take on architecturally scaled proportions. It is already the largest

piece of Land Art yet created and when complete will top the size list in a genre

that, having escaped the physical confines of a gallery setting, includes many

expansive works. The objective of this dissertation was to examine works in Land Art

that, resembling the built environment in their scale, are within the overlap of art and

architecture to seek out a dividing, defining criteria to discern an oeuvre as one and

not the other. City is the primary work that has been examined; the aspects of size

and scale are the principal investigative tools.

1.2 Structure of Dissertation

In Chapter 2 the relationship of art to architecture is examined twofold; firstly, as

two distinct disciplines and, secondly, as two individual arts sharing a commonality.

Chapter 3 looks to the definitions of scale and size, the difference between the two

terms and how both are tools used to create art and architecture. Chapter 4 gives

a brief introduction to Land Art to show the background setting and atmosphere in

which City has been imagined and constructed. Chapter 5, an abridged chronology

of Michael Heizer’s career, outlines the major works leading up to the beginning of

City and those completed during its gestation. In Chapter 6 City is examined in detail

along with significant, large-scale works by three other notable pioneers of Land Art,

James Turrell, Walter De Maria and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as well as an artist

working on the other end of the scale, Charles Simonds. The conclusion, Chapter 7,

firstly relates briefly to size in both realisations of city scale and fantastical depictions

of architecture and, secondly, utilises the definitions and distinctions discussed in

earlier chapters to determine the architectural significance of City.

1.3 Methodology

Michael Heizer’s City was the starting point for investigation following art critic Michael

Kimmelman’s documented return to the site for his 2005 New York Times Magazine

article. Starkly different to any other contemporary work of art due to its vast scale

and level of permanence, it is relevant to architects not for its used of similar materials

- concrete and earth - or for the methods of construction - with the aid of engineers

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and heavy machinery - but because of its city-block size. That one man alone was

behind its conception was of sufficient interest for early research into its maverick,

reclusive creator. Heizer’s work, situated in the Nevada desert, is at least strongly

connected to if not firmly within the classification of Land Art, and so the way in which

his work was both a result of the trends in the genre and was significant in developing

it was examined further.

The question that arose concerned that point at which a large edifice, with cantilevered

concrete, plazas and stretching over a mile in length, was and was not architecture,

if a work of art could be. Hence the terminology becomes important: historical and

contemporary definitions of art and architecture can assist in comprehending the

significance, if any, of City’s architectural connotations. As the grandiose size provided

the original reference to architecture, it was then necessary to examine, along with

scale, its conceptual use to understand their utilisation in both art and architecture.

To facilitate this requires philosophical inquiries into the roles of artists and architects

alike, literature on ideas of aesthetics and the nature of the ideal creative pinnacle,

beauty.

The semantics focus of this dissertation demands analysis of the literature that

informs the discussion. Whilst there are no primary sources of evidence from personal

experience of the artworks - both Michael Heizer’s City and James Turrell’s Roden

Crater, still under construction at the time of writing, are closed to public viewing,

whilst many Land Art works either no longer exist or are so geographically dispersed

as to make visiting unfeasible - the secondary descriptions are contextualised where

possible. Frequent use of illustrations, in particular photographs, is made to correctly

depict the settings of many works, an integral aspect in their effect.

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I hadn’t had the idea of building an object, but shaping space, and I think that’s also not... well, it is closed architecture, but it isn’t architecture, so I think it’s in between, if you want to say that... it lies between sculpture and architecture...1

1 Robert Morris, in Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) p. 83

Fig. 3 - Observatory, Robert Morris, 1977

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2 Between Art and Architecture

2.1 The In Between

‘Things’ become more important, not less. ‘Concepts’ cloud people’s minds more than ever before. ‘Problems’ are international and insoluble. Art provides relief from thinking, as it always has, and leaves fixed solutions, never attempting more than itself.2

Art and architecture are often worlds apart. For all that connects them, and despite

the theories that aim to tie the two disciplines together, an expectation exists that

one should not be the other. British architectural historian Jane Rendell, in Art and

Architecture: a Place Between, suggests that in advanced capitalist cultures there is

a strong interest in the ‘other’, and that this ‘could be characterized by a fascination

with who, where or what we are “not”’.3 Architects look to the world of art for aesthetic

inspiration, for the subversive attitude and for the answer gained by being freed of the

economic and societal pressures; artists see the ‘purposefulness’ in architecture, its

role, control and power in society. In considering what each creates, the definition of

a work of art as distinct from a work of architecture can be done of various grounds,

such as function, mass and size; the latter is of particular interest when considering

works in Land Art.

Art that is truly in three dimensions, that is not including essentially two-dimensional,

frontal representations given an element of depth such as in reliefs, shares a varying

degree of commonality with architecture. For works that could be described in the in

between between art and architecture, those that are perhaps close to or exceed

the size of the human body or those that appear as of such a mass as to resemble

a building or a large building element such as monuments, statues or follies, the

definition of one as art and another as architecture can be made by considering the

work’s function.

In German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, published in German

in 1970 and first translated into English in 1984, he states that art has the capacity to

make society self-conscious and become able to transcend itself. In order for this to

be possible, art must be autonomous, free from religious, political and social roles; it

is society’s antithesis and its sole social function is its functionlessness. This is distinct

from the variety of roles that architecture performs in society, from providing shelter

to providing a setting for reification; in becoming useful, in representing a pragmatic

value, architecture loses its autonomy.

Nineteenth century philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, influential in the understanding of

2 Michael Heizer, in Germano Celant, Michael Heizer (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997), p. 3283 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: a Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 3

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aesthetics and versed in the arts of

antiquity, classified architecture as one

of the individual arts but differentiated

it from the others, namely sculpture,

painting, music and poetry. If art is to

demonstrate that the spirit – the self-

reflection of human thought - is free it

should do so in contrast to what is ‘itself

unfree, spiritless and lifeless - that is, three-

dimensional, inorganic matter, weighed

down by gravity’.4 Sculpture, in replicating

human form or that of the Gods, does

this by imbuing stone or metal with spirit,

whereas architecture merely shapes the

surrounding for the expression of spirit

and cannot be the ‘explicit manifestation

or embodiment of free spirituality itself’.5

With sculpture and architecture breaking

free of Classical definitions – sculpture

as an anthropomorphic representation

of spirit and architecture its container -

by the time of Land Art’s inception, this

approach is anachronistic, yet it details a

source of distinction.

Gilles A. Tiberghien, in Land Art, indicates the complexity of the historical relationship

between architecture and sculpture in referring to Hegel’s belief that any construction

defines itself in a simple way, contrary to sculpted works that are presented as ends in

themselves. That is, a construction that functions in another sense cannot be sculpture,

with there being a ‘division of functions’ between the field of architecture and the

other individual arts. Before this division one would find ‘“independent” works whose

meaning, like the meaning of symbols, is to be found outside of them’.6 Along this

line of thinking much of Land Art can be classed as ‘independent architecture’, or

‘inorganic sculpture [inorganische Skulptur]’, whereas the Pyramids at Giza, housing

tombs, are ‘more’ than this. For Hegel, architecture loses its independence and its

own significance by becoming functional, though this negates there being any

function, implied or received, to art.

4 Stephen Houlgate, ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics> [accessed 13 December 2009]

5 Ibid.6 Tiberghien, p. 64

Fig. 5 - Conical Intersect, Gordon Matta Clark, 1975

Fig. 4 - Partially Buried Woodshed, Robert Smithson, 1970

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In 1979, American art critic Rosalind Krauss, in response to the inappropriateness

of sculpture as a term to describe many three-dimensional modernist and

postmodernist works of art, considered sculpture as being not-landscape and not-

architecture as part of an expanded field.7 Using a mathematical structural device,

a Klein group, three new sculptural conventions emerge between the nothingness

of landscape and the fullness of the built environment that are of great pertinence

to Land Art. Combining not-landscape and landscape, marked sites are places

given physical manipulations; a site-construction, both landscape and architecture,

is something built in the landscape; axiomatic structures, inherently architecture and

not-architecture, are interventions into the real space of architecture, a mapping

of ‘the abstract conditions of openness and closure’.8 This cumbersome, structuralist

mode of defining not only brings out three new terms for describing artworks but

also infers architecture, along with landscape, as being not-sculpture; it is not-art

and firmly so.

Nevertheless, Land Art is unique amongst the individual arts for the literary coupling

with architecture, an association dependent on the physicalities of a particular

work, in particular mass and size. Whilst Tiberghien points to the ‘monumentality, [...]

mass and the tension that exists between their verticality and the laws of gravity’ as

placing Land Art in the realm of architecture, the ‘simplicity of their forms, lacking both

anthropomorphic reference and spiritual connection’ ties them firmly to sculpture.

7 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 37

8 Ibid., p. 41

Fig. 6 - Rosalind Krauss’s Expanded Field1) There are two relationships of pure contradiction which are termed axes (and further differentiated into the complex and the neuter axis) and are designated by the solid arrows.2) There are two relationships of contradiction, expressed as involution, which are called chemas and are designated by the double arrows; and 3) There are two relationships of implication that are called deixes and are designated by the broken arrows.

8

However,

...mass by itself is […] not enough to characterise an architectural object; an emphasis on mass can also evoke, to the contrary, an unarchitectural object, a disorganisation of the forces that contribute to its elevation, freeing it from the laws of gravity.9

The example given is Land Art proponent Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed,

for which truckloads of earth were dumped on a shed, collapsing its structure so

that it is ‘emptied of its emptiness, and it becomes an inorganic sculpture restored

to its primary form’.10 Describing Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1971), a

series of large cuts in an empty building soon to be demolished that provided a view

through to the in-construction Pompidou Center, Tiberghien says ‘the architecture, in

emptying itself, in ridding itself of its mass, became lightened and elevated […] the

air and light that penetrated it allowed the building to breathe’.11 This is mentioned in

contrast to the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose building-wrapping turned

architecture into mass, giving prominence to its inertia.

The opacity, closed to access and activity, of these works is a lack of interiority that

offers nothing but itself, prohibiting the envisaging and actualising of all the spatial

possibilities within the object. It offers half the relationship with the viewer the other

half, a reciprocation that makes the art alive and not the container of life as in

architecture.

2.2 Aesthetic Concurrence

For Land Artists and architects alike, the variety of created objects, places and

events are measured by particular criteria: perhaps the probity of the endeavour, the

thoroughness evident in the result and, the characteristic that endures the whims of

critical bias and the changes in fashions, beauty. The philosophy of deconstruction,

developed by Jacques Derrida, informs the discussion of the in between in between

art and architecture. The deep-rooted binary model of either/or can be replaced

with both/and, with neither seen as dominant.12 The différance – both what defers

meaning to each term and what marks the difference between them – is complex:

the exponentiation of deferrals arguably breaks both down to the proponents’ desire

to create wonder, something marked by beauty.

For American philosopher Jared Sparks Moore, beauty is a kind of harmony: either

between the object and the contemplating mind, between the idea and the form

or between unity and variety.13 A simple beauty may strike a ‘responsive chord’ in the

9 Tiberghien, p. 6710 Ibid., p. 6711 Ibid., p. 6712 Rendell, p. 913 Jared Sparks Moore, ‘The Sublime, and Other Subordinate Esthetic Concepts’, The Journal of

9

heart - a spiritual harmony - or it may either express its inner meaning exactly or have

variety and unity in equal measure - expressive and formal harmonies respectively.

When one element - idea, unity, form etc. - is more apparent than its opposite a

subordinate and more discursive class of beauty can be articulated. Chief of these is

the sublime, an effect given prominence by eighteenth century philosopher Edmund

Burke. Sublimity describes an overwhelming, elevating, formless character, a conflict

of the mind that produces a ‘sense of spiritual exaltation’.14 It implies an element of

pain, danger or terror though these are mental experiences; it is the greatness of

thoughts and emotions as much as it is physically sensed. Moore describes it as the

preponderance of object over observer, the transcendence of idea over form. Burke

morosely illustrates the importance of the idea in the sublime in saying:

A level plain of vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.15

It is the astonishment as the passion being created when viewing the sublime:

‘astonishment is the state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some

degree of horror’.16

Spiritual Harmony Object Sublime Brilliant (Statuesque)

}PicturesqueObserver Pretty (Ridiculous)

Expressive Harmony Idea Sublime

}Picturesque. StatuesqueForm Brilliant Pretty

Formal Harmony Unity Statuesque (Sublime)

Variety Picturesque Pretty (Brilliant)

Moore continues to fill out a table to describe the effects of his three types of harmony,

though he admits it is a non-definitive analysis. When variety looms larger than unity,

a beautiful thing can be expressed as picturesque, after British eighteenth century

art theorist Uvedale Price’s definition; and coordinate to the picturesque is the

brilliant, introduced by American art theorist George Lansing Raymond in Essentials

Philosophy, Vol. 45, No. 2 (15 January 1948), pp. 42-47 (p. 44)14 Ibid., p. 4215 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the

Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 53-5416 Ibid., p. 53

Fig. 7 - Jared S. Moore’s table of aesthetic definitionsEach concept that is marked by a preponderance of one element over the other is placed on the line on which the preponderating element appears: where there is no such preponderance, the concept is placed after the bracket. When some such preponderance is detectable but is of slight importance, the term is enclosed in parentheses.

10

of Aesthetics as the effect of an overpowering of the mind by the elaborate form

of something, and not by the idea expressed by it. Prettiness and ridiculousness are

both opposite to the sublime, but the former has an appearance that is nevertheless

attractive whilst the latter strikes us only because of the insignificance of its contained

idea. Pretty is contrariwise to sublime as statuesque is to picturesque; the overwhelming

aspect is unity.

11

3 Scale and Size

3.1 Scale

scale, n.3 /skeɪl/III. 11. a. The proportion that the representation of an object bears to the object itself; a system of representing or reproducing objects in a smaller or larger size proportionately in every part. to scale: with exactly proportional representation of each part of the model.b. A unit of dimension in a representation of an object, bearing the same proportion to the unit of dimension in the object itself, as the size of the object shown on the plan bears to the actual size of the object that it represents.17

Scale can be imagined as another dimension of viewing, another layer of information

that adds upon the strictly physical three-dimensional properties of size and is in

addition to the intangible but often necessarily perceptible dimension of time. This

information only exists once the mental activity of referencing begins, both within

what is being viewed – the object and its setting - and what is referenced from

previous experience.

Architect Charles Moore distinguishes between space, generated by Euclidean

geometry and perceptual space, the sum of all dimensions that the mind can

perceive: ‘The dimensions of architecture are the dimensions of perceptual space.

The three spatial dimensions are, of course, and always have been, of high interest,

but not always the highest. A perfectly proportioned Palladian room, for instance,

can stimulate great admiration. But not if it happens to be on fire…’18 Scale is not a

mere mathematical ratio of the dimensions of one object to those of others; it is a

psychological phenomena.

Scale is not size, it is relative size. It is relative to: the whole, one element compared

with the size of the entire composition; other parts, an element compared with other

elements in the composition; usual size, elements compared with their expected sizes;

and human size, elements compared with the human body or its parts.19 Architectural

literature talks most often about human scale, monumental scale, miniature scale

and super-scale, and usually in that order of frequency.

Difficulties with the perception of scale make it difficult to ensure the artist’s or

architect’s intentions are truly realised. For human scale there is the difficulty of

perceiving an object or space in relation to human size if it lies too far for comparison

- the relative height of a tall tree to the human body being more difficult to ascertain

17 Oxford English Dictionary, <http://dictionary.oed.com> [accessed 15 December 2009]18 Charles Moore and Gerald Allen, Dimensions: Space, Shape and Scale in Architecture (New

York: Architectural Record, 1976), p. 519 Ibid., 18-21

12

than a standard door - and there is the problem of specific and generalised design

sizes for a variety of human dimensions. In these cases, usual size becomes the

important scale relation.

Scales can be layered and revealed at the same time, for instance in the façade

of a building that has the same element in different sizes. This multiplicity can be

combined with a difference in shape between different elements, setting up double,

triple or multiple scales between façade elements or pieces of furniture in a room. This

can allow the designer to disrupt the normality of scales imposed by other elements

with one or more having, for example, a size contrasting with its usual size, inviting the

viewer to question rather than accept.

3.2 Size

size, n.1 /sʌɪz/II. 10. a. The magnitude, bulk, bigness, or dimensions of anything. b. Preceded by of, or in later use with ellipse of this. of a (or one) size, of the same magnitude or dimensions. c. In abstract use: Magnitude.20

Size is raw data. It refers to a dimension - length, width, height, area or volume - and

is fixed at a point on a scale; other terms are used for a size that is changing, such

as growth or reduction. It is an uninformed descriptor, one dimensional even when

describing area or volume; without reference it has no meaning. Yet from an early

age we have points and frames of reference and can define objects as being a

particular size, though always in relation to another. Whilst it is the viewer of a work

of art or architecture who will determine its scale, it is the artist or architect who had

previously determined its size, decided on its dimensions and distances and angles

between elements to create this effect.

When size is as the bigness, and not the smallness, of an object compared with the

human body - the magnitude - it can negate the sense of a gestalt, the organised

whole that is perceived as greater than the sum of its parts. The masking of this size,

or the rendering of it as unmeasurable in an instance through the organisation of

elements, can bring out a level of sublimity. One of the earliest writers to describe

the sublime as beauty, eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke, stated that in

the achieving the sublime ‘the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot

entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it’;21

an object that engulfs the eyes with its size could engulf the mind.

20 Oxford English Dictionary, <http://dictionary.oed.com> [accessed 15 December 2009]21 Burke, p. 53

13

As with scale, size can be broken down into terms that, however, cannot avoid their

associations with scale: human-sized can represent an object that has significant

variation in size because the implication is that those variations sit on a scale that

distinguishes a human body from, say, a mouse or a mountain; and city-sized means a

place above a certain point on a scale, and could encompass areas populated with

300,000 people as well as those of 30 million. For monument-sized, there is a difficulty

in determining to what type of monument the reference is being made - a statue in

a city square, a cathedral or one of the Pyramids at Giza, perhaps. Monumentality

includes a layer of meaning - representation, veneration, objectification etc. - but it

differs from ornamentation in that it implies something standing alone and something

of a size. A monument aims to impress and often does so simply because of its large

size.

As a measurement of dimensions, size can also be used to describe time. The size

of time becomes relevant when objects appear to have been produced far in the

past, or conceivably are seemingly from the distant future, and can be irrespective

of objects that are nearby or similar in a general sense. Only when time or meaning,

stretching beyond comprehension, are used in this way can an object be described

as having infintie size.

Prominent Land Art pioneer Robert Smithson outlined a distinction between size and

scale that is akin to drawing a line between the absoluteness of science and the

perceptual potential inherent in a work of art in stating:

Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty.22

22 Robert Smithson, in Tiberghien, p. 71

14

Fig. 8 - Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, 1970

Fig. 9 - Ice Piece, Andy Goldsworthy, 1987

15

4 A Brief Introduction to Land Art

4.1 Situation and Setting

Land Art is one of a number of terms to describe projects and work by a particular

group of artists that roughly overlaps. By different criteria it is otherwise known as Earth

Art, Landscape Art, Earthworks, Environmental Art, Process Art, Ecological Art or even

Total Art. Yet, with the exception of Walter De Maria, none of the artists collected

under this umbrella term use it to describe their work. It is not a formalised movement

like Surrealism or Futurism; it has no unifying manifesto.

Loosely speaking, it defines a work as not merely being positioned in a landscape

but engaging with it, though sometimes not. It can also encompass sculptures like

Brancusi’s Endless Column (1920) that are in a landscape setting, or what would today

be called landscape architecture, such as the more abstract public plaza creations

of Isama Noguchi or Peter Walker. The inclusion of Brancusi is, in truth, a retrospective

grabbing of big name sculptors to help tighten the threads of art progress running

through the Twentieth Century, for Land Art proper began in the early 1960s with

Walter De Maria.

In a reaction to the commoditisation of the art world leading up to the halfway

point of the Twentieth Century, there was ‘an attempt to redefine art through art, a

desire to escape from the traditional classifications constructed by modernism’.23 The

devices used to this end in the gallery setting – ephemerality, intangibility, narrative

etc. – manifested in the work of Land Artists as much as it did for conceptual and

performance-based artists. However, whilst the preponderance of works of Land Art

are not discrete, portable objects ready for the tour of examination and a final resting

place in a collection, they are also not predominantly intangible or illusionary. The

fundamental difference is that, in the main, they are outside.

Early Land Art artists, such as De Maria

and Heizer, are described as ‘passing

through minimalism’, defining their

work as ‘a challenge to architecture’s

role as exhibition space’, paraphrasing

Robert Morris’s speculation that ‘the

larger the object and the more space it

requires, the more our relationship to it

becomes public’.24 Minimalism here is the

23 Tiberghien, p. 1824 Ibid., p. 65

Fig. 10 - Cross, Walter De Maria, 1968

16

rejection of anything resembling personal

experience or inner emotion, the size

of the works in particular forbidding any

private relationship with them. Tiberghien

counters this one-dimensional reasoning

for open, wilderness settings becoming

the chosen habitat for Land Art by stating:

‘It is no longer simply a question of installing

sculptures outside, or in other architectural

contexts [...] but to give the works value

in another way: if “the object is no longer

sufficient by itself”, the architecture which

houses it cannot compensate for its

deficiencies.’ 25 Minimalist artists allowed

‘a return to a sort of original form’26 in

sculpture by rediscovering its common

elements with architecture.

The distancing of the sculpture of Land

Art from architecture is furthered in its

relationship to its surroundings, with the

relationship understood to be best when

resolutely physical. For Land Artist Robert

Morris, this meant that the sculptures must

be placed on bare ground to assert their

gravity, revealing their mass and the larger

mass of the ground holding them up, and

so the gallery would not do.

The settings for much of Land Art render it

altogether inaccessible whilst at the same

time intrinsically accessible. Positioned

almost in defiance to urbanisation and

population density, some sites are only

reachable by taking side roads off side

roads and then traversing a desert plain,

yet they are reachable for the determined

if not for all. The degree of escapism, the

remoteness from studio and institution,

defines some works, particularly those in

25 Ibid., p. 6426 Ibid., p. 65

Fig. 11 - Endless Column, Constantin Brancusi, 1938

17

the desert or forest.

In contrast to the complexity of the city,

Walter De Maria (Las Vegas Piece, Desert

Cross), Charles Ross (Star Axis), James

Turrell (Roden Crater), Hannsjörg Voth

(Himmelstreppe) and Nancy Holt (Sun

Tunnels, Star Crossed) amongst others

departed for the cosmic, boundless space

of the desert. In the stillness, on arid ground

devoid of life, under cloudless skies, the

remoteness offers no spatial orientation

and the largest blank, planar canvas for

which one could wish. There, works can

stand out as unusual interventions or

provide a surprise only noticeable when

on top of the markings. For Richard Long

(Dusty Boot Line, Touareg Circle) the

desert offered quiet, intimate, neutral

ground for contemplation.

More common for Land Art in Europe

is the forest as a setting. Awash with

legends and myths, and presenting a

labyrinthine impenetrability swollen with

growth, fecundity and decay, artists such

as David Nash (Running Table, Wooden

Waterway) and Andy Goldsworthy (Seven

Spires, Sidewinder) engaged imagination

more than anything else. The latter’s

reconfigurations of leaves, pieces of ice

atop ponds, twigs, stones, all found close

by and often lasting for short periods, are

playful, ephemeral accumulations of the

abundant sylvan minutiae that take the

viewer back to both medieval times and

childhood curiosity.

Whilst some artists, Heizer and De Maria

included, seemed reluctant to return to

the city, Land Art has, albeit infrequently,

not been confined to wild, untouched

Fig. 13 - Running Table, David Nash, 1978

Fig. 12 - Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Garden, Isama Noguchi, 1961-64

Fig. 14 - Himmelstreppe, Hannsjörg Voth, 1980-87

18

settings. The city has received treatment

and, especially towards the end of

the twentieth century, more projects

have worked with post-industrial sites.

In wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with

100,000m2 of fireproof polypropylene

(Wrapped Reichstag), and also in

constructing a series of 7,503 fabric gates

in Central Park, New York (The Gates,

Central Park, New York, 1979-2005),

Christo and Jeanne Claude brought the

ideas behind their large-scale landscape

interruptions into an urban setting.

Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield, Battery City

Park – A Confrontation (1982) sowed

and cultivated a wheat field on a site,

surrounded by skyscrapers, awaiting

redevelopment in Manhattan, providing

a window through which the recent

agricultural past could be viewed.

Having bore witness to man’s power over

nature, former industrial sites, already

impure and stripped of their virgin soil,

were places for trying out something new.

The aesthetic healing of quarries, coal

mines, ore-mines and gravel pits is closer to

environmental art than most of Land Art,

a chance to resuscitate ground poisoned

by seeping chemicals and bereft of life.

For Spiral Jetty (1970), Robert Smithson

saw potential on the northeast shore of

the Great Salt Lake, Utah, for a ‘rebirth’

project sited on abandoned, salt-crusted

mud and amongst rusted machinery and

heavy-duty detritus. It is one of Land Art’s

most noted works, rich with both edge-of-

apocalypse and hopeful sentiments.

Fig. 15 - Sun Tunnels, Nancy Holt, 1973-76

Fig. 16 - Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Agnes Denes, 1982

19

4.2 Temporality and Tradition

The artist who works with earth, works with time.27

Temporality in particular is one device introduced to appropriate a more steadfast

distinction between gallery-kind art and Land Art. The time involved in experiencing -

the duration of the visit, the hour of the day or the time of year - alienates these works

from the opening hours of institutions. An artwork may also have its own roughly set

or clearly defined lifetime, short enough for the art to exist only for an instant or long

enough for it to be engulfed by shifting earth or encroaching waters, or eaten away

by erosion. The apparent macabre obsession of some artists on the moribundity of

the materials they had collected together for their sculptures doesn’t appear so on

closer inspection; the curiousness towards and documentation of natural decay was,

in part, a rediscovering of natural mortality and a coming to terms with humankind’s

presence in a more comprehensive ecosystem.

The anticipated corollary of time on many Land Art works renders them difficult

financial investments. It also prevents the viewer from appreciating them, at once, in

their totality, regardless of any feeling of a gestalt. Instead, the knowledge that they

still exist and have likely altered state since visiting would be more prominent, and

would help express a different understanding of natural processes.

If one wasn’t there at the time to experience the few fleeting moments of Dennis

Oppenheim’s Whirlpool, Eye of the Storm (1973) – spiral jets of smoke from an aeroplane

mimicking the path of a tornado – then one could wait around for the right conditions

in which lightning would strike De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977), or visit Christo and

Jeanne Claude’s Valley Curtain (1970-72) during its twenty-eight hour existence. With

patience, the alignment to the equinoxes in Robert Morris’s Observatory (1971) could

be seen for oneself if only it still existed; like much of Land Art there is nothing there

any longer.

Temporality sets much of Land Art apart from works exhibited in museums, where art

history is commonly comprehended as a linear time progression of the points at which

artworks were unveiled. In this way it is suggested that Land Art defies classification

and cannot easily be accommodated on a canonical time line, each piece having

not a point but its own, albeit still linear, stretched existence.28

Land has always been treated through time, not only by agriculture but also in the

creation of various types of garden. America inherited the European tradition of

27 Walter De Maria, in Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art (Boston: Birkhauser, 1996), p. 21

28 Tiberghien, p. 64

20

picturesque landscaping that originated in eighteenth-century Britain, though these

arrangements are not frequently repeated in Land Art, even in Europe. Instead,

what predominantly exists are abstracted forms, true to Modernism or Minimalism.

The concern for the purity of abstract form was, according to art historian Robert

Goldwater, writing in 1938, an expression of ‘Intellectual Primitivism’.29

The use of reductive forms like mastabas, solstitial alignments with the heavens,

‘dumb tools’ and references to - if not full involvement with - indigenous cultures

were all archaisms intended to bring out universal, basic and eternal sensations. The

abstraction allows for the breaking of finite barriers, entrance to the actuality of infinity

in nature and representing reality in the mind rather than in the senses. Yet with such

a diverse interpretation of mankind and environment amongst artists, this rule was

often broken, with artists like Richard Goldsworthy producing detailed, human-scale,

pleasing works. Nevertheless, tradition in Land Art is inherently linked with the longer

time frames of evolution and tectonic movement, and the civilisations that came

before our modern iteration.

29 John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond, 4th edn (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006), p. 59

Fig. 17 - Sky Line, Hans Haacke, 1967 Fig. 18 - Whirlpool, Eye of the Storm, Dennis Oppenheim, 1973

21

4.3 Substance and Process

Liberated by the setting, the insignificance

of a work’s durability or preciousness,

and the removal of the inclination to

work with paint, marble, bronze or other

traditional media, Land Art shows artists

freely using a range of materials. It is also

appropriate to describe them as using a

range of matter. ‘Natural materials’ are

abound in Land Art: earth, stone, wood,

smoke, water, wind, sunlight, dust, steam,

leaves, ice, snow, etc. The material here is

of great importance; the substance is also

the message.

Worthless materials like earth, dismissed

as filthy and base, unrefined and

inconsequential, are celebrated in Land

Art. In 1968, De Maria filled a gallery room

with moist, pungent soil for Munich Earth

Room, bringing the outside in to invite

thought. David Nash (Running Table,

Wooden Waterway) worked primarily

with raw, dead wood, not planed, nailed,

painted or treated, retaining its whimsical,

knobbly character. Stone in Land Art is

normally untreated, with Heizer prominent

in the introduction of rough boulders

already plump with geomorphic history

and ready to become sacred without

interference (Displaced/Replaced Mass

1, 2 & 3). On the importance of a lack of

colour in Land Art, art historian Alois Riegl,

writing a quarter of a century before the

genre’s inception in 1938, suggests that

colour ought to be rejected in all sculpture

for being illusionary, immaterial, and non-

tactile, and therefore incompatible with

the more tangible nature of sculpture. Fig. 21 - The New York Earth Room, Walter De Maria, 1977

Fig. 20 - Wooden Waterway, David Nash, 1978

Fig. 19 - Steam (second version), Robert Morris, 1974

22

The difficulty in translating large scale

or ephemeral works to the gallery, and

the deeply conceptual nature of most

works, means photography and text

are necessary for communicating the

ideas. De Maria’s dislike of photography

as a means of representation, paling

in comparison to the experience at his

works, is not shared by all. A photograph’s

instantaneousness closely matches

the fleeting existence of some works,

and the blown-up images of others is in

keeping with their largeness and is still

preferable to producing works befitting

a gallery. Hamish Fulton chose to make

no deliberate marks in the landscape; his

ramblings are only documented through

photographs and diagrammatic posters.

Smithson’s influence was served well by

his continued critical writing on his own

work and the work of others; for him, text

was indispensable, adding not only layers

to his own work but to Land Art as a whole.

Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis’s division

of the processes involved in creating

Land Art, whilst being tidy and contrived,

is insightful. Integration covers works that

manipulate the landscape as a material

in its own right; Interruption covers the

introduction of the man-made into the

natural; Involvement illuminates the often

one-on-one relationship of artists to the

land; Implementation charts the link with

socio-political structures; and Imagining

features the work of artists using the land

as a metaphor.30

30 Land and Environmental Art, ed. by Jeffrey Kastner, survey by Brian Wallis (London: Phaidon, 1998), pp. 7-9

Fig. 22 - Ringdom Gompa, Hamish Fulton, 1978

Fig. 23 - Standing Coyote, Hamish Fulton, 1981

23

Yet despite the scope originally available to Land Art, what began in the middle of the

twentieth century, particularly in the American West, with sculpture that spoke mostly

about the rejection of the market-led commoditisation of art, morphed towards the

end of the century into works centred on the tenets of environmentalism, committed

art given almost religious importance. The investigations into treating the land found

limits of what would be accepted, appropriation suffocated by appropriateness.

24

Fig. 24 - Planar Displacement Drawing (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1970

25

5 Michael Heizer

5.1 Early Works

The subject is architecture, the result is sculpture.31

Michael Heizer was born in Berkeley, California, in 1944, the son of the anthropologist

Robert Heizer. His father had authored, co-authored or edited 415 papers in the

four anthropological disciplines – archaeology, cultural anthropology, physical

anthropology and linguistics – but most of his publications centred on the Great Basin

and California.32 In contributing to studies of Olmec archaeology in Mesoamerica

and Luxor in Egypt, Robert Heizer took his son on a tour of Native American sites

and Central America, influences that would later come to fruition in Michael Heizer’s

works in the Nevada Desert.

After dropping out of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1963-64, Michael Heizer travelled

to New York and began a series of geometric paintings that spoke more about what

wasn’t there than what was. Planar, graphic and imbued with a physical and visual

tension, what Heizer called displacement paintings were strictly logical, structural

paintings of classic and formal relationships; ‘There is nothing’, he says, ‘arbitrary

in them, there are no aesthetics involved.’33 The two-dimensionality of these works

gave Heizer an understanding of viewpoint that would become more evident when

he followed his greater interest in sculpture, or more specifically negative sculpture:

making something by taking something away.

A recurring theme in Heizer’s work is

the repetition of forms at different sizes,

usually from small to large, perhaps

showing a growing confidence with the

form, but also from large to small. North,

East, South, West 1 (1967), a series of

four, human-scaled geometric objects

defined as much by their own form as the

suggested hole their removal left in the

source material - the other ‘half’ of the

sculpture – was repeated as North, East,

South, West 2 (1982), this time scaled up

many times to occupy the large open

space outside the Wells Fargo Building in

31 Michael Heizer, ‘Interview with Julia Brown’, in Kastner, pp. 228-9 (p. 229)32 Pat Barker, Robert Heizer <http://www.onlinenevada.org/Robert_Heizer> [accessed 3

December 2009]33 Heizer, in Celant, p. 533

Fig. 25 - Eccentric Painting, Michael Heizer, 1967

26

Fig. 26 - Negative Painting, Michael Heizer, 1966

Fig. 27 - Rectangular Painting 1, Michael Heizer, 1967

Fig. 28 - Rectangular Painting 2, Michael Heizer, 1967

27

Fig. 29 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1966 Fig. 30 - Negative Painting, Michael Heizer, 1966

Fig. 31 - Untitled 1, Michael Heizer, 1967 Fig. 32 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1967

Fig. 33 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1966 Fig. 34 - Untitled, Michael Heizer, 1967

28

Los Angeles. The graphic pattern in Circular Surfaces: Planar Displacement Drawing

(1970), for which Heizer, riding a motorcycle, held Speedway-like circular skids to mark

out 50-100m circles in the desert dust, reappeared two years later as Circular Planar

Displacement Etching (1972), an identical composition as 5-10cm etchings in a New

York pavement. Heizer was freed in the larger, unconfined spaces and filled them

with his work, commonly reacting in an uptight manner when closed in the gallery or

cityscape.

The large, expansive and forever forgiving American desert became Heizer’s colossal

canvas. On the Coyote Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, California, Heizer’s Black Dye

and Powder Dispersal 1 & 2 (1968) and further dye and powder dispersals in blue,

yellow and white throughout 1969 saw the coloured dust thrown up into the wind and

settle on top of the original lake bed dust, abstract images spread over 10-30m. The

true aspect of size here is both the dislocation from civilisation and the infinitesimal

time for which the artwork exists before being blown away. The dispersals vanished

before they were examined, destined to only exist in memory: ‘Memory will supplant

abstraction as an alternative to life.’34

34 Heizer, in Celant, p. 108

Fig. 35 - Planar Displacement Drawing, Michael Heizer, 1970

Fig. 36 - Circular Planar Displacement Etching, Michael Heizer, 1972

29

Fig. 37 - Dissipate (no. 8 of Nine Nevada Depressions), Michael Heizer, 1968

Fig. 38 - Dissipate/Runic Casting/Matchdrop, Michael Heizer, 1968

Fig. 39 - Windows 2, Matchdrop, Michael Heizer, 1969

30

5.2 Double Negative

In 1969 Heizer created his breakthrough

and still most noted work, Double

Negative. Using crates of dynamite and

a team of bulldozers to shift 240,000 tons

of rock, two 15m deep sloping trenches

were carved into the side of a narrow

canyon on the edge of the Virgin River

Mesa near Overton, Nevada, forming

an imaginary line 13m wide and 457m

long and creating a ‘monument to

displacement’.35 The title refers to the

impossibility of a double negative – ‘there

is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture’36

– and the success of the work is both

that it is essentially about absence, an

implication, a hint of something there,

and also that it is so large. A pair of cuts

a tenth of the size would not express the

same mysticism surrounding its creation,

would not have the same relationship

to the landscape and would not refer

to the size of objects found in the built

environment. Whilst Heizer saw working

in the desert as a means of escaping the

commoditisation of the art world and thus

its reduction to functionality, he is awake

to the importance of size:

Because of working in Nevada and having accumulated heavy equipment, my work got bigger and bigger. I started working with concepts of architectural measurement. When I built Double Negative I realised I had built something as big as a building, something greater in length than the height of the Empire State Building. This became an important relationship for me.37

35 Brian Wallis, ‘Survey’, in Kastner, pp. 18-43 (p. 29)

36 Heizer, in Celant, p. 20337 Ibid.

Fig. 40 - Double Negative, Michael Heizer, 1969-70

Fig. 41 - Double Negative, Michael Heizer, 1969-70

31

Certainly the rejection of the gallery was complete; how could a gallery compete

with the aggressive size, the domination in Double Negative? It was displayed in a

gallery setting in the Michael Heizer: New York-Nevada (January 1970) exhibition at

the Virginia Dwan Gallery, New York, as a series of photographs from the site, furthering

the sense of scale already instantly evident in the images: Double Negative was not

there in the gallery, it was 2,500 miles away and much, much bigger than the room in

which the viewer would have stood.

Some critics argued that such a work was environmentally destructive, the further

exploitation of nature by man, destroying the natural environment rather than

honouring it. Others, such as David Hickey, understood how Double Negative was an

apt reaction to the surroundings. With there a binary appreciation of place, ‘the dust

at your feet and the haze on the horizon’, the in between is vacant space marked

by its nothingness. Hickey states that ‘since you do not see things, but simply see, it is

always easier to experience what has been taken away than what has been added

… You can ‘add’ by taking away.’38

What followed next, to be discussed in more detail below, was Complex One, the first

of the collection of sculptures that forms City.

38 David Hickey, in ‘Earthworks, Landworks and Oz’, in Kastner, pp. 196-199 (p. 196)

Fig. 42 - Double Negative, Michael Heizer, 1969-70

32

5.3 During the Development of City

After Complex One, Heizer created works that eventually found their place in the

assemblage of City. Prominent amongst these are Platform (1980), Effigy Tumuli (1983-

85) and the 45°, 90°, 180° series of sculptures from 1981 to 1984, with Heizer’s paintings

from the seventies seeding the exploratory process.

Platform, a large-scale sculpture for the

grounds of the Oakland Museum, showed

a more nuanced appreciation of scale

for Heizer, a work that ‘couldn’t be too

big’.39 More important was the object

itself, how the sun hit it, elevating the

simple rectilinear form into an object of

otherworldliness as if deposited from the

cosmos.

Effigy Tumuli set Heizer loose on a site approximately one mile by one half mile, similar

in scale to City. On an abandoned surface coal mine beside the Illinois River and

adjacent to Buffalo Rocks State Park, Illinois, Heizer created five colossal sculptures

of stylised animals living in the surrounding area: a water strider, a frog, a turtle, a

catfish and a snake. The mounds were formed using heavy machinery to move some

460,000 cubic metres of earth and laying down 6,000 tons of limestone to reduce the

acidity of the soil, encouraging the return of vegetation that had been unable to

grow for over forty years.

Originally planned to be insects, the

animal forms were chosen as much to

represent the species most likely to be

the first to return to the neutralised site

as the creatures for which geometric

abstraction was most fitting. However,

the allusive and allegorical Effigy Tumuli

marked a departure from Heizer’s earlier,

more abstract conceptions and signalled

a linking of site with prehistoric Native

American mounds, with America itself

– if not Americana - and not European

traditions of art:

39 Ibid., p. 348

Fig. 43 - Platform, Michael Heizer, 1980

Fig. 44 - Catfish of Effigy Tumuli, Michael Heizer, 1983-85

33

It’s all earth-moved sculpture, architecturally sized, American Art. They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don’t have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.40

It furthered his escape from the gallery out

into the wild, entranced by the pioneering

spirit manifest in the expansive lands and

the simplistic, geometric re-forming of

earth, to Heizer the original material of

art. Heizer saw the expressive potential in

materials but was more concerned with

their structural characteristics than their

aesthetics.

Begun in 1981, Heizer’s series of sculptures,

45°, 90°, 180°, was a development of

his earlier tripartite Adjacent, Against,

Upon compositions. For those, roughly

hewn boulders were placed in a row in

one of the three named configurations:

near, leaning or atop a cleanly defined,

fabricated concrete base of equal size.

45°, 90°, 180° (1981) was a rearrangement

of this idea: three large stones - found

objects - took the three angular positions,

each above a concrete pedestal and

held in place. The concept was then

scaled up, with larger, now neater stones

and massive supports, to fill a courtyard

at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Filling

the large exhibition space for a show

at the Museum of Contemporary Art in

Los Angeles, 45°, 90°, 180°/Geometric

Extraction (1984) saw Heizer return to the

idea of a frontal yet dispersed, seemingly

massive and expansive composition

found in Complex One.

40 Heizer, in Celant. p. 404

Fig. 45 - Waterstrider of Effigy Tumuli, Michael Heizer, 1983-85

Fig. 46 - Frog Effigy of Effigy Tumuli, Michael Heizer, 1983-85

Fig. 47 - 45°, 90°, 180°/Geometric Extraction, Michael Heizer, 1984

34

Fig. 48 - Aerial view of City, Lincoln County, NevadaThe plaza surrounded by Complexes One, Two and Three lies at the top of the composition, 45°, 90°, 180° at the bottom. In between are geometrically-shaped earth mounds, domes and valleys.

35

6 Size in Land Art

6.1 Michael Heizer’s City

I don’t work with scale, I work with size. Scale is an effete art term.41

Michael Heizer has been constructing City for almost four decades, and he will

continue on it until he can no longer. It is estimated to have cost up to $25m, funded

by the Dia Art, Lannan and Brown foundations and the Riggio family.42 Heizer bought

a vast stretch of cheap land in Garden Valley, Lincoln County, Nevada in 1972 and

began constructing Complex One, the first of a series of complexes that would

make up City, a sculpture one and a quarter miles in length and over a quarter of a

mile wide. Heizer forbids visitors whilst work continues, and even threatens to shoot

trespassers; Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times Magazine article from 2005 is the

most recent documented visit.

Complex One, completed in 1974, relates to Heizer’s displacement paintings from

the previous decade. An angular, sloped mass of earth with trapezoidal ends, forty-

three metres long and over seven metres high, it is designed to be viewed formally

and informally: from the front the concrete banding acts as a rectangular frame; on

walking round the rectangle is revealed to be composed of 30-ton T and L shapes

that cantilever out from the top of the mound, concrete blocks that lie in front of it on

the ground or lie in the plane of the slope. The tools were borrowed from engineering:

in a nod to Nevada’s recent past as a nuclear test site, Complex One was designed

to withstand a blast, the site seismically analysed and the concrete used of the

highest specification that could be achieved; heavy machinery – diggers, cranes

and concrete mixers - toiled away during the night so that the concrete would keep

its colour.43

On completion of Complex One, Heizer and his team of heavy machinery operators

dropped the level of the ground in front seven metres to create a plaza that is blind

to the surrounding mountains. Complex Two and Complex Three, completed in 1999,

form two of the other sides of the plaza like a stadium open at one end. Complex Two

and Complex Three are said to be angular dirt mastabas up to a quarter of a mile in

length.

41 Michael Heizer, in Micahel Kimmelman, ‘A Sculptor’s Colossus in the Desert’, New York Times, 12 December 1999 <http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/12/arts/art-architecture-a-sculptor-s-colossus-of-the-desert.html> [accessed 29 May 2009], p. 5

42 Michael Kimmelman, ‘Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy’, New York Times, 5 February 2005 <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06heizer.html> [accessed 15 December 2009], p. 7

43 Tiberghien, p. 77

36

Successive phases to the northwest have

dwarfed the sculpture around the plaza.

For the four further complexes, Heizer has

moved earth by amounts only ever seen

elsewhere on large engineering projects,

forming hills and mountains and creating

a ‘patch of unspoiled sage, like a park,

smack in the middle, for flood runoff

through the valley’.44 Amidst the mounds

is a concrete sculpture bearing at least

material resemblance to the first three

complexes, and bearing a very close

resemblance to Heizer’s 45°, 90°, 180°

series. Heizer calls it a ‘diffracted gestalt’:

‘From the ground you grasp the size but

can’t make out the shapes – the opposite

of what you sense from the air – and

your perception changes as you move

around.’45 On approaching City, the earth

movements, concrete structures and

spaces in between are hidden from view

behind berms, domes and embankments;

the entirety of City is to be experienced

progressively with the whole and the

whole of each component not read at

once, that is to say the entire project is a

diffracted gestalt.

••••••••••••••••••••••••

I like to work so large that the camera can’t eat it. My sense is that you see art sequentially. You don’t need a gestalt. That’s a European manner. I’m trying to be an American artist.46

44 Michael Kimmelman, ‘Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy’ p. 5

45 Ibid, p. 546 Heizer, in Celant, p. 418

Fig. 49 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76

Fig. 50 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76

Fig. 51 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76

37

Frequently referenced by all writing about City is its similarity with megalithic structures

of antiquity. Heizer himself admits the resemblance is strong and in part intentional, with

the form of Complex One relating to Egyptian mastabas and the concrete framing

devices referencing the serpent-head motif from the Great Ball Court at Chichen Itza

in Mexico. Indeed, Heizer’s father, a noted archaeologist, in taking his son with him to

study pre-Colombian monuments and sites in Central America ignited an intrigue with

the size and mass of the monuments rather than their symbolism. Heizer, a reactionary

against commodified, object-in-gallery art refutes the argument that he is making a

break with the past: ‘I’m not a radical. In fact, I’m going backward. I like to attach

myself with the past.’47 However, he now holds back from those earlier remarks: ‘I

said I derived some of the shapes from the serpent motif at Chichen Itza, and now I

have to live with this forever, as if that’s the whole meaning behind it.’48 Tiberghien,

however, justifies Heizer’s position in stating:

Architecture and sculpture, as they exist, indistinguishable, in these ‘inorganic sculptures’, are perpetually out of date. Additionally, Land Art is profoundly ‘unreal’. In each of these artists’ work, in diverse forms, there is something unnameable, something in the silence of the desert, which exists as if of an earlier time.49

It is undoubtedly Michael Heizer’s fascination with mass that is behind his works prior to

City, in particular Double Negative (1970). Leaving such a large void that suggested a

much larger, building-sized object had made its mark in the landscape, Heizer himself

admits that it was the origin of his interest in architecture: ‘When I was done it was

47 Heizer, Beardsley, p. 1748 Heizer, in Kimmelman, p. 349 Tiberghien, p. 79

Fig. 52 - Complex One, Michael Heizer, 1972-76

38

as big as a building. I had accidentally

combined an issue of architecture with

an issue of sculpture.’50

For regular geometric shapes, such as

cubes and pyramids, the whole can be

sensed at once and is offered immediately,

avoiding any sense of intimacy. The

scaling-up to Land Art’s large dimensions

is purported to accentuate this. Smithson

is quoted as stating: ‘There is no escaping

nature through abstract representation;

abstraction brings one closer to physical

structures within nature itself.’51 Heizer

agrees, declaring: ‘Geometry is organic.

The study of crystallography demonstrates

that there is more geometry in nature

than man could ever develop…. There

is no sense of order that doesn’t exist in

nature.’52

Heizer is known for being fully aware if not

morbidly fearful of a near, apocalyptic

future and this helps explain what

journalist Michael Kimmelman calls the

‘bunker metaphor’ within City: ‘Part of

my art, is based on an awareness that we

live in a nuclear era. We’re probably living

at the end of civilization.’53 There is the

suggestion that what Heizer is attempting

to create is a final monument to modern

civilisation – technology- and science-

obsessed, corrupted by big government,

resolutely focused on progress – before

the nuclear finale: ‘The H-bomb, that’s

the ultimate sculpture. The world is going

to be pounded into the Stone Age, and

what kind of art will be made after that?’54

50 Heizer, in Brown, in Kastner, p. 22851 Robert Smithson, in Tiberghien, p. 6752 Heizer, in Brown, in Kastner, p.22853 Ibid.54 Heizer, in Celant, p. 207

Fig. 53 - Complex Two (models), Michael Heizer, 1980-88

Fig. 54 - Complex Two (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1980-88

39

City references not just past monuments

but also airports, motorways, city squares

and concrete stadia that might survive

the destruction. Heizer has himself

likened Complex One to a blast shield,

and in making City internalized and, as

Kimmelman described it, ‘defensive’ it

appears that Heizers is adding drama.

As Burke put it: ‘And to things of great

dimensions, if we annex an adventitious

idea of terror, they become without

comparison greater.’55

City, as with most of Heizer’s work, deals

with a somewhat solipsistic relationship

with human scale; it may be perceived

as on a monumental scale in relation to

other artworks or to smaller buildings such

as a modest house but the experience

or this artwork is intended to be internal.

Explaining the function of the plaza at the

centre of the first three complexes in City,

Heizer clarifies his own methodology: ‘It’s

like making a room; the sculpture makes its

own area, it’s completely isolated.’56 Whilst

Heizer’s earlier works may have talked

about their landscape setting – ‘the kind

of unraped, religious space artists have

always tried to put in their work’ – City does

not; ‘It’s about art, not about landscape.’

Beardsley attests that ‘some association

with the landscape is unavoidable: the

works are after all, situated in a flat basin

whose distant mountain ranges echo the

long, ground-hugging, rough character

of Heizer’s mounds’.57

Hamish Fulton, an artist whose wandering-

explorer methodology deliberately left no

55 Burke, p. 5456 Heizer, in Brown, in Kastner, p. 22857 Heizer, in Beardsley, p. 13

Fig. 55 - Complex Two (in construction), Michael Heizer, 1980-88

Fig. 56 - Complex Two, Michael Heizer, 1980-88

40

mark in the landscape, felt that the work

of Heizer, Smithson and De Maria to be a

continuation of ‘“Manifest Destiny”… the

so-called “heroic conquering” of nature’

and found it ‘inescapably urban’, that

any intervention by default comments

on many issues aside from its setting.58

Beardsley goes on to propose that, when

finished, City will be more of the character

of conventional monuments than Heizer’s

previous works:

The elements will be massive and occupy space emphatically. Yet though parts may be large in size, they can never be truly large in relation to the scale of the surrounding basins and ranges. And the excavation between them will define and environment for which we, the viewers are the centre, rather than occupying the centre themselves as conventional monuments do.59

On the subject of working on an

architecturally measurable scale, Heizer

says: ‘Not scale, size. Size is real, scale is

imagined size. Scale could be said to be

an aesthetic measurement whereas size

is an actual measurement.’60 Art critic

Philippe Boudon characterises scale as

‘a specifically architectural concept,

as opposed to proportion’ for which the

dependency of an object on another

nearby of known size allows for ‘ambiguity

of scale’.61 In positioning the plaza of City

over seven metres below ground level,

Heizer removes any reference points for

scaling the sculptures, an effect not fully

understood by Tiberghien:

58 Hamish Fulton, in Beardsley, p. 4459 Beardsley, p. 1960 Heizer, in Brown, in Kastner, p. 22961 Philippe Boudon, in Tiberghien, p. 45

Fig. 57 - Complex Two (detail) of City, Michael Heizer, 1980-88

Fig. 58 - 45°, 90°, 180° (centre, in distance) of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005

Fig. 59 - 45°, 90°, 180° of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005

Fig. 60 - 45°, 90°, 180° (artist in foreground) of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005

41

…the visitor, incredulous at first, then stunned, cranes his neck at a forty-five degree angle, his body lightly tenses, without any possible point of reference, seized by a desire to alter his position in an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. No matter whether one recedes or approaches, one never finds the perfect distance. When the visitor goes around the work, he sees only the access ramps that lead to the centre. Even with the variations of light, at noon, at sunset, or under a full moon, the same feeling remains. Incomprehensibility or the sublime?62

Tiberghien pursues Hegel’s interpretation

of the sublime – ‘[the] outward shaping

which is itself annihilated in turn by what

it reveals, so that the revelation of the

content is at the same time a supersession

of the revelation, is the sublime’ – to mean

that Heizer’s work would be situated ‘not in

the symbolic, but in the sphere of indivision

between architecture and sculpture’, or

Hegel’s ‘primitive need for art’. He asserts

that Heizer is troubled by the notion of

scale, that it is the ‘excess of presence’ in

the objects in City that creates the art; ‘His

gigantic crystals offer the eye nothing but

their size. One cannot evade them...’63

Beardsley agrees, stating that Heizer’s

work can be seen as ‘a contemporary

expression of the sublime’.64

Heizer uses a different word: awe:

It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally-sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. To create a transcendent work of art means to go past everything.65

62 Tiberghien, p. 7363 Ibid., p. 7964 Beardsley, p. 5965 Heizer, Tiberghien, p. 77

Fig. 62 - Complex Two (left) and Complex One (right) of City, Michael Heizer, 1972-88

Fig. 61 - Dome-shaped earth mound of City, Michael Heizer, c. 2005

42

Fig. 63 - Roden Crater (process artwork), James Turrell, 1974-present

43

6.2 James Turrell’s Roden Crater

James Turrell is an artist dealing primarily

with ideas of perception and the science

of seeing. His principal manipulated

medium is light; Turrell is considered one

of the founding members of the California

Light and Space Movement of the 1960s

and 1970s. Early works were illusionary:

light projected onto walls was arranged

to appear solid, two-dimensional

planar shapes masquerading as three-

dimensional forms composed entirely

of light, the matter dematerialised and

ungraspable. For the Ganzfeld installations

(1968 - present) entire rooms were filled

with homogeneous, palpable light, the light

in the spaces feeling ‘physically charged

with coloured light’.66 The same effect was

made more intimate in his perceptual cells:

in Gasworks (1993) viewers lay down on a

bed and were rolled inside a metal sphere

to be overwhelmed with the homogeneous

coloured light inside. Turrell’s Skyspaces

(1975 – present) are small, centrally focused

rooms, lined with benches, open to the sky

above. Playing with the juncture of interior

space and the space outside, the rooms

feel enclosed but are subject to the passing

clouds and variations of light as the sun,

moon and stars arc overhead.

It was working on the Skyspaces that led Turrell towards what would become his

magnum opus, Roden Crater (1974 – present): ‘[they] brought about the desire to work

with larger amounts of space and a more curvilinear sense of the sky and its limits.’67

With a background as a pilot, Turrell flew his small plane between the Canadian and

Mexican borders, from the Rockies to the Pacific, for seven months before the right

site – an isolated geological formation, hemispherically shaped, over 1,500m above

sea level, 150-300m above a plain, cloud-free and far from sources of light pollution

66 James Turrell, in Peter Noever (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), p. 123

67 Ibid, p. 158

Fig. 64 - Gasworks, James Turrell, 1993

Fig. 65 - Roden Crater (detail), James Turrell, 1974-present

44

- was found amongst the 400 craters that

form the San Francisco volcanic field,

north of Flagstaff, Arizona.

In a bowl-shaped, extinct volcano Turrell

has for the last thirty years been building

a series of celestial vaulting chambers as

part of an observatory complex. Celestial

vaulting is the effect created when the

sky is viewed without a visible horizon line

whereby the sky appears to be ‘coming

down’ to enclose. Approached from the

flat plain of the Painted Desert, the path

curves upwards to the first point at which

the expanse of the land, infinite and

ineffable, can be experienced. At the top

of the fumarole, the South Lodge leads

to one in the network of tunnels that end

in a designated observing space. These

spaces capture the space and shape

of the sky and its light at different times:

the Sun and Moon Space, a camera

obscura, displays on its walls an image

of the sun, riddled with its black dots, at

the solstices; the North Space, accessed

via another camera obscura in the Kiva

Space, observes the pole star, Polaris; the

Fumarole Space, insulated from radio

noise by a Faraday cage, acts as a small

radio telescope, receiving signals from

quasars and Seyfert galaxies; and the

South Space charts the north star and is

designed to mark a lunar event occurring

every 18.61 years.

Roden Crater is significantly larger than

anything else Turrell – or any other artist

- has created, which, given his focus on

perception, is a progression that indicates

the importance of scale in the search of

the sublime. The work is ‘on a scale that is

symphonic, revealing light from multiple,

Fig. 66 - Roden Crater (interior Skyspaces and connecting tunnel), James Turrell, 1974-present

45

massive sources in a space designed for its revelation’68 and allows ‘a unique and

sublime experience to viewers seeking perceptual enlightenment’.69 The long tunnels,

lit at the ends by bright discs of the light outside, are human-scaled, confined transfers

between the end points of long lines and the edges of implied shapes: lines to distant

stars, to the sun and to the moon; the shapes of the crater’s sphere, the sky’s intensified

concavity and Earth’s surface. Conceived in the decade following the first shots of

Earth from space, Roden Crater offers a response to Earthrise: the heavens can be

encountered on Earth as much as Earth is in the heavens.

68 Michael Hue-Williams, ‘Wordless Thought’, in James Turrell – A Life in Light, ed. Meredith Etherington-Smith (Paris: Somogy, 2006), p. 11

69 Robert E. Knight, ‘Roden Crater’, In James Turrell: Infinite Light (Scottsdale, Arizona: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), p. 2

Fig. 67 - Roden Crater (view of crater centre), James Turrell, 1974-present

46

Fig. 68 - South Space of Roden Crater (model in two parts), James Turrell, 1998

47

6.3 Other Works

6.3.1 Walter De Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometre/The Broken Kilometer and Lightning Field

For 1977’s Documenta VI art exposition in Kassel, Germany, Walter De Maria had

a solid brass rod, measuring a kilometre in length and with a cross section of 5cm,

bored vertically into the ground, passing through six geological layers. The kilometre

was composed of 167 rods approximately six metres in length, the installation taking

79 days to complete. The rod is topped by a 2m square sandstone plate that sits at

the crossing of the two paths in Friedrichsplatz. The companion piece completed two

years later, The Broken Kilometre, located in an apartment block on West Broadway,

New York, consists of five hundred two metre long brass rods in arranged neatly in

five rows on the floor. Both works express an implied size, hidden underground on an

unfamiliar axis and in an unfamiliar direction, or hidden by being segmented and

incomplete.

Fig. 69 - Vertical Earth Kilometre, Walter De Maria, 1977

Fig. 70 - The Broken Kilometre, Walter De Maria, 1979

48

De Maria’s best known work is his 1977 Lightning Field in near Quemado, New Mexico.

Four hundred highly polished, stainless steel poles with pointed, solid tips are arranged

in a twenty-five by sixteen rectangular grid, one mile long and one kilometre wide, so

that the tips of the poles, positioned on a gentle slope, would form an even horizontal

plane on average six metres from the ground. During the lightning season from May

to September, lightning strikes the poles an average of three times every thirty days.

Fig. 71 - Lightning Field, Walter De Maria, 1974-77

49

The site is only accessible by written permission in order to keep a strict ratio of ‘a small

amount of people to large amount of space’.70 Similar to Roden Crater in the use of the

space of the sky as a material or object, the immensity, rapidity and tempestuousness

of the lightning and thunder above the poles subjugates anyone looking on at the

tremendous, electrified field.

70 Walter De Maria, in Kastner and Wallis, p. 233

Fig. 72 - Lightning Field, Walter De Maria, 1974-77

50

6.3.2 Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Valley Curtain

Christo and Jean Claude have frequently

worked with large sizes; theirs is a response

to setting, and what often appears as an

elucidation of enormousness is due to the

scale of the location. For Valley Curtain

(1970-72) 12,780m2 of orange nylon

fabric was hoisted up by steel cabling to

stretch 381m across a valley in Rifle Gap,

Colorado. It lasted for just 28 hours, high

winds necessitating its hasty removal.

Like all their large projects it was years

in the making and necessarily involved

hundreds of professionals with expertise in

other disciplines; a feat of engineering -

akin to a narrow suspension bridge or a

frail membrane dam - it is a statement

of delicate, reverential interruption that

reflects the size of accomplishment by

man not over nature but within it.

Fig. 73 - Valley Curtain, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1970-72

51

6.3.3 Works by Charles Simonds

American artist Charles Simonds, included

by many in the group of Land Artists

because of his use of earth as a material

and his tendency to predominantly work

away from the gallery setting, is essential

in any discussion in the field that concerns

size or architecture. Since 1970 he has

created miniature, pueblo-styled houses,

made up of 8mm-long earth bricks, for

a tribe he calls the Little People. These

have sometimes existed in galleries but

are normally placed in either proximity

to Native American villages or within the

ruins of derelict urban sites, particularly in

New York.

Simonds’ interest lay in the relationship

between body and earth - specifically his

own body and earth - and both the myth

of origin and the origin of myth. For Birth

(1970) Simonds buried himself in the earth

and was reborn from it; for Landscape-

Body-Dwelling (1971) Simonds lay naked

on the ground, covered himself with earth

and proceeded to build small earth-brick

houses on the landscape formed by the

curves of his torso. For the Dwellings series,

begun in 1970, Simonds built small ruins

of houses and walls within the cracks of

crumbling buildings and their walls. To put

one’s mind within these tiny creations is to

inhabit them, to carry out the chores and

rituals of their imagined inhabitants: ‘You

have that feeling of falling into a small

and distant place which, when entered,

becomes big and real - a dislocation

which gives it a dreamlike quality.’71

71 Charles Simonds, in Kastner and Wallis, p. 240

Fig. 74 - Dwelling, P.S. 1, Charles Simonds, 1975

Fig. 75 - Landscape - Body - Dwelling, Charles Simonds, 1973

Fig. 76 - Age, Charles Simonds, 1982-83

52

The role of architecture in Simonds’ work is that of narrative, the small size allowing

the whole to be comprehended instantly and rendered inconsequential, letting the

intricate detail of the built forms and the mythical life come forward. This is ‘scale

without size’72 and, like Simonds’ later interest in urban restoration, is effective in

making the viewer sense responsibility for their surroundings by suggesting there

are little people to care for; unlike Heizer, whose work impresses itself on the viewer,

Simonds’ miniatures force the viewer into a position where they are aware they are

impressing themselves on others.

72 Tiberghien, p. 73

Fig. 77 - Land - Body - Dwelling, Charles Simonds, 1971

53

54

Fig. 78 - Antiquus bivii viarum Appiae at Ardeatinae (Ancient intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina), Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1756

Fig. 79 - Newton’s Cenotaph, Etienne-Louis Boullée, 1784

55

7 Conclusion

Away from realm of actuality, magnitude can be a construct of the imagination.

Eighteenth century architect Etienne-Louis Boullée, also a professor at the Académie

Royale d’Architecture in Paris, drew up designs for buildings and monuments that

have an ‘eerie quality of immensity’,73 mostly unbuilt. His Newton’s Cenotaph (1784)

comprises a sphere over 150m in diameter, resting on a terraced base and pierced

with holes to let in pin-pricks of daylight that would mimic stars suspended in the

infinite universe. At night a sphere of lamps would be suspended from the ceiling to sit

in the centre, bathing the curved walls with something resembling daylight. This was a

fitting epithet for Newton, or at least Boullée’s admiration for him: ‘Sublime mind! Vast

and profound genius! Newton! Accept the homage of my weak talents...’74

Designs for the Proposed New Hall for Expansion of the National Library (1780) are

unashamedly large, unrelated to the sizes of the books or shelving they contain or the

readers that would visit. Again, Boullée is clear in his intentions, designing ‘an immense

basilica’, for which nothing could be ‘more grand, more noble, more extraordinary,

nor have a more magnificent appearance than a vast amphitheatre of books’.75 His

Funerary Monument (1785), one of Boullée’s many pyramidal monument designs,

confirms an untamed desire for grandiose constructions, an architecture that has

immediate effects on the sensibilities. Boullée was a visionary who enjoyed the

poetics of his virile and prophetic designs, particularly in their use in his teachings,

caught between declaring a distaste for baroque theatricality and the high drama

of magnitude.

Boullée’s neoclassical tendencies were resolutely Roman in their origin, not akin to

Greek temples that he found monotonous; Newton’s Cenotaph would not have been

dissimilar to the Pantheon in its effect. The ruins of Rome, still grandiose and massive

in their broken state, also inspired eighteenth century architect, archaeologist and

engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Restoring the historical authority of the city in

his etchings for Antichita Romane engorged Piranesi’s imagination with ideas of the

settings that could be readied for a new age of Roman ambition. Like Boullée, his

designs were not bound by reality - certainly not technical feasibility - and all but

a few remained unbuilt, perhaps inherently so. However, his was a very significant

influence on the arts; his superlative, fantastical architectural etchings not only depict

sublime, monumental buildings, epic, convoluted stairways, tumescent buttresses

and terrifying torture machines but are also presented with a perspective style so

detailed and rich with variety and activity they are as much picturesque as they

73 Dominique de Menil, in Visionary Architects: Boullee, Ledoux, Lequeu (Houston, Texas: University of St. Thomas, 1968), p. 13

74 Etienne-Louis Boullée, in de Menil, p. 2675 Ibid., p. 63

56

are sublime. Despite being a proficient writer, Piranesi found a visual means through

which he could channel his wish that the impressive and grandiose scale of ancient

Rome returned to the minds of its contemporary inhabitants if not in its physical form

too.

The fantastical depictions of both Boullée and Piranesi, lacking sobriety and moderation

in their scale, were, however, proposals for something that could be. On the cusp of

reality were German architect Albert Speer’s proposals for Germania, the new Berlin

fit for the Third Reich’s rule over all of Europe. Colossal in proportions and famously

designed to last for a thousand years, the enormous domes, halls and triumphal

arches would have been on a grander scale than in any other city in history. The

horizontal stretching of the architecture spoke of territoriality, the vertical of elevation

- to the ideals of the Nazi regime. This was, with the clear view of retrospection, the

enormousness of enormity.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Whilst it is yet to be determined if Heizer’s City lives up to its objective of being

awe-inspiring, Michael Kimmelman, in the last published account of a visit, writes

he was ‘flabbergasted’76 with what had been accomplished. Yet despite its size

it is not architecture, and not not-architecture; it does not function in the same

way as architecture but it is not landscape either. Krauss’s awkward Expanded

Field, in attempting to evolve more terms to describe modern sculpture, does not

go far enough. City is part sculpture, part architecture and part not-architecture.

Constructed with the solidity and opacity of concrete and rammed earth, and

situated in a vast expanse of mostly lifeless aridity, the term most applicable would be

axiomatic structure, axiomatic meaning ‘of the nature of an admitted first principle’,

‘self-evident’ or ‘indisputably true’.77

Originally conceived as just Complex One, Heizer’s City has grown to include the

further complexes and a surrounding landscape of moved earth. Its distinct sculptural

pieces are statuesque, standing out starkly against red dirt below and blue sky above.

The meandering composition and multifarious hills and valleys, not comprehensible

until its lengths and widths have been traversed, give it a sense of the picturesque,

albeit time-delayed. When complete it will not function as a city, teeming with life

and saturated with the diversity of human activity, and will only function, as intended,

as a work of art. Though it is a hubristic, profligate construction that will invite visitors to

indulge in the level of solipsism that has driven its creator, and despite Heizer’s fears

of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, City contains more hope than despair; in the

76 Michael Kimmelman, in Kimmelman p. 577 Oxford English Dictionary, <http://dictionary.oed.com> [accessed 15 December 2009]

57

stillness of the desert Heizer is attempting to produce an embodiment of the sublime,

beauty on a par with nature.

58

8 Bibliography

8.1 Books

Beardsley, John, Earthworks and Beyond, 4th edn (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006)

Bourdon, David, Designing the Earth: The Human Impulse to Shape Nature (New York:

Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1995)

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime

and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Celant, Germano, Michael Heizer (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997)

de Menil, Dominique (ed.), Visionary Architects (Houston: University of St. Thomas,

1968)

Ficaccia, Luigi, Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (London: Taschen, 2000)

Graham-Dixon, Andrew, ‘James Turrell – A Life in Light’, in James Turrell – A Life in Light,

ed. by Meredith Etherington-Smith (Paris: Somogy, 2006), pp. 20-41

Hue-Williams, Michael, ‘Wordless Thought’, in James Turrell – A Life in Light, ed. Meredith

Etherington-Smith (Paris: Somogy, 2006), pp. 6-19

Kastner, Jeffrey and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 1998)

Knight, Robert E., ‘Roden Crater’, In James Turrell: Infinite Light (Scottsdale, Arizona:

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), pp. […]

Licklider, Heath, Architectural Scale (London: The Architectural Press, 1965)

Moore, Charles and Gerald Allen, Dimensions: Space, Shape & Scale in Architecture

(New York: Architectural Record Books, 1976)

Noever, Peter (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001)

Pinkard, Terry P., Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Rendell, Jane, Art and Architecture: a Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)

59

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal

Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985)

Tiberghien, Gilles A., Land Art (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995)

Virilio, Paul, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London: Continuum, 2004)

Weilacher, Udo, Between Landscape Architecture and Landscape Art (Boston:

Birkhauser, 1996)

8.2 Periodicals Articles

Crone, Rainer, ‘Prime Objects of Art: Scale, Shape, Time – Creations by Michael Heizer

in the Deserts of Nevada’, Perspecta, Vol. 19 (1982), pp. 14-35 < http://www.jstor.org/

stable/1567047> [accessed 5 April 2009]

Kimmelman, Michael, ‘Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy’, New York Times, 5 February 2005

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html> [accessed 29 May

2009]

Kimmelman, Michael, ‘A Sculptor’s Colossus of the Desert’, New York Times, 12

December 1999 <http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/12/arts/art-architecture-a-

sculptor-s-colossus-of-the-desert.html> [accessed 29 May 2009]

Moore, Jared Sparks, ‘The Sublime, and Other Subordinate Esthetic Concepts’, The

Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 45, No. 2 (15 January 1948), pp. 42-47 < http://www.jstor.

org/stable/2019580> [accessed 17 December 2009]

8.3 Websites

Church, Jok, ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude’ <www.christojeanneclaude.net>

[accessed 30 December 2009]

Houlgate, Stephen, ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://

plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics> [accessed 13 December 2009]

Tarasen, Nic, ‘Double Negative: A Website About Michael Heizer’ <http://

doublenegative.tarasen.net> [accessed 13 December 2009]

Oxford English Dictionary, <http://dictionary.oed.com> [accessed 15 December

2009]

60

8.4 Films

Christo’s Valley Curtain. Dir. Ellen Giffard, Albert Maysles and David Maysles. Maysles

Films. 1974

James Turrell: Passageways. Dir. Carine Asscher. Editions du Centre Pompidou. 2006