Designer of the Month: Michael Heizer

Week 4: City

City (1972- ) is truly an unusual, visionary work, even for an artist like Michael Heizer. When it's complete, it will have the distinction as the largest sculpture in the United States. Even in its current, ongoing state, the work is so large - roughly eighty feet high, a quarter of a mile wide, and one and a quarter miles long - that when the energy department did a survey flyover of the area, they mistook it for a military project.[1]

Michael Heizer, 45º, 90º, 180º/City, 1980-1999. Garden Valley, Nevada. Photograph by Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times.

Unlike Effigy Tumuli (1983-85), City is a project that was conceived entirely by Heizer himself. He began searching for land in the West where he could begin work in 1971, finally settling on an initial three-square-mile plot of land in the Nevada desert.[2] As Michael Kimmelman describes of the work in a 2005 article in The New York Times:

In 1972, Heizer acquired land in Garden Valley and began work on the first part of ''City,'' his own version of Easter Island or Angkor Wat: a modernist complex of abstract shapes -- mounds, prismoids, ramps, pits -- to be spread across the valley. It was to be experienced over time, in shifting weather, not from a single vantage point or from above but as an accumulation of impressions and views gathered by slowly walking through it. Artists in the 1960's and 70's -- Donald Judd, Andre, De Maria, Smithson, others -- were pushing sculpture off its pedestal. This was sculpture pushed all the way into the Western desert, the sort of work that you couldn't buy or sell even though it was very expensive to produce. Its materials were dirt and rock and cement and rebar, not marble or porcelain or bronze, and its tools were not chisels but heavy machinery.[3] 

It's a grand vision, and one that Heizer has said may take his lifetime to complete.[4] Heizer's vision for City is for a series of complexes within the desert. Complex One - a sloped, flat-topped mound with projecting beams - was completed in 1974, but since then, his work has reached somewhat of an impasse.[5] Complex Two and Three relate to One by forming a horseshoe - like a stadium open at one end - around a broad pit or plaza, but with continual logistical and equipment issues, they represent the greater problem of what happens over time with such a remarkably massive undertaking.[6] ''A lot of money over the years went into simply trying to maintain old, useless equipment,'' Heizer has explained; ''I never stopped working on the pit and the Complexes, whenever I could afford to. But we're talking crazy optimism here.''[7]

Michael Heizer at the City site, next to 45°, 90°, 180°/Geometric Extraction . Courtesy of the Public Art Foundation of Greater Des Moines.

After 27 years of work and a major setback in the form of a debilitating neurological disease, Complex Two and Three were finally completed in 1999.[8] In addition to the first three complexes, the concrete sculpture 45°, 90°, 180°/Geometric Extraction (1999), his most massive single positive sculptural shape to date, was added to the space during this time and is a focal point within the larger City landscape.[9] As Michael Kimmelman describes of the effect of the four works:

Complexes One, Two and Three, which are collectively nearly the size of Yankee Stadium, look tiny and precious. The new phases are more pneumatic -- raked dirt formations resembling hills, valleys and mountains. There is a patch of unspoiled sage, like a park, smack in the middle, for flood runoff through the valley (Heizer was thrilled to discover that it actually worked during the recent January storms); and there's now a concrete sculpture, ''45o, 90o, 180o,'' which both evokes ancient Egypt and resembles a board game on the scale of an airport hangar. ''I call it a defracted gestalt,'' Heizer said while slowly steering the truck to the steep precipice of what he calls Alpha mound. ''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.''[10]

And then, of course, there's the issue of money. Although the Dia Art Foundation and the Lannan Foundation are current supporters of the project, as a non-commissioned, private artistic undertaking, raising funds for the project has always been an issue for Heizer.[11] And until the project is complete, City remains, and will continue to remain, a very private work. Heizer eventually plans to open City to the public, but not until he completes the 15 miles of concrete curbs that delineate the mounds and shore up the dirt slopes, tasks he estimates could take another decade to complete.[12]


[1] Public Art Foundation of Greater Des Moines online, "Michael Heizer's 'City'," http://dsmpublicartfoundation.org/feature/michael-heizers-city/, (accessed September 25, 2012).

[2] Douglas C. McGill, "Introduction," from Michael Heizer: Effigy Tumuli, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990), 19.

[3] Michael Kimmelma, "Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy," from The New York Times, February 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html?pagewanted=3, (accessed September 26, 2012).

[4] Douglas C. McGill, "Introduction," from Michael Heizer: Effigy Tumuli, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990), 19.

[5]  Michael Kimmelma, "Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy," from The New York Times, February 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html?pagewanted=4, (accessed September 26, 2012).

[6] Ibid. 

[7] Ibid.

[8]  Michael Kimmelma, "Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy," from The New York Times, February 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html?pagewanted=5, (accessed September 26, 2012).

[9]  Michael Govan, "Exhibitions: Michael Heizer, Intoduction," Dia Art Foundation online, http://www.diacenter.org/exhibitions/introduction/83, (accessed September 26, 2012).

[10] Michael Kimmelma, "Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy," from The New York Times, February 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html?pagewanted=5, (accessed September 26, 2012).
 
[11] Michael Govan, "Exhibitions: Michael Heizer, Artist Biography," Dia Art Foundation online, http://www.diacenter.org/exhibitions/artistbio/83, (accessed September 26, 2012).

[12] Michael Kimmelma, "Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy," from The New York Times, February 6, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html?pagewanted=6, (accessed September 26, 2012).