We knew that the installation of Michael Heizer City would be impossible to visit when we drove through the Nevada desert in the summer of 2016 with a excursion investigating the “technical lands” of the American desert for students of the history and practice of art, architecture, and science. As our charter bus left the Land Use Interpretation Centre, Wendoveron the morning of August 22, we spotted a complicated satellite compass/telephone system that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided to our group as a safety precaution, preparing to announce the moment we passed near City (we had already given up on trying to get in).
But by the time our bus was hurtling down Route 318 to arrive at Heizer’s Double negative before sunset (and a threatening thunderstorm), most of the passengers – and no longer the cool, exuberant crowd that boarded about six hours ago – were asleep, lulled by a land art documentary playing on the bus monitors above their heads. We counted half an hour before Cityapproaches in increments of about five minutes: “It’s coming on the right, get ready! » We have reached the section of motorway closest to City with little fanfare and with very few people other than ourselves looking out the window. We saw a tall dark rocky range between our route and Heizer Land about 30 miles away which would have taken hours to reach if we had attempted to travel on local roads. We did not stop.
We didn’t visit the enigmatic, decades-long and massive construction project in the heart of the Nevada desert, about 160 north of Las Vegas. Until last summer announcement From the opening of the facility, access to this site was strictly restricted, with only a few testimonials from selected visitors offering insight into its construction. Some wondered if the work would ever be finished. Even the New York Timeswhich devoted a huge eight-page color spread to the “Atlantis art world“, warned that” art is Fitzcarraldo [Heizer] still doesn’t consider ‘City’ done.
City‘s lack of accessibility and seemingly indefinite state of incompleteness, which suggested a perpetual postponement of its opening date, made its part in the 2015 proclamation the establishment of the surrounding Basin and Range National Monument by the Obama administration is a bit confusing. The designated protected area comprises over 700,000 acres which include petroglyphs, mining structures and other features aligned with the guidance of the General Antiquities Act 1906, which protects sites of cultural, historical or scientific significance. . Yet an entire paragraph of the 2015 proclamation was devoted to the centrality of City – at the time an unfinished work completely closed to the public, located on private and impenetrable land (Heizer was renowned for personally chasing intruders from the property with a shotgun).
The Basin and Range National Monument protects the area surrounding Citymakes it an act of preserving the field of vision that serves sight from In the work while making it inaccessible to most (a notable response to a “view” quiz about the Monument seems to respond in the same way – encouraging surveyors to “build high strong walls around [City] — improve eyesight! “). In the United States, the preservation of a view surrounding a cultural or natural destination is a conservation philosophy set in a colonial heritage of settlers to evacuate the lands of their occupants in the service of their aestheticized protection. Hyperallergic report on the reactions of Native American artists City shows how to install participates in a tradition of “people replacing those who have been displaced by their own monuments”, in the words of visual and sound artist Diné Raven Chacon.
While CityWhile the preservation of the site through antiquities law was necessarily centered on cultural heritage, the monument designation also had environmental implications. Michael Govan, longtime Heizer advocate – director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and board member of the Triple Aught Foundation which maintains City – made this link in his statement celebrating success of this plea: “What made this possible now was the coming together of artistic interests – people who really thought this was a masterpiece of American art that should be protected – and conservation interests who realized it was one of the great landscapes of the United States.” While the conservation discourse has other sinister associationslinking this speech to City instrumentalizes the work through an environmental alibi that claims the natural landscape as the beneficiary of the artistic intervention.
The lack of vehicular access to City is similar to the pre-Highway approach to La Venta, an important Olmec site in the jungles of Veracruz, Mexico where Heizer’s archaeologist father Robert F. Heizer worked. Michael Heizer has made an explicit link between City and La Venta (although he later regretted making the reference). Art historian Luis Castañeda traces the intersections of Heizer’s and his father’s work through the artist’s design of the Cor-Ten steel mounts that displayed the Olmec heads at La Venta at LACMA in 2010, and in the accelerated mobility that the art world has imposed on these objects. . Olmec heads are large carved boulders measuring up to nine feet and weighing several tons, making moving them from the original site to museums and exhibition spaces precarious and onerous. This paradoxical mobility was famously described in the October 1966 cover of art forum, featuring a photograph of a heavy stone Olmec head lifted by a crane and floating in front of the monumental curtain wall facade of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in Manhattan. The casual dislocation and display of Olmec heads contrasts with the concepts of permanence and remoteness that have always underpinned the mythology of City.
When we arrived a few hours later at Double negative, we found no explicit barriers to entry, except for rough terrain that even our rental SUVs couldn’t traverse – we drove the last half mile – and, of course, those who were overcome by accessing the grants that funded this venture in the first place. As we climbed the large Heizer Cup in the mesa, looking out its wide opening to the Virgin River below, we saw plenty of evidence of other visitors: traces of campfires, cigarettes, and other paraphernalia of groups who had stayed late at night. We took a picture of our shadows thrown into the deep crevasse of Heizer’s work by the setting sun; “Double positive! commented our friend Olga when we posted it on Facebook. We didn’t make it City that day, and we still haven’t because the tickets were officially booked for the opening season early on; at least one of us is content to never make this visit. But in total, how many people will access this work? After years of inaccessibility and mystery, the artwork is still hard to reach, even after the unveiling was recently announced. We are impressed by the performative research of Kohl Marantz, whose video on his try to skate City For Jenkem Magazine mostly takes place around the gated perimeter, beautifully illustrating how inaccessible it remains.
City serves as an apparatus for two different regulatory enterprises: on the one hand, a culturally designated space of landscape preservation, and on the other, a regulated experience of the art world of manifest scarcity. We can see that she takes advantage of this rarity. Public and private safeguards reinforce Citythe identity of a distant place surrounded by a supposed “virgin land.” Categorical claims to solitary confinement — from City of its environment, of the culture of nature, of the land of its inhabitants – seem to us contrary to the logic of renewed relations with the land advocated by indigenous activists.
In one piece for Hyperallergic which coincided with Cityresearcher and Cherokee Nation citizen Joseph M. Pierce points to the problematic nature of land acknowledgments, advocating for the development of active mutual relationships which allow us to better understand “what are our responsibilities towards the earth as parents”. It is precisely the types of reciprocal relationships that are hampered by Citypersistent isolation. We did not go to Cityand our very inability to reach it underscores its role in elising criticism and resisting the reciprocal relationships we hope to learn and practice.
