the size of city: michael heizer's masterpiece as architecture
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MArch DissertationTRANSCRIPT
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.
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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
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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