Size, Scale and the Imaginary in the Work of Land Artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and Dennis Oppenheim

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Larger than life: size, scale and the imaginary in the work of Land Artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and Dennis Oppenheim

A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Art History and Art Education

UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES | Art & Design

August 2014 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Hedger

First name: Michael Other name/s: Albert

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: Ph.D.

School: Art History and Education Faculty: Art & Design

Title: Larger than life: size, scale and the imaginary in the work of Land Artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and Dennis Oppenheim

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

Conventionally understood to be gigantic interventions in remote sites such as the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and packed with characteristics of "romance", "adventure" and "masculinity", Land Art (as this thesis shows) is a far more nuanced phenomenon. Through an examination of the work of three seminal artists: Michael Heizer (b. 1944), Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) and Walter De Maria (1935-2013), the thesis argues for an expanded reading of Land Art; one that recognizes the significance of size and scale but which takes a new view of these essential elements. This is achieved first by the introduction of the "imaginary" into the discourse on Land Art through two major literary texts, Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias (1818)- works that, in addition to size and scale, negotiate presence and absence, the whimsical and fantastic, longevity and death, in ways that strongly resonate with Heizer, De Maria and especially Oppenheim. As this thesis also demonstrates (and as conventional readings have overlooked), further complicating Land Art is the fact that size and scale are reiterated concerns in works made for galleries, such as De Maria's Earth Rooms (1968-77), and Oppenheim's Two jumps for Dead Dog Creek (1970). as well as works for other urban spaces accessible to the broader public such as Heizer's Levitated Mass (2012), installed in the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These questions are also rearticulated in gigantic but unrealized projects including De Maria's Three Continent Project, 1968, and Oppenheim's Swiftian and playful Waiting for the Midnight Special (A thought collision factory for ghost ships), 1979, and in his body I performance works.

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Conventionally understood to be gigantic interventions in remote sites such as the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and packed with characteristics of ―romance‖, ―adventure‖ and ―masculinity‖, Land Art (as this thesis shows) is a far more nuanced phenomenon. Through an examination of the work of three seminal artists: Michael Heizer (b. 1944), Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) and Walter De Maria (1935-2013), the thesis argues for an expanded reading of Land Art; one that recognises the significance of size and scale but which takes a new view of these essential elements. This is achieved first by the introduction of the ―imaginary‖ into the discourse on Land Art through two major literary texts, Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Shelley‘s sonnet Ozymandias (1818)—works that, in addition to size and scale, negotiate presence and absence, the whimsical and fantastic, longevity and death, in ways that strongly resonate with Heizer, De Maria and especially Oppenheim. As this thesis also demonstrates (and as conventional readings have overlooked), further complicating Land Art is the fact that size and scale are reiterated concerns in works made for galleries, such as De Maria‘s Earth Rooms (1968-77), and Oppenheim‘s Two jumps for Dead Dog Creek (1970), as well as works for other urban spaces accessible to the broader public such as Heizer's Levitated Mass (2012), installed in the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These questions are also rearticulated in gigantic but unrealized projects including De Maria's Three Continent Project, 1968, and Oppenheim‘s Swiftian and playful Waiting for the Midnight Special (A thought collision factory for ghost ships), 1979, and in his body / performance works. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An undertaking such as a thesis would be impossible without the assistance of advisors and colleagues. My greatest thanks, of course, are due to my supervisor Associate Professor Dr Alan Krell, of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, whose guidance and patience have been exemplary and whose editing, over several months, went far beyond the call of duty. My gratitude is also given to Dr Sheila Christofides for her valuable assistance in editing.

Special thanks for their help and time are owed to my great friends at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, the extraordinary William L. Fox, Director Center for Art + Environment, who drew the only map of Double Negative that enabled me to locate it, and to archivist and curator Sarah Franz.

To the many other colleagues I met in the United States I express my deepest gratitude. For their insight into Land Art I thank Steven Evans of the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio; John Bowsher, Deputy Director of Museum Planning, and Nancy Meyer, Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA; Professor Richard Shiff of the University of Texas; Dr Jane McFadden of the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena; and Leigh-Anne Miller from Art in America whom I met at The Lightning Field and who provided me with invaluable research assistance.

Thanks are due to the following museum librarians: from Houston, Eric Wolf at the Menil Collection and Joel Pelanne at the Hirsch Library, Museum of Fine Arts; Maria Ketcham at the Detroit Institute of Art; Megan Witko at the Dia Foundation, New York; and to the other unnamed librarians at the Dallas Museum of Art, LACMA, the McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, the Phoenix Public Library, the Salt Lake City Public Library and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

I also thank Professor Sascha Grishin from the Australian National University for his advice, Jason Slattery from the Manly Library for finding so many reference texts for me, Marco Migotto for translating the De Maria Italian catalogues and Edward John for his assistance in the presentation of this thesis. Finally, thanks are due to the

i University of New South Wales / Art and Design for the two travel grants to enable me to visit the Land Art sites in the United States.

Michael Hedger August 2014

DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to the three artists whose extraordinary practices inspired it, and especially to Walter De Maria and Dennis Oppenheim who died during the course of my research.

iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. ―Earthworks in the Wild West‖. From Kay Larson, ―New Landscapes in Art: Landscapes—Opinion by Kay Larsen‖, The New York Times Magazine, 13 May 1979, 5. 2. Colossus of Memnon (rear view of North Statue), c. 1380 B.C. Thebes, Egypt. Photograph by Robert F. Heizer, n.d., from Julia Brown (ed.) with Barbara Heizer, Sculpture in reverse, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, 14. 3. Claes Oldenburg, Placid City Monument (1967), from Michael Lailach, Land Art, Cologne: Taschen, 2007, 11. 4. Michael Heizer, North, East,South, West (model) (1967), from Germano Celant, Michael Heizer, Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997, 31. 5. Michael Heizer, Slot 2 (1968), from Celant, Michael Heizer, 63. 6. Michael Heizer, Dissipate 1 (Nine Nevada Depressions 8), 1968. Photograph by Michael Heizer, from Jeffrey Kastner (ed.) and Brian Wallace (surveyor), Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1998, revised 2010, 91. 7. Michael Heizer, Rift1 (Nine Nevada Depressions) (1968). Photograph by Michael Heizer, from Celant, Michael Heizer, 82. 8. Michael Heizer, Cilia (Nine Nevada Depressions) (1968), from Celant, Michael Heizer, 90–91. 9. Michael Heizer, Five Conic Displacements (1969). Photograph by Michael Heizer, from Gillies A. Tiberghien, Land Art, London: Art Data, 1995, 138. 10. Diavik Diamond Mine, ―10 Most Incredible Earth Scars‖, Scribol News and Politics, 8. Accessed 16 May 2014 from http://scribol.com/news-and- politics/10-most-incredible-earth-scars/5. 11. Michael Heizer, Displaced / Replaced Mass 1:2 (1969), from Celant, Michael Heizer, 176. 12. Michael Heizer, Dragged mass displacement (1971). Detroit Institute of Arts, from Celant, Michael Heizer, 241. 13. William L. Fox, ―Diagram of the location of Double Negative‖, 2011. Courtesy of William L. Fox, Nevada Museum of Art. 14. Michael Heizer, Double Negative (1970). Photograph by Tom Vinetz, from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 55. 15. Michael Heizer, Double Negative (east side) (1970). Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni, from Celant, Michael Heizer, 221. 16. East face of South-central Platform. a, Old-rose floor series. b, Platform face. c, White sandy floor series. d, Water-sorted floors (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Philip Drucker, Robert Heizer and Robert J. Squier, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, Plate 3, n.p. 17. Man north-south trench. In foreground, Massive Offering No. 3 (Feature A-l- h); in background stone column tomb (Monument 7). Upper 5 feet of deposit (mainly red clay cap) has been removed alongside trench to lighten overburden along seep trench (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Drucker et al., Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, Plate 21, n.p.

18. Left, Monument 25. Right, Monument 26 (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Drucker et al, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, Plate 53, n.p. 19. Mark Landis, Air check (2003). From Marek Wieczorek, ―Life raft in the desert: Shawn Patrick Landis‘s rendezvous with Double Negative‖, Sculpture, Vol. 27, No. 6, July / August 2008, 27. 20. Effigy Tumuli site plan at Buffalo Rock State Park, Illinois. Photograph by Edward John, 2013. 21. Michael Heizer, Effigy Tumuli (1983–85). From Celant, Michael Heizer, 405. 22. Michael Heizer, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees / Geometric Extraction (1984). Photograph by Tom Vinetz, from Celant, Michael Heizer, 392. 23. Amei Wallach, President of the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics looks into the depth of North, East, South, West. Photograph by Karl Rabe, The Poughkeepsie Journal, New York, n.d., PoughkeepsieJournal.com. Accessed 25 July 2014 from Dia Foundation, http://host-195.227.54.159.gannett.com/projects/gallery/dia/images/heizer.jpg. 24. Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West (1967–2002). Photograph by Tom Vinetz, n.d., accessed 25 July 2014 from Dia Foundation, http://www.diaart/org/media/transfer/img/heizer_nsew.jpg. 25. Michael Heizer, Levitated mass (2012). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph by Michael Hedger, 2013. 26. Diagram of dimensions of Levitated Mass and Slot, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010. 27. Perspective sketch of Pyramid and Complex A of La Venta site (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Drucker et al., Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, frontispiece. 28. Isamu Noguchi, Monument to the plough (1933), accessed 19 December 2013 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/raimist/318316709. 29. Satellite image of Michael Heizer, City, accessed 25 July 2014 from http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/img/city/city_sat_hires.jpg. 30. Satellite image of Michael Heizer, City, from Inside the Solarist, accessed 25 July 2014 from http://media.tumblr_mcel561cirlqfbmwm.jpg. 31. Michael Heizer, City (Complex One), 1972–1974. Photograph by Tom Vinetz from Celant, Michael Heizer, 266. 32. Walter De Maria, Bed of spikes (1968). Photograph by Attilio Maranzano from Germano Celant, Walter De Maria, Milano 1999–2000, Dia Centre for the Arts, Kunstmuseum Basel, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1999, 78. Translated for the author of this thesis by Marco Migotto in 2011. 33. Walter De Maria, Mile long drawing (1968). From Tiberghien, Land Art, 56. 34. Edgar Arceneaux, Detroit (2009), acrylic and graphite on paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Lutz Bertram, from Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (organizers), Ends of the earth: Land art to 1974, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Cal.: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Munich, Germany: Prestel Verlag; London, United Kingdom: Prestel Publishing Ltd., 2012, 143. 35. Walter De Maria, Las Vegas piece (1969), from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 46. 36. Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room (1977). Photograph by John Cliett from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 109.

37. Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field (1977). Photograph by John Cliett, from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 2–3. 38. Walter De Maria, 5 Continent Sculpture (1987). Photograph by Nanda Lanfranco, from Celant, Walter De Maria, 216. 39. Dennis Oppenheim, Site marker (Milled anodized aluminium, felt, plastic cylinder, location and description on parchment paper) (1967). From Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1997, 36. 40. Dennis Oppenheim, Landslide (1968). From Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 49. 41. Dennis Oppenheim, Boundary Split (1968). From Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 59. 42. Dennis Oppenheim, Salt flat (detail) (1968). Photograph by David Sundberg, from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 76. 43. Dennis Oppenheim, Three Downward Blows (Knuckle Marks) (detail) (1977). Photograph by David Sundberg, 1977, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 190. 44. Dennis Oppenheim, Excavated Sculpture #3 (1967). Photograph by David Sundberg, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 33. 45. Dennis Oppenheim, Falling Room (1979). Photograph by Earl Ripling,from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 199. 46. Dennis Oppenheim, Directed seeding, Cancelled crop (1969). From Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 50. 47. Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel stress (1970). Photograph by Joshua Kalin, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 109. 48. Dennis Oppenheim, Two-Stage Transfer Drawing. (Advancing to a Future State). Erik to Dennis Oppenheim (1971). Photograph by Dennis Oppenheim, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 72.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i DEDICATION iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS iv

INTRODUCTION 1 Endnotes 4

CHAPTER ONE Travelling through Land Art 5 Ozymandias 9 ―Deserts of the Imagination‖ 13 Lines, longevity and the lateral 16 Presences 19 Death and infinity 22 Gulliver’s Travels 23 Size and scale 24 Endnotes 33

CHAPTER TWO

Michael Heizer: The challenge of scale 39 Voids, land drawings and displacements 50 Double Negative (Second Displacement) 67 Mounds 81 Re-creations 86 City (begun 1972) 97 Endnotes 108

CHAPTER THREE Walter De Maria: The possibilities of scale 116 Early geometric works 127 Desert-based art 133 The Earth Rooms and Shaft works 140 The Lightning Field 147 The broken kilometer and later floor based works 157 Endnotes 161

CHAPTER FOUR Dennis Oppenheim: The adventure of scale 168 ―Bound‖ works 175 Proposals 195 Subversions 200 Body work 203 Endnotes 208

CONCLUSION 212 City 213 Endnotes 218

BIBLIOGRAPHY 220

vii

INTRODUCTION

Conventional approaches to Land Art emphasize size and scale; monumentality; the remoteness of sites (chiefly in the deserts of Utah and Nevada); the very physical, supposedly ―masculine‖ nature of the work; and its location in the American West, a phenomenon seen as a reclaiming of the ―frontier spirit‖ of adventure and risk- taking.1 These observations—variously accurate, fanciful and mythologised— overlook, as this thesis demonstrates, the diverse and nuanced work of three major practitioners: Michael Heizer (b. 1944), Walter De Maria (1935–2013) and Dennis

Oppenheim (1938–2011). Revisiting questions of size and scale, the thesis argues for an expanded view of Land Art; one that introduces the critical role of the

―imaginary‖ in both conception and realization (of the work), and draws attention, importantly, to those works (by all three artists) designed to be seen indoors in gallery spaces as well as urban sites where visitation is high (the antithesis to massive interventions in remote desert sites); and where questions of size and scale must necessarily take on new meanings.

The initial idea for this thesis was to examine the concepts of size and scale in Land

Art through the lens of Jonathan Swift‘s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), an allegorical and satirical text that Rachel Wells would invoke in her recent study on scale in contemporary sculpture.2 The interchangeability of sizes that Gulliver experiences in his voyages affect his perceptions of the situations and the characters he encounters and there are clear resonances within this text to conventional readings of Land Art. For me, at this juncture, the conceit of Land Artists as ―giants‖ manipulating the land as they saw fit, appealed and it segued into the notion of

―giantism‖ as described by Robert Morris in his seminal 2000 essay ―Size matters‖.3 Yet as my research developed I came to conclude that Land Art in all its manifestations is a more finely graded phenomenon.

The ways in which size and scale are explicit in Gulliver’s Travels’, its mixture of the whimsical and fantastical, have implications for Land Art; this is discussed in Chapter

One, ―Travelling through Land Art‖, together with another famous English text, Percy

Bysshe Shelley‘s sonnet Ozymandias (1818). This poem, like Gulliver’s Travels, deals with size and scale but also deals with themes of presence and absence, longevity and death that are integral to the new understanding of Land Art advanced in this thesis.

Chapter Two, ―The Challenge of Scale‖, focuses on Michael Heizer, whose practice is dominated by enormous Ozymandian desert works, including the famous Double

Negative (1970). These are the results of a self-initiated challenge to re-create the earth-moving and construction pieces of Egyptian and Mesoamerican cultures as massive self-referential cuttings and ―architectural‖ structures such as City

(commenced in 1972, still to be completed). The influence of Robert F. Heizer, the renowned anthropologist, on his son Michael is well documented but only in respect of City. As this chapter demonstrates, however, Robert Heizer‘s archaeological investigations cast their shadow over many other works by his son. Emphasizing these new understandings of size and scale in Michael Heizer‘s oeuvre, this chapter also discusses ―re-creations‖ that he placed in civic and museum grounds, Levitated mass (2012), for example, as well as those he installed in galleries.4

Chapter Three ―The Possibilities of Scale‖, examines Walter De Maria‘s few gigantic outdoor works such as Las Vegas Piece (1968), now no longer visible, and his most celebrated work The Lightning Field (1977) as well as his indoor Earth Rooms

(1968–77) and his precisely executed and evocatively sublime floor-based metallic works (1965–91), which were designed for specific interior spaces. Notwithstanding their containment within these interiors, these works expand the notion of Land Art to incorporate both the timelessness and the imaginative capacities of Earth and its materials.

Dennis Oppenheim, as demonstrated in Chapter Four ―The Adventure of Scale‖, is very much the ―maverick‖ in relation to conventional readings of Land Art.

Idiosyncratic and mercurial, his practice encompassed temporal interventions, imprints and ―transplants‖, for example Mount Cotopaxi transplant (1968), proposals for ambitious and enigmatic concepts (the Franklin Furnace Mines project,1995), as well as performance-based work such as Reading position for second degree burn

(1970). He most demonstrably invokes the energy, spirit and romanticism evoked by

Gulliver’s Travels and his practice shows a playful exploratory engagement in the broad possibilities available within the Land Art genre.

Summarizing the new readings of Land Art as advanced throughout the thesis, the

Conclusion demonstrates how City, the climactic work in the career of Michael

Heizer, (the Land Artist for whom the term understood in its conventional sense may be most readily applied), literally breaks new ground in regard to the creation of desert-based, monumental Land Art, larger than life, transgressing time lines and invoking the imaginary on a comparable scale.

Endnotes

1 See studies such as Suzann Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the landscape of the sixties, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, Art since 1970, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004; Jeffrey Kastner (ed.) and Brian Wallis (surveyor), Land and Environmental Art, London, Phaidon Press Limited, 1998, revised 2010 and articles such as Michael Kimmelman, ―Michael Heizer: A sculptor‘s colossus of the desert‖, New York Times, 12 December 1999 and ―Art‘s last, lonely cowboy‖, New York Times, 6 February 2005. 2 Rachel Wells, Scale in contemporary sculpture: Enlargement, Miniaturisation and the Life-Size, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2013 3 Robert Morris, ―Size matters‖, 2000, in Nena Tsoutis-Schillinger, Robert Morris: Have I reasons. Work and writings 1993–2007, Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 2008, 128. See also Lucy Lippard‘s observation in the same year, ―monumental Land Art that epitomizes the term takes much of its power from distance—distance from people, from places, and from issues‖, from ―Land Art in the rearview mirror‖ in the Art in the landscape conference papers, Marfa, Texas: The Chinati Foundation, 2000, 11. 4 As Miwon Kwon has argued, Land Art has given the artistic sense of the word "work" new meaning, both as a noun and a verb, emphasizing its physicality. See Miwon Kwon, ―One place after another: Notes on site specificity‖, in Erika Suderburg (ed.), Space, site, intervention—Situating Installation Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 43.

CHAPTER ONE Travelling through Land Art

Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: ―My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!‖ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.1 (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818)

This chapter presents an overview of Land Art with special reference to the three artists that are the focus of the study: Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and Dennis

Oppenheim. Drawing attention to the role of the ―imaginary‖ in Land Art—a desire for adventurous, at times purely theoretical, concepts of ambitious design—two major literary texts in the English canon are discussed, Ozymandias (quoted above), and

Jonathan Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels (1726); works that, in addition to size and scale

(questions central to this thesis), negotiate presence and absence, the whimsical and the fantastic and longevity and death, in ways that resonate with all Land Artists but especially Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim.

Critical enquiry into Land Art has focused often on themes of ―bigness‖,

―masculinity‖2, ―isolation‖ and its locations in the ―American West‖.3 These understandings are set against notions of ―the critique of art and its commodification‖, hence explaining the desire of artists to work in places far removed from the pristine spaces of the ―white cube‖, notably the deserts of Utah and Nevada. Repeated time and again in the literature on Land Art, these perspectives are convincing, but nonetheless veil a more expansive view such as the one developed in this thesis.

The gigantic works of Heizer and De Maria were made in remote locations; they were extraordinary physical undertakings involving massive resources; and they were intended as permanent interventions in and on the land. Throughout their careers, however, these two artists also created smaller indoor, gallery-based works which, while recognizing limitations of space and the requirements of commissioners and curators, still can be seen to be addressing questions of size and scale. De

Maria‘s Earth Rooms (1968–77) and Heizer‘s North, East, South, West (1967–2002) are two obvious examples.

Running counter to traditional Land Art (as pointed out before I use the adjectives

―traditional‖ as well as ―conventional‖ throughout the thesis simply to distinguish massive interventions in the land from indoor work) are most of the works of the mercurial Dennis Oppenheim. While his practice initially paralleled those of De Maria and Heizer, it was his predilection for changing scales, his preference for urban sites, his emphases on gesture and spectacle and, above all, his interest in exploring

6 enormous, often whimsical concepts, rather than in the creation of permanent interventions in the land, that demand different terms of critical engagement.

All three artists came from California. Oppenheim and De Maria both attended the same high school in San Francisco, although they were not friends, and both travelled to New York to imbibe its thriving art scene. Being Californians, the nearby desert did not deter or hold surprises for them. Like Heizer, who was originally from

Berkeley, and had spent a long time in Nevada, they had an affinity with the desert— or at least an understanding and appreciation of its scale and remoteness.4 This contrasts them with the Land Artist, Robert Smithson (1938–1973), who was from

New Jersey and who, like the European artists, saw the desert as an alien place, yet who travelled to the Yucatan in Mexico to create works such as Incidents of Mirror- travel in the Yucatan (1969). Like Smithson, though, De Maria, Heizer and

Oppenheim were all exposed to, and influenced by, the industrially-fabricated objects that became synonymous with Minimalism and which, in their hands, could be manifested in voids, cuts and displacements.

Richard J. Williams in After modern sculpture (2000) claims that Land Art ―liberat[ed] the idea that sculpture needed to be tied to interior spaces at all‖.5 Of course, this needs qualification. As pointed out above, and to be developed in subsequent chapters, Land Art also embraced the indoors in intriguing ways. That said, Williams‘ assertion hints at a spirit of rebellion—a spirit that for Elizabeth C. Baker manifested itself as ―a new romanticism‖.6 Above all, Baker recognized this romanticism in the isolated and difficult conditions in which artists worked: Heizer in the Nevada desert

(Double Negative 1970); De Maria in New Mexico (The Lightning Field 1977);

Oppenheim in Maine, USA and New Brunswick, Canada (Time line 1968); and

Smithson in Utah (Spiral Jetty 1970).

Image deleted for copyright reasons

lIlus. 1, ―Earthworks in the Wild West‖, from Kay Larson, ―New Landscapes in Art; Landscapes —Opinion by Kay Larson‖, The New York Times Magazine, 13 May 1979, 5.

In 1979 The New York Times published a (seemingly irreverent) diagram (illus.1) showing how each Land Artist had ―claimed‖ a state or ―kingdom‖ for himself. As this illustration clearly showed, Land Art was very much associated with the west of the

United States and was clearly understood to be massive interventions in the desert.7

Almost a decade before this article, in 1970, Philip Leider writing in Artforum gave, inter alia, a personal account of a journey around the larger sites. For Leider and others, Land Art was seen as continuing, symbolically at any rate, in the tradition of early westward expansion and the mastery of the New Frontier.8 Sitting comfortably with this view is the fact that works such as Double Negative and Spiral Jetty (both

8 1970) were made respectively near sites of major national building projects: the

Hoover Dam (completed in 1936) in Nevada and the Union Pacific Transcontinental

Railway (1869), public works that have something close to a mythological status in the United States.

As shall be demonstrated in the following chapters, Heizer, De Maria and

Oppenheim were all interested in geology and geography, the conditions of which were necessarily incorporated into their art. Heizer dug and carved voids into the ground, with particular attention given to right angles, and his locations were chosen according to the spatial relationships of the planned works to the natural features of the sites. Oppenheim‘s temporal works—his cuts, transplants and brandings—were always tightly related to their sites in rigorously conceptual ways, while De Maria‘s interventions owed as much to their formal and precise mathematical sequences as to their specific locations.

So what may all of this have to do with Shelley‘s Ozymandias and Swift‘s Gulliver’s

Travels? Any discussion of Ozymandias and Land Art necessarily invites consideration of giantism and the fact that each makes a special claim on the desert as both an actual and imaginary site. The enormous, of course, also links Land Art with Gulliver’s Travels, yet the latter invites comparison especially with the experimental and whimsical nature of Oppenheim‘s work.

Ozymandias

Ozymandias came about as the result of a contest between Shelley (1792–1822) and his friend, the poet and novelist, Horace Smith (1779–1849), devised by Leigh

Hunt, the editor of the Sunday paper, Examiner. Hunt was inspired by the publication of Thomas Leigh‘s ―Narrative of a Journey in Egypt and the Country beyond the

Cataracts‖ (1816), the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Sicvius, who first described the sculpture of Ozymandias, and the highly anticipated acquisition of a

7.5 tonne fragment of the head and torso of the pharaoh Rameses II (called The

Younger Memnon) by The British Museum, London. In the octave the narrator describes the location of the fragments of Ozymandias‘ statue, and its characteristic defiant and threatening facial features which the narrator believes also attest to the sculptor‘s feelings for the pharaoh. The sestet continues the description by paraphrasing the challenging inscription on the pedestal but noting, wryly, the emptiness of the surrounding desert.

In the past it was thought that the statue of Ozymandias was based on the grand monuments, The Memnon Colossi, at Thebes, but it is in fact based on the pharaoh

Rameses II. Eugene M. Waith explains the long standing confusion of the title by citing D. W. Thompson‘s 1937 claim that the fragments are actually from the

Ramesseum, which sat nearby the better known Colossi. Adding to the confusion, the Colossi were traditionally held to be of Memnon, the king of Ethiopia who was killed at Troy, although they actually represent the pharaoh Amenhotep III.9

The implications of the poem are clear: all power is transitory and a mortal‘s challenge to rivals, in the forms of deities and other emperors, is folly. Time will negate any challenge and the narrator demonstrates this message to both Shelley and to the reader. Despite the emphasis of the inscription that Ozymandias‘ achievements were literally larger than life, the statue has become synonymous with

10 the temporality of human endeavour. Peter Sorenson claims that the sculptor of

Ozymandias is ―involved in subterfuge‖ since he ―mocks‖ the pharaoh‘s cold sneer and ultimately will mock his legacy.10 Without referring to the tyranny of the pharaoh or to Shelley‘s republican views, the sonnet is pessimistic in both tone and outlook.

It is ironic that only fragments of the sculptor‘s art, now reduced to the status of museum objects, survive Ozymandias himself. To what extent natural causes, jealousy or vandalism led to the destruction of the monument is not known.11

However, parallels can be drawn with the inevitable impact of weathering processes on Land Art. These processes will ensure that the works will slowly but continuously change their relationships with their settings by becoming more a natural part of their environments.

Notwithstanding these more obvious parallels between the sonnet Ozymandias and

Land Art, there are a number of other tempting comparisons. Heizer‘s Displaced /

Replaced works (begun 1969) and many of his re-creations are necessarily of fragments of larger landforms. These excavated boulders from mountains are not manipulated further and their sizes and mass determine their reincarnations as sculpture. Levitated mass (2012) is a huge boulder but also a fragment from a larger landform and even in its reduced scale, it evokes concepts of magnitude and infinity.

In a most remarkable parallel, Heizer has compared Levitated mass to The Memnon

Colossi ( illus. 2), a work he knows well.12 His allusion correlates with the relative huge scales and towering dominance of both works over their sites, and his personal connection with The Colossi, for which his father (the archaeologist Robert Heizer)

11 conducted the petrographic study (geological analysis); and further, the fact that they are both made from single blocks of stone.13 The Colossi were meant to be permanent memorials to dwarf and intimidate rivals and visitors—while Heizer‘s work provokes similar reactions of fear, as viewers are able to walk beneath it and experience its threat of danger. For the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where

Levitated mass is located, its phenomenological experience has become hugely important for the marketing of the museum and, as shown in Chapter Two, has given extraordinary latter day prominence to Land Art, albeit in this instance an example that is situated in an urban space frequented by thousands of visitors.

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 2, Colossus of Memnon (rear view of North Statue), c. 1380 B.C. Thebes, Egypt, n.d. Photograph by Robert F. Heizer, from Julia Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 14.

12 “Deserts of the imagination”14

The words ―traveller‖ and ―antique‖ in the first line of Ozymandias underscore the essential element of ―adventure‖ of Land Art. Artists travelled to deserts and other remote regions because these provided relatively cheap sites where both gargantuan and more moderately sized work such as Heizer‘s Field (1968) were possible to make and where the desired effects would be most efficacious. This latter conviction resonates with Carl Andre‘s idea of the importance of an ―art of isolation‖ which, like manifestations of Land Art in distant locations, would direct attention to the works themselves and limit associations with other elements.15 Contrasting with such assumptions, however, Smithson chose to ―explain‖ the desert in ways that were distinctly heroic and very much gendered as male. Claiming that the desert had a regenerative effect on the artists he said: ―When the artist goes to the desert he enriches his absence and burns off the water (paint) on his brains. The slush of the city evaporates from the artist‘s mind as he installs his art.‖16

An early work made jointly by De Maria and Heizer, Mile long drawing (1968) at Jean

Dry Lake, Nevada, to be discussed in Chapter Two, referenced the linear imagery of

Barnett Newman and the Minimalists. A seminal work in the development of Land

Art, it showed how the desert surface could, like a canvas, function as a two- dimensional plane. In typically grandiloquent terms, Germano Celant claims that this collaboration saw the artists ―re-immersing art in the aura and sacrality of the archaic ritual typical of Mesoamerican religious culture‖ and projecting a ―cosmic sense of creativity into the primordial substratum of earth‖.17 Beyond Celant‘s rhetoric, however, there is substance—as we shall see in a discussion of Heizer‘s Effigy

Tumuli (1983–85) and De Maria‘s shaft works, examined respectively in Chapters

13 Two and Three. While Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim all worked in the desert, only Heizer‘s practice is consistently dominated by projects in this setting. His voids, increasing in size and climaxing with Double Negative, excavated absences, as it were, into deserts to create mysterious effects—his mounds were manipulated from the spoils of voids and his largest work, City (commenced 1972), is a vast complex created from the stuff of the desert.

Contrasting with the traditional purposes of monumentality and spectacle evidenced in the sculpture of Ozymandias, works of Land Art drew attention away from conventional notions of commemoration and / or decoration.18 Of no practical or ceremonial purpose, the concepts and forms were self-referential and their scales delivered decentred and multiple viewpoints. Richard Serra (b. 1939) an American minimalist sculptor and video artist well known for large scale assemblages of sheet metal, has said that ―The significance of the work is in its effort not in its intentions.

And that effort is a state of mind, an activity, an interaction with the world.‖19 As will be demonstrated in later chapters, Serra‘s ideas can be equally applied to the efforts of Heizer and Oppenheim.

Donald Judd viewed the locations of Land Art as an inevitable consequence of giving physical presence to specific large concepts. He claimed that huge free standing works fitted more comfortably into landscapes which they would then redefine and, further, that they were beneficial as land is valueless ‖if not remade by man‖.20 This astonishing assertion flies in the face of ecological sensitivity, past and present, in much the same way that many other examples of Land Art do, a matter that invites addressing but is not the concern of this thesis.

14 Desert-based works challenge the surrounding landscape; they announce themselves to their sites, although the sites themselves suggested the concepts to be explored. Lucy Lippard has gone so far as to say that the landscapes are ―not allowed histories of their own‖ since they remain secondary to the art.21 For Robert

Smithson, on the other hand, Land Art ―exposed‖ the site, rather than ―imposed‖ upon it—drawing attention to its surroundings in ways that are generally of lesser importance for gallery placed works.22 That the vast majority of viewers could only see Land Art via photography clearly established another order of perception and understanding. The art historian Philip Rawson, for one, has argued that scale is dependent upon a sculptor‘s intentions for a work according to a particular setting, and that the viewer is required to accept ―the space and scale of the actual for its effect‖, highlighting the divergent phenomenological responses that the works evoke.23

When experiencing Land Art first hand in the desert, and in other equally vast and bare landscapes, one is aware of the extraordinarily deceptive nature of scale. This sensation was particularly apparent to me at the site of Double Negative. Regardless of their demonstrable size, Land works are in fact small in relation to their sites; but they needed, of course, to be realized in their specific locations to give meanings and relevance to their concepts. Heizer, for instance, sited Double Negative on a

Nevadan desert mesa as he knew that the work‘s impact would be sustained and that new smaller landforms would be created from the displaced material when he visualized the deep cutting of the large-scaled trenches; De Maria attempted to attract lightning to a particular designated New Mexican site with The Lightning Field using relatively small poles to interact with the atmosphere; and Oppenheim‘s

15 geographic interventions such as Annual rings (1968) in the snowfields are obviously and necessarily of large scale, since he cut six concentric rings of ice within the overall range of 45 and 61 metres into the legal but invisible border between the

United States and Canada, in the St. John region, but they are in fact a miniaturized demonstration of a gigantic concept.24

Lines, longevity and the lateral

The ―lone and level sands‖ surrounding the Ozymandias statue in Shelley‘s poem emphasize the desolation of its site—but they also invite an imaginative entry into the dominance of the horizontal in Land Art and, indeed, to the special attraction that the Nazca Lines of Peru held for the artists. Located in the Nazca Desert, these are shallow lines made in the ground by removing the surface of reddish gravel and revealing the whitish soil beneath. Land Artists were especially drawn to their scale, their remoteness, their direct intervention into the earth, and the physical efforts required creating them.

In his description of the Nazca Lines, sculptor, conceptual artist and prolific writer,

Robert Morris (b.1931), lists the features which Land Artists recreated in their desert line drawings and imprints in works such as the previously mentioned Mile long drawing, by Heizer and De Maria; Desert Cross by De Maria (1968) and Branded mountain (1969) by Oppenheim, all to be discussed in later chapters. The features

Morris identifies include the removal of materials; the lack of introduced colour and other elements; the gestalt of the unadorned and fundamental geometric shapes; and the ―intimate, unimposing, even off hand‖ nature of responding directly to the landscape through branding it, rather than imposing something upon it.25

16 Because of their vast length, the Nazca Lines appear vertical at certain points as their forms are determined by following the topography of the landscape, giving them an unplanned rhythm. Morris noted that details were less visible and therefore less important according to their distance and that their gestalt increased as the details became less prominent. The phenomenological aspect predominates as viewers become readily used to adjusting their positions in order to appreciate the regularity, clarity and different perspectives of the lines, which continually change according to the viewer‘s position. The horizon is critical to a full appreciation of the lines as its perspective heightens their clarity and divides the view between land and sky.

Morris‘s assertion is that the lines can only be fully appreciated by standing directly upon them or within the areas they enclose. Wherever lines cross, there is no attempt at blocking another line, showing the respect for earlier scoring by later line markers. Fashionable mythology in the wake of Erich van Daniken‘s enormously popular book The Chariots of the Gods (1968) believed—and Morris acknowledges this—that the Nazca Lines were intended to be seen from the air by extra- terrestrials. The fact of the matter, however, is that the Lines were always meant to be taken in from the ground, hence their elongated linear scale which was meant to overwhelm and to impress. This same conundrum applies to Land Art since the huge works can only be fully envisaged from the air and aerial photographs were originally used to publicize them. However, this perspective was, literally, against the artists‘ intentions and, as detailed in later chapters, they took steps to prevent this from happening after the early Earthworks exhibition of 1968.26

The dominant trope in Ozymandias is the contradiction between impermanence and longevity. Ozymandias believes that his deeds will have eternal earthly and cosmic

17 recognition and his direct challenge to deities and humans can indeed still be read through the inscription, many centuries after its creation. Compounded by the absence of all of the pharaoh‘s perceptible power is the fact that the statue is in fragments, as noted previously. Although created from a timeless material, the loss of the majority of the statue is a strong reminder of the transience of all matter, whether from weathering or from deliberate vandalism.

De Maria‘s 1971 statement that, ―The artist who works with earth works with time,‖ is an implied recognition of longevity and its relationship to Land Art; a question that takes into account the seemingly enduring character of natural sites; the physicality and duration of execution of the art; and the subjection of the work to the processes of weathering.27 Here it must be said that any intervention into a landscape is clearly only one part of the continuum of activity in that arena. As pointed out earlier,

Smithson intended Spiral Jetty to be a permanent feature in the Great Salt Lake and although it has submerged and re-surfaced, so to speak, several times since its creation, it will ultimately sink beneath the bed of the lake. Invisible from the surface, it will, however, still exist in one form or another and will remain part of the geological history of the site.

Smithson‘s recognition of entropy, never pursued by De Maria, was implied in the transitory land and body works of Oppenheim, for whom gesture and effect overrode any concern at making a permanent mark upon the land. Heizer, interestingly, was not concerned with entropic effects early in his practice, but later asserted that at least one of his major works, Double Negative, should be refurbished so that it could remain close to its initial state, and as we shall see in Chapter Two, City has been

18 reinforced to strengthen its longevity. Heizer has stated on several occasions his desire that this work would be ―pointed at the future‖.28

The influence of Carl Andre‘s lateral works on Land Art is significant. From his early flat, floor-based sculpture, such as the line of 137 bricks shown at the Primary

Structures exhibition (1966) and Joint, an 83.5 metre line of 183 hay bales at the

Windham College, Vermont exhibition (1968), which André claimed to be a lateral version of Brancusi‘s Endless Column (1938) that could be read as a ―road‖ from any point,29 Land Artists learned how the ordered placement of elements in particular relationships and locations enabled their sculptures to create their own environments or ―places‖.30 There is, however, an important distinction in the two types of ―places‖.

Andre‘s indoor pieces, could, of course, be disassembled, gathered, stored in separate containers and exhibited at a later time, whereas the works of Heizer, De

Maria and Oppenheim were always intended to become a part of the landscape whether for a brief time or in perpetuity, and necessarily subjected to the vagaries of the weather.

Presences

Like the Ozymandias statue, monumental Land Art achieves its presence through mass, scale, spatial and situational relationships and through natural or manipulated characteristics. Heizer‘s statement that: ―I find an 18‘ square [1.67 square metres] granite boulder. That‘s mass. It‘s already a piece of sculpture. But as an artist it‘s not enough for me to say that, so I mess with it‖, demonstrates his belief in the power of massive natural material to invoke its own gestalt.31 He further claimed that boulders

19 and sculptural objects are defined not ―by [their] sculptural beauty, but by [their] simple presence‖.32

Philip Rawson calls mass ―relatively informed sheer weight‖33 which a viewer can read intuitively, a view that brings to mind Immanuel Kant‘s notion of ―the mathematically sublime‖ in his The Critique of Judgment (1790).34 As such, circumnavigation of a mass is unnecessary to understand its volume as informed responses to size and material are learned early. Similarly, Rawson claims that volume is ―a content of space‖, understood, defined and inferred by its surroundings.

These effects were expanded by Land Artists to create the sensations of immersion within works and to dominate their new environments. The gestalt of Heizer‘s

Displaced / Replaced Mass works is derived from the concentration on the mass of gigantic boulders placed in incongruous contexts; De Maria carved massive spheres out of granite to fill specific indoor environments as well as displaying earth in gallery spaces, forcing viewers to notice the aura and physicality of the natural material; and

Oppenheim cut timelines and borders into ice to give physicality to real but abstract concepts.35

Aristotle claimed that for ―beauty‖ to be present in any creature or object, a logical arrangement of parts and an appropriate scale must be used and that unity and wholeness within an object are lost once scale is vast—meaning that if an object cannot be perceived in one glance, its aesthetics are compromised and its shape is unrecognized.36 The maxim was not lost upon the Land Artists who invoked differing scales to enable viewers to experience multiple perspectives. The contrary view to

Aristotle‘s maxim also suited their purposes well since their gigantic works cannot be

20 seen in one glance, unless viewed aerially, which as we have seen, was not their intention.37

In The Critique of Judgment Kant also postulates a theory of ―the dynamically sublime‖ whereby a sublime moment is understood to encapsulate a highly charged aesthetic experience imbued with a sense of awe: as in watching a storm build, or a volcano erupt, or huge waves crashing on the shore. For the American poet, academic and literary critic Susan Stewart, however, this aesthetic characteristic of the sublime to ―astonish and surprise‖ (in front of the grandeur of nature) was transformed through Land Art ―to astonish and to confront‖ viewers, since the landscape is ―displayed‖—that is, it is either framed by the art or it frames it and gives it a background, and she posits Land Art as the ―modern descendent of the sublime on the one hand and the picturesque on the other‖.38 The synergy created simultaneously connects, complements and competes for impact.

It may be said that all Land Art created out of doors begins to wear away as soon as it is produced. In other words, entropy, discussed earlier, is very much a part of the art. Considered in these terms, we can understand why Stewart, sees Land Art as ―a souvenir or memento‖ of the original intervention.39 Over time, all mass will diminish in force; all interventions or placements of other materials will acquire familiarity; and, all extracted voids will become perceived increasingly as naturalistic. As will be explained in the following chapter, Heizer‘s voids, regardless of their size, whether the smaller individual works of Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) or the huge Double

Negative (1970), all have the uncanny ability to show absence as presence.

Death and infinity

Many of the works of both Heizer and De Maria allude to infinity. Celant believes that

Heizer‘s interest in this theme arose from his Untitled series of paintings in 1967 which contained illusory voids at their centres: illusions that were transferred into physical voids later that year when the solid geometric models of North, East, South,

West became absences cut into the earth.40 De Maria‘s shaft works, his metallic floor based pieces, his rods and spheres, are all made from permanent materials and are placed in locations where they will retain their original states indefinitely, whether deeply driven into the earth or arranged in specially designed interiors. In the latter

(see Chapter Three, pp. 157–159), the allusion to infinity is created by patterns of the arrangement of rods through decreasingly smaller mathematical series reaching to vanishing points.

An atmosphere of death pervades the poem Ozymandias, but the evocation is more to a presence beyond death. Similarly, the ambition to create permanent works has seen De Maria and Heizer take up the Ozymandian-like challenge of making art that can only be destroyed through natural forces and entropy. In more specific terms, death is also evinced strongly by Heizer‘s voids through their clear resemblance to funereal forms. Excepting those re-creations in museum grounds and in some interiors, the voids require caution in looking into them, adding to their evocation of danger and death.41 These evocations, as previously mentioned, are prominent features of Levitated mass.

Heizer‘s City, while being a planned environment, is also perversely evocative of death since it is based on the plans of the excavated archaeological Mesoamerican

La Venta site at Tabasco, Mexico and is designed to exclude any inhabitants. Like an archaeological site itself, it hints at both potential and lost power and is indeed a challenge to the surrounding deserts to reclaim it. It is even more directly a challenge to the nearby Nellis Air Force Base as its frontal design is meant to withstand blasts by fighter jets. Of course, Shelley‘s ―lone and level sands‖ will ultimately reduce City to something like an archaeological site if weathering is not monitored and countered.

De Maria‘s floor pieces evoke infinity but a work like Bed of spikes (1969) also has a real threat of danger. Even Oppenheim‘s conceptual and temporal works, to be discussed in Chapter Four, invoke danger—the mosquito and sunburn performance and body works, among others—while the transience of life is alluded to through the imprints of fingerprints onto landscapes and through his explorations into producing art on the bodies of people with common genetics.

Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver‘s fantastic voyages can be seen to be strikingly pertinent to an examination of Land Art and particularly to this thesis because of the dominance of size and scale in the first two voyages, to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. However, while the novel is universally acknowledged as one of literature‘s great satires, its criticisms of eighteenth-century politics and its observations on the dispute over the superiority of the Ancients versus the Moderns in literature are now anachronisms. That said, its comments on past and present societies, and Gulliver‘s deepening pessimism over the course of the four voyages, paralleling that of his creator, maintain our interest.

Jenny Mezciems who has written extensively on notions of Utopia, calls the first two

Books journeys to the real world since despite the fantastical elements, the distortions are real and physical, while the second two Books Mezciems says, describe the ideal, the abstract and the spiritual.42 Because of the scope of the fantasy, or the ―relax[ation of] the standards of credulity‖, as Joseph Horrell calls it, this movement is not jarring.43 It is tempting to see a parallel here with the movement of Land Artists away from the traditional art centres and venues to the desert where they played with scale and concept, proposal and realization, and returned sporadically, as it were, to gallery-based work that at times consisted of documentation (of their own works) but at others, was original production.

Although implicit in ―traditional‖ Land Art is a rejection of the gallery system and its commodification of art, artists like Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim, as this thesis makes clear, continually used the gallery for their own purposes. It goes without saying, as Suzann Boettger, among others, has recognized, there is an irony in the fact that monumental Land Art could not have been realized without funding from collectors and patrons, who were then able to sell the documentation of the works.44

Size and scale

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.45

An important source for Gulliver’s Travels was Francis Bacon‘s New Atlantis (1627) which suggests the manipulation of species through ―art‖: 24

By art likewise we make them [beasts and birds] greater or taller than their

kind is, and contrariwise dwarf them and stay their growth. We make them

more fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and contrariwise barren and not

generative. And we also make them differ in colour, shape, activity, many

ways.46

Such a description opened Swift‘s mind to the possibilities of magnification. He was very precise. The ratio of 1:12 to differentiate Gulliver from the other people is used in both Lilliput and Brobdingnag: at Lilliput Gulliver is twelve times larger than the inhabitants and at Brobdingnag his is one twelfth of the giants‘ sizes. In Book 1, at

Lilliput, he is a giant whose size and strength enable him to partake in fantastical adventures including defeating the Lilliputans‘ enemies, the Blefuscu, by single- handedly gathering their navy into his hands and extinguishing a Lilliputan palace fire by urinating on it. While the moral focus of the first Book is on the question of imperialism with its subjugation of societies and Gulliver‘s rejection of it, the romantic image of being able to tower over the world and to manipulate it as you choose is the dominant and lasting appeal for readers.

Artists always have had an acute appreciation of size, a measurable absolute, and scale, which is always relative, and their abilities to transform imagery, objects and relationships. The large size, characteristic of much Land Art, magnifies everything: the object, its spatial relationships, and ultimately its gestalt. A defining feature of scale in Land Art is not necessarily its size in comparison to humans, although this is a critical element, but rather its size in comparison to the environment in which it is placed and to its conceptual notion. To explain the vagaries of scale, Kant contrasted

25 the experiences of standing next to the pyramids where the details and symmetry of the stones predominate but where he felt aesthetic judgements are limited, with standing at a distance from them where the overall or ―full emotional effects‖ subsume the viewer.47

In Robert Smithson‘s statement, quoted at the introduction of this section , definitions of size and scale were intended to differentiate the ‗fluctuations‘ in their perception, according to a viewer‘s perspective. He claimed that scale ―operates by uncertainty‖—meaning that it is never fully perceived or appreciated, as one can be gazing at a site or be within it and one‘s continuous eye movements confuse the realities of both size and scale.48 The design of Spiral Jetty thus enables a viewer to be both within and outside of its scale as the eye‘s tendency to define tiny salt particles is confused with the mass‘s ―irregular horizons‖.49

The visionary artworks Smithson planned for the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport Layout

Plan (1966) were the embodiment of his statement that ―Art today [is] a total engagement with the building process from the ground up and from the sky down,‖ an early plea for the integration of public art within buildings at the design and development stages.50 Smithson envisaged large earthworks by Robert Morris, Carl

André, Sol Le Witt and himself, near runways and terminals that could be viewed by passengers from differing altitudes. His reasoning was that new technologies had allowed perspectives to change and so sculptors needed to capitalize on these changes and create works that could be read from differing heights.51 This aerial art would create ―artificial time‖, by which he meant non-measurable time and the telescoping of the distance between Earth and other galaxies. The idea of creating

26 art that could be read from space was first formulated, as we shall see in Chapter

Two, by the Japanese American sculptor and inadvertent precursor to the Land

Artists, Isamu Noguchi (1904–68) in 1947, but by the 1960s, with jet travel in the ascendency, it was a concept no longer bound in science fiction.52 This vision separates Smithson from the three artists who are the focus of this study, who, as we have already seen, increasingly distanced themselves from aerial photographs of their work.

In 1969, the year of the Apollo 11 moon landing, both Smithson and Oppenheim independently envisaged the Earth, Gulliver-like, as ―sculpture‖, a claim that resonated with the imprints and transplants of Oppenheim and the 1968 proposed intervention of De Maria, Three Continent Project.53 Echoing this claim, Celant states that large-scaled Land Art fills romantic fantasies in that it can only be fully viewed aerially, and his monograph on Heizer contains multiple aerial photographs. He also notes that a viewer would need to travel 837 kilometres to see Heizer‘s Nine Nevada

Depressions (1968) in its totality.54

As encountered in Gulliver’s Travels, scale predominantly takes as its point of reference the size of an object in relation to the human figure, and scale in human terms is measured by how humans can interact with other elements—hence, height or depth are measured by how objects tower over, fall away, are placed near, are perceived at a distance from a viewer, or are laid out in front of one. Whether an object can be held in a human‘s hands or whether it is many times larger than the human form, scale implies qualities ranging from charm and deep engagement to alienation or even intimidation, and intimacy is determined accordingly.55

Contemporaneous with early Land Art, the 1967 Scale as content exhibition at the

Corcoran Gallery, Washington, while not exhibiting works by Land Artists per se, nonetheless drew attention to the increasing awareness by sculptors of scale and size. In reference to this exhibition the critic Eleanor Green described scale as ―a function of the way the forms appear to expand and continue beyond their physical limitations, acting aggressively on the space around them and compressing it‖, and personified it with an ability to act independently of its object, forcing viewers to renegotiate a space that may be familiar to them.56 In similar fashion, Lucy Lippard‘s assessment of the same exhibition drew attention to how scale was not sensed optically but was ―particularly to be communicated as a sense of place,‖ summarizing in the process the tendency of sculpture at the time to extend and dominate its space to the extent that a new one was created.57

In his introduction to the 1967 Sculpture in Environment exhibition held in Central

Park, New York, Irving Sandler noted the importance and the illusory effects of scale by stating that the works on display demonstrated ―a desire for monumentality, not of size alone but of the kind of scale that causes forms to appear larger than they are.‖58 Here he was indirectly acknowledging the development of gestalt in forms created by the Minimalists, who understood the power of simple and unadorned forms which were then becoming incorporated into Land Art.

The most controversial and debated work of the exhibition was Claes Oldenburg‘s

Placid Civic Monument (also known as The Hole) (illus. 3), a void 2 metres long, 1 metre wide and 2 metres deep. The void was dug one day and filled in the next, making it both a conceptual and a performance work or, as the artist himself said, an

28 ―‗invisible sculpture‖.59 That this void was made in the same year that Heizer created his first voids, the rectangular North, East, South, West 1: North and the circular

North, East, South, West 1: South and when Oppenheim created his Oakland wedge, suggests a clear influence or at the very least, a correlation that is notable.60

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 3, Claes Oldenburg, Placid City Monument (1967), from Michael Lailach, Land Art, Cologne: Taschen, 2007, 11.

In a reversal of the moral focus of Book 1 of Gulliver’s Travels, where aggression dominated the narrative, the second book describes the Brobdingnagians who are revolted by violence and intrigue—but it is the scale reversal that once again

29 preoccupies the reader. The charming images of Gulliver sailing in a water trough against the breeze made by courtiers waving their fans, and of becoming a pet for the women at court, are secondary to his study of gigantic human features and other objects at close range. This immersion (Gulliver stands upon people‘s chests to study their faces) could be seen to parallel a viewer‘s immersion within immense

Land Art.61

Gulliver is a tiny creature among giants where insects and animals become major threats to his existence, but it is the physicality of other humans that most intrigues him. He learns that everything traditionally considered of little importance in a proportionate scale to a human, here takes on an exaggerated significance because of its magnification. Fine details like skin and hair become planes and objects that must be negotiated and it is the traditionally microscopic natural characteristics and flaws that dominate his visual interests. The tactile and olfactory senses become increasingly significant for Gulliver: characteristics, as we shall see, that were to be used as major elements in key works by Heizer, such as Double Negative and by De

Maria, notably in the Earth Rooms (see Chapter Three).62

Gulliver‘s third and fourth voyages demonstrate Swift‘s satirical take on the Royal

Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge and its research,63 as well as his disdain for contemporary Europe.64 While, seemingly, of extraordinary intelligence, the flying planet Laputans whom Gulliver meets on his third voyage are Swift‘s representations of how pointless and silly he believed much theoretical research to be. The Laputans‘ experiments to create sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble to make pillows and turning excreta into food, however, have little if no

30 relevance to Land Art, at least to the genre in its ―traditional‖ manifestations—but their obsessions with geometry, mathematics and astronomy do find strong connections in the works of De Maria, and the experiments certainly resonate with the capricious work of Dennis Oppenheim. His proposals for Ground mutations

(1970) and Study for Accelerator for Evil Thoughts (1983) (see Chapter Four, p. 198) are original and whimsical at best, preposterous yet seductive, at worst.

It is indeed Oppenheim whose practice most resembles that of the adventurous

Gulliver: mercurial, obsessively curious, delighting in spectacle and theatricality.65

There were his repeated ―voyages‖ to remote locations in deserts, to plains, to snow lands and to the tropics: all in the exploration and realization of his ideas. Without particular affinities for any of these places, these ―voyages‖ were followed by ―safe returns to home‖—that is, to interior spaces and to galleries, but they were resumed when new concepts were imagined. These movements paralleled both the continuous changes in scale in Oppenheim‘s work and his movement from Land Art to Body Art and back again. Throughout, questions of magnification and miniaturization are continually negotiated. His willingness to utilize virtually any matter in the purpose of art, including his own faeces, bonds Oppenheim with the notoriously scatological Swift.66 Even the original title of Swift‘s novel (Several

Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships) echoes the labyrinthian titles of Oppenheim‘s body transference works such as Two-stage transfer drawings. (Returning to a past state).

Dennis to Erik Oppenheim and (Advancing to a future state). Erik to Dennis

Oppenheim (1971) (illus. 42)—titles that seemingly strive to be quasi-scientific in nature.

31 Oppenheim‘s works are suffused with qualities of charm, playfulness and fantasy, in ways that, as discussed previously, invite comparisons with Gulliver’s Travels. These qualities may also be discerned in the works of Oldenburg (b. 1929) and his collaborator and partner Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009) who, while not strictly speaking Land Artists, nonetheless address questions of size and scale and humour through their Proposed Monuments and ―Obstacle Monuments‖, continually imagined since 1965, in ways that may be compared with Gulliver’s Travels.

Oldenburg‘s much quoted statement: ―The project began as a play with scale, and that‘s what it seems to be about—the poetry of scale,‖ relates to the ability of the gigantic scale to evoke a sense of happiness and delight through familiarity, nostalgia and play. By juxtaposing the mundane and the monumental, Oldenburg‘s

Brobdingnagian Proposed Monuments were designed to replace well known monuments: London‘s Nelson’s Column by a gear stick or a rear view mirror; the

Eros statue at Piccadilly Circus by a drill bit; the Statue of Liberty by an electric fan; and the Washington Monument by a pair of scissors; and also to be gigantic

―obstacle monuments‖ to disrupt major thoroughfares—for instance, the entrance to

Park Avenue, New York with an ice cream block; the plaza of Times Square, New

York with a banana, among others.67

The academic Doreen Roberts has written perceptively on Gulliver’s Travels in ways that parallel the practices of both Oppenheim and Oldenburg. Describing the travels of Gulliver as ―speculative and playful‖ explorations of possibility (a phrase that could happily apply to many of Oppenheim‘s works and to Oldenburg‘s Monuments),

Roberts writes that Swift‘s novel

…explores problems rather than firmly proffers conclusions and rests its case.

And in so far as the issues are not only sustained but re-examined and

deepened from one point to its successor, it is one book, despite its narrative

episodicity, constant shifts of locations and chameleon-like narrator.68

As will be demonstrated in the following chapters, Roberts‘s quotation finds equivalences with the ―episodic‖ practices of all three Land Artists and also with their continuous ―re-examination‖ of imaginative concepts. It may therefore be seen as axiomatic to the expanded understanding of Land Art as described in the

Introduction and formulated throughout this thesis.

Endnotes

1 Hayward, John (ed.) The Penguin book of English verse, Bungay, Suffolk: Penguin, 1983, 290. 2 Land Art has been labelled ―male monuments‖. However, it was not until the mid–1970s that female Land Artists emerged and their works, such as Nancy Holt‘s Sun Tunnels (1976), were judged as ―landed‖, meaning that they were less interventionist in terms of scale and in earth manipulation, than those of the men. (William L. Fox, Aeriality, Berkeley, Cal.: Counterpoint, 2009, 42.) 3 Smithson claimed that Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape designer of New York‘s Central Park, was an artist ―who …throws a whole new light on the nature of American art.‖ (Robert Smithson, ―Incidents of mirror-travel in the Yucatan‖, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson, The complete writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 170.). This quotation foreshadows the often repeated claim that Land Art is a quintessential American art form and that the manipulation of the landscape is central to the nature of America. Expanding this theory, Heizer and Morris viewed large- scaled art as quintessentially American and large-scaled American abstraction was justified by Morris as both ―the only hope against its nemesis, the decorative‖, and an example of ‗American know-how‘, by which he meant that its processes and methodology were the antithesis of European art. (Morris, ―Size matters‖, 123.) 4 There is a natural symbiosis between De Maria and Heizer as both discovered Land Art simultaneously through their joint desert drawings. G. Robert Deiro stresses the differences in attitude towards the works and practices between the two artists and labels De Maria ―ethereal‖, ―more refined‖ and ―elegant‖ (Deiro Transcript, 5 January 2009 (1), 9) because De Maria preferred to treat the lake as a ―canvas‖ by drawing upon it rather than cutting into it or to manipulate other landforms. His concern was not to embed the early works into the landscapes. His costings, time lines and design preparations were precise and ordered. Deiro further claimed that De Maria‘s practice was

―Eurocentric‖ (Deiro Transcript, 5 January 2009 (2), 15) and lacked a Nevadan or Western ‗connotation‘. (Deiro Transcript, 29 December 2008,15). G. Robert Deiro Transcripts, Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment Collections. Gift of G. Robert Deiro, 2009. 5 Richard J. Williams, After modern sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe 1956–70, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, 118. 6 Elizabeth C. Baker, ―Artworks in the land‖, in Alan Sonfist (ed.), Art in the land: A critical anthology of Environmental Art, New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1983, 75. 7 It is curious that Charles Ross‘ Star Axis is listed as the New Mexico ―Earthwork‖, although De Maria‘s more well-known The Lightning Field was made in 1977. Since the publication of this diagram, there have been many notable Land Art maps published. The most extensive is that in Gillies A. Tiberghien, Land Art, London: Art Data, 1993, 268–270. 8 Philip Leider, ―How I spent my summer vacation: or Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah‖, Artforum, September 1970, 40–49. 9 Eugene M. Waith, ―Ozymandias: Shelley, Horace Smith, and Denon‖, New York: Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 44, 1995, 22. 10 Peter Sorenson, ―New light on Shelley‘s Ozymandias: Shelley as prophet of the ‗New Israel‖, Rome: The Keats-Shelley Review, Vol. 16, Issue 1, January 2002, 77. 11 Heizer‘s claim that ―…the history of sculpture, as we know it, consists mostly of remains and fragments, damaged either by man or by natural phenomena‖ is pertinent to his views on the longevity and presences of his works. (Heizer, in Julia Brown (ed.) in collaboration with Barbara Heizer, Sculpture in reverse, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, 25.) 12 Another remarkable parallel is that, in a 1999 article, Michael Kimmelman called Heizer ―a sculptor‘s colossus of the desert‖. (Michael Kimmelman, ―A sculptor‘s Colossus of the desert‖, The New York Times, 12 December 1999, Section 2, 1.). 13 Germano Celant, Michael Heizer, Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997, xxv. 14 This romantic title comes from a chapter in Celant, Michael Heizer, xxii. 15 Carl Andre in Kenneth Baker, Minimalism: Art of circumstance, New York: Abbeville Press, 1988, 138, cited in Carter Ratcliff, Out of the box: The reinvention of art 1965–1975, New York: Allworth Press, 2000,, 6. 16 Smithson, ―A sedimentation of the mind: Earth projects‖, 1968, in Flam, Robert Smithson writings, 109. 17 Celant, Michael Heizer, xx. 18 It is interesting to note that in the mid-1950s in the era of Cinerama, the artists who were later to explore Land Art were experimenting with spectacular effects. Robert Morris was suspending himself over canvases placed on the floor and applying paint with his hands or a spatula; Robert Smithson was creating surreal collages of dinosaurs and pre-historic life forms; Michael Heizer‘s early paintings were expressionistic and large in their reach; Christo and Jeanne-Claude‘s interventions and wrappings invoked concepts which became larger as landmark sites were approved and funds were raised; and Walter De Maria was exploring both kinetic sculpture of wooden boxes through which

34 balls would roll, in pinball fashion, and performance art with decorative entrances to rooms of his drawings. 19 Clara Weyergraf (ed.), Richard Serra: Interviews, Etc. 1970-1980, Yonkers, New York: The Hudson River Museum, 1980, 36. 20 Ibid., 11. 21 Lucy Lippard, ―Land Art in the rearview mirror‖, in Art in the landscape conference papers, Marfa, Texas: The Chinati Foundation, 2000, 12. 22 Robert Smithson, ―Towards the development of an air terminal site‖ 1967, in Flam, Robert Smithson writings, 60. 23 Philip Rawson, Sculpture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 65. 24 Several commentators have noted the differences in the practices between the American Land Artists and those from Europe, such as Richard Long, who does not attempt to change the earth permanently, but rather arranges features of it, such as rocks, to create works that accentuate the landscapes‘ natural features. Long‘s comment that: ―Land Art is a kind of megalomaniac American invention involving bulldozers and the control of nature‖, expresses the negativity directed to the large-scaled practices of Heizer and the American practitioners by some commentators and indirectly validates Heizer‘s comment about ―decorative‖ European art. (Long cited in Lippard, ―Land Art in the rearview mirror‖, 23.) However, aware that even in its early stages Land Art was an international movement, Earth Art (1969) curator Willoughby Sharp included works by European artists, against the expressed wishes of Smithson, De Maria and Heizer. See Willoughby Sharp, ―On the ‗Earth Art‘ exhibition at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1969‖, in Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (organizers), Ends of the earth: Land art to 1974, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Cal.: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Munich, Germany: Prestel Verlag; London, United Kingdom: Prestel Publishing Ltd., 2012, 40. 25 Robert Morris, ―Aligned with Nazca‖, in Robert Morris, Continuous project altered daily: The writings of Robert Morris, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993, 144. 26 Because of its scale, its immediacy, the perceived romance of its locations and its physicality of execution, many writers have commented on the suitability of Land Art for photo journalism and magazine features, and the number of articles on it in non-art journals continues to be considerable, although they have not always been favourable. Tom Holert noted that the 25 April 1969 edition of Life published David Bourdon‘s ―What on Earth!‖ article, which linked Heizer‘s Dissipate 1 with the ancient Great Serpent Mound in Ohio (which would be of great interest to Heizer in the 1980s) and the Uffington White Horse carving in England, but then, in the Ecology section of its 1960s decade edition of 26 December 1969 it juxtaposed Rift 1 with pictures of deforestation and the effects of strip mining. (Tom Holert, ―Land Art‘s multiple sites‖, in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the earth, 98.) This negative comparison ignored the fact that the artwork was created in a desert and was subject to disintegration. The tenuousness of the comparison may have escaped many readers, but the scale of the work was unmistakable.

27 De Maria from Heinz Ohff, Guttersloh: Galerie der Neuen Kunste catalogue, 1971, 20, cited in Margarethe Jochimsen, ―Time in Contemporary Art: From limits to infinity‖ in Michel Baudson (ed.), Art and time, exh. cat. Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1986, 35. 28 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 34. 29 Andre in David Bourdon, ―Carl Andre‘s razed sites‖ (Artforum, October 1966), in Gregory Battock (ed.), Minimal Art: A critical anthology, New York: E P Dutton and Company, 1968, 104, cited in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 40. 30 Andre in Phyllis Tuchman, ―An interview with Carl Andre‖, Artforum, June 1970, 57, cited in Ratcliff, Ibid., 98. 31 Heizer in Avalanche, 1970, 70. 32 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 18. 33 Rawson, Sculpture, 59. 34 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 1790, translated by J. H. Bernard, London: Macmillan, 1914, reproduced by The Online Library of Liberty, Section 23, 40. 35 Conversely, in the Asian and European Field works (1989–2003) of Antony Gormley, hundreds of small terracotta figures (between 8 and 26 centimetres) are arranged on the floors of enclosed spaces to create massed works of a huge scale. The endearing qualities of the singular primitive figures (which are usually made by volunteers or artisans from the regions where they are shown) are transformed into presences of confrontation and intimidation as they block entries to the spaces and their mass gives them an aura of threat or invasion. 36 Richard McKeon (ed.), The basic works of Aristotle, ―The Poetics‖, New York: The Modern Library, 1941, 1462. 37 The alternate view, in miniatures, that a ―knowledge of the whole precedes knowledge of the parts‖ is a critical point in Levi-Strauss‘ discussion of aesthetics. (Claude Levi-Strauss, The savage mind, (1962), (translation by Weidenfeld, 1966), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981, 24.). 38 Susan Stewart, On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, Durham NC.: Duke University Press, 76. 39 Ibid., 77. 40 Celant, Michael Heizer, xxi. 41 While Double Negative is outdoors and therefore visitation cannot be controlled, the re-creation of North, East, South, West at the Dia Foundation in Beacon, New York, is separated from viewers by glass panels. 42 Jenny Mezciems, ―The unity of Swift‘s Voyage to Laputa‖, in Claude Rawson (ed.), Jonathan Swift: A collection of critical essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1995, 246. 43 Joseph Horrell, ―What Gulliver knew‖, in Ernest Tuveson (ed.), Jonathan Swift: A collection of critical essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964, 58. 44 Boettger, Earthworks,, 43. 45 Robert Smithson, ―The Spiral Jetty‖ (1972), in Flam, Robert Smithson Writings, 147. 46 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, 1627, cited in John Carey, (ed.), The Faber book of Utopias, London: Faber and Faber, 1999, 64.

47 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, Section 26, 47. 48 Smithson, ―The Spiral Jetty‖ (1972). 49 Ibid. 50 Robert Smithson, ―Aerial Art‖ (1969), in Flam, Robert Smithson writings, 116. 51 In an indirect reference to his forthcoming Non-sites, Smithson suggested that an ―artificial universe‖ gallery be built in the air terminal to display photographs, topographical maps and films of the construction processes. (Ibid, 117) 52 Ibid. 53 Robert Smithson, ―Earth‖ (1969), in Flam, Robert Smithson Writings, 177, and Oppenheim at the Earth Art symposium, Cornell University, 6 February 1969, cited in Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim Explorations, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2001, 113. 54 Germano Celant, Michael Heizer, Milan: Fondiazione Prada, 1997, xxii. 55 Robert Morris makes this point in the essays: ―Notes on sculpture Parts I and 2‖ (1966), in Morris, Continuous project altered daily, 11, 15. 56 Eleanor Green, ―Scale as content‖, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery, Washington, 1967, cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 37. 57 Lucy Lippard, ―Escalation in Washington‖, Art International 12, No.1, January 1968, cited in Boettger, Ibid., 38. 58 Irving Sandler, ―Introduction‖, Sculpture in Environment catalogue, New York: NYC Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, 1967, not paginated, cited in Boettger, Ibid., 16. 59 Claus Oldenburg in Boettger, Ibid., 3. 60 As will be seen in Chapter Four, in 1960 Oppenheim dug voids and filled them with alien materials which were then burnt. He returned to voids in 1966 with Excavator’s work and then with Oakland wedge in the following year. 61 There is an interesting correlation here with the then contemporary Photorealist painters such as Chuck Close (b. 1940). 62 It is also an intriguing parallel that the Brobdingnagians view digging holes as part of ―the law of Nature‖. (Louis A. Landa, Gulliver’s Travels and other writings, Boston: The Riverside Press, 1960, 83.) 63 The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (or Royal Society) was established in 1660 and is today the British government‘s scientific advisor. 64 Gulliver’s Travels Book IV, A voyage to the Houyhnhmns, is more a philosophical discourse and as such has no bearing on the issues of this thesis and is therefore not discussed. 65 William L. Fox describes the creation of Land Art as ―exactly the context – talking a small action we might perform as a child, such as digging a hole or dropping a pebble into it, and writing it large upon the land‖: an analysis that stresses its exploratory and ―playful‖ nature which can begin as a small gesture and grow according to the effects it has on the landscape and on the developing understanding upon its creator. (William L. Fox, Mapping the empty: Eight artists and Nevada, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999, 113.) 66 See Norman O. Brown, ―The excremental vision‖, in Tuveson, Jonathan Swift, 31–54.

67 Oldenburg, cited in Mark Rosenthal, ―‘Unbridled‘ Monuments: or, How Claes Oldenburg set out to change the world‖, in Claes Oldenburg: An anthology, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1995, 256. 68 Doreen Roberts, ―Introduction‖ in Gulliver’s Travels, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001, xvi.

CHAPTER TWO Michael Heizer: The challenge of scale

Man [sic] will never create art really large in relation to the world—only in the

relation to himself and his size. The most formidable objects that man has

touched are the earth and the moon. The greatest scale he understands is the

distance between them, and this is nothing compared to what he suspects to

exist.1

Of the three Land Artists examined in this thesis, Michael Heizer has most consistently made works of gigantic proportions that intervene in the land. His is a practice that sits seemingly comfortably with conventional readings of Land Art. It has correlations with the themes of isolation, monumentality and the evocation of former grandeur found in the sonnet Ozymandias. For Heizer, the challenge of scale, understood in terms of its (potential) immensity, led him to make works that, in his words, would overwhelm viewers: ―To be in the presence of powerful sculpture is to be more conscious and physically alive.‖2 Drawing inspiration from the monuments of antiquity, Heizer, through a contest of his own making, made massive and permanent works that he imagined would set records—although he denied attempting to compete with the scale of the natural world.3

Heizer set out to make an art, as he put it, with ―no limits‖.4 More specifically, he has said:

I think size is the most unused quotient in the sculptor‘s repertoire because it

requires lots of commitment and time. To me it‘s the best tool. With size you

get space and atmosphere: atmosphere becomes volume. You stand in the

shape, in the zone.5

His understanding of the term ―atmosphere‖ shows his awareness of the surprisingly intimate implications that the large scale of his works may evoke. Heizer realized this atmosphere through the creation of huge works that are spaces which can separate viewers from the world outside and force them to reflect upon the power of the art created through size and mass alone. This was, as we shall see, in the emulation of the antique monuments which initially inspired him. Heizer‘s reference to viewers partially negates his discounting of the traditional measure of scale‘s relationship to the human form and his assertion that his interest is simply in size itself. However, as

William L. Fox, Director of Center + Art, Nevada Museum of Art, has pointed out, this relationship is axiomatic because when experiencing a new landscape, viewers will immediately relate themselves to its scale, and change the land into a ―landscape‖.6

Heizer‘s intention was not to scale his art according to the chosen landscape, but viewers will automatically perceive this as such.

Paradoxically, Heizer‘s concern was not to create anything physically new, but rather to make work that would not physically add to the wealth of art already existing, in terms of new materials—as he put it, a rejection or negation of ―all these materialistic concepts‖.7 Hence, most of his desert voids are composed entirely of negative spaces that ultimately crumble back into the earth, as many already have done; and the stone blocks excavated from mountains obviously already existed and have merely been removed for display elsewhere. Even the architecturally–scaled complexes of Heizer‘s later career are made of local materials which will continually

40 deteriorate because of the desert‘s weathering processes—although he has reinforced some of them, most notably the early forms of City, in the hope that they will last for millennia.

In line with his views on the integrity of natural forms, Heizer once stated:

I‘m really concerned with physical properties, with density, volume, mass and

space. For instance, I find an 18‘ square [1.67 square metres] granite boulder.

That‘s mass. It‘s already a piece of sculpture. But as an artist it‘s not enough

for me to say that, so I mess with it. I defile…if you‘re a naturalist you‘d say I

defiled it, otherwise you‘d say I responded in my own manner.8

This statement qualifies and demonstrates his reluctance to manipulate a natural form, his admiration for the innate gestalt of mass, and an understanding that his work would only be critically regarded as sculpture if it were manipulated. This early assertion was modified in later ―displacements‖, but Heizer has largely held to it, mostly altering boulders only for stability. In Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976), the first work in a series of similar installations, the non-manipulated stones in their varying positions were presented on fabricated bases. For Jonathan Fineberg, Heizer‘s work can be understood both as an ―attack [on] art as a portable object and dominated by historical necessity‖—first, because the works (exploring spatial relationships with landscapes) largely become permanent and immovable monuments and, second, because an overt challenge of superseding the ancients sees the works encompassing broad concepts such as geology and time.9 This assessment, however, disregards the innovative creation of new scales and sculptural processes, their impact on audiences, and their unique explorations of the capacities of art. 41 Michael Govan explains Heizer‘s preference for the term ―size‖ over ―scale‖ in two ways: emphasizing their different physical implications on viewers, and demonstrating that the phenomenological experience is more substantial and meaningful when viewers are required to make physical and sustained efforts to experience the works.10 As stated previously, crucial to this assertion is the basic and recurring cognitive concept of how humans perceive land and create ―new‖ landscapes in their minds. Heizer does not relate scale, ―an effete art term‖, to human perception or measurements. His differentiation between size and scale is that scale is related to decorative European art, and to the relationships between object and setting, whereas size is inherent only in large unadorned forms and is related to American art.11 This assessment is derived from his studies of, and direct experiences with, Mesoamerican art and is related to histories as varied as the mythology of the settlement of the American West and the Nazca lines of Peru.

There is an underlying assertion about strength and mass that he believes is quintessentially American and particularly evident in the western United States landscape and its subsequent manipulation by humans.

He has said: ―We came from the same rock, you know, we are the same that the air is made out of…I am accomplishing as far as like reducing it back to like a simpler number within‖.12 This statement stresses Heizer‘s unbridled confidence and a determination to create art that seemingly encompasses the foundations of human existence. These and other equally provocative pronouncements help to explain the mythologizing of the artist and his work. In recognition of his emulation of ancient construction methods in remote and harsh landscapes, Patricia A. Fairchild describes Heizer‘s practice as an ―updating of the history of object-making‖ as

42 evidenced in the history of Constructivism, Dadaism and Minimalism. She further argues that, in tracing the ―forms and material concerns of these three movements] to the ancients‖, he both ―gives them an anthropology…and reveals that the objects, especially on the scale of ancient structures, is sometimes constructive and destructive simultaneously‖—a categorization which alludes to his unique achievement of the creation of contemporary self–referential geometric sculpture, based on ancient construction methods, for which process is integral.13 Other interpretations categorize Heizer‘s oeuvre similarly but overlook the fundamental point that the works are of essentially basic shapes or found objects of gigantic sizes, and that a large part of their success as art is their simplicity or familiarity.

Their characteristic newness is the act of creating them or presenting them as art.

Because of their shapes, whether geometric or naturalistic, Heizer‘s Land Art has an eerie familiarity and that is a key strength.

Heizer‘s decision to site his works in Nevada, part of The Great Basin, the largest and least inhabited desert of the United States, was more for personal and economic reasons, rather than the often mentioned ―macho / adventurous‖ posturing.

Understandably then, he took great umbrage at Hayden Herrera‘s view that in the desert Heizer could ―find that kind of unraped [sic] peaceful, religious space artists have always tried to put into their work‖.14 He was from a family of ranchers, geologists, builders and mining engineers and was familiar with much of the area and its harsh conditions. The timelessness of the desert sites resembled those of the monuments of antiquity that he had admired and the sites were far cheaper to purchase than land on the east coast.15 The remoteness also shields him from the

New York art world and, as he says, affords him solitude.

While Heizer has disputed all romanticized notions about his desert work, many writers continue alluding to it: isolation and monumentality are powerful myth- makers. As early as 1970, Dore Ashton summed up Heizer‘s practice in typically gendered and heroic terms, writing that his journey was to ―the primeval wilderness to leave monuments of his manhood [sic] there.‖16 Mark Rosenthal, writing some thirteen years later, would suggest that the Land Artists imbued the landscape with

―romantic values‖.17 Countering these views, Heizer has claimed that he would have created Double Negative and City in New Jersey if suitable sites had been available; the works, he said, allude only to art and not to their natural sites:18

All these so-called experts try to say my work is about the West, that it‘s about

the view. They don‘t know what they‘re talking about. I came for the space

and because it was cheap land. I don‘t care if you see the mountains. The

sculpture is partly open because, rather than put you in a box, I want you to

be able to breathe. But I also want to isolate you in it, to contain you in it like

in all my negative sculptures. It‘s not really different from Double Negative.

The sculpture is the issue, not the landscape.19

In Double Negative, as we shall discuss later in this chapter, Heizer understood that the scale and impact of large voids would be enhanced by their placement at the edges of a mesa, since vertical references were eliminated and the right angled gouges would contrast with the natural organic form, heightening the presence of the voids as art. Acknowledging that Double Negative is ‗huge‘ Heizer claims that its scale is not, since it could not compete with the natural landscape and instead, it creates ―a new place‖ within it.20 He offers perhaps the definitive definition of outdoor

Land Art with the description ―Art in nature re-arranged.‖21 44 Apart from the differences in the costs of the land and possible problems with civic planning authorities, Nevada removed Heizer from the traditional networks of the

New York art world with its commercialization and commodification of art, and from its critics. It also enabled him to create work ―without the use of art materials‖: beginning the tradition of Land Art being created out of existing local materials, directly emulating the monuments of the ancients.22 Enticing other Land Artists with similar ideas to the Great Basin region, in July 1968 Heizer was accompanied by

Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt (1938–2014) on a month long tour. Later that year he brought out Walter De Maria.

Heizer always strictly controlled the construction of his works, designated how they should be viewed, and wanted his intentions acknowledged, but of course he had no control over their reception. He was clearly interested in creating works that physically changed and dominated their landscapes and which could be seen from great distances, thereby necessarily of a large scale.

Process is integral to Heizer‘s work and there are no attempts to disguise the physicality involved in making art, even in those later works made for institutional sites and for large audiences. In the early voids and displacements, there was no concern for permanence; a characteristic that changed only when the large scaled architectural type explorations were attempted later.

Heizer‘s interest in voids paralleled Dennis Oppenheim‘s inspiration behind the

Indentations series, discussed in Chapter Four, in that the simplicity of the gesture of removing an object from a space allows that space to exhibit a new resonance.

45 Needless to say, this subtractive process would have appealed to Heizer, who as we have already seen, championed the manipulation of existing materials rather than the utilization of new ones. All elements within the composition become larger and more prominent and, in this way, the reductive process reveals an existing artwork.

The ambiguous simplicity of the ―implied volumes‖ of the spaces, the nothingness within the large scaled voids and their casual natures are countered by the solidity, volumes, mass and innate gestalt in Heizer‘s early sculpture.23 The early voids are self-referential reductions with concern only for shape and symmetry and, until City

(see pp. 97–108), all sculptures but the lined voids were devoid of introduced colour and texture. Natural features were endemic and so were incidental to the finishes.

Mark Rosenthal has likened these early works to an amalgam of the hard edged geometry of Minimalism in their precisely measured industrial excavation processes and their unembellished surfaces, with Abstract Expressionism‘s gestural qualities of physicality.24

As voids are below ground level and show only the volume of their cavities, they focus the viewer‘s attention on depth, the visceral and texture while denying traditional sculptural qualities of mass and weight. 25 However, by making voids large enough to become landscape features that can be physically entered, their internal surfaces and textures become all-enveloping. Thus, the utilization of the large scale enabled Heizer to give his voids weight by expanding the concept of absence as presence to one of emptiness as mass. The emptiness of the voids allows them to

―take up the universe into [themselves]‖,26 that is, they are ―filled‖ with the atmosphere. In this way they realize Heizer‘s quest of presenting another conundrum, that of transparent mass. The wall mounted concave ―shields‖ of Anish

Kapoor (b. 1954) achieve the same presence since their centres appear to be immense voids and viewers feel drawn into them.

Heizer stands with De Maria in his stated desire that his works last forever:

Long after the canvas painting and the synthetic and fragile works have

deteriorated, long after the civilizations as we know them have evolved or

been annihilated by wars, germs, pollutants or political regimes, the rock-

mass piece will remain intact, and should never show signs of change or

wear.27

However, while the immensity of Heizer‘s works would seem to ensure their permanence, their mass means that they have greater exposure to the elements, particularly to the pluvial events of The Great Basin. They are therefore inherently more at risk from collapsing or disintegrating and will ultimately not last, contrary to

Heizer‘s wish. In this quest for pieces that will forever remain ―intact‖, Heizer stands in contrast to Robert Smithson who was intrigued by the geological processes of entropy—as evidenced by his writings Entropy and the new monuments (1966) and

Entropy made visible (1973), and his temporal works Partially buried woodshed and

Spiral Jetty (both 1970).

The greatest influence on Heizer‘s career was that of his father, Dr Robert Fleming

Heizer (1915–1979), the eminent pre-Columbian archaeological anthropologist and

Great Basin rock art expert. Despite his ―towering ego‖, Heizer admired his father enormously and accompanied him on many expeditions throughout the United

States, Egypt, Mexico, Bolivia and Peru.28 Heizer‘s quest became to realize his

47 father‘s studies through a revival of the construction of large-scaled monuments that would replicate ancient building processes and which, like them, would outlast millennia. Important examples of these Ozymandian revivals include Complex 1 (the first element of City) in the manner of the Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara and the

La Venta site, and the Displaced / Replaced Mass works in the manner of the Valley of the Kings Colossi at Memnon. As emphasized by William L. Fox, however, predominant in this challenge was Heizer‘s interest in, and fascination with, the logistics and construction methods of the ancient structures.29 This interest in the technological achievement of transporting such masses is a narrowed appreciation of these monuments, compared with the systematic and methodological archaeological studies of his father, and was a consequence of exposure to his father‘s prime area of research of the La Venta site. (See pp. 73–76)

Notwithstanding the undoubtedly heroic and adventurous nature of an artist creating gargantuan works in the desert, as previously discussed, and as we have argued of limited interest to Heizer, his motivation to work in this manner may be viewed, in part, as a response to contemporary American foreign policy. As he stated:

I started making this stuff in the middle of the Vietnam War. It looked like the

world was coming to an end, at least for me. That‘s why I went out in the

desert and started making things in dirt…When you make a sculpture by

digging out dirt, you‘re negating all of these materialistic concepts. You

change the definition of material and material usage, and you redefine what

an object is. When I calmed down and thought about it, I thought it was a

good contribution. It wasn‘t materialistic, and it was spiritual and mystical and

oriented toward the earth.30 48 An equally important motivation has been the attempt to create art that is essentially

American. The implications of this for the size of his works have been discussed, but equally important are his interests in measurement and in the distances covered by

American communications. Added to these considerations, Heizer has long claimed that the remote locations, the physical efforts required and the simplified geometric forms made his Land Art distinctly American; again echoing the mythology of western settlement experiences and the designs of native Americans. Although the influences of ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican forms are demonstrable, Heizer stresses that, as his works are contemporary, they cannot be embedded with ceremonial or spiritual qualities (although he concedes that those characteristics are

―interesting‖ for audiences).31 This assertion means that while his sculpture revives ancient architectural processes and uses its materials, it is directly a product of its own period—an assertion that emphasizes its secular intention.

Heizer has often expressed his confusion over the ambiguity of his work. While acknowledging his blurring between art and architecture, he has often pointed out how quickly an artist can lose sight of what he is creating and why. When reflecting upon such dilemmas, he acknowledges the danger in deluding oneself that one is creating art when one is doing something else, although what this ―something‖ is remains unexplained.32

The repetition of same or similar titles in Heizer‘s early works and re-creations is a direct reference to how he views their life spans and to how he denies the formalism of the created or finished object. They are all displaced and replaced, dragged and elevated or levitated, dismantled, dispersed and depressed. The similarity of many of

49 the procedures means that the titles specifically reference the artwork‘s structure and installation and that various works are often only distinguished by series numbers.

This was a contemporaneous practice of Pop and Minimalist works to highlight their industrial qualities and intentions, but for Heizer‘s works it serves to stress the physicality, the processes and scale.

Voids, land drawings and displacements

The financial backing of early Land Art projects by financiers and commissioners was crucial in its development. Virginia Dwan‘s support for Smithson‘s works was an extension of her patronage as his gallerist, but outside backers like Robert C. Scull commissioned works because of their own interest in the concepts explored by Land

Artists. As Scull said, showing faith in new concepts that would be intrinsically difficult for many business people to understand:

[Heizer] was talking about the purest kind of art there is, an art that I can‘t sell,

that I could own, that would even be a hardship for me to see, but

nonetheless owning it would give me some kinship to having it, that I would

have it even if it‘s not in my house on the wall…33

Scull financed the Nine Nevada Depressions series or ―bodies of works‖34 (1968) and Displaced / Replaced Mass (1969) following his initial meeting with Heizer, who wrote what must have seemed extraordinary to Scull: ―I am an artist engaged in an idea which you might find of interest. I am digging holes in the earth.‖35 In the year following, Heizer advised Scull that, ―This work will never be a physical legacy to you either. All that could really happen would be that the value of the land will increase.‖

The self-deprecating tone of these words undercut the artist‘s stated desire that his 50 artworks will last forever and show his understanding of Scull‘s entrepreneurial interests.36

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Illus. 4, Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West (model) (1967). From Germano Celant, Michael Heizer, Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1997, 31.

Heizer‘s early Land works used right angles and symmetry to emphasize their alien and interventionist natures, and construction photographs show work teams engaged in industrial type excavations and building processes. The first works were the Sierra Nevada interventions North and South (1967) developed from the series

North, East, South, West 1 (1967): wooden and galvanized steel, circular and rectangular voids derived from the earlier models of a cylinder, a cuneiform triangle, a cone and a combination of cube and parallelepiped (illus.4). They transferred the ordered geometric models from the positive form to the negative, and placed them into random natural settings, thus removing them from their Minimalist mathematical

51 object status and transferring them into mysterious and ambiguous ―depressions of absence‖ in an alien landscape. This revelling in, and celebration of, ―the dialectical relationship between the presence and absence of mass, identifiable both in matter and in immateriality,‖ as described by Germano Celant, was continued in a body of void works created at El Mirage Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, California, begun in

1968, in the two years before Double Negative.37 Clustered together, like elements of a single work, these voids, as we shall see below, were given simple descriptive titles, which belied their more ambitious intentions.

The industrial rectangular shapes refashioned the box forms of Minimalism as trenches in the ground, leaving the art devoid of everything but shape and reversing the practice of creating ―something from nothing‖ by creating ―nothing from something‖. Resembling utilitarian and industrial geometric depressions excavated for the foundations of a large building, they came to be mysterious ―windows‖ into another world, which grew incrementally larger as the series progressed.38

The boxes series began with voids that were visible only when standing over them and each was substantially different, with only Gesture as a series of squared voids.

The rectangular lined voids were Two-stage liner buried in earth and snow and

Windows 1 (which was originally to be two voids connected by an underground tunnel to allow light). The large and oblong series were the nine rectangles of Field,

Slot 1 and Slot 2 (illus. 5). The double triangular Compression Line reverted to more linear forms, similar to the geometry of De Maria‘s later ―pinball‘ works to be discussed in Chapter Three. Collapse introduced wooden planks as the dominant features of its composition and resembled a gravitational accident with each plank

52 ―falling‖ into the centre and directing attention into the void; thus reinforcing the temporal and tentative nature of these early works which was relieved only with

Trough, a moulded concrete industrial form.

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Illus. 5, Michael Heizer, Slot 2 (1968). From Celant, Michael Heizer, 63

As two-dimensional markings on lake beds, all of the above works reduced art to minimal designs that imposed symmetry on their organic surfaces. They affirmed at the very least that an artist had been there. Their methods of production were matched by aggressive weathering forces, ensuring that they would quickly resemble natural desert formations or markings, or disintegrate. The linings of the voids were

53 soon eliminated to allow the forms and materials to be synonymous, but preservation linings were reinstated when Heizer recreated these voids in the museum– commissioned works many years later, making the works permanent and visible to large audiences. (See pp. 86–97).

Heizer‘s contribution to Virginia Dwan‘s 1968 Earthworks exhibition, curated by

Robert Smithson, was a 2 metre back-lit colour transparency of Dissipate 2 from

Nine Nevada Depressions. A visionary and sympathetic gallerist like Dwan enabled larger commissioned works to be made and would seem to have countered the reactions to the gallery world that the Land Artists intended to circumvent. In a 1996 letter to Suzann Boettger, Dwan claimed that a gallery show was ―very definitely our last choice‖ but decided to hold a ―sort of an anthology show of what we were aware of as current earthworks at that point, or of projects which were intended to be earthworks projects‖.39 Germano Celant‘s comment that Heizer‘s abandonment of the gallery system was not merely due to political and economic considerations, but also the physical limitations in displaying any of his own work that was interesting him at the time, might seem to undercut Heizer‘s resolution and determination to create his unique practice in isolation.

Expanding the physicality of the void series made earlier in the year, Nine Nevada

Depressions (1968) became Heizer‘s first gigantic work in terms of distance covered: explorations of linear forms through gestural voids and lined slots, extending 837 kilometres across the deserts and dry lake beds of Nevada. Viewed aerially, they demonstrated their relationship with the ground in the manner of figures in a painting and were, in effect, Heizer‘s first play at the effects of giantism. The scale and effort

54 of the undertaking was described by commissioner Robert C. Scull as evidence of

―the secret aspirations of what men [sic] have wanted to do since the beginning of time: let people know that they passed through‖40

Nine Nevada Depressions attempted, in the weighty words of Celant, to ―return to the primordial substratum of the world.‖41 Although this return meant direct intervention, in time all would be negated through weathering. Their delineated spaces accentuated their sites, and their surrounds acted as ―frames‖ that

―increased‖ the size of the works. Heizer again termed them ―windows‖ to demonstrate their illusionistic aesthetic, despite their diminished scale in comparison to their locations, and reinforced this with a quotation from Levi Strauss‘s The

Savage Mind to emphasize the power of illusion.42 He was determined that the voids would have ―no history‖ and would be ―indeterminate in time and inaccessible in locale‖,43 meanwhile stressing their anonymity and his preferred understanding of them as aesthetic forms, imposed by an artist, Gulliver-like, onto an alien landscape.44

The most gestural work of the series, Backfill, in the manner of a preparatory excavation for a building site, was a trench with its removed one tonne of earth forming a mound at one end: juxtaposing both the positive and negative forms. Other works in the series demonstrated a greater concern for precision, but their titles such as Rift 1 invoke a disturbance or a direct intervention and hint at violence. The organic forms of the earth drawings were reworked into precise excavations of aesthetic linear forms. Rift 1, a zigzag 15 metres long and 2 metres deep and a 1.5 tonne displacement, combined the single trenches and voids into a single angled

55 linear form that appears as an aggressive scouring of the passive surface, illustrating

Heidigger‘s definition of a riss (rift) as a battle between the world and earth in which the earth is all-consuming and on which the world is grounded.

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Illus. 6, Michael Heizer, Dissipate 1 (Nine Nevada Depressions 8), 1968. Photograph by Michael Heizer, from Kastner and Wallace, Land and Environmental Art, 91.

Dissipate 1 (illus. 6), was a series of more random excavations, five ordered and precise right angled trenches lined with wood. The positions of the trenches were determined by Heizer dropping five matchsticks onto a piece of paper and taping them down.45 This new scale and the juxtaposition of formality and randomness gave the work a more mysterious narrative with its abstraction increased according to its increased weathering effects—uniquely and directly linking time and space in the work, since the latter was determined by the former. Junker described the dropping of the matchsticks (―toothpicks thrown on a table top‖) as a ―self-effacing‖ gesture as any such object of gesture would appear inconsequential in such a scaled setting.46

56 Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 7, Michael Heizer, Rift1 (Nine Nevada Depressions), 1968). Photograph by Michael Heizer, from Celant, Michael Heizer, 82.

Rift 1 (illus. 7) and Interstices 1, made from the removal of 1.5 tonnes and 6 tonnes of earth respectively, introduced unlined zigzag forms and curves, rather like the dollar symbol, which appear as totemic depressions cut into the surfaces of the lake beds. Isolated mass / Circumflex, was a 365 metre wave-like and looped trench made from a 6 tonne displacement of earth cut into the bed of Massacre Lake, continually photographed as it disintegrated from the forces of the wind. Not lining the voids made them integrate more fully with the earth and they did indeed become subsumed by the earth following rainfall when they filled with water.47

Like the Nazca lines they have the sense of the branding of the land, but without the social implications of the Nazcas‘ ownership. On the surface they are large depressions that could be walked through or around, but from the air they were

57 curious ritualistic lines breaking up the surface and showing the intervention of humans into an inhospitable and unsympathetic landscape.

Like the work Collapse, the evocatively titled Styx and Hydrate made earlier in the same year featured wooden planks on their surfaces which emphasized their depressions. Double Compression consisted of two parallel wood lined trenches each 3.6 metres x 30 centimetres x 30 centimetres dug beneath a large boulder, and placed so that they seem to extend the lines of the natural fissures in the boulder.

The boulder is clearly part of the composition of the work and the trenches hint at mystery beneath the ground.

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Illus. 8, Michael Heizer, Cilia (Nine Nevada Depressions) (1968). From Celant, Michael Heizer, 90-91.

Cilia, the most curious work, in that it is the most ―finished‖ of the Nine Nevada

Depressions series, is a rectangular trench lined with painted wood onto which short angled wooden boards were attached (illus. 8). Rather like an alien intervention, the single published photograph shows the work‘s deliberate position in the foreground

58 of a broad landscape with the sage brush and mountain range in the background. In maintaining the isolation of the works and the need for personal engagement, all photographs of Heizer‘s works that were subsequently exhibited at galleries were meant as documentary records of the works and not as artworks themselves.48

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Illus. 9, Michael Heizer, Five Conic Displacements (1969). Photograph by Michael Heizer from Tiberghien, Land Art, 138.

The incorporation of contemporary technology to create work was expanded by a commission from gallerist Heiner Friedrich to create Five Conic Displacements

(1969), Heizer‘s largest voids to date (illus. 9). Six hundred and eighty tonnes of earth were removed to create five voids that were each 45 metres in diameter and

13.5 metres deep, and the entire site stretched to 240 metres.49 Despite the industrial machinery, the voids were created with the seeming randomness of Jean

Dry Lake drawing Ground Incision / Loop Drawing, (see p. 62), with no attempt made

59 towards the professionally finished edges of previous works; truck and bulldozer tracks are left around the voids.

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Illus. 10, Diavik Diamond Mine, ―10 Most incredible earth scars‖, Scribol News and Politics, 8. Accessed 16 May 2014 from http://scribol.com/news-and-politics/10-most-incredible-earth-scars/5.

The overall appearance (for comparison see illus. 10) is of an unfinished industrial site.50 When viewed aerially the five conical voids appear as punctuations in an otherwise overall scribbled pattern, but at ground level their visceral qualities dominate. Deterioration of the work was rapid. In photographs taken later in 1969, weathering had ―finished‖ the site by eliminating many of the surrounding marks and heightening the presence of the voids further, but they were increasingly filled with sand.

Indeed, there is a remarkable similarity between photographs of Five Conic

Displacements (for example, illus. 9) and the ice-bound Diavik Diamond Mine in

Canada (as seen in illus.10). The industrial efforts and processes employed and the challenges required to create mines are the same as those for Heizer‘s voids

60 although they are, of course, ends in themselves: aesthetic and non-functional, but they still comment on what the Earth yields.

In the manner of Five Conic Displacements, Munich Depression (1969) was a gigantic excavated crater of over 1,000 tonnes of soil, 30.48 metres wide and 4.8 metres deep in an open ―desert‖ area marked for a satellite city, making it Heizer‘s first immediately interactive Land Artwork.51 The void exposed the gravel beneath the surface and, when entered, the viewer could see only the gravel and the sky.

Heizer considered the gravel to be ―an analysis of its place‖, and stated that the excavations in the Mojave Desert in 1968 had revealed to him the resonance of such fundamental natural materials.52 Obviously when immersed within Munich

Depression and seeing only the gravel and the sky, viewers would be forced to contemplate the resonance of the two.53 Of course this would be a crucial aspect in the expanded Double Negative where immersion was of fundamental concern.

Heizer‘s explorations of two-dimensional art in natural materials and in natural landscapes, called by him part of the ―entire vocabulary‖ of art, inspired the creation of the Dye Paintings series (1968), of which Yellow Dye and Powder Dispersals covered 9 square metres and the enormous Primitive Dye Paintings (1969), the larger of which covered 202.5 square metres on the surface of Coyote Dry Lake,

California.54 These works directly referenced the Navajo sand painting techniques revived by Jackson Pollock, by using the lake beds as their canvas, invoking gesture as their techniques and utilizing random ground features and wind forces to determine their compositions. As full perception of them was possible only from above, they showed Heizer‘s interest in invoking scale to reinforce their presence.

Gestural drawings like Ground incision / Loop drawing (1968), a 240 metre looped line of eight car tyre tracks, anticipating the snow works of Oppenheim (discussed in

Chapter Four), and the 270 metre Circular Surface Planar Displacement Drawing

(1970), circular patterns on the bed of Jean Dry Lake, Nevada, made by a motorcycle and filmed by G. Robert Deiro, directly invoked performance, as an extension of the gestures and processes of Heizer‘s voids. Circular surface drawing

(1968), created by shovelling two loads of backfill totalling 680 tonnes from a moving truck, imitated Pollock‘s Action Painting practice, and anticipated Robert Smithson‘s more permanent Concrete pour (1969).

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Illus. 11, Michael Heizer, Displaced / Replaced Mass 1:2 (1969) from Germano Celant, Michael Heizer, 176.

Following a visit to Meteor Crater with De Maria and Deiro in 1968, Heizer became intrigued with reversing the process of a volcanic eruption. The series Displaced /

Replaced Mass 1:1, 1:2 (illus. 11) and 1:3 (1969) embodied his prime interest in the physicality of moving massive stone blocks and also in recreating and countering geological processes. Reflecting his penchant for puns, the literal term ―replaced‖ in the title also refers to the boulder‘s usurpation of a traditional art object; chosen solely because of its ability to convey mass. Three granite boulders of between 27 and 65 tonnes were dynamited from 2,736 metres high in the Sierra Nevada range and relocated 96.5 kilometres away from the range and at 1,216 metres below it into concrete-lined depressions in the floor of Dry Lake at Silver Springs, Nevada. Here they became ―insertions‖, reversing the ancient geological processes that originally moved them up to the mountains, and were placed diagonally protruding from the void at 45 degrees, lying horizontally inside the void at 90 degrees and at a vertical right angle to the void at 180 degrees.55 Although the displaced boulders and voids were the same colour, the central prominence of the boulders emphasizes their mass and evokes the atmosphere of an archaeological dig, anticipating a theme that would be developed further in City, to where (following pluvial deterioration) they were relocated and given a referential mathematical title.56

The Displaced / Replaced Mass works utilized the popular form of many commemorative civic monuments which have boulders placed into civic spaces and are marked with a plaque detailing an anniversary, a major event, or the deeds of an individual or group. These simplified memorials use the rocks as enlarged bases for the plaques. Indirectly acknowledging their decorative features they are at the same time directly acknowledging their capacities to embody concepts of time and permanence. In an evocative and challenging development from Displaced /

Replaced Mass, Heizer proposed Levitated mass (1970) for the Munich Olympics, a

136 kilogram basalt boulder which could be viewed from beneath. It was realized in a modified lateral fashion at the IBM Building in New York in 1982 as a ground level work of cut and shaped granite block, incised with graphics symbolizing its location, within a stainless steel border and appearing to float on water; and in 2012 at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a gigantic 340 tonnes boulder resting upon a void / passage called Slot and under which viewers could walk (see pp. 94–96).

Heizer‘s interest in displaying rock formations in urban environments and to larger audiences is discussed later in this chapter.

Although unrealized, the Vertical Displacement projects aimed to recreate the cutting of the monolithic voids of Double Negative into horizontal spaces and to move the cut blocks into excavated voids on the ground. In the first work, a 1970 commission by the Swiss gallerist Bruno Bischofberger, who represented many leading American contemporary artists, Heizer intended to cut a void into the Messmer rock face, part of the Santis Alps in north eastern Switzerland, but the project was abandoned because the limestone was not robust enough to undergo the strain of being lowered to the ground. Removed material could not have been pushed systematically from the void as it was later in Double Negative, but any material that did fall would have added to the finished work by forming a mound at its base. The later Mount Haggin,

Montana, attempt (1972) was also abandoned after six months of preparatory work because of its physical difficulties, although the property deed in this attempt has the distinction of being the first to be recognized as an artwork.57 This second proposal aimed to use natural forces in the spectacle of moving a boulder through the injection of water into cracks and utilizing the resultant freezing to force movement.

The scale of these ambitious projects meant hiring teams of structural and mining

64 engineers and geologists as well as tradespeople. Topographic photographs and cross-section diagrams attest to the determination of Heizer to master extraordinary conditions in the creation of art.

Despite abandoning attempts to make the ambitious Vertical Displacement voids which would have reproduced the Displaced / Replaced design into a gigantic scale,

Heizer later reworked the design into new commissioned versions: in 1977 as

Displaced / Replaced Mass 2 in museum and urban contexts; and in 1993 as

Displaced / Replaced Mass 3 where the rocks resembled archaeological displays of timeless materials transformed into completely foreign environments.58 With these displacements, Heizer was again exploring scientific principles and environmental conditions and attempting to move gigantic forms to create absences. A vertical displacement is the uplift or subsidence of geological material due to a shift in the earth so, as with Double Negative, Heizer‘s intention was described precisely through the simple but cryptic nature of his titles. There is also an unmistakeable play on the concept of The Sublime, as seen in the paintings of the nineteenth- century artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). While Friedrich‘s figures are overwhelmed by the aura of mountains and the views beyond, Heizer was attempting to change the physical faces of the mountains, accepting a challenge to conquer and alter nature‘s supremacy and permanence; Vertical Displacements would have been the first of his works to invoke the spectacular.

However, the simplicity of the displacement of a natural object became extraordinarily controversial when it was used to destroy part of a domesticated environment. Dragged mass displacement (illus. 12), created in situ for the Detroit

Institute of Arts in 1971, was the ―actual‖ component of the Photographic and Actual

Work exhibition curated by Samuel J. Wagstaff.59 In contrast to the gallery‘s advance media release which simply described the work as ―a monumental piece‖, the spectacle of its installation became the focus of attention. A 32-tonne granite boulder, chosen solely because of its weight, was repeatedly dragged across the lawn in front of the museum, gouging a depression 30.48 metres long and 60.8 centimetres deep.60 Despite attracting poems and a shrine of tokens, including a crucifix, (as we shall see, Double Negative will invite similar responses), the numerous complaints as to the ―unresolved‖ or casual nature of the work61 led to the museum‘s refusal to accept it as a donation, its removal after only one month, and a large fine being levied on the curator for the rehabilitation of the lawn.62 While

Heizer‘s boulder was ultimately dynamited in 1973, because of storage problems, the title was reused in 1985 for another large interior work at the Whitney Museum.

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Illus. 12, Michael Heizer, Dragged mass displacement (1971). Detroit Institute of Arts, from Celant, Michael Heizer, 241.

The reactions to Dragged mass displacement, a ―public relations disaster‖, cannot have surprised Heizer.63 While Munich depression was created in a degraded area that was soon to be developed, and the Berne and Amsterdam works were of smaller scales, the Detroit work deliberately disrupted the grounds of a major art museum, contrasting sharply with its New Classical façade and dignified atmosphere. Its ―unfinished‖ nature was both disturbing and disappointing to the public who had donated funds for it and had expected a more traditional monument.

As Julian Myers notes, it was created in a city coping with the physical implications of the decline of its automotive industry which began in the late 1960s, and with the social implications of the race riots of 1967. Both traumatic events led to widespread destruction and demolition of much of the inner urban areas. Heizer‘s brutalist intervention was seen as ―a ‗hole without history‘ in a city full of them‖, being ironically both a sympathetic and a disturbingly confrontational work.64

Double Negative (Second Displacement) (1969–70)

Double Negative, commissioned by Virginia Dwan and a negotiated condition for his representation in the celebrated Earthworks exhibition in 1968, gave Heizer an achievable opportunity to create on a massive scale. It is his largest example of the conundrum of absence as presence, and its extraordinary aura and gestalt make it the strongest example of the large scale being utilized to create intimacy. Its location is on the remote, flat and rocky sagebrush steppe Mormon Mesa, Nevada—part of the nineteenth-century Mormon Trail in the Sierra Nevada Range, above the Virgin

River, and off United States Highway 15 which links the Great Basin cities of Las

Vegas and Salt Lake City. Interestingly, Double Negative’s site was first found by G.

Robert Deiro before Heizer had even conceived the work.65 It was purchased at

$17.50 per acre with support from the Civa Corporation which Heizer established with the assistance of Deiro, who also oversaw construction and other regulatory permits.66 Deiro also later suggested sites for Displaced / Replaced Mass and City, but the actual locations were finally chosen by Heizer.67

Illus. 13, William L. Fox, ―Diagram of the location of Double Negative‖, 2011. Courtesy of William L. Fox, Nevada Museum of Art.

Despite Las Vegas‘ encroaching urbanization and the constant highway traffic, the site of Double Negative remains difficult to find. The aerial photographic maps provided by the county library in nearby Overton are those uploaded onto the internet by Heizer admirer Nick Tarasen and they can be confusing.68 The non- signposted and unpaved road from the cattle gates near the top of the mesa to the sculpture is difficult to follow and the many trails that cross the mesa attest to the problems that visitors, including this writer, have had in locating it. Only a hand

68 drawn map by William L. Fox (illus. 13) enabled me to locate it.69 Even when standing on the mesa near the work it is difficult to see, as there is no warning that one is close to it. Because it is cut into the mesa, it drops away beneath the viewers‘ feet. This elusiveness has helped to embed the work further into the mesa and it is becoming more indistinguishable from it as it ages. For Rosenthal, the result borders on the ironic in that a viewer is invited to enter and explore a space that is ―hidden from view‖.70

In a comment to his early financial backer, Robert C. Scull, defending the location of

Double Negative, Heizer claimed that the effort required to visit the site was far less than that required for Americans to view the Mona Lisa, yet no-one complained of having to travel to Paris to view the painting.71 He has since been vindicated. Despite its isolation, the reputation of Double Negative, reinforced by the regular publication of travel articles about it, has led to it becoming a tourist destination, but not one in the manner of the more well-known work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude whose immense temporary interventions invariably invoke a celebratory atmosphere, in contrast to the contemplative and reflective nature of Heizer‘s work.72

Called ―horizontal architecture‖ by Germano Celant,73 the sculpture consists of two opposing trenches cut into the edge of the rhyolite and sandstone mesa to a size that could accommodate the Empire State Building on its side (illus. 14).74 Its original dimensions were 12.8 metres deep, 9.14 metres wide and 335 metres long, with two

45 degree ramps created from an excavation of 36,000 tonnes. It was enlarged in

1970 to the depth of 15.24 metres and the length of 457 metres by the excavation of a further 208,000 tonnes, increasing the dominance and grandeur of the trenches

69 and embedding them further into their setting.75 Heizer saw the central void as ―an implied volume‖.76 He did not divulge its shape to anyone before its photographic exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in 1970, which was promoted by very large posters distributed amongst American and European galleries.77 For Heizer, photographic documentation of his work was simply that, documentation. In other words, it could never supplant the importance of direct physical engagement and this is the reason why he tried to prevent any further aerial views of Double Negative.78 His statement:

―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,‖ explains several of his key concerns but particularly his disdain for photography.79 It should be pointed out, however, that from the air the work appears literal, that is, it is clearly two mathematical negative symbols: a reading that cannot be made at ground level.80

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Illus. 14, Michael Heizer, Double Negative (1970). Photograph by Tom Vinetz, from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 55.

The scale of the trenches evokes mythical state buildings of antiquity, while the walls resemble the massive stone cuttings of Petra, the ancient Jordanian city: the whole space appears cathedral-like (as suggested by Virginia Dwan).81 Viewers walk on the surface of the cuttings and can, of course, touch its sides. This immediacy of tactility creates an unexpected sense of intimacy. Interestingly, the trenches also resemble the methods by which highways are cut into the mountains throughout this area. Ultimately, the work must be considered as the simplest possible made form, since it was created solely by the processes of excavation and it consists of nothing but symmetrical void walls of 90 degrees, the only concession, as it were, to aesthetic considerations (illus. 15).

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Illus. 15, Michael Heizer, Double Negative (east side) (1970). Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni from Celant, Michael Heizer, 221.

As the work consists entirely of absence, in effect, the trenches are increasingly indistinguishable from their surrounding landforms. The continued effects of weathering and exposure to the harsh landscape would seem to ensure that this will continue. The residue or ―the sources of the spills‖ from the voids that are heaped at the bases of the trenches are continually reformed and increased by the additions of new rubble and vegetation.82 Although this material was excavated and manipulated to form the voids‘ shapes and to complete the work at the time of creation, this residue also suffers from weathering. New channels are created through this rubble which directs the rainfall down to the valley and to the river below the mesa.

Once the viewer is ―embedded‖ in the mesa, the trenches appear to be more natural because of their weathered state, and as their edges continue to collapse, the right angles at ground level are smoothed and more organic forms are created. The conundrum indicated by the literal title of the work is reinforced by the problems that the trenches present for viewers in fully appreciating the gestalt of the work. Double

Negative can only be experienced by entering it; and as a viewer can only be in one trench at a time, only the opposite trench can be seen.

It would seem that Double Negative’s trenches have triumphed over what Barnett

Newman has called ―the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity‖ in that the excavations have given a naturally beautiful site another aesthetic, albeit disruptive, feature.83 The effect could traditionally be judged as anti- aesthetic since it is an intrusion for no reason whatsoever. Yet, notwithstanding the alien nature of the work when discovered in situ, Heizer has successfully juxtaposed the differing elements so that the forms or non-forms seem to belong to their setting.

Robert F. Heizer‘s influence on his son‘s sculpture has already been cited earlier in this chapter. His 1955 archaeological study of La Venta, Tabasco, Mexico, with

Philip Drucker and Robert J. Squier, is the acknowledged source of inspiration for

Heizer‘s City (begun 1972), to be discussed at the end of this chapter. However, the study‘s influence on Heizer‘s works other than City is, as suggested earlier, overlooked but equally and persuasive.84 Although the La Venta site had been previously well surveyed, the specific purpose of the later research undertaken by

Drucker et al. was to focus ―on patterns of construction, or architecture…with reference to masses of piled up clay.‖85 The photographs reproduced in Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955 correlate uncannily with Heizer‘s voids, especially

Double Negative, since the exposure of the layers is the only visible evidence of any human activity. Heizer has expanded the documentary photographs of the exploratory diggings from his father‘s earlier study into a gigantic artwork; remaking the two-dimensional documentation into a three-dimensional excavated space.

Illustration 16, East face of South-central Platform, shows the excavations of the base of the South-central Platform, detailing their measurements and geological layering. While the revelation of what lay beneath the surfaces was the desired end point of both the La Venta study and Double Negative, the key difference was that

Robert Heizer‘s team was excavating to discover archaeological (human made) material, whereas Michael Heizer‘s excavations were for the singular and unique purpose of simply revealing the natural subterranean material. Heizer was alert to the gestalt created by absence.

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Illus. 16, East face of South-central Platform. a, Old-rose floor series. b, Platform face. c, White sandy floor series. d, Water-sorted floors (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Drucker, Heizer and Squier, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, Plate 3, n.p.

Man north-south trench (illus. 17) shows Robert Heizer measuring the depth of a trench while workers in the background are digging with shovels. This labour- intensive method was obviously necessary to avoid damage to structures and objects and contrasts sharply with Michael Heizer‘s later explosions and machine- driven excavations, but the image could easily be mistaken for a photograph of the excavation of Double Negative (see, for example, Illustration 15), a comparison that

74 has not, to my knowledge, been acknowledged. Left, Monument 25. Right,

Monument 26 (illus. 18) shows two large carved stone slabs. The photograph is obviously a sufficient document for the researcher-authors to record the features of the carvings, but the partial excavation leaves the stones appearing as though they have been placed into voids, which seems to anticipate Michael Heizer‘s Displaced /

Replaced Mass works (see illus. 8). Heizer was no doubt attracted to the imagery and presences created through the partial burial in what appear to be incongruous cavities.

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Illus. 17, Man north-south trench, In foreground, Massive offering No. 3 (Feature A-l-h); in background stone column tomb (Monument 7). Upper 5 feet of deposit (mainly red clay cap) has been removed alongside trench to lighten overburden along deep trench (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Drucker, Heizer and Squier, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, Plate 21, n.p.

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Illus. 18, Left, Monument 25. Right, Monument 26 (1955). From Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 170, reprinted in Drucker, Heizer and Squier, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, Plate 53, n.p.

Mark C. Taylor explains the mathematical theory behind the concept of the double negative by referring to Hegel‘s writings on form and matter, emphasizing that negation underlies all determinate identity and that a double negative is a structure that underlies all reality. He notes that Heizer‘s concern is ―to dispel rather than to create illusions‖, so that Double Negative ―(impossibly) represents nothing‖ or

―presents and represents the impossibility of presence and thus the failure of representation‖. Paradoxically, says Taylor, ―this failure is its success.‖86 While a mathematical double negative is a positive and linguistically it produces an affirmative, this work is a physical realization representing an intensification of a negation. Heizer has created a pun on theoretical riddles and produced a work that

76 presents nothing other than what it literally describes: two extractions or two negative forms. These negations are not of something that has been physically experienced, but of what remains of something; the work itself. In Lyotard‘s terms, this ―negative presentation‖ means that the mode of presentation is ―in retreat‖ and the presentation consists of an ―abs-traction‖—that is, the absence is a mode of presentation and a sign of what was present but which can now only be experienced subjectively.87 Furthermore, the ―artless finality‖ or ―absence of all style‖ of Double

Negative, so Lyotard argues, is achieved through its physically demanding excavation and its lack of artifice, the result of which heightens the sublime

―simplicity‖ of the site.88

Double Negative is Heizer‘s strongest example of the interplay between the positive and the negative and materiality and immateriality. Being a void, it is an amalgam of all four states, and Heizer‘s achievement is in blurring the lines between these. The interior generates a presence from nothing and the scale allows the play between materiality and immateriality as the edges blend into the mesa and then into the atmosphere. When standing on an edge of one of the trenches and looking down, one sees space, the floor and one wall; when standing within one of the trenches, looking ahead, only the materiality and immateriality of the opposite trench can be seen; and when lying on one of the floors, only the sky is visible. Subtraction has created a new whole entity. The gestalt created in such a large-scaled work is greater than the sum of its parts. Heizer calls it a ―full visual statement and an explanation of how it was made‖ and has likened it to Hatshepsut‘s temple at Luxor which is a façade cut into a hillside—we see here once again his penchant for ancient methods of construction.89

This site specific Ozymandian geometric intervention into, and displacement of, a natural landscape remains a strong physical statement of artistic intention, regardless of its weathered state, but what Heizer may not have anticipated is that as the work ages, its influence on the surrounding environment increases. The landforms were altered in comparatively small ways in relation to the size of the mesa, but these effects increase entropically when eroded by rainfall and wind, and with this combination, paradoxically the effects of the scale of the artwork increase.

Double Negative remains the culmination of Heizer‘s voids and negative spaces and was arguably the catalyst for the expansion in the number and size of large-scaled

Land Art. Made to relate to its site (although not to refer to it); creating a unique space, and demonstrably being a human production, Double Negative renewed

Heizer‘s interest in architecture. Notwithstanding the romantic notions that may orbit around the work, Double Negative remains very much a product of its time. It was part of a counter-culture desire to undermine the gallery system, (although paradoxically it was financed by a gallerist), and in part with making a political statement about United States foreign policy, as detailed earlier in this chapter.

These concerns, added to the work‘s relationship to Minimalism through its form and to Abstract Expressionism through its gestural physicality, place it firmly in the late

1960s.

Double Negative was deeded to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

(MOCA) in 1985 by its financier Virginia Dwan, making MOCA the first museum to accession a permanently sited Land Artwork into its collection and marking the work itself as the first enormous Land Artwork to redefine how art could be made,

78 experienced, exhibited, interpreted and collected.90 However, contrary to earlier interest in the idea that Double Negative would ultimately crumble, Heizer has recently expressed concern at its projected life span and suggested that it could be coated with concrete to keep it ‗pristine‘, following his stabilization of the walls of City

Complex 1 with shotcrete in 2001. Such a process, needless to say, would dramatically alter its appearance and would be counter to Heizer‘s often-stated belief in the excavation process itself as fundamental to the work.

Like other massive earthworks and the ancient monuments it references, Double

Negative inevitably creates its own mythology. On sections of the myriad of trails leading to it, visitors have constructed and dedicated ―artworks‖, assemblages and shrines to the work, made of mixed media such as wood, bricks, stones and metal with decorative additions such as flags and pins.91 A large wooden bedstead has a series of maxims inscribed onto it, in different hands, such as ―Treat the earth with respect‖, ―Dedicate your efforts to the greater good‖ and ―Work for the benefit of all mankind‖. There is also abundant evidence that people have camped at the site.

These responses from Land Art‘s ―pilgrim tourists‖, as Chris McAuliffe has appropriately described the artists and others visiting Spiral Jetty, counter the video clips uploaded onto You Tube which are mostly either evidence that someone has visited and traversed the site or are meant simply as humorous reactions to it—all, however, attest to the popularity of Double Negative.92 Viewers do not respond of course to highways excavated in similar methods to those of Double Negative, which used industrial heavy machinery and explosions, and which are highlighted in

Taylor‘s photographic record of the work, yet the narrative of an artist creating and dedicating himself to such a fantastical and difficult project clearly resonates with

79 viewers and adds to Double Negative‘s mythology.93 To wander through the sculpture forty years after it was created makes this writer feel like an archaeological tourist among ruins, albeit ruins of mid-twentieth century art. Its aura has been noted by many commentators but Taylor‘s description of his visit to the site is for me the most evocative: ―I heard silence speak. At this moment silence became visible.

Nothing happened.‖94 Not only has absence become presence, but silence has assumed form.

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Illus. 19, Mark Landis, Air check (2003). From Marek Wieczorek, ―Life raft in the desert‖, 27.

Beyond its status as a tourist attraction, Double Negative now has the added distinction of being the catalyst for a new interventionist artwork. In 2003, Shawn

Patrick Landis created Air check (Illus. 19), a double inflatable work that literally filled the trenches of Double Negative, making it positive again. Huge blue plastic tubes of the exact sizes of the trenches were fabricated, fixed at ground level and inflated with air and expanded to the volumes of the trenches. Installation photographs resemble those of Christo and Jeanne Claude-type procedures where gigantic plastic sheeting covers the walls, evoking a sense of play, and the deflation photographs show Landis‘ assistants sitting inside the inflatables, directly interacting with the trenches like other visitors, except that they are doubly enclosed.

Landis‘ motivation was a response to his belief that Double Negative ―compels interaction‖. 95 Indeed, he believed that Heizer himself was challenging artists to respond to the work. The critic Marek Wieczorek likens Landis‘ response to

Duchamp‘s ―rendezvous‖ challenge where particular artworks, Wieczorek argues, are created chiefly to invite future critical responses. While Landis‘ intervention could be labelled as a stunt it was a considered response to what he sees as a continuum of collaboration that certain works invite. His initial title was Replaced Displacement, a direct reference to, and a pun on, Heizer‘s series of works, detailed earlier in this chapter.

Mounds

Effigy Tumuli (1983–85), the commission by the Ottawa Silica Company Foundation for the rehabilitation of a polluted mining site of 98 hectares in Buffalo Rock State

Park, Illinois, presented Heizer with new artistic challenges.96 He compromised his

81 usual abstracted forms by manipulating figurative elements into a traditional

Mesoamerican massed form, but stressed that the project was an independent art work and ―not a reclamation‖ project.‖97 This assertion places him at odds with

Robert Smithson whose Proposal,1972 advocated using Land Art to regenerate degraded mine sites and to use their tailings,98 but not with Robert Morris who claimed in 1979 that it was a ―misguided assumption‖ that artists would create works that would ―socially [redeem] those who wasted the landscape in the first place‖.99

Illus. 20, Effigy Tumuli site plan at Buffalo Rock State Park, Illinois. Photograph by Edward John, 2013.

Following his often-declared purpose of attempting ―to get what is the essence of being American‖, Heizer chose to re-create the mounds made by the Illini native

Americans of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, some of which dated back to

500 CE, and used for funerary, defensive or ceremonial purposes.100 Specifically,

Heizer has said that his use of effigies or symbolic animal shapes alludes to the

―genocided‖ [sic] race that made the original mounds.101 His familiarity with the

82 surveys by the scientist and naturalist I. A. Lapham of 1836, which documented similar mounds in Wisconsin, guided the designs (illus. 20).102 These challenges complemented Heizer‘s self-determined physical challenge of creating mounds larger than the ancient ones and enabled him to maintain the vision of creating specific traditional pre-Columbian American forms: tumuli or artificial hill structures.103 The commission therefore fulfilled Heizer‘s intentions of creating essentially American art, of utilizing only the materials of the site and being part of a

―global human dialogue of art‖.104 Through the incorporation of these disparate elements, Effigy Tumuli revived ancient, symbolic and organic forms and placed them onto a re-created ―natural‖ landscape for aesthetic, social and political purposes. Through large scale earth moving, he created permanent interventions of stylized and symmetrical organic forms that have weathered to resemble land forms over time.

The industrially-degraded site first required the neutralization of the soil, through drainage and a top layer of limestone and netting being spread across it until grass seeds germinated. As with earlier commissions given to Morris, Oppenheim and others, Land Art was used by mining companies and civic authorities for regenerative purposes. The obvious ability of Land Artists to grasp the characteristics of a physical space and to intervene accordingly, made them amenable to organizations and government agencies.

Heizer‘s mounds referenced and incorporated the 10 metre high mounds left by the coal strip mining of the preceding decades, a human made landscape not dissimilar to the deserts of his previous Land Art. He planned enormous mounds in the shapes

83 of insects, as their forms could be abstracted further than those of animals, but in homage to the Illini who hunted in this area, decided instead on referencing five local indigenous animals, a catfish, a water strider, a frog, a turtle and a snake—a resolution that led to the reduction of each form to rectangles, triangles and jutting angles (illus. 21).105 This reworking of the traditional Illini totems into precise geometric shapes eliminated organic references and imposed geometry onto a seemingly natural landscape, but was itself a gigantic intervention of ―power and animation‖ upon a natural landscape.106

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Illus. 21, Michael Heizer, Water Strider from Effigy Tumuli (1983–85). From Celant, Michael Heizer, 405.

Befitting their location in a State Park, the mounds are reached by walking along several non-descript trails. Apart from a site plan and individual figure markers, some

84 of which are missing, the figures are almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape which has been regenerated with intensive plantings of native grasses.

The mounds are in a curved single file, 1.6 kilometres long and 800 metres wide.

Water Strider effigy (208 metres in length) reduces the organic form to a central rectangle cut at right angles at both ends and centring the four large antennae and the four back antennae. Like a space ship from a science fiction film, from the air it resembles a large cross bisecting a central enclosed form with four angled legs jutting from the rear. It reflects its title by ‗striding‘ across its mound, and its multiple features have made it the most distinctly recognizable form of the group. Frog (103 metres) reduces its form to a solid trapezoidal form astride a central M shape, the body and legs distinguished only by the sloping sides of each rectangle. This containment more closely resembles the mastaba form used by Heizer in City and yet it appears to be the most natural of the series since it seems to emerge only subtly from the hill.

At the highest point of the site, Catfish (234 metres) resembles something from science fiction with its triangular dorsal fins, protruding nose and splayed tail. The most abstracted form and the most minimal intervention is Turtle (197.6 metres) which consists of three frontal rhomboids and an acute rectangle and two trapezoids at the back. The rhomboids are formed from an existing rock mound which acts as the central shell-like form. Heizer incorporated and made more precise the existing ravines for the details of the head and fins. Snake (629 metres) consists of seven separate solid rectangular units circling an alluvial ravine, sloping and arrowing down

27.4 metres towards the river. By following the contour, this effigy is the only one

85 with an illusion of movement, and it has the most affinity with the angles and random dynamism of Dissipate 2 (1968), with the voids replaced by positive forms.

Re-creations

Heizer‘s later re-creations of many of his earlier works were anticipated in 1970 when he re-created some of the patterns made by the motorcycle from Circular

Surface Planar Displacement Drawing (1970) onto the window of Max‘s Kansas City, the New York cafe frequented by Land Artists. This work was remade larger, twice more, following damage to the window.

The drive to own and exhibit that which was originally created in opposition to these aspirations has seen several museums and corporations commission Heizer to re- create particular works or concepts in new, controlled and accessible public environments, such as museum grounds and corporate plazas. Made largely by mathematically reducing the original forms to smaller sizes, they stand in sharp contrast to a Land Art of isolation or limited visitation, strategically placed in relation to other sculptures or garden features within arranged environments, and regularly maintained. The new forms change the dimensions of physical perception and negotiation since their scale within defined spaces and the numbers of visitors and / or passers-by mean a far more intimate contact with the works.

Rift 2 (1982) at the Nassau County of Museum of Fine Arts, New York, is a 15 metre recreation of Rift 1 from the Nine Nevada Depressions; Interstices 2 (1983) at the same museum is a reversion to oblong trenches, eliminating the curves of the original work. A smaller version of Isolated mass / Circumflex was re-created in the

86 grounds of the Menil Museum, Houston. These new works are stainless steel lined trenches and appear more as decorative garden features than voids challenging and submitting to the landscapes. Rift 1 was re-created as Negative line, a cutting into the floor at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 1996 where it became a hazard that defied the precision of the right angles of the space and the evenness of the floor. It was accompanied by two mass works of diorite granite steles of 16 and 18 tonnes: a combination of positive and negative forms that Heizer was later to rework at the Dia

Foundation at Beacon, New York.

Wall arrangements of rocks within recesses, referencing the encased mineral Non- site works of Smithson such as Non-site ―Line of Wreckage‖, Bayonne, New Jersey

(1968) where the aluminium display crate is as equally an important compositional element as the rocks it holds were made from 1980–81. The frieze of Negative

Sculptures: Quebec, Vermont and Escondido limited appreciation of the rocks to frontal views, reducing them to abstracted two-dimensional planes.

Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976) presented three, four and five sided rocks at differing angles near, leaning against and resting upon Minimalist rectangular concrete bases, following the human positions of standing, sitting and lying; and reworking the first

Displaced / Replaced voids which contained the rocks into positive forms. Like the dolmen structures of ancient Britain, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees and

Elevated, Surface, Depressed (both 1982), works of three boulders each in varying stages of elevation, mounted like museum objects, demonstrated the gestalt of mass with the only visible hand of the artist being the bases or voids they rest upon or within. As they were placed in urban contexts and despite competing with other

87 architectural features for viewers‘ attention, these interventions contrast with the subtlety of Heizer‘s gigantic interventions like Double Negative which were composed of the same material as the landscape and which appear to becoming increasingly a natural part of it.

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Illus. 22, Michael Heizer, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees / Geometric Extraction (1984). Photograph by Tom Vinetz from Celant, Michael Heizer, 392.

Huge versions of 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees were later created in the first phase of City (Complexes One, Two and Three, 1980–1999) as a structural boundary feature and also for 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees / Geometric extraction (1984) (illus. 22). This interior work at the Museum of Modern Art, Los

Angeles, which was 6 metres high and covered 696.75 square metres, reworked and

―civilized‖, as he describes it, the abandoned 1970 Vertical Displacement planned for the Swiss Alps, discussed earlier in this chapter. That proposition was to displace, through cutting, large boulders from the mountains, and to lower them to the valley floor for replacement within excavated voids, in the manner of the other

Displacement / Replacement Mass works. This recreation placed its seventeen

88 elements, twelve triangular and five rectangular volumes, made of cardboard, silk screened with a magnified photographic pattern of Vermont granite (the only direct reference to Land Art), at differing angles from those of the walls and floor, ignoring the original illusion that they were created from the spoils of a ―cut‖. While appearing as an installation, it was a sculpture of mass which was heightened by the compressed space. There was no attempt to disguise its medium. It utilized the principles of the perception of scale according to confinement within a space, in the manner of Donald Judd‘s Marfa installations (1986), so that a viewer‘s perception was determined by the physical responses of walking around and between the blocks and imitating a viewer‘s visit to an archaeological site.107

Perhaps enjoying the resurgence of his reputation in the museum sphere, Heizer named his 1985 Whitney Museum work Dragged mass geometric, reusing the title of his infamous Detroit Institute of Arts intervention of 1971. This new work was a corrugated cardboard installation over a metal armature onto which were silk screened photographic enlargements of Coyote Dry Lake, Vermont granite and

―dragged‖ Indian ink marks, the latter a wry reference to the original work. Its gigantic scale (35 metres long, 5 metres high and 14 metres wide) and tight containment within the gallery spaces meant that only parts of it were visible, again emphasizing its mass and physical negotiation. In a direct reference to De Maria‘s Earthworks

(1968) painting, and to Heizer‘s own Land Art, the gallery walls were painted

―Caterpillar tractor‖ yellow.

Heizer‘s largest commission of this period was for the creation of a ―place‖ at the

State Plaza in Lansing, Michigan. This equals that (1976–80), an enormous seven-

89 part stone work, is the most manipulated of his major outdoor works and the one which most closely follows the Minimalist practices of composition derived from the arrangement of multiple forms. Divided and measured like De Maria‘s geometric metallic works (see Chapter Three), the work‘s concept is based around the fundamental equation of 1 = 1 and compels viewers to negotiate mentally and physically its mathematically proportioned elements. Like a child‘s set of counting blocks, this concept is represented by the equivalences of two halves, four quarters and eight eighths through the features of a 14.6 metre diameter and 1.82 metre high horizontal disc, a row of 7.31 metre diameter discs and two 3.65 metre discs, a row of three 7.31 metre columns and other segments.

Reverting to his interest in archaeology, the catalyst for the Tools series (1987–89), the Perforated Object works (1989–1996) and his Pace Wildenstein Gallery exhibition of 2006 was the 1936 expedition led by Heizer‘s father Dr. Robert Heizer to Humboldt Cave, Churchill County, Nevada, which yielded hundreds of stone and bone implements. Michael Heizer presented re-creations of these prehistoric and

Mesoamerican archaeological stone implements, in concrete and steel, but now increased massively in size and displayed on bases like museum objects. This remaking of ancient utilitarian forms (some dating from 3,000 BCE) into large scaled aesthetic forms shows his determination to persuade viewers to appreciate the craftsmanship of ancient cultures through a ―decorative symbolic link to the past‖, as his father described it, to view art making as a continuum, and to recognize the societal bonds that contemporary societies have with the archaic world.108

The source of Perforated Object #27 (1996) sited at The Federal Courthouse

Building, Reno, 161 kilometres from the Humboldt Cave site, was an anonymous

11.68 centimetre long, 2 millimetre thick and 45 millimetre wide sheep‘s horn perforated with ninety 63 millimetre holes.109 The form has been re-created as a positive and negative work of a perforated steel silhouette and its lanced perforations, four hundred and fifty times larger than the original horn, at 8.22 metres in length, 2.89 metres in height, and weighing 2 tonnes. The purpose of the original horn was speculated to be ―decorative‖ and its new incarnation maintains that prime purpose.110 The silhouette, mounted on a steel support, is at the front of the building while the cut out steel ring perforations are assembled into a wavering line at the rear, somewhat reminiscent of the display of debris from void excavations. Fox notes that the perforations demonstrate Heizer‘s continued interest in creating works about absence, and that the voids do enliven an otherwise mundane shape.111

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Illus. 23, Amei Wallach, President of the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics looks into the depth of North, East, South, West. Photograph by Karl Rabe, The Poughkeepsie Journal, New York, n.d., PoughkeepsieJournal.com. Accessed 25 July 2014 from Dia Foundation, http://host-195.227.54.159.gannett.com/projects/gallery/dia/images/heizer.jpg.

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Illus. 24, Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West (1967–2002). Photograph by Tom Vinetz, n.d., accessed 25 July 2014 from Dia Foundation, http://www.diaart/org/media/transfer/img/heizer_nsew.jpg.

The most successful of Heizer‘s re-creations are those that are the realizations of earlier Land Art concepts, expanded to scales that were previously only imagined and now reconsidered for new sites. In their new incarnations these works demand very different viewer responses from those of the earlier works, but nonetheless invoke a sense of danger often found in Heizer‘s oeuvre. The four small-scaled geometric positive models North, East, South, West (1967), later realized as voids in the Sierra Nevada, as discussed earlier in this chapter, were re-created as 2-metre high positive stainless steel forms in Los Angeles in 1982 and then as huge negative spaces at the Dia Foundation at Beacon, New York (1967–2002) (illus. 23, 24).

Sited at the far northern end of the former factory, giving it a silence that more centrally placed works lack and meaning a replication of the ―journey‖ that Heizer‘s previous outdoor works required to be undertaken, it re-creates in rolled steel the wooden and galvanized steel voids of the 1967 work of the fundamental shapes of the cylinder, the cuneiform triangle, the cone and a combination of the cube and the parallelepiped. Based upon the Euclidean geometry of all three-dimensional forms of the box, the cone and the wedge and upon the crystalline morphology underlying all physical shapes, the original work has been expanded to 38.1 metres in length and the voids are 6 metres deep. The 360 degrees clockwise direction of the title of the work encompasses the wholeness of a landscape: in other words, Heizer has created a work which assimilates the gigantic concept of all known geometry and the compass.

The colour of the steel voids is dark grey, but the lighting effects change this into variations of grey and blue and change the perception of the depths. The silence of the works dominates. Unlike the negative spaces of Double Negative, North, East,

South, West is a menacing work because of the ambiguity of its depth and its darkness, and especially because of the industrial fabrication which evokes a sense of incarceration similar to the gigantic steel spirals of Richard Serra which are sited on the floor below this work. Like giant vats, the voids can induce vertigo and, because of their potential danger, they are maintained behind a small glass barrier.

Accompanying this work is the provocatively titled Negative Megalith #5 (1998), a

4.5-metre high vertical displacement of a granite boulder encased within an industrial steel ―coffin‖ and set within a gallery wall. Resembling an ancient stele, dolmen or a

―Monument‖ from the 1955 La Venta expedition (see p. 76), it is Heizer‘s largest

Non-site. The title highlights the ―negative space‖ of its original Site and its placement within a negative space that complements the voids of North, East, South,

West. The awe evoked in viewers at the scale of the installation and the aesthetic features of the boulder are tempered, as we have said, by its potential danger.

This ambiguity is exploited most notably by Heizer‘s most recent recreation Levitated mass (illus. 25), installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012.

Conceived to ―anchor‖ the campus site, it must rank as Heizer‘s greatest public art challenge: its unlimited access by multitudes of people combined with the unique geological characteristics of the site.

Illus. 25, Michael Heizer, Levitated mass (2012). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph by Michael Hedger 2013.

This 345-tonne, 7-metre high boulder took eleven days to transport from its quarry

137 kilometres away, along specially marked roads, through twenty two communities—its journey becoming a ―cause celebre‖ with thousands of people nightly lining the route to view the spectacle.112 It thus had the distinction of being an intervention into the landscape from the moment of its departure from the quarry.113

Continuing his pre-eminent interest in mass, Heizer claimed that it was the size of the boulder itself which inspired him to take up the earlier abandoned concept. The protracted installation period that involved Heizer taking six weeks to determine the position of the boulder additionally involved scans to establish its centre of gravity and core samples being drilled to identify its strongest ―sitting‖ position.114 Apart from public and industrial safety and earthquake considerations, the geology of the site presented special challenges as the Museum is above an ancient river bed and tar pools, with a high water table, so the design had to withstand possible sinkage.

The boulder is balanced over Slot, a trench 147.8 metres long, 6.5 metres wide and

4.21 metres deep at its lowest point, and viewers are able to walk beneath it (illus.

26). This seemingly precarious balance gives the work an element of threat reminiscent of the placements of several of De Maria‘s spherical works, which are examined later. This trench took one year to construct, as 5,199 cubic metres of earth were removed to allow for the ramp which was originally meant to be only

112.6 metres in length. Civic requirements about accessibility meant that it had to be lengthened to lessen its gradient to allow wheelchair access, and a discrete grooved

―handrail‖ structure was included. The underground buttressed walls are 60 to 90 centimetres thick, made from two hundred and fifty loads of concrete and are reinforced by thirteen steel pins to minimize earthquake damage.

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Illus. 26, Diagram of dimensions of Levitated Mass and Slot, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010.

In keeping with Heizer‘s obsession with the movement of enormous masses rather than simply a desire to create a spectacular work of art, arguably the force of

Levitated Mass is not the display of the work, per se, but rather the technological achievement of having it ―levitating‖ above the public. There is an undeniable thrill, tinged with a sense of menace, in walking under such a mass which seemingly defies gravity.115 As discussed in Chapter One, in relation to Ozymandias, Heizer calls the work his Colossi of Memnon, a reference to the twin stone sculptures of

Pharaoh Amenhotep III, near Luxor. Reaching the height of 80 metres, these sculptures stood guard at Amenhotep‘s memorial temple.

The installation of Levitated mass was complemented by Actual Size, an exhibition of twelve large-scale documentary photographs of Heizer and assistants sighting,

96 measuring and lifting huge boulders for various earlier works, with a clear emphasis upon the movement of massive objects.116 The figures are strategically placed to delineate the size of the boulders, giving the exhibition its title (resurrected from

1971) and designating size and scale as the phenomenon by which Heizer‘s art is universally measured and assessed. The museum has publicity stressed Heizer‘s comment that: ―We live in a world that‘s technological and primordial simultaneously.

The idea is to make art that reflects this premise‖.117 Here, Heizer is equating the geological forces that created the boulders with the contemporary industrial processes that lifted and moved them for artistic purposes.

City (commenced 1972)118

Heizer‘s largest and most extraordinarily ambitious work, City, is constructed in the isolated Garden Valley, Lincoln County, Nevada, with funds provided by the Menil

Museum, the Dia Foundation and the Fondazione Prada, among others. Blending with the contours of the valley, that is ―to the environment but not to the landscape‖,

City is an amalgam or hybrid of more conventional architectural forms and concepts as well as sculptural forms.119 It is a permanent complex, ―pointed at the future‖, and largely based upon the plan of the La Venta archaeological site in Mexico (illus. 27) increased to a scale that is meant to subsume visitors.120 The findings of Heizer‘s father‘s 1955 study of that site, which have already been mentioned (see pp. 73–76), clearly resonated with Heizer and were compounded with his long-term interest in ancient Egyptian construction, which was renewed by a visit to Egypt with his father

Robert F. Heizer in 1972. His comment about the site of Berne depression fronting the cathedral (discussed in endnote 51 of this chapter) is of significance to City since his praise for the cathedral was limited to an appreciation of its mass: ―The most

97 solid thing about the church is that it rests upon the ground. It is based and immovable‖.121

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Illus. 27, Perspective sketch of Pyramid and Complex A of La Venta site (1955) from Drucker, Heizer and Squier, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, 1959, frontispiece.

Heizer‘s appropriation of ancient Egyptian architectural forms, chiefly the pyramids, is more than an acknowledgement to their longevity and appropriateness to desert sites and it is extraordinary to see the same forms were proposed by the inadvertent precursor to the Land Artists, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, in his unrealized monuments,

Monument to the plough (1933) and the ambitiously titled Sculpture to be seen from

Mars or Memorial to Man (1947). Monument was to be a three sided pyramid of two

1.6 kilometre long sides made of rammed earth and capped in concrete with a stainless steel plough at its peak. To be placed at the ―middle Western Prairie‖ of the

United States, it was to symbolize the opening up of the western lands through agriculture. The latter work was to be a face composed of five geometric forms, including a central pyramidal ―nose‖ of the same dimensions of the pyramid of the

Monument (illus. 28). These works would seem to be clear antecedents for the Land

Art of the 1960s and especially for City. As City has not yet been open to outside viewers, all statistics and discussions of its features are from published information and analyses of its plans.

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 28, Isamu Noguchi, Monument to the plough (1933), accessed 19 December 2013 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/raimist/318316709.

The research undertaken by Heizer‘s father at La Venta cannot be overestimated as an influence on the design of City. Its original name, City Complex, referenced the title given to the Mesoamerican site and, despite its contemporary construction methods and Minimalist features, City aimed to revive the mass and presence of the earlier site. Heizer is adamant in saying that he did not wish City in any way to be invested with symbolism. This seems to me to be wishful thinking. Even considered via reproductions which, to repeat, is at present the only way the work can be

―approached‖, the site registers as hugely affective. Many elements of the La Venta site have been eliminated from City, but some decorative features like stele have

99 been retained. The romanticized quest of discovery in archaeology has therefore been replaced by the creation of a fully documented site, still in the process of construction, which has been created unambiguously for the purpose of Art. Heizer‘s curious statement, ―It will never be misused‖, shows his determination that any excavations of the site in the distant future will not have reasons to guess at its purpose.122

The physical and technical efforts that went into the construction of ancient monuments were very much embedded in the mid-twentieth-century American popular psyche. Several Hollywood Biblical films such as Land of the Pharaohs

(1955) demonstrated theories of pyramid building in their narratives. There was also widespread discussion on the ecological implications of the scale of the human footprint. This was not focused on the negative impacts that have dominated the ecological debate ever since, but on the extent to which humanity had physically changed the landscape. The then controversial anthropocene statistic was that humans had in fact moved more land than rainfall had. (I am indebted to William L.

Fox for raising this issue.) Heizer, through his extraordinary projects, was obviously responsible for the large movement of land but, as we have seen elsewhere, he was indifferent to ecological questions. Paramount for him was the creation of ―place‖.

The inspiration for City, the La Venta site (c. 1200–400 BCE) covers an area of two square kilometres and is made of rammed earth and clay architectural forms with basalt transported from the Tuxtla Mountains, north-west of the site, used for the decorative features. Excavations have shown the Mayans‘ experimentations with different materials and layering to give the complex strength and permanence. The

100 entire site is labelled Complex A, but included are two further divisions, Complexes B and C. The rectangular Great Pyramid, a structure 33 metres high and with a mass of 100,000 square metres, dominates the site and leads to the Ceremonial Court, five Central Platforms, three elongated ellipse mounds and two huge circular mounds which contain tombs, altars and offering platforms. There are strategically placed decorative stele and columns throughout the site.

Illus. 29, Satellite image of Michael Heizer, City, accessed 25 July 2014 from http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/img/city/city_sat_hires.jpg.

City enlarged the design of La Venta from that of a ceremonial complex to the scale of a ―city‖ complex with parkland. Both sites are elongated and divided by precise directional central linking axes which add symmetry and are oriented to gain maximum sunshine (illus. 29 & 30). City has the significant eclectic additions of

Egyptian-like pyramids and mastabas, Mayan overhangs, a Chichen Itza (Mayan) ball court and decorative borders derived from Chichen designs.

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Illus. 30, Satellite image of Michael Heizer, City, from Inside the Solarist, accessed 25 July 2014 from http://media.tumblr_mcel561cirlqfbmwm.jpg.

The entire complex of City’s multiple forms, narrow at 2.01 kilometres long and 40 metres wide, and ultimately covering 113.6 hectares, was begun in 1972 and has been reportedly completed, but this is disputed.123 Its plan of geometrically stylized forms imposed onto a natural landscape was constructed in five phases with hired labour. The plans were drawn up by Goplen and Yokoyama Engineers of Berkeley,

California, drafting what William Fox revealingly calls ―a set of sculptures investigating size.‖124 Blueprints are lodged at the Nevada Museum of Art, along with deeds for the land, maps, suppliers‘ contracts, installation notes and correspondence.125 Although monumental, the scale of City is in harmony with its setting and is, surprisingly, dwarfed by it. Many satellite photographs of the development of the complex have been uploaded onto the internet by admirer Nick

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Tarasen, along with co-ordinates and directions to the site, although, as we have said, visitation is prohibited.126

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 31, Michael Heizer, City (Complex One), 1972–1974. Photograph by Tom Vinetz from Germano Celant, Michael Heizer, 266.

Phase 1 consisted of Complexes One, Two and Three. Complex One (1972–74)

(illus. 31) is fronted by a 33.4 metre ramp, made of nine thousand tonnes of rammed earth dug at the site, leading to a western 45 degrees sloping mastaba of moulded earth and shot crete sides, 43 metres long and 7 metres high. It is an imitation of the sloped mound with trapezoidal ends of the Step Pyramid of Zoser in Egypt. The mastaba is chocolate coloured, a mixture of cement and volcanic cinder and it holds the concrete bands which form its geometric linear frontal pattern. A concrete re- creation of the Chichen Itza serpent motif is cantilevered in a T-shaped form and an

L-shaped column, forming a rectangle and reworking the head of the Aztec god,

Tlacoc. Although the lines are broken, the distortion makes them appear as continuous from the frontal view.127

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Heizer expanded and modernized the pre-Colombian and ancient Egyptian forms through contemporary construction and engineering methods and practices, such as building huge horizontal footings and vertical masses made of local materials plus sand, gravel and silt, reinforced with cement and wood to hold the massive forms.

Aerial photographs reproduced in Celant‘s text show the development of the gigantic structure with dam-like walls, and erosion-minimizing concrete kerbs, rising from the desert floor.128

Consisting of stele fronted 24.38 metres high pyramids of rammed earth emerging from a 314 metres long wall flanking the huge plaza, and as big as Double Negative,

Heizer described Complex Two (1980–88), as ―a painting on the scale of the

Western desert‖—a description that acknowledges its relationship to Minimalism through its flat, triangular and rectilinear surfaces.129 The front slope of this Complex is 21.5 degrees (half that of the front of Complex One and a concession to future maintenance requirements) and 40 degrees at the rear. While all sides of a three- dimensional object must be considered to be equally important as viewers can circumnavigate the object, Heizer‘s contradictory and ambiguous emphasis on the frontal perspective in Complexes One and Two (as, indeed, in his other massed works), directs viewers‘ gazes and movements towards it.

Complex Three (completed in 1999), consists of 206.7-metre long walls flanking northern and southern earth mastabas and, with Complex Two, surrounds two sides of the central plaza. This plaza is cut by an angular roadway which leads outside the site and separates the architectural forms from the remainder of the site. As shown in the satellite images, the remainder, Phases 2–5, is a mixture of many

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Mesoamerican ovular and circular mounds like those of Effigy Tumuli, and an elaborate pattern of interplays of domes, swales, a park and a flood runoff.

The whole site ends abruptly with a contrasting large-scaled re-creation of Heizer‘s

Euclidean 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 180 degrees / Geometric Extraction sculpture (c.

2005) which is a vertical and lateral cut into a slope, creating a wall and a floor, with geometric forms created from the material ―spoils‖. This re-creation has been made twice before, but this incarnation uses towering rectangular stones cut from a single monolith as the central element within the eighteen differing concrete forms, and the work references the plays with perspective at the front of Complex One, in that from its frontal view it appears to be a solid form.130

City is approximately 48.3 kilometres from the Nellis Air Force Base, established and continuously upgraded since 1940. Following the establishment of its Fighter

Weapons School in 1981, with its associated real and projected infrastructure and the proposed building of a railway to transport nuclear material, as stated in the

Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987, and announced in 2003, Heizer lowered the frontal ground of Complexes One and Two by 7 metres to create a massive plaza, in effect, a reworking of La Venta‘s Ceremonial Court.131 The complex‘s overall height was therefore ―increased‖ as viewers could only see it from below and the surrounding landscape and all reference points were eliminated; forcing viewers ―inside‖ it to appreciate its mass more than its frontal perspective.132

It now rests equally above and below the horizon level, and this allows a ―way to enhance and concentrate vision‖ heightening viewers‘ awareness that they are looking at art and not at ―landscape art‖ which incorporates its surroundings without

105 other visual distractions. Further, it now compels viewers to re-negotiate Heizer‘s intention of ―isolation‖.133 As well as invoking ambiguity from an aerial perspective, the scale also invokes ambiguity from the ground level since, from the plaza beneath, viewers could be looking at a stadium, an amphitheatre, a military installation or a science fiction film set. The smooth and hard-edged complex is in stark contrast to the low lying rocky and specked ground, and it contrasts with the nearby mountain range.134

City is an ironic title for the complex, since there are no inhabitants, and Heizer has stated that there never will be any. Its location in the most remote site that he could find, suggests, at the very least, that any development of a ―real city‖ would be inconceivable. It is essentially a complex of opposing human-made forms where a viewer is made to feel small or insignificant.135 He has kept the site closed to all but a few friends, peers and tradespeople and he has progressively purchased the surrounding land to reinforce its isolation. Fox claims that Heizer‘s deliberately isolated site means that there has been no audience ―reinforcement‖ for City, and all of it has had to come from the artist himself—thus making the work the supreme achievement of a singular determined vision.136 While the ego, confidence and drive to build such a structure cannot be overstated, the overriding concern for Heizer was always to create a monumental place, regardless of the efforts and time spans involved. Perhaps envisaging and acknowledging a time when visitors will be able to access the site, he has expressed enthusiasm about the physical and psychological demand that City will make upon them: ―It‘s supposed to be about a motor-delayed, cumulative observation: you‘ve got to walk around it, climb over it and later put it together in your mind and figure out where you were.‖137 A further discussion on City

106 is included in the Conclusion of this thesis as it embodies both the features of conventional Land Art and the nuances and concepts that warrant the new reading of Land Art that is advocated in this thesis.

A project that would have rivalled City in its immensity was the unrealized Geometric

Land Sculpture / Anaconda Project (commenced in 1981), a proposed reclamation commission by the Anaconda Minerals Company for a site in Tonopath, Nevada. In an overall design similar to that of Complex One, this complex was to be a severely- realized geometric work, 1.6 kilometres long and 304.8 metres wide. Three pyramids each 122 metres high were to be placed on the platforms of a circle, a triangle and a square, surrounded on the two ends and at the back by a curved sloping wall. The complex was to be made from 100 million tonnes of compounded waste rock excavated from the Anaconda molybdenum mine, a feature that would have been consistent with Heizer‘s early intention of not adding to the art of the world via introduced material. Referencing the state monuments of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the formality of Mesoamerican architectural sites, this complex would have stood as Heizer‘s most imposing work. The project would have taken some decades to complete but it was abandoned when the mine closed. Ironically, Heizer‘s plans for this project show a greater concern for its longevity than for any other of his previous works. On top of the primary wall structures, to a depth of 3.65 metres, minerals were to be compacted, then watered and seeded to diminish erosion.138

In addition to City, the creation of Anaconda would have again seen Heizer and his practice enter into the ―imaginary‖, a central focus of this thesis, which in different

107 ways manifests itself in the more systematic work of De Maria and the idiosyncratic work of Oppenheim.

Endnotes

1 Heizer, cited in Jane Bell, ―Positive and negative: New paintings by Michael Heizer‖, Arts Magazine, November 1974, Vol. 49, No. 3, 55. 2 Heizer, cited in Frances Colpitt, ―Heizer‘s extracts‖, Art in America, November 1984, 133. 3 Heizer in Willoughby Sharp, ―Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson‖, Avalanche no. 1, Fall 1970, 51. 4 G. Robert Deiro Transcript , 29 December 2008, 1, Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment Collections. Gift of G. Robert Deiro. 5 Heizer, cited in Michael Kimmelman ―Michael Heizer: A sculptor‘s Colossus of the desert‖, New York Times, 12 December 1999, Section 2, 1 & 49. 6 Michael Hedger, interview with William L. Fox, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, 27 October 2011 (21‘ recorded). 7 Heizer, cited in Douglas C. McGill, Michael Heizer–Effigy tumuli: The re-emergence of ancient mound building, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1990, 11. 8 Heizer, ―Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson‖, Avalanche, 70. 9 Jonathan Fineberg, Art since 1940: Strategies of being, London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2000, 325. 10 Michael Govan, Michael Heizer, New York: Dia Foundation, 2005, accessed 9 October 2011 from http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/heizer/essay.html. 11 Howard Junker, ―The new sculpture: Getting down to the nitty gritty‖, The Saturday Evening Post, 241/22, 2 November 1968, 42. 12 Heizer in ―Interview transcript between Samuel J. Wagstaff and Michael Heizer‖, in ―The Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. Records‖, Series V: Exhibitions DIA 1900–1976 (1966–1976), Accession Box 9/10, MOD / WAG, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1971, 7. 13 Patricia A. Fairchild, ―Introduction‖, in Patricia A. Fairchild, Primal acts of construction / destruction: The art of Michael Heizer 1967–1987 (2 vols.), PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1993, 1. 14 Hayden Herrera, ―Michael Heizer paints a picture‖, Art in America, November–December, 1974, 92. 15 G. Robert Deiro, a pilot with the Hughes Corporation who knew the Great Basin and Nevada well, became an advisor to Heizer and De Maria and to another earthwork artist, Charles Ross (b. 1937). He helped them identify and purchase suitable sites, determined their budgets and ordered their supplies. These offers of help arose from a conversation between Heizer and Geoffrey Gates, a New York broker and an admirer of Heizer‘s work, which Deiro had overheard, and after Deiro had viewed Nine Nevada Depressions (1968), (see pp. 54-59). Deiro‘s claims that Heizer‘s work in Nevada, a state where individualism has been the norm, and his early Christo-like inclusive methods of

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explaining his practices and purposes to neighbouring communities, made him ―Nevada‘s artist‖. He further states that Nevadans like Heizer‘s art because of its scale and because it is of the earth and that he has given the state a ―prominence‖ in art that it previously lacked. (Deiro Transcript, 29 December 2008, 27.) Certainly the popular press took to Heizer in enthusiastic ways, describing him as a type of folk artist who arrived in Nevada with only ―a bus ticket and a spade‖ and who proceeded to give the state a new and respected status. (A. D. Hopkins, ―Michael Heizer: Avant-garde artist at home in Nevada‖, Nevadan, 27 September 1981, 5J.) 16 Dore Ashton, ―New York commentary‖, Studio International 179, no. 920, March 1970, 119. 17 Mark Rosenthal, ―Some attitudes to Earth Art: From competition to adoration‖, in Sonfist (ed.), Art in the land, 62. 18 Jeffrey Deitch, ―The new economics of Environmental Art‖, 97. 19 Heizer in Kimmelman, ―A sculptor‘s Colossus‖, 49. 20 Heizer in Leider, ‖How I spent my summer vacation‖, 41. 21 Ibid., 48. 22 Heizer in Julia Brown (ed.) with Barbara Heizer, Sculpture in reverse, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, 14. 23 David Bourdon, Designing the Earth: The human impulse to shape Nature, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1995, 218. 24 Mark Rosenthal, ―Some attitudes to Earth Art: From competition to adoration‖, in Sonfist (ed.), Art in the land, 62. 25 It is interesting that voids themselves seem appropriately sited in deserts since these relatively featureless landscapes evoke their own mysteries which are compounded by Heizer‘s creations of absence. Added to this feature, Fox has noted that The Great Basin itself is a void as all of its rivers either flow inward or are dissipated because of its dry winds. (William L. Fox, The void, the grid and the sign, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000, 4.) 26 Michael Heizer, exh. cat., Essen and Otterloo: Museum Folkway and Ryksmusuem Knoller – Muller, 1979, 64. 27 Heizer to Robert C. Scull, cited in Judith Goldman, ―My sculpture in the desert: Robert C. Scull and Michael Heizer‖, Washington: Archives of American Art Journal 50, Spring Nos 1–2, 2011, 66. 28 Hedger, interview with William L. Fox, Reno, 27 October 2011. 29 Ibid. 30 Heizer cited in McGill, Michael Heizer–Effigy Tumuli, 11. 31 Ibid., 33. 32 Heizer in Leider, ―How I spent my summer‖, 40. 33 Heizer in a letter to Scull, 21 June 1968, ―My sculpture in the Desert‖, from the Robert C. Scull papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, cited in Goldman, 64. 34 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 14. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 66.

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37 Celant, Michael Heizer, xvii. 38 Patricia A. Fairchild has related photographs of the black void North in the snow to the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich‘s Black Square, which was on a white ground; photographs of North play with the illusion of its two-dimensionality. (Fairchild, Primal acts of construction, 116.) 39 Virginia Dwan, undated letter to Suzaan Boettger, received 27 January 1996; included in Charles Stuckey, ―Interview with Virginia Dwan‖, Smithsonian Institution: Archives of American Art, reel 7, 40. 40 Scull in Gregoire Muller, ―Points of view: A taped conversation with Robert C. Scull‖, Arts Magazine, November 1970, 39. 41 Celant, Michael Heizer, xvi. 42 Heizer, in ―The art of Michael Heizer‖, no author credited, Artforum, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 1969, 38. 43 Heizer in Diane Waldman, ―Holes without history‖, Artnews, May 1971, Vol. 70, No. 3, 47. 44 Heizer, in ―The art of Michael Heizer‖ (1969), 36. 45 This process of invoking chance to determine placement through the dropping of the matchsticks has a clear parallel in Duchamp‘s shooting, by toy cannon, of matchsticks dipped in paint at a glass to determine the positions of the holes he would subsequently drill into the glass panel of his multi-media work The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even (The Large Glass) (1915–23). 46 Junker, ―The new sculpture‖, 42. 47 Deiro Transcript, 29 December 2008, 6. 48 Celant, Michael Heizer, xxii. 49 Heizer‘s previous large work was Triple Landscape at Coyote Dry Lake (1969) where a massive 544 tonnes of soil were excavated to form a winding trench with pyramid forms at either end: an overall length of 90 metres. 50 Compounding the industrial or ―masculine‖ nature of Heizer‘s reputation is the remarkable similarity of his voids and those created by mining. Interestingly, in keeping with the idea of Land Art being related to western US expansion and to major nation-building projects, the world‘s largest ―big hole‖ is the Bingham Canyon (copper) Mine, Utah, developed in 1906, now 4 kilometres wide and 1.2 kilometres deep, and designated as a National Historical Landmark in 1966. While the universal invasion and displacement of the Earth for monetary purposes can be destructive, its aura of power has an attraction for many people and its attraction for the Land Artists cannot be overlooked. The heightened status of the Bingham Canyon Mine in 1966 was only two years before Heizer created Nine Nevada Depressions and notably only three years before Five Conic Displacements, works that could be mistaken for open cut mines. It is ironic that at least three artists have been commissioned to create major Land works to rehabilitate mining sites: Heizer‘s Effigy Tumuli (1983–85) was to rehabilitate an Illinois mining site; Oppenheim‘s unrealized Waiting Room for the Midnight Special (A thought collision factory for ghost ships) (1979) and Robert Morris‘s Untitled earthworks (1979) were for the rehabilitation of a landfill and military site in Washington State. 51 Early large-scaled urban interventions included paving stones being removed from the front of the Whitney Museum to create City depression (1968) (an Arte Povera work contemporaneous with the

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removal of cobblestones from city streets by university students to use as weapons against the police during the Paris riots of 1968) and ―anti-institutional‖ Matchdrop smashed pavement near the gallery, a recreation of Dissipate from Nine Nevada Depressions, at the 1969 Works-Concepts-Processes- Situations-Information exhibition at the Berne Kunsthalle. The more precise Berne depression or Cement slot, a 10 metre long void in the shape of a large V, cut into the surface of a park and pointing to the Berne Cathedral, pervaded, according to Heizer, ―much that corrodes art‖— that is, ―utility (magic)‖, ―justification (religion)‖ and ―decoration (architecture)‖. (Heizer in ―The art of Michael Heizer‖ (1969), 37. 52 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 32. 53 Paralleling the ambiguity of the work, the Freidrich gallery offered Munich Depression for sale as a ―permanent place‖. The planned complementary gallery show was then ―cancelled‖ and replaced by the Depression in situ. Heizer had agreed to its sale if it could include the surrounding land so that all of the shadows cast from neighbouring buildings would not reach it and consequently alter its prominence: a desire for permanence a wholly integrated artwork. The poster for the exhibition claimed that ―This work has no measurements as its limits are infinite‖. (Heizer in Earthworks: Statements by Michael Heizer, cited in Julienne Lorz, ―The case for Munich 1968-1972‖, in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the earth, 167.) 54 Ibid., 28. 55 Their similarity to excavation photographs taken by Robert F. Heizer at the La Venta archaeological site in Mexico is discussed on p. 86. 56 Deiro Transcript, 5 January 2009, 49. 57 Deiro Transcript, 5 January 2009, 20. 58 Displaced / Replaced Mass 2 (1977) at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles and at Marina Del Rey, Venice, California; Displaced / Replaced Mass 3 (1993) at Ace Gallery, New York. 59 The ―photographic‖ component was Munich rotary interior, an actual-sized projection of nine photographs of Munich depression taken by Heizer himself: the scale reproduced to recreate the sensation of being within the crater. The series, called Actual Size, was shown again at LACMA in 2012, in an exhibition of the same title, to accompany the installation of the gigantic Levitated Mass. 60 Detroit Institute of Arts press release 11 February 1971, in DIA Museum Archives, The Samuel J. Wagstaff Records, Exhibitions 1900–1976 (1966–1976), MOD / WAG 9/6. 61 The resultant work was an earth mound of exposed tree roots and cables, in the manner of the Arte Povera-like Robert Morris interior Earthwork (1968), an eight-metre diameter mound of rods, pipes, wire and felt. 62 Julian Myers, ―Earth beneath Detroit‖, in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the earth, 131. 63 Robert Rogers, Director of Public Relations, Detroit Institute of Art: DIA Museum Archives, The Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jnr. Records, MOD / WAG 9/12. 64 Ibid., 149. 65 Deiro Transcript, 29 December 2008, 2.

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66 Named after the Civa Shelter, a Native American site near Garden Valley, Nevada, and in homage to the Chemehuevi tribe who created stick figures by the removal of rocks. It was superseded by the Triple Aught Foundation, a not for profit organization established to receive the funding from the Dia Foundation (1998). 67 Deiro‘s Archive of photographs, sketches, maps, prints, exhibition invitations and catalogues, newspaper articles and construction documents, all related to the installations of Land Artworks until 1974, and the interview transcripts cited throughout this chapter, are lodged at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. 68 Nick Tarasen, Double negative: a website about Michael Heizer, accessed 25 February 2011 from http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/works.html. 69 As stated in the Acknowledgements, the drawing by William L. Fox (illus. 13) was the only ―map‖ that enabled me to locate Double Negative. 70 Rosenthal, ―Some attitudes to Earth Art‖, 65. 71 Heizer in Goldman, ―My sculpture in the desert…‖, 64. 72 Like Kenneth Baker‘s essays on his responses to De Maria‘s The Lightning Field over a period of twenty nine years, at least one commentator has revisited the site to see how it had changed in the ten years since his previous visit. (Arcy Douglass, ―Revisiting Heizer‘s Double Negative‖, Portland art + news, Portland Museum of Art, 2008, accessed 7 February 2013 from http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2008/11/revisiting_mich.html/.) 73 Celant, Michael Heizer, xxx. 74 Michael Govan, Michael Heizer: Long-term view, New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1995, n.p., accessed 10 August 2011 from http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/83, 75 The ―imaginary line‖ of the length of Double Negative was replicated by Smithson‘s Spiral Jetty (1970) in a spiral formation. (Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1998, revised 2010, 31.) 76 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 36. 77 Deiro Transcript, 5 January 2009, 2. 78 Hugh M. Davies, ―Post-studio sculpture‖, in Sally Yard (ed.), Sitings, exh. cat. La Jolla, Cal.: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986, 15. (From 1980 Heizer has produced photomontages and silk screen prints of his works, in the manner of those of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which are produced to raise funds for new projects, and are available for sale through his commercial galleries.) 79 Heizer cited in Celant, Michael Heizer, 418. 80 The issues created by the advances in satellite technology that have made aerial views of Heizer‘s works readily accessible are discussed in the Conclusion of this thesis. 81 Virginia Dwan‘s term from an interview with Charles Stuckey, cited in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 162. 82 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 24. 83 Barnett Newman, ―The Sublime is now‖, Tiger’s Eye, (December 1948), in John P. O‘Neill (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected writings and interviews, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 171.

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84 Philip Drucker, Robert Heizer and Robert J. Squier, Excavations at La Venta Tabasco, 1955, Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1959. 85 Ibid., 1. 86 Mark C. Taylor, ―Rend(er)ing‖ in Michael Heizer: Double Negative, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991, 17. 87 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, (Kant’s ―Critique of Judgment‖), (1991), translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1994, 151. 88 Ibid., 157. 89 Heizer cited in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 15. 90 Taylor, Rend(er)ing‖, 10. 91 An inscribed title on one of the assemblages at the Double Negative site. 92 Chris McAuliffe, ―Pilgrimage and periphery: Robert Smithson‘s Spiral Jetty and the discourse of tourism‖, in Jaynie Anderson, Crossing cultures: Conflict, migration and convenience: The proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art, Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009, 766. 93 Taylor, ―Rend(er)ing‖. 94 Ibid., 14. 95 Marek Wieczorek, ―Life raft in the desert: Shawn Patrick Landis‘s rendezvous with Double Negative‖, Sculpture, Vol. 27, No. 6, July / August 2008, 24–31. 96 ―Tumuli‖ is a Latinate term referring to a mound of earth. 97 Heizer‘s note in William L. Fox: Michael Heizer, Series 1: Perforated Object Folder 3; Research, essays, notes, brochures file, Reno: Nevada Museum of Art. 98 Smithson, ―Proposal, 1972‖, in Flam, Robert Smithson writings, 221. 99 Robert Morris, Earthworks: Land reclamation as sculpture, Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1979, 16. 100 Heizer cited in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 18. 101 Ibid., 11. 102 Ibid., 24. 103 Heizer chose to realize the traditional forms described by Barnett Newman as ―the greatest works of art on the American continent‖; forms that could not be exhibited in a museum or adequately photographed; that had to be experienced in situ and which embodied ―the physical sensation of time‖.(Newman, ―Ohio, 1949‖, O‘Neill, Barnett Newman writings, 174). Newman‘s visit to the mounds of the Ohio Valley in 1949 confirmed in him that their presence developed from all of the qualities of the ancient monuments that had attracted Heizer to the mounds in the first instance, and also that, as they transcended eras, he felt insignificant in relation to their time scales rather than to their physical scales. Newman had previously claimed that scale could only be achieved through content so here he was indirectly praising the efforts of the ancients which resulted in undecorated ceremonial geometric forms which evoked in him the wonders of ancient rituals. 104 Ibid., 23. 105 Ibid., 24.

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106 David Fogerty, ―From mine-ravaged wasteland to works of art‖, The Christian Science Monitor, 13 December 1985. 107 Donald Judd‘s 15 outdoor concrete forms and 100 aluminium prisms or cuboids are placed in precise orders at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. 108 Robert F. Heizer and Alex D. Kreiger, The archaeology of Humboldt Cave Churchill County, Nevada, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1956, 115. 109 William L. Fox, Mapping the empty: Eight artists and Nevada, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999, 103. 110 Heizer and Kreiger, The archaeology of Humboldt Cave, 67. 111 William L. Fox, Mapping the empty, 120. 112 This is the realized Levitated mass (1970) originally proposed for the Munich Olympics. 113 The published statistics stress the physical requirements of the installation, which has been compared to the public excitement generated by the installation of the Egyptian obelisk Cleopatra’s Needle in New York in 1882. (Scott Tennent, ―The long road to Levitated Mass‖, Insider, Los Angeles: LACMA, Vol. 6, No. 3, Summer 2012, 12.) 114 ―A big day for…a show of artistic faith‖, no author credited, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 June 2012, 24. 115 Coupled with the fact that this is an urban intervention, it has become an immediate tourist attraction. The media and public interest in its transportation to the site are now complemented by the number of tour buses which stop outside the fence of the grounds so tourists may photograph it. 116 Michael Heizer: Actual Size, Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, 17 July 2012–24 February 2013. 117 Heizer cited in Insider, ―The long road…‖, 15. 118 Heizer claims to have been working on City since 1970, but it is listed in all catalogues as beginning in 1972. 119 Heizer in Michael Kimmelman, ―Art‘s last, lonely cowboy‖, New York Times, Section 6, Column 1, February 2005, 6, accessed 8 March 2011 from http://www.nytimes.com. 120 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 34. 121 Heizer cited in ―The art of Michael Heizer‖ (1969), 37. 122 Heizer cited in John Gruen, ―Michael Heizer: You might say I‘m in the construction business‖, Art News, December 1977, 98. 123 Fox in the 2011 interview reported that it had been finished, but John Bowsher, Deputy Director of Museum Planning, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (in the 2013 interview with the author) claimed that there is still some ―five years‘ work left‖. 124 William L. Fox, The void, the grid and the sign, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000, 18. 125 Concreter Bill Harmon who has worked extensively on City claims that Heizer‘s measurements are to ―within 1/16th of an inch‖. (Kimmelman, ―Art‘s last, lonely cowboy‖, 7.) 126 Nick Tarasen, double negative: a website about Michael Heizer , http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/.

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127 The geometric shapes reference Heizer‘s 1970s‘ displacement paintings and, curiously, they are a direct reference to the pop culture features of its nearest city, the billboards of Las Vegas. 128 Elizabeth C. Baker has called Complex One the positive of Double Negative, a reversal process that Heizer had explored in the re-creations of North, East, South, West (1967) made before his desert voids. 129 Heizer cited in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 142. 130 The three stones were cut from a block from a previously abandoned vertical sculpture, prompting Michael Govan to claim that ―Heizer‘s ‗forms‘ are sometimes less designs than the results of a practical physical process‖. (Govan, Michael Heizer: Long-term view, n.p.). 131 Heizer had also previously designed the front wall of Complex One to be a ―blast shield‖ because of its proximity to the nuclear base. (Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 16.) 132 Heizer learned this device from the effects created in Munich Depression (1969) where he ―erased landscape‖. (Ibid., 38.) 133 Fox, The void, 18. 134 Celant, Michael Heizer, 458–463. 135 Wagstaff interview with Heizer, The Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jnr. Records, n.d., 9. 136 Hedger, interview with William L. Fox, Reno, 27 October 2011. 137 Heizer cited in Kimmelman, ―A sculptor‘s Colossus‖, 49. 138 Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 42.

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CHAPTER THREE Walter De Maria: The possibilities of scale

―The artist who works with earth works with time.‖1

Credited with the creation of the term Land Art, a simplification of Earthworks, the

Smithson-appropriated term from science fiction writer Brian W. Aldiss, Walter De

Maria was the first artist to describe its intentions.2 He envisaged and utilized the possibilities of the large scale in his attempts to invoke infinity, to harness meteorological forces, to demonstrate the qualities and power in the Earth, the atmosphere and even outer space and to make gigantic works based on numerical sequences and mathematical equations, in which the actual scale can be hidden from the viewer and must be accepted on trust. His statement that ―The invisible is real‖ stresses his fascination with energy sources, gestalt and unseen presences that imbue his Land Art and which makes it equally or more deeply embedded literally into its sites than Heizer‘s voids or Oppenheim‘s cuts. As with both of those artists‘ practices, De Maria‘s Land Art developed from exploring Minimalist forms and expanded to two-dimensional drawings and cuts on desert surfaces before it diverged into his unique amalgamation of both these practices.

In an expansion of Robert Smithson‘s Non-sites, and critical to the new readings of

Land Art proposed in this thesis, De Maria‘s Land Art moved the indoors to the outdoors, and the outdoors indoors, to confront viewers with unexpected juxtapositions. He retained and developed Minimalist geometric forms throughout his practice and inserted versions of them into and onto landscapes, and later into interiors, in strikingly visual and pre-determined formal patterns. For Carol Hall, De

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Maria‘s work ―has always shown more of an interest in space concepts than in the land‖. The landscapes, she argues, did not dominate the finished works, but were included as integral compositional elements.3 De Maria‘s geometric forms were deliberately human but minimal interventions into the landscape, rather than manipulations of natural forms that could be construed or perceived as natural formations. The works show a continuous testing of concepts and the reworking of successful designs and, at each reworking, new effects, meanings and significance are suggested.

Meanings, of course, are determined by viewers. As De Maria writes: ―It‘s at that point, where warm meets cold, action meets inaction, that‘s what interests me. And what goes on in people‘s minds.‖4 Jonathan Fineberg notes that De Maria‘s art is dominated by scientific principles, measurement and ordering systems, rather than

Heizer‘s and Smithson‘s concerns with the effects of geological time.5 There are many overt parallels with the scientific studies of Smithson, but unlike his works and those of Heizer, De Maria was not concerned to highlight the entropic effects of time—as interventions, his works are maintained to be as pristine as possible.

De Maria‘s work stresses the power and gestalt of the Earth through simple cast and polished metallic geometric forms which demonstrate the innate mysteries of the universe through mathematical concepts. To reinforce these mysteries, De Maria has expanded upon a characteristic element of Smithson‘s practice—that of displaying mineral samples in interior settings and adding finishes to them to emphasize their aesthetic qualities.

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Most commentators on De Maria‘s work admire an artist who can produce works which affect viewers on so-called spiritual levels while being executed in precise and industrial and therefore impersonal ways, thus inducing ―a parallel meditation on the relationship of the phenomenological to the metaphysical‖.6 As discussed below, De

Maria published exact dimensions and descriptions of materials and installation processes for his large scaled works and left audiences to determine their meanings.

Yuji Akimoto sees De Maria‘s sculpture as a manifestation between the dilemma of subjectivity and objectivity and claims that his art presents divine questions in understandable terms for viewers, citing the maxim from Aristotle‘s On Memory and

On the Soul that abstract thoughts can only be formulated through symbolic representations.7 Akimoto details that while it was the ―Experimental Method‖ of the seventeenth century which formulated the concept that it is language and mathematics which enable humans to make sense of time and space, and that through music and art, mathematics was first developed to understand and measure time and space. Further, Akimoto notes that Italian Renaissance artists were the first to use geometry to create realism through perspective in painting, and he claims that

Western civilization is characterized by its use of mathematics, which it can apply to any area of study and the expansion of which led to the development of the physical sciences. He equates this with both De Maria‘s theoretical sculpture and Land Art which exemplify ―transcendence‖ despite being derived from mathematical formulas.8 How this paradox is realized aesthetically is discussed later in this chapter.

Akimoto further claims that De Maria is the subject of his art and that the works are explorations through the principles of the concept of infinity by way of mathematics.

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Once a work is created or ―at the solution of the problem‖, the presence of the artist is not required and is necessarily unseen, and then a specific illustrative title must be given to the work, as a demonstration of a concept.9 This summation implies that De

Maria is a designer and an organizer of the manifestation of principles and ideas which are fabricated by others in industrial manners—pointedly omitting all interpretations.

Germano Celant notes that De Maria‘s works are the fusion of opposites, as they invoke both positive and negative power so that silence becomes thunder, light can become fire and life can become death.10 He summarizes De Maria‘s intention as being ―to define a limit through the concrete existence of an object that has its own energy in every second of its existence‖.11 This relates to De Maria‘s harnessing and displaying of permanent works that retain their energy permanently.

The invocation of the sublime in De Maria‘s works has struck many commentators.

Lars Nittve, for instance, believes these works invoke the Irish philosopher Edmund

Burke‘s theory On the sublime and beautiful (of 1756)12 which correlated the sublime with the human instinct for self-preservation and encounters with infinity and death.13

That is, Burke believed that experiencing supreme beauty or perfection can be through overwhelming yet inexplicable impacts from dangerous natural occurrences such as storms equally as well as from human created aesthetics. De Maria‘s Bed of spikes (1968) exemplifies this theory as it is aesthetically attractive because of its order, symmetry and sheen yet it is obviously a highly dangerous object to encounter at close range. Nittve claims that De Maria‘s detailed notes on the technical aspects of his work could temper any sense of the sublime within them, but in his view this

119 does not happen. He further claims that De Maria‘s studio is the conceptual place where his works are ―charged with perhaps their most significant mark: energy‖.14

Mario Perniola expands Nittve‘s ideas by equating lightning with the same qualities of beauty and danger, and sees The Lightning Field (1977) as a ―condition of the advent of beauty‖, since beauty enters from beyond the work and energizes it into action.15 Plato (in Phaedo) and Pseudo-Longinus (in On the Sublime) are cited as writers who describe examples of beauty ―striking‖ the viewer in such differing descriptions as that of seeing a lover and the effects of a moving oration.

John Beardsley notes the extraordinary replication of Christopher Hussey‘s categorization of the elements of The Sublime (1925) with The Lightning Field: obscurity, power, privations, vastness, infinity, succession and uniformity.16 Following this list, De Maria‘s intervention seems to have been made to order. His art has transferred Barnett Newman‘s two-dimensional ―experience of the sublime totality‖ into three dimensions, according to Ingrid Rein and, like Nittve, she notes that De

Maria‘s precision does not diminish his evocation of the sublime because his Land

Art allows him to invoke the largest scales possible.17 The precision means that perfect geometric forms are created, yet their spatial relationships with the landscape extend them and the viewer‘s experience of them into the immateriality beyond their edges or perimeters. Their large scale means that they are integrated jointly into the

Earth and into space and that their mathematical order and invocation of natural forces integrates them into the mysteries of time. The scope of gigantic projects like the 5 Continent Sculptures (1987–89) makes the works literally global in their ambition and reach, as discussed towards the end of this chapter.

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The reclusive De Maria gave few interviews, proffering only rare comments in exhibition catalogues more often than not listing the technical details and dimensions of his works.18 However, the works speak of an artist of serious intensity and they embody the exploration of complex mathematical and scientific concepts, extensive research, and precise fabrication and installation methods—thereby directly providing audiences with a detailed understanding of his practice while simultaneously indirectly providing an understanding of himself. Despite the differences in their works, there is an interesting symbiosis between De Maria and

Smithson which covers their early interest in equating construction with destruction and of the heightened respect for earth as material and for the products that are forged from it. De Maria‘s stainless steel and aluminium forms are as much embodiments of the Earth‘s capacities as they are aesthetic forms.

The early writings of De Maria anticipate the complexities of his later work. While these writings do not equate with the rigour and formality of those works, many of the themes are anticipated in his Fluxus pamphlet Compositions, Essays, Meaningless

Work, Natural Disasters (1960–1).19 These short essays are crudely expressed thoughts and ramblings about what would be realized later as his Land Art and

Performance Art, and they contain random clues about explorations that he would subsequently make. Interestingly, many of the sentiments expressed by De Maria correlate with those of Claes Oldenburg in his celebrated polemic I am for an art…, published in the same year.20

―Meaningless Work‖, an essay that appears to be a condemnation of factory processes as repetitive and unsatisfying for workers, parallels Robert Morris‘s

121 compendium work Traveling Sculpture (1961), a proposal for a performance work for several people which specified how a timber structure was to be erected and dismantled along a pathway and then burnt and the entire process timed, photographed and sound recorded.21

The massive scale of De Maria‘s Land Art was first invoked in the essay ―Art Yard‖, which describes the excavation of a large void as a performance piece involving bulldozers, steam shovels and ultimately, explosions. The excavation was to continue until supplies were exhausted or the void collapsed. This monologue verges on the absurd but it does anticipate the Land Art of Heizer and the performance art of Oppenheim and it was also the forerunner of the physical and industrial processes behind De Maria‘s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) and the unrealized Olympic

Mountain Project (1970). The hint in ―Art Yard‖‘s final paragraph, ―Perhaps you haven‘t thought me as serious? Actually I am,‖ is a tease; the reader is led to believe that there is a serious purpose to the preposterous proposal, and one that De Maria fully intended to realize and, in fact, ultimately did, although the means would be less flamboyant and more symbolic.

Reading beyond the provocatively titled essay, ―On the importance of natural disasters‖, De Maria is proposing to create large-scaled art that affects viewers profoundly, yet remains ―impersonal‖. Anticipating the Land Artists‘ ultimate challenge by stating ―I don‘t think art can stand up to nature‖ and ―the big things always win‖, he is hoping that audiences will be inspired by the natural world as much as he is. A further statement, ―if all of the people who go to museums could just feel an earthquake‖, calls for the sensational and frightening effects of the

122 natural world to be appreciated in a similar manner to the art of museums, and an understanding that other sensual forms of experience were diminishing the power of art and its status. This extravagant language was undoubtedly influenced by contemporary Happenings, three of which De Maria organized in San Francisco in

1959 and 1960 and later at his Jones Street Gallery, New York, in 1963. His interest in destructive forces, it should be noted, was later expanded in Smithson‘s essay A sedimentation of the mind (1968). Smithson praised the ―primordial grandeur‖ of construction / destruction that is achieved through the usage of earth moving machinery and stated that he preferred the processes of construction to their end results, an opinion which resonated in the early work of Heizer.22

Nittve stresses that in the essay ―On the importance of natural disasters‖ De Maria is emphasizing the power of natural energy, the tapping of which became a quest in his shaft works and The Lightning Field and the harnessing of which was a feature of his geometric stainless steel floor pieces.23 De Maria‘s essay and sketches of Beach crawl anticipate Performance Art through their repeated gestures, but their cyclic and circular nature shows De Maria contemplating both the energy states and the fundamental geometric shapes that he has recreated throughout his practice.

Curiously, and in contrast to the fabrication and purpose of the wooden boxes, he denies that this act is ―meaningless‖, while enjoying the joke that it must be ―done with solemnity‖ and that its participants cannot be distracted by dogs. The only project in this vein was that planned for Hanover, Germany (1970), where De Maria proposed housing one hundred elephants in streets and parks to divert the city‘s attention from its reported infrastructure problems and to give it a unique distinction.

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The proposal was a quasi-serious response to the loss of wild-life habitat in Africa; unsurprisingly, it was not adopted by the city.24

From 1960 De Maria rejected any form of expressionism which he claimed demonstrated the presence and activity of the artist, a ―kind of a dead drunk raving wild man life‖;25 and, further, that expressionistic works lacked objectivity, ―honesty‖ and independence.26 Because art needed to be free from ―the indefinable condition of interior states of mind,‖ he moved to the three-dimensional minimalist forms which in one way or the other have characterized his entire output.27 These utilize the repetition of symmetrical and mathematically precise geometric forms and placements, industrial finishes and a lack of introduced colour.

The prolonged installation periods and the determination required to complete these works are mirrored by De Maria‘s views on the sustained periods required by viewers to appreciate them. He understood the centrality of time for a fuller appreciation and revelation of a work‘s gestalt and he knew that, over time, the works would change according to their surrounding conditions as well as from what the viewer brought to them in terms of experience and openness, and took from them as a result. It was therefore critical that no instructions were given as to the physical approaches to the work, recommended engagement times and interpretation.

De Maria‘s background as a drummer would have undoubtedly taught him much about musical scales and their mathematical structures.28 Jane McFadden has documented De Maria‘s musical relationship with musical composer La Monte

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Young (b. 1935) and referenced Young‘s discussion on tuning and the durations of sounds to explain the precision of measurements in De Maria‘s art.29 De Maria incorporated mathematical systems into his art to achieve similar rhythmic effects and forced viewers to consider their relationships to these physical sciences. Scale is an inherent element in these relationships since the entities and questions are often larger than can be reasonably understood by the viewer. His use of the definite article in the titles of his Land works underlies confidence in their achievement and status and designates them as the legitimate results of protracted research and methodology.

The large scale of his sculptures forces viewers to walk around or through them since they cannot be encompassed in any one single view; a fuller appreciation of them in effect echoes the artist‘s own methodical and protracted research. As such, the works demand much from the viewer, but this condition has not limited or diminished interest in them, although early reviews show some disappointment or were casually dismissive.30 David Bourdon‘s cautiously negative review of 1968 suggests that De Maria was ―not really concerned with pursuing the implications of a particular style, technique or ideology, so much as expressing his unique sensibility in whatever manner seems most appropriate‖.31 This is perhaps an understandable position when reading ―Art Yard‖, viewing the geometric metallic works and hearing of the first Earth Room.

Mathematics, a human logic which describes the natural world, has a long history of usage in art and architecture. However, its employment as the formal structure behind an image is a twentieth-century phenomenon, beginning with Cubism and

125 developed by the de Stijl group in their abstracted geometric paintings and then given prominence in Minimal Art. Instead of making diagrams of mathematical formulae on graph paper, in two-dimensional wall and floor drawings or in three- dimensional models, in the style of Sol LeWitt, De Maria made them of permanent materials and transferred them out of gallery spaces in physically real and large scales. De Maria‘s concepts are mathematical entities that require precise measurements to be true. Moving these cognitive concepts out of doors and invoking gigantic scale enabled them to be visible and therefore more meaningful and stimulating to viewers. Invoking the forces of nature added the elements of chance, challenge and daring to the works. Further explorations into mathematical entities led to De Maria adding to series works, years after initial fabrications and installations.

The formulations possible in mathematics are infinite, and the variations of natural materials are beyond the capacity of cataloguing, so the series works of De Maria cannot be repeated nor the forms exhausted, although many works can be considered as studies for larger works. The precision of Minimalism and of mathematical models was maintained. Importantly, De Maria relied on the viewer‘s sense of order to find in the works the rhythmic patterns possible in mathematics.

Categorizing De Maria‘s work as variously conceptual, theatrical, monumental and minimalizing, Wim A. L. Beeren summarizes it as: ―a field of tensions…between the poles of abstraction and (fascination for) matter… [wherein] matter is rendered abstract [and] abstraction is materialized‖—a description that sees De Maria‘s art as one of demonstrating the overriding concern to portray mathematical principles as fixed but realizable entities with a reliance upon spectacle.32 In Beeren‘s analysis,

126 the primary concerns are the mathematical systems behind the geometric models such as Bed of spikes (ultimately seen in large scale in The Lightning Field), and the reduction of matter to a display material so that its inherent qualities are recognized, as in The New York Earth Room and the 5 Continent Sculptures, discussed below.

Early geometric works

De Maria had determined as early as 1959, at the age of 24, that he wanted to create work that was the antithesis of Abstract Expressionism or of the ―improvised‖

Expressionist work of sculptors like David Smith. In the period predating the public exhibition of Minimalism, De Maria‘s response was to create unembellished wooden boxes, free of any emotional implications.33 Like Oppenheim‘s conceptual works, these pieces have an implied scale—regardless of their size, they reference concepts such as gravity, comparative religions and static energy states. De Maria compressed the concepts into mundane wooden and metallic objects that suggest states of otherness and possibility.

Called ―events‖ by McFadden, these boxes were further explorations in what became the traditional geometric forms of Minimalism (expanded to be explorations of controlled mathematical or theoretical entities) and were often presented with instructions.34 Despite their gallery dimensions, it was always the artist‘s intention that they be installed singularly in large rooms, so that the implications of their scale would be better understood.35

Aligning these works to hugely ambitious concepts, De Maria claimed that they

―contained…all the right information about the universe and about oneself and about

127 the time‖, that is, they comprised their own logic, something he found lacking in expressionism.36 As they were conceptual objects, any inference could be drawn from them and they became the catalyst for De Maria to explore space, spatial relationships, the movement from the material to the immaterial, the sense of being able to express the inexpressible and, most importantly, infinity. He claimed that closed forms or objects would not allow this as concentrated viewing would ―collapse the object in‖, whereas open works on the large scale would extend the limits of the works and the viewer‘s experience into infinity.37

Many of De Maria‘s Series works consist of individually small pieces which, when exhibited together or dispersed according to a specific theme, become large scale installations. The first stainless steel Channel Series works, created individually over seven years and displayed together at its conclusion, were De Maria‘s first exploration into what might be called the socio-political through engaging expansive and deliberately provocative concepts. The series consists of a brushed aluminium pinball trilogy of a Christian crucifix, Cross (1965); a swastika ambiguously titled

Museum Piece (1966); and a Star of David, Star (1972). J. C. Cooper has detailed the extensive history of the swastika (meaning, ―it is well‖), and its changing meanings in ancient cultures, ranging from a wheel of fire to a Christian symbol in the Catacombs.38 Yet surprisingly, at the time of creation, De Maria‘s challenging series would seem to have little to do with these histories, and more to do with the artist‘s fascination with the juxtaposition of geometric forms.39 An element of play might also be discerned by the incorporation of ball bearings which, as we have seen earlier, are part of each of the three objects. The placement of the objects flat on the

128 floor, moreover, diminishes their symbolic importance while reducing all three symbols to the same literal and figurative levels.40

De Maria began producing the High energy bars in 1966; he eventually made over one hundred of them.41 These are solid, stainless steel parallelograms (3.8 cm x

35.6 cm x 3.8 cm) which are engraved with the work‘s title, its edition number and the artist‘s name. They were made sporadically, sold (for a maximum of $100) or given to someone and accompanied by a certificate signed and dated by the artist, although they remain the artist‘s property and cannot be transferred to another person.42 The certificates state that the bars should occasionally be carried around and displayed. These bars are physically similar to the metallic site pegs of

Oppenheim‘s Sitemarkers series (see Chapter Four, pp. 176–179) and like them are industrially designed and can be certified and traded like other goods. The pun in their titles is another reference to American advertising culture and to the industrial process of their manufacture. The certificates are in effect part of a larger work, The high energy unit, as they designate the linkage between the series of possible energy states used to manufacture the bars and the owner and the creator who determines their number but cannot control their life spans.43 De Maria views these objects as ―perfect‖ because they are self-referential, yet their gestalt implies more than can be perceived.44 Neville Wakefield draws an interesting parallel with these bars and the deposition of solid platinum-iridium alloy bars at the French National

Archive to commemorate the national introduction of the metric measurement system in 1791.45 Further, the supersession of the static and physical measurement system by the atomic standard in the 1960s meant that the physical representation of distance was now redundant. Similarly, De Maria presents the physical objects

129 that invoke these scientific and mathematical concepts through small physical entities.

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Illus. 32, Walter De Maria, Bed of spikes (1968). Photograph by Attilio Maranzano from Germano Celant, Walter De Maria, Milano 1999–2000, Dia Centre for the Arts, Kunstmusuem Basel, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1999, 78.

A reworking of a Hindu fakir‘s bed of nails, Bed of spikes (1968) (illus. 32) was De

Maria‘s first major work to exhibit content as form. Described puzzlingly by the artist as ―summariz[ing] some of my ideas about New York at the time‖, the work was presented as five stainless steel floor based rectangular plates with obelisk shaped spikes, arranged in the regular odd number formations of 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and increasing the number of spikes incrementally to 3, 15, 45, 91 and 153 by the formulas of 1 x 3,

3 x 5, 5 x 9, 7 x 13 and 9 x 17.46 Through these formulas the spikes fit evenly onto the uniformly sized plates (33.3 centimetres by 199.6 centimetres by 105.6

130 centimetres). There is clear irregularity in these formulas but the overriding concern is for symmetry so the ratios of the spikes have been developed according to even spatial relationships on the plates. The mathematical concepts of odd and prime numbers and surds intrigued De Maria; here he is demonstrating fundamental principles of numerical systems, expanding into three dimensions the traditional division of two-dimensional measurement that creates balance somewhat in the manner of classroom mathematical models. Yet, by highlighting the visual seduction of repeating polished forms, he disguises any didacticism.

The size of the individual plates is unrelated to their potential scale, as series works include spatial relationship plays with negative spaces, thereby greatly increasing their sizes. The series can be arranged in various configurations according to the available space, like Carl Andre‘s floor works. De Maria has energized Andre‘s passive panels to display the potential and ambiguous power of the metallic forms and to create a new kind of active interaction with viewers, that of tension and danger. At floor level, the ability of the plates to harm keeps visitors at a distance, and indeed the series was exhibited with a viewers‘ ―Unconditional Release‖ notice at the Dwan Gallery in 1968.

In the year before The Lightning Field (see pp. 147–157), with its challenge to forces literally beyond Earth, De Maria exhibited two series of works that alluded to infinity: the mathematical panels Gold meters and Silver meters (1976-7) which consisted of eight stainless steel panels of 1 square metre, inserted with plugs of gold and silver.

These were patterns based on the squares of the sequences of numbers from 2 to 9, so that the plugs number 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64 and 81 are clear graphically and

131 numerically symmetrical sequences. The amount of gold and silver in each panel is equal to one troy ounce (28.35 grams), so the plugs decrease in size according to the number of them on each panel. As well as alluding to infinity as a physical concept in the overall placement, De Maria is playing with the metaphysical infinity of numbers and division since, theoretically, one ounce can be divided an infinite number of times. When laid out in formation, the series extends to 80 linear metres.

The Equal area series (1976–77), was a much larger attempt at suggesting infinity, and was designed specifically for its display at 19 Waverly Place, New York. Twelve sets of circles and squares were laid onto a floor at 30 centimetre intervals with each square 2.54 centimetres incrementally longer than the preceding one, making the size range of squares from 1.82 metres to 2.13 metres. The circles are each enlarged incrementally by 3 centimetres to range from 2.03 metres to 2.37 metres.

Here, De Maria was exploring the measurement of pi and the Pythagorean conundrum of squaring circles and testing viewers‘ eyes to notice the subtle variations in size.47 Compounding the mathematical plays even further, there is the puzzle that as the squares‘ sides and the circles‘ dimensions increase, they become less equal, although their areas remain equal. As the work could only be seen from the shorter ends of the room, the vanishing point perspective dominated and this subtle trompe l‘oeil increased the work‘s perceived size. Both Gold and Silver meters and the Equal Area Series are regularly installed at the Dia Foundation, at Beacon,

New York, where the pairs of circles and squares are placed side by side, changing their perspective and relative size. They harness scale‘s ability to confuse through repetition and subtle size variations.

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Desert-based art

De Maria considered the desert to be one of ―the most aesthetic places in the world‖; a sweeping, clearly, but equally grandiose claim that in the main involved notions of timelessness and isolation, its isolation and natural spatial relationships meant that a work could be appropriately and fully executed outside of the gallery system.48 These characteristics suited his purpose as they meant that his Land Art could not be

―judged‖—an ambiguous term that may betray a lack of confidence in the acceptance of the works or a strengthening of purpose that any critical judgment without physical experience of the work would be pointless.49 His first Land work, a joint venture with Michael Heizer, was in the Mojave Desert of the Great Basin of

Nevada where they had first journeyed in 1968, a trip determined as necessary to develop the art of both artists and which resulted in the creation of the first work of its type, one where the medium and the site are the same: Two parallel lines: Mile long drawing (illus. 33) 50

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Illus. 33, Walter De Maria, Mile long drawing (1968). From Tiberghien, Land Art, 56.

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Illus. 34, Edgar Arceneaux, Detroit (2009), acrylic and graphite on paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York, photograph by Lutz Bertram. From Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (organizers), Ends of the earth: Land art to 1974, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Cal.: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Munich, Germany: Prestel Verlag; London, United Kingdom: Prestel Publishing Ltd., 2012, 143.

As discussed below, the linear imagery of Mile long drawing showed both of the artists the possibilities of expanding Andre‘s horizontal floor based sculpture to a colossal scale while simultaneously reducing it to fundamental gestures that embedded the works into the landscape. Lucy Lippard‘s claim that Land Art‘s development from Carl Andre‘s work was more a ―result of the jet age‖ (for the first time art could be visualized aerially), perhaps overstated the early explorations of De

Maria.51 The fact of the matter is that all three artists did not wish their works to be seen from the air. The seminal images of De Maria‘s Mile long drawing are actually not taken from above; rather they show De Maria aligned with the mountain range, lying on the ground between the lines (in one image with his nose touching one line),

134 emphasizing the physical integration of the artist with the work and the environment.52 ―Seminal‖ is not an exaggerated term given the image‘s reworking in many other contexts (see illus. 34).

While Heizer is more readily associated with the physicality of Land Art, because of his processes and scales, De Maria‘s early works show sustained physical efforts.

Mile long drawing’s two parallel lines of white chalk, 10.16 centimetres wide and 4 metres apart, were meant as a temporal draft for the construction of Mile long parallel walls in the desert, an unrealized project of two parallel white concrete walls,

1.6 kilometres long, 3.65 metres high and 3.65 metres apart, which would fully integrate contemporary art into an ancient landscape.53 De Maria planned this project with Utah or Nevada in mind and asked Robert Scull for the construction funds, but despite extensive negotiations with contractors, it was not built. The perceived physical sensations of entrapment and claustrophobia in audiences, exploited by Morris‘ Passageway (1961) and later in the tall steel spiral works of

Richard Serra, would have been generated by this Land work despite the openings at both ends of the structure and the lack of a roof.

At Dwan Gallery‘s Earthworks (1968), both De Maria and Heizer submitted two- dimensional works that, in effect, constituted their first Land Art exhibition. De Maria presented photographs of the 1968 Earth Room and the Mile long drawing, but as he was overseas he asked Heizer to construct and submit Yellow Painting / The color men choose when they attack the earth (1968)—a 2.1 metres by 6 metres Minimalist painting of a yellow rectangle with a stainless steel plate mounted in the centre, bearing the words of the second part of the title.54 The pun of the title refers to large-

135 scaled earth moving equipment, which is traditionally painted ―Caterpillar‖ yellow, and also to popular science fiction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the only work sold at the show and it was bought by the later Land Art commissioner Robert C. Scull.55

As can be clearly seen, there developed a natural symbiosis between De Maria and

Heizer when both discovered Land Art simultaneously through their joint desert drawing.56 This bond continued at Willoughby Sharp‘s Earth Art exhibition at Cornell

University in 1968. De Maria wrote ―Good Fuck‖ on his interior earth installation and the room where this was displayed was subsequently closed by the University. As a result, Heizer withdrew from the exhibition in support of De Maria.57

Commenting on the symbiosis between De Maria and Heizer, G. Robert Deiro has suggested that it is essentially an exchange of ideas and concepts; but he also hints at their rivalry.58 While Heizer‘s intention to embed large-scaled works into the landscape is clear, Deiro calls De Maria‘s efforts ―ethereal‖ since he did not want to cut deeply into the landscape, but rather to use it like a canvas.59

Mile long drawing was followed by another huge physical undertaking, Desert Cross

(1968), two 7.62 centimetre wide white chalk lines of 304.8 metres in length and

15.24 metres in width, drawn onto the surface of El Mirage Lake, Nevada. Las Vegas piece and Swastika (1969) expanded Heizer‘s Nine Nevada Depressions void series into longer and shallower geometric voids cut into the desert surface. The process was again creating absences through the removal of material, but now for the purpose of physical interaction, rather than for displaying the surrounding landscape.60 Reworking the first two forms of The Channel Series, Las Vegas piece

(illus.35) consisted of four overlapping lines, posited in north-south and east-west 136 coordinates, each 2.44 metres wide and I.61 kilometres long and forming two right angled intersections. These were cut into the desert surface by a bulldozer, their rigidity contrasting with the confluence of water courses. Swastika meanwhile was a

4.83 kilometre angled cut.61 The progression from drawing to cutting into the surface with machinery showed De Maria‘s growing concern for permanence and site domination.

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Illus. 35, Walter De Maria, Las Vegas piece (1969) from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 46.

His prime interest in scoring these long cuts, made according to precise alignments of the north–south and east–west axes, was an ambitious one since it was to create a uniquely timed experience for viewers, albeit one that was to be undirected. De

Maria assumed that viewers spent no more than one minute looking at a traditional sculpture. Through his use of gigantic scale, he believed that viewers would be forced to experience works over longer periods. (This reached its climax in The

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Lightning Field where, as we shall see, viewers must make a reservation to visit the work and are required to stay with it for a day, although their personal interactions with it are unregulated.) De Maria calculated that it took a viewer four hours to experience Las Vegas piece by walking along the length of both of its lines, and when this time was added to the two hours required to reach the remotely-sited work from Las Vegas and the two hours spent returning home, it would mean that an entire day was spent experiencing a single artwork.

Unknown to the viewer was the fact that the lines ended without any precise or significant points: one resulted in a dead end and the other met a road, so the experience of just walking along the lines was the complete experience, one more in keeping with the works of the European Land Artists such as Richard Long (b. 1945).

Viewers could begin the walk at any point, depending upon the point where they arrived at it, and along either line there was a choice of following the intersecting line, again to an unknown destination. De Maria was relying on the curiosity and determination of viewers to continue to walk, in spite of their exposure to the harsh climate, and he expressed the experience in terms of experiencing architecture. As time is required to experience and to come to ―know‖ an architectural form, so too would his Land works require time.62 He refused publication of aerial photographs of them to maintain and reinforce the ground level experience. This denial, however, had to be abandoned in De Maria‘s next work; its enormous size meant that it would be impossible to view it in any way other than aerially.

Three continent project (1972) would have set the standard for colossal Land Art. De

Maria planned to cut two one mile (1.609 kilometre) trenches, one vertical (north–

138 south) and one horizontal (east–west), in Africa and India and a one square mile

(258 hectares) cut in the United States. To achieve the conceit, the cuts were to be photographed by satellite on the same day and juxtaposed, so that the regular geometric form of a cross within a square would be created. It is tempting to speculate on whether this would have signified the ―four corners of the Earth‖ cliché or whether it would have just been De Maria imposing a strict geometrical form on irregular landforms; that is, order upon random forms. As the work would only be recognizable from space, it would have elevated a Land Artwork to the level of monuments like the Great Wall of China and shown an artist opening new boundaries far beyond the aerially readable Dallas–Fort Worth Airport project planned by Smithson in 1966, as discussed in Chapter One. For Jane McFadden,

Three continent project was indicative of the new phenomenon of the ―global arena‖ of which artists were now a part.63 In other words, it would be natural for artists to try to incorporate the new technology into their work to realize previously unimaginable concepts.64 The appeal for De Maria would have been obvious. At any event, only the African cut was made. Tellingly, in 1972 De Maria lamented that his Land Art practice was sporadic; this he attributed to financial pressure and to the critical preoccupation with his metallic works.65

The recognition by European curators of De Maria as essentially a Conceptual artist

(―in no way an object maker‖) led to his inclusion in the hugely important exhibition held in 1968 both at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London and at the Kunsthalle,

Berne entitled Live in your head: When attitudes become form–works–concepts– processes–situations–information.66 De Maria submitted pictures of Mile long drawing together with the conceptual drawings and notes he had intended for the Art

139 by telephone exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (delayed until

1969).67 This work consisted of an indoor / outdoor link via a telephone with a direct line to the artist, marked by a sign stating: ―If this telephone rings, you may answer it.

Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.‖ While clearly a performance work, De Maria no doubt enjoyed the pun of ―on the line‖, implying indefinite distance or ―cutting through‖ distance, and also alluding to the artist‘s physical integration, as shown in the Mile Long drawing photograph.

Incorporating ideas about aerial perspective from Smithson and the naturally cinematic nature of traditional Land Art, Two lines Three circles in a desert (1969), on the leased Jean Dry Lake and De Maria‘s part in Gerry Schum‘s (1938–1973)

Land Art film (1969),68 was a combination of surface drawing, Performance Art (as

De Maria walked between the drawn lines) and cinema, with the circular motion of a single shot camera filming the movement and creating the circles of the title.

Schum‘s film expanded the Earthworks exhibition of the previous year by showing the artists at work. Physicality and scale are its dominant themes and the artists are portrayed as Lilliputian figures.69

The Earth Rooms and Shaft works

De Maria‘s Earth Room series, as the title implies, constitute his first large-scaled

Land Art indoor works. They are similar to Smithson‘s Non-sites as they show natural materials in their unembellished states or in states that are ―diametrically opposed to the content in where [they] now occur‖, and from where they were collected.70 They perhaps reclaim their natural sites back from the urban landscapes.

As the buildings sit above the earth or are embedded into it, they are reminders of

140 the timelessness of the sites and hint at the temporality of all human endeavour over natural forces.

In contrast, between 1967 and 1969 Smithson displayed identifiable mineral samples from specific sites in sculptural bins with corresponding documentation detailing the locations of the sites. These installations showed a concern to bring mundane features from the outdoors (the Sites), to the indoors (the Non-Sites), thereby demonstrating the dichotomous relationship between the Sites which were real places with individual features and ―scattered information‖ and the Non-Sites which were limited, anonymous places of ―contained information‖.71 By reducing the original large scale of the landforms to a gallery scale, through the exhibition of unaltered fragments, he hoped to change viewers‘ perceptions of them by an acknowledgement of their aesthetic qualities and, through this familiarity, a new understanding of the aura of the natural world would be gained. De Maria‘s intentions were far more nuanced.

The Earth Rooms, three in all, are arranged installations of earth, rather than the contemporaneous ―dumped‖ earth works of Robert Morris or the individual mineral fragments of Smithson. Removed from the natural environment and placed into built ones, the Earth Rooms refocus the attention of viewers to the materiality of earth.

Impact is created through this displacement and contrast and alteration of scale.

Viewers can in fact touch the soil, all the while being aware of colour, smell and humidity. For De Maria, these sensual experiences are sufficient to urge contemplation of Earth‘s most fundamental material that has been covered over and built upon for millennia, yet which supports all life on land.

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The first two Earth Rooms were installed in Germany. Earth Room—full title 50m3

(1,600 cubic feet) Level dirt / The Land Show: Pure dirt / pure earth / pure land, an installation of 50 cubic metres of compost or ―pure‖ earth72 to a depth of 60 centimetres, was placed in three rooms of the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich in

1968, following De Maria‘s decision not to place any further steel works in gallery spaces.73 This was the first Land Art exhibition in Europe, a satellite exhibition of

Documenta 4. As specified in the media release, De Maria hoped that the earth would be appreciated as significant in itself, although viewers‘ gazes were restricted to what could only be seen from a doorway, and beyond this doorway to the nineteenth-century streetscape outside. In its attempt to entice audiences and to emphasize its uniqueness, the exhibition poster stressed that the installation held no objects, that the soil was undecorated and that nothing was growing in it: a stark and

Minimalist-type description that presumably the owner of the gallery Heiner Friedrich believed would attract audiences. Included in the poster were these words by De

Maria, ―God has given us the earth, and we have ignored it.‖ This statement and the assertion that the prime motivation to create the work was because the artist missed contact with the earth while living in New York, perhaps overstated De Maria‘s motivation. That said, his intentions can be seen to be closely related to those of

Heizer with whom he worked collaboratively, as we have seen (see above and

Chapter One, endnote 4, pp. 33–34).74 Following this first Earth Room, in 1974 De

Maria was commissioned to create a second version, called the Large Earth Room, as part of a solo group exhibition at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt,

Germany. This version covered 166 square metres to a depth of 60 centimetres.75

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The third reincarnation, The New York Earth Room (1977) (illus. 36) parts company with the previous two as being De Maria‘s first permanent Land work / intervention.

Expanding on the concept used by Robert Morris‘ Continuous project altered daily

(1969) by making it into a permanent work, 334.5 cubic metres of soil from neighbouring Long Island, to a depth of 60 centimetres and spread over 334.5 square metres, were installed in a building at 141 Wooster Street, New York, the result of a Dia Art Foundation commission. Its location would seem to be more appropriate than the earlier German works since the placement of free-formed earth in a building within the systematic grid street plan of Manhattan forms a more specific contrast, although it still hints at what lies beneath the streets.

Demonstrating the gestalt of this most fundamental material, The Earth Room is raked daily to retain its surface moisture, smell and humidity: a process of renewal that resonates with notions of timelessness and infinity.

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Illus. 36, Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room (1977). Photograph by John Cliett, from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 109.

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As in the previous incarnations and the subsequent shaft works, to be examined later, the full size of The New York Earth Room must be understood on trust because the configuration of the room prevents a full viewing of the installation. Like a ploughed field, the movements of sunlight alter and highlight different features of the earth. While access is partially restricted by a pane of glass, one can still touch the earth, although this is not encouraged: the emphasis is on a sensory and contemplative experience, rather than upon direct interaction.

The New York critical reception was more negative than that of the German critics in

1968 and 1974, perhaps because the 1968 installation was seen as an adjunct exhibition to Documenta where avant garde art is, of course, expected and welcomed. Valentin Tatransky‘s 1977 review expressed what many would have felt at an initial viewing.76 He claimed that after all that art had attempted to achieve and had realized, viewing The New York Earth Room was ―to experience a feeling of collapse, a release of effort‖, showing the veiled disappointment that perhaps he was viewing the work of an artist who had run out of ideas and was presenting his own state of collapse, rather than displaying the entropic qualities of the material with its own demonstrated atmosphere. Tatransky missed that the installation was a directed gesture for viewers to consider material, rather than a gesture itself: unlike

Smithson‘s Non-sites, De Maria was displaying unaltered natural material in a gallery without an explanation.

The Earth Rooms can now be critically considered outside of De Maria‘s systematic practice. Their free and unaltered materials in forms contained only by the right angled dimensions of their rooms, are counter to the mathematically precise ordered

144 forms that have constituted the remainder of his practice. They did focus attention onto earth, as intended, but since then De Maria has mined and displayed the minerals from within the Earth to demand the same attention. The first Earth Room was a reaction to the enthusiasm he felt for the Olympic Mountain Project which, as we shall see, would have forced a metallic shaft deep into the Earth to link supposedly to energy forces. De Maria realized that reproducing anything like this within the gallery system would be impossible so The Earth Room perhaps did show his ―feeling of collapse‖; namely, his frustrations at the limitations of interior spaces.

Arguably lacking the presence and daring of a Heizer displacement, The New York

Earth Room continues to draw visitors, presumably because it has now taken on the status of a tourist attraction. In an attempt to make it relevant for new and different audiences, a Youtube clip has been uploaded by two film makers. As photography of

The Earth Room is prohibited, the clip includes a monologue by its caretaker Bill

Dilworth, who is shown greeting visitors, explaining how he rakes the earth and displaying his own sketch book: a modern technique to reinvigorate a static display, the energy of which can only be experienced through time and contemplation.77

De Maria‘s subsequent Land works were interventions of industrially-produced metallic shafts and poles into and upon the Earth and all invoke the largest scales imaginable: moving from the state of ―collapse‖ back to real states of energy. They include a work that aims symbolically to reach the Earth‘s core and tap into its energy source, realized as discussed below, and another aiming to harness atmospheric forces in the sky to activate its components, The Lightning Field.

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A characteristic feature of De Maria‘s ―underground‖ interventions—the shaft works—and indeed with much of Oppenheim‘s work (see Chapter Four), is the acceptance of trust on the immensity of the works. These shaft works are literally reversed monuments since attention is directed into the Earth and its forces in symbolic ways. The unrealized Olympic Mountain project (1970) for the 1972 Munich

Olympics proposed a 2.74 metre wide shaft to be drilled 122 metres through a hill made of rubble that had been constructed after World War II. The shaft was to reach the soil beneath the hill but signified only by a plate mounted on its top: a subtle attempt to link the results of real human-made destruction with natural forces that are potentially destructive. The rubble, pebbles and small rocks, represented the forces of war which reduced buildings to what De Maria described as more ―natural‖ forms.

As the rubble contained military debris and possibly human remains, the proposal was rejected by the commissioning body. Papers including geological surveys, site notes, precise budgets and time lines lodged at the Nevada Museum of Art show another detailed project analysis for the creation of a similar work of 121.9 metres in depth and 2.74 metres in diameter and weighing 76,910 kilograms, on Bisquit

Mountain high in the Mustang Range (between 1,478 and 1,609 metres), near

Tombstone, Arizona. Although unable to be seen, its presence would have been marked by a large 6.4 metre steel plate. This project was also unrealized, but in

1977 De Maria created a work that greatly expanded upon these two proposals.

Conceived as part of Documenta 6, The vertical earth kilometer (1977) is a one kilometre long shaft of solid brass (composed of one hundred and sixty seven 6 metre lengths), 5.1 centimetres in diameter, drilled through six geological layers down into the Earth. Its position in the front of the Friedricianum Museum, Kassel, is

146 marked at the surface by a 2 metre square brass plate and surrounded by a sandstone path and a garden—a stark contrast to its dramatic and controversial excavation and installation. The plate is the only evidence of the work; the excavated materials were cleared away at the time of installation, but curiously some photographs of it show only the façade of the museum and the path as a small foreground feature.78 De Maria was again exploring or joining concepts related to natural and human-made forces, while perhaps hinting at human fragility or insignificance compared with Earth‘s invincible forces. The work refers to the mystery and ambiguity in the perceptions of scale since while a one kilometre work is obviously a gigantic sculpture, that distance is only a fraction of the real scale of

Earth. While the shaft could not possibly reach the magma or lava at the earth‘s core, it re-creates both the structure of a mine shaft and the vertical thrust of a volcano.79 This evocation of natural energy forces continued to intrigue De Maria and would be demonstrated dramatically in The Lightning Field, his signature intervention in the landscape.

The Lightning Field

The Lightning Field is a huge metallic intervention into a natural landscape, sporadically operational since it requires or ―tempts‖ the power of nature to complete the work. De Maria acknowledges that Bed of spikes (1968) was the catalyst for The

Lightning Field and he began looking for suitable sites to install it in 1972.80 The original test Field was installed in 1974 on a private property in north Arizona and it consisted of thirty five stainless steel poles each 5.48 metres tall, placed at intervals of 61 metres. It was dismantled in 1976 and is now in storage under the stewardship of the Dia Foundation which also commissioned and maintains the current Field.81

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G. Robert Deiro, the Hughes corporation pilot who showed the Nevada and New

Mexico sites to Heizer and De Maria, first recommended that De Maria choose the site for the new Lightning Field (1977) (illus. 37) in the plains beneath the Datil

Mountains in western New Mexico, the area of the United States with the highest recorded annual number of lightning strikes, although these number only around sixty a year. Measurements have shown that lightning senses the Field’s poles from

61 metres above them, so the possibilities of contact are as high as they can be.82

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Illus. 37, Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field (1977). Photograph by John Cliett from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 2–3.

The four hundred poles range in height from 4.57 metres to 8.15 metres, according to their placement in the field. The different heights take account of the topography and result in all of the poles being perceived to be level at the top. Comprised of stainless steel cylindrical cases around heavy carbon steel inserted into concrete bases, the poles are embedded into cement foundations that are one metre deep,

148 and are placed 30 centimetres below the ground. Their cylindrical shapes enable them to withstand extreme wind pressures and their futuristic forms of ―repressed power‖ belie their fabrication.83 The poles were installed precisely in rows with the north–south coordinates numbered A to S and the east–west coordinates numbered

1 to 25. Each pole was then designated a number such as C3, E10 and so forth, meaning that height variations were more easily accommodated. This grid formation contrasts strongly with its site, paralleling The New York Earth Room’s free form contrasting with the right angles of the room and the outside Manhattan street grid.

The height of the poles, as noted previously, is all to do with their ability to attract lightning. In this way they contrast with Richard Serra‘s Shift (to Terry Serra) (1970–

72), which has a ―moving‖ centrality within its lines of six 1.5 metre rectilinear walls, achieved through its measurement of human scale against the indeterminacy of the land.84 Serra‘s walls are placed according to the topographical elements and can be viewed simultaneously from any given point. They therefore rise and fall according to a viewer‘s eye level, presenting a multiplicity of centres. As the elevation changes, so does the centrality.

The Technical Development notes at the Field site contain details such as measurements and materials and notes on the five-month installation period, as well as lists of all of the names of contractors, suppliers and assistants involved in the installation. Complete documentation including personal and project correspondence and detailed archival material including all maps, plans, sketches, some on napkins and placemats, site notes, photographs and legal correspondence is lodged at the

Nevada Museum of Art.

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As viewer participation is necessary to complete the work, visitation is encouraged but tightly controlled. Only a maximum of six visitors are permitted at the site at any time—a ratio condition that ensures that the scale of the Field remains overwhelming and that the site‘s isolation is preserved. Visitors or ―pilgrim tourists‖ must reserve a place and are met by a driver at the nearby town of Quemado, where they sign a liability waiver.85

It is noteworthy that all commentaries on The Lightning Field relate the narrative of the commentator‘s journey to the site, as the experience of the work begins at

Quemado. De Maria‘s statement that ―The land is not the setting of the work, but a part of the work‖ could be expanded to include the viewer‘s journey to the site.86

Commentators also record the meteorological conditions and their effects on the reflections of the poles, thereby directly immersing themselves with its secondary purpose.

The drive to this remote site is disorienting (a winding, unsealed road in the desert), while the approach is underwhelming since the colours, the thinness of the poles and the spaciousness of the installation make it difficult to see until visitors are very close to it. The view is filled with rugged tertiary coloured landforms and a featureless plain of low tussock grass and small wildflowers. The desert conditions leave the earth‘s surface dry and cracked and the abundance of rabbits attests to its degradation. It is clearly and pointedly a landscape of no human activity. The poles come into vision only as proximity increases, the light effects change and the heat haze lifts, and viewers are then contemplating the questions of whether the site is significant

150 because of the intrusion of the poles or whether they are an intrusion onto an otherwise undisturbed and unspectacular space. The scale of the work, it should be said, is also deceptive since the height of the encircling hills does not dominate.

Arriving at the site, the practical conditions and implications of the visit are explained and the driver leaves to return the next day. Apart from the caretakers of the Field, no-one lives near the site. Accommodation is provided in a three bedroom wooden bungalow, constructed from other early twentieth-century abandoned local cabins and homesteads, with the natural wood exterior and the surrounding verandah blending the house with the landscape and embedding it into it.87 The rows of poles begin only three hundred metres from the house but their precision and industrial construction contrast with an old windmill and some broken fence posts as well as with the naturally ―chaotic‖ landscape—weathered utensils in a site that appears to be quintessentially western American and resembles the romanticized setting for a

Western film. De Maria‘s words that ―Isolation is the essence of Land Art‖, are borne out by the location and starkness of the setting.88

Walking around the perimeter of The Lightning Field can take up to two hours and the well-trodden paths attest to the ritualistic trek that thousands of viewers have made around it. As with the Las Vegas piece, there are no designated entry points or pathways to traverse the site, but the majority of viewers clearly prefer a full circumnavigation. Aligned to its rectangular shape, all poles are mathematically placed in an ordered sequence of 61 metres apart in rows of twenty five (the east– west axis) by sixteen (the north–south axis), totalling four hundred, and regardless of the direction of a viewer‘s walk, it is impossible to miss the changing patterns made

151 by the differing perspectives of the sequence. De Maria has again combined the

Imperialist and European measurement systems by making the rectangle one mile by one kilometre. It seems ironic that many of De Maria‘s works were conceived, fabricated and displayed in Europe, using understandably, metric measurements and that he displays them in the United States, a country that has steadfastly refused to adopt the metric system. This internationalist perspective contrasts his practice and sentiments with those of Heizer.

Because of the regular transport arrangements, the site is first seen in the early afternoon. When the poles are lit by the sun they appear to be white but they are quickly camouflaged and become grey and black as the sun lowers and shadows appear. Like silent sentinels they stand as a human intervention into and onto a landscape, protecting nothing, as it were, but an atmosphere. Their thinness and isolation make them appear vulnerable and hide their innate power. The sheen created by the stainless steel and the swift replacement of the poles if damaged keeps the installation looking new—a concern for De Maria in all of his metallic works. Although they are obviously man-made and have been inserted into an alien landscape, the landscape initially dominates because of its surrounding and all- encompassing nature and because of the slender, cylindrical shape and lightness of the poles. This dominance decreases when one is immersed in the installation.

There is a contrast of the precision of the poles with the randomness of the New

Mexico landscape, and completion of the work is only through chance meteorological conditions. The perspectives created by the lines of the poles are a surprising feature of the structure. Like a diagram imposed upon a painting, the vanishing points lead to the mountains, integrating the entire structure into the landscape. The

152 verticality and precise placements of the poles contrast with the lateral and organic lines of the mountains.

The poles have welded rounded tapered tips which from the ground appear to be triangular, reminding viewers that they are primarily instruments or tools for conducting lightning strikes. As structures that have their genesis in elements drawn from the earth, the poles have been inserted back into the landscape in ways that give them their new properties. De Maria is demonstrating Smithson‘s observation that even the most advanced tools and machines are made of ―the raw matter of the earth‖—a realization that was attractive to both artists and which was expanded by

De Maria to show the potential power that might be achieved through a combination of the enhancement of the power from the skies.89 As well as the occasional and random lightning strikes, the ―St Elmo‘s Fire‖ phenomenon of glowing electrical currents being emitted from the tips of the poles can be seen. In calling the work ―an emblem of unbounded will‖ Carter Ratcliff is perhaps alluding to De Maria‘s challenge and invocation of superhuman forces to react according to his artistic plan.90

Kathleen Shields, overseer of The Lightning Field for the Dia Foundation, comments that the work ―carries strong implications of the desire to sanctify our relationship with the world‖ is in harmony with the spirituality that The Lightning Field evokes in many visitors.91 Apart from the direct interaction of viewers walking around and through the Field, their reflections are caught on the poles and they become a part of the work. Like the changing sunlight, their presences are temporal and moving, contrasting with the permanence of both the poles and the landscape. Visitors

153 become aware that their attention is directed both to the sky above the poles and to the ground below them and that the poles are extraordinary links between the two.

In the sunset reflection, the poles become a bright golden-coloured shimmer and the grid lines are more distinct and prominent. Light and shadow give the impression that all of the poles are facing in the same direction while emphasizing only one section at a time. They lose their cylindricality and appear to be flat. The force of the light changes the illusion as the closer the light source appears, the more the poles begin to disappear. The gigantic scale allows different sections of the site to recede and to come forward, thereby adding new depth to the installation. As the sun drops below the horizon, the hills become silhouetted. As they darken, the shadows make the poles appear to be more numerous and of differing heights; and, as the sun descends over the hills, the depth of field increases and the poles change in colour to white and then to yellow-orange. The cyclic rotation of the sun means that the poles that were darkened first as the sun moved west are lightened first from the east at dawn, and the cycle of gold at sunset and silver at dawn reflects the colours of De Maria‘s other metallic grid works. This natural occurrence adds a strongly poetic quality to the work. At dawn in the low sunlight the poles appear to be white.

The rows and individual numbers of poles are most distinct at sunrise when all are illuminated and they fade and ―disappear‖ as the sun rises. The peaks are hit by the sun first, which then moves down to illuminate all of the poles. Coincidentally, the shapes, stature and inherent power of the poles are echoed by the numerous windmills from the wind farms recently placed throughout the western part of New

Mexico and Texas.

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Big in size and big in concept, The Lightning Field appears smaller than it is when one is in its presence. This in large measure is because of the scale of the surrounding mountains. An aerial view of the work (a perspective as has been noted, that is an anathema to the artist) shows the grid points whereas at ground level, the verticality dominates and challenges the sky. This call to the skies, so to speak, as well as to harnessing energy has been a primal interest for millennia, and while the work was industrially manufactured, it has similar intentions and appeals as do the monuments of antiquity. The precision and scale of the installation emphasize De

Maria‘s dedication to the physical and conceptual intensities of the project and his determination for its longevity, but even without the contingency of the replacement of the damaged poles, the scale of the work declares a pronounced presence.

The number of bookings each year attests to the continued recognition and popularity of The Lightning Field. Its status has grown to being a mandatory visit for anyone seriously interested in 1970s art. For others, its large size, the precise and difficult installation and its surreal placement in the desert are strongly appealing.

The regular notices in the press keep the site topical and of interest for potential visitors.92 Some critical responses, however, are less complimentary, with criticism levelled at the artist‘s attitude to the work and control of it. Geoff Dyer has cynically called the work‘s title a ―sensational bit of marketing‖, while John Beardsley claims that the audience‘s ―controlled‖ engagement with the work denies ―an independent appraisal‖ of it.93

The effects of The Lightning Field upon viewers can be profound. The critic and academic Kenneth Baker has recently detailed his responses in a book published in

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2008. Although he is at pains to emphasize that his essays are works of ―description and reflection, not of scholarship‖, he includes multiple and detailed references throughout as he expands on the thoughts that The Lightning Field inspires.94

Pointedly, he is subject to the same reveries and fantasies that affect many other viewers, including this writer.

In the essay entitled 1978, Baker describes his first two visits to the site in the year after it was made and his delight at how the lighting effects changed over the course of his ten days there. In other more recent essays, published in the same volume, he addresses such seemingly mundane topics as Cabins, Wilderness and Numbers and then continues to more esoteric issues. Topics such as Laws, Panic, Witness and

Bounds may seem irrelevant to descriptions of his site visits but they reflect Baker‘s entrancement by the power of the site to suggest concerns ranging from the everyday to the philosophical.95 Baker‘s essays, it seems to me, convey the same intensity as do the maxims written at Michael Heizer‘s Double Negative site, discussed in Chapter Two.

The Lightning Field is aimed into space and is activated by atmospheric forces, so questions about the forces beyond Earth naturally arise, as De Maria would have hoped. Baker notes that although the rows of poles are parallel, which is universally understood to mean that they do not converge, since the seventeenth century mathematicians have claimed that, as parallel lines do appear to converge at vanishing points, they do indeed converge in infinity.96 As such, De Maria is again playing with mathematical principles and human and spatial perspectives to present a conundrum of space, size and mathematics.

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In 1983 De Maria planned an expanded version of The Lightning Field for an unspecified site in the Northern Territory, Australia. Titled variously, Proposal for an

Earth sculpture and The 2000 Ring Lightning Field, it was to commemorate the

Australian Bicentenary of 1988 while anticipating the new millennium. Two thousand stainless steel poles, 7 metres high and 5 centimetres in diameter were to be anchored in 2 metre deep cement foundations. They were to be arranged in one hundred, one kilometre rows of twenty each, within two huge circles of between 6.28 kilometres at the inner circle and 12.56 kilometres at the outer. The radius of this

Field was to be four kilometres and the area of the work would have totalled 158 square kilometres, an extraordinary challenge that would not have daunted De

Maria.97 The design could be interpreted as twenty concentric circles of one hundred poles or one hundred radiating rows of two hundred poles. Given the ambitious logistics of this gigantic work, it is perhaps not surprising that it was never realized.

Since there is extremely little information on this work, any observations are purely speculative.

The broken kilometer and later floor based works

In stark contrast to The Lightning Field, De Maria‘s later metallic works, portable and displayed indoors, play with the concept of horizontality—panels and rods arranged in mathematical configurations, emphasizing the lateral and invoking infinity.

Distance is materialized and displayed in The broken kilometer (1979) where five hundred 2 metre long, 5 centimetre thick brass rods, weighing 19 tonnes, are presented in parallel rows. The ambiguity of the title refers to the literal ―broken‖ one kilometre rod and to the ―broken‖ function of the distance—which is now, of course,

157 no longer linear but displayed in a new manner. Paralleling the presence of Museum

Piece (see p. 128), The broken kilometer objectifies a concept and its purpose has been dematerialized. The identical rods of Sol Le Witt‘s Incomplete Open Cube series (1974) have been removed from their parts of vertical structures and placed into systematic patterns on the floor, thereby changing their gestalt from intriguing plays with three-dimensional mathematical forms to an impersonal display of measurements. Being lateral, this is the complementary work to The Vertical Earth kilometer and it has converted that work‘s absence into a presence by moving it indoors. Josef Helfenstein claims that through his uniquely measured works De

Maria ―abolish[es] the notions of form and composition within the history and theory of modern art‖; that is, these works use the large scale and established numerical systems as compositional elements, rather than traditional devices such as shape and colour.98 De Maria understands the aesthetic inherent in series and repetition, as the Pop artists did, and has expanded on the seemingly sterile repetition used by the

Minimalists. He has made a work that both challenges and engages the intellect of the viewer with its perception of distance. Engagement is extended through the changing light and shadows that play upon the rods, which are lit by metal Halide stadium lights to emphasize their grandiosity. This play and the patterned floor relieve an otherwise sombre atmosphere. Again, while the dimensions and materials are listed for viewers, it is the force and mood created by these industrially fabricated rods within an older building that give the work its meaning.

While it is virtually impossible to visualize accurately a distance such as a kilometre, viewers are intrigued that one is presented to them in five hundred pieces. Trust once again is critical to the success of the work as one must accept De Maria‘s

158 measurements. The rods at the rear of the room are placed further apart, to make them appear to be the same distance from each other as those at the front. One kilometre, needless to say, can be divided equally into many combinations; De

Maria‘s five hundred rods simply demonstrate one division which fills the specific interior space at 393 West Broadway, New York, where the work is permanently displayed. Here, the massive scale is achieved from the most fundamental of arrangements and from small packages and objects.

In a reversion to the Minimalist forms and formations of Judd and Morris, De Maria continued to create mathematical and systematic installations, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of regularly placed metallic rods. Some are large-scaled floor- based re-creations of the 1960s ―events‖ metallic sculptures (see pp. 127–129). The

4 – 6 – 8 Series (1966–91) placed vertical rods in linear or cluster arrangements and other works of increasingly ambitious titles, which directly invoked allusions to infinity and maintained De Maria‘s commitment to the gigantic in scale and in concept. A computer which will solve every problem in the world / 3 —12 Polygon (1984) placed seventy five triangular stainless steel polygon rods, each one metre long and weighing 31.7 kilograms in rows increasing in numerical order from three to twelve.

The tapered formation reflects the number of rods in each row, determined by the number of sides of each polygon in that row. Ironically resembling an abacus, the ten rows of rods refer to order and disorder, according to the position of the viewer in the room.

Expanding the size of Smithson‘s Non-sites of mineral fragments within contained metal crates to the scale of the Earth Rooms and revisiting the intercontinental vision

159 of Three Continent Project, the first 5 Continent Sculpture (1987) (illus. 38) was an immense intervention of equally-mixed white marble, quartz and magnesite stones gathered from Greece, India, Brazil, Kenya and the United States. Dated from between 22 million and 1.8 billion years, the stones covered a gallery floor to an area of 200 square metres and to a depth of one metre and were not altered in any way.

The Non-site installation was later re-created in a 25 cubic metre vertical cage for the collection of Daimler AG in Mohringer, Germany as 5 Continent Sculpture (1989).

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 38, Walter De Maria, 5 Continent Sculpture (1987). Photograph by Nanda Lanfranco, from Celant, Walter De Maria, 216.

2000 sculpture, made in 1992, is the simplest concept of the floor works, its title urging a consideration of the number of the four digits which at the time of the work‘s creation, pointed to the second millennium: another example of De Maria‘s evocation of immense concepts through more moderate means. It consists of 2,000 elongated

160 pentagonal and octagonal polyhedron rods each between 11.8 and 12 centimetres in diameter and all between 1.2 metres and 1 metre in length. There are 800 five-sided rods, 800 seven-sided rods and 400 nine-sided rods made of plaster and hydrocal.

The installation instructions allow for the rods to be placed in either an open rectangular pattern of 10 metres by 50 metres, in alternate lateral and horizontal lines, similar to those in a Mondrian painting, or in rows like The broken kilometer.

Each square metre contains four elements of the same type placed in a precise diagonal number structure and the entire work weighs 10,800 kilograms. Because of its dimensions and the illusions it creates through its spatial relationships, 2000 sculpture was chosen for the inaugural ―closed‖ exhibition at LACMA‘s Resnick

Pavilion in 2010, a site of 4,645 square metres. It was reinstalled in 2012 for the wider public attention.99

In what is a relatively small oeuvre, De Maria produced works in the desert, works that ambitiously interacted with the sky and, by contrast, with subterranean elements: he brought the outdoors indoors with his Earth Rooms and the proposed works generated by satellites. All of these modes of practice the artist considered to be meaningful investigations into mathematical systems and scientific principles.

Underlining all of De Maria‘s activities was, however, a deep interest in the transformative nature of elements of the Earth as well as their aesthetic dimensions.

Endnotes

1 De Maria (from Heinz Ohff, Galerie der Neuen Kunste exhibition catalogue, Guttershoh, 1971) cited in Jochimsen, ―Time in Contemporary Art: From limits to infinity‖, in Michel Baudson (ed.), Art and time, exh. cat., Brussels and London: Société des expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts and Barbican Gallery, 1986, 35.

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2 Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art, London: Art Data, 1995, 13. 3 Carol Hall, ―Environmental artists: Sources and directions‖, in Alan Sonfist (ed.), Art in the land: A critical anthology of Environmental Art, New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1983, 20. 4 De Maria in David Bourdon, ―Walter De Maria: The singular experience‖, Art International, No. 10, 20 December 1968, 39. 5 Jonathan Fineberg, Art since 1940: Strategies of being, London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2000, 326. 6 Neville Wakefield, ―Walter De Maria: Measure and substance‖, Flash Art, May–June 1995, 91. 7 Yuji Akimoto, ―Walter De Maria‘s universal form‖, in Tadao Ando builds for Walter De Maria, James Turrell and Claude Monet, exh. cat., Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum, Ostfildern–Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005, 115. 8 Ibid., 118. 9 Ibid., 119. 10 Germano Celant, Walter De Maria, Milano 1999-2000, Dia Centre for the Arts, Kunstmuseum Basel, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1999, 210. Translated for the author of this thesis by Marco Migotto in 2011. 11 Ibid., 200. 12 Edmund Burke, ―On the Sublime and Beautiful‖ in A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our idea of the Sublime and Beautiful, (1756), University of Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, 2014. Accessed 12 March 2014 from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burke/edmund/sublime/part1.html. 13 Lars Nittve, ―The sublime‖, in Lars Nittve (ed.), Walter De Maria, exh. cat., Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1989, 80. 14 Nittve, ―Energy‖, in Ibid., 83. 15 Mario Perniola, ―Beauty is like a Lightning Bolt‖, in Ibid., 101. 16 John Beardsley, ―Traditional aspects of New Land Art‖, Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, Fall 1982, 227. 17 Ingrid Rein, ―Infinity‖, in Nittve, Walter De Maria, 98. 18 The most extensive interview was recorded on 4 October 1972 with Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art. This interview was accessed 15 January 2013 from http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-walter-de-maria-1. 19 De Maria, Compositions, Essays, Meaningless Work, Natural Disasters, in La Monte Young (ed.), An anthology, New York: George Maciunas and Jackson Mac Low, 1962, reprinted by George Maciunas Foundation Inc., accessed 17 July 2013 from http://georgemaciunas.com/?page_id=860. 20 Oldenburg, ―I am for an art…‖, in Claes Oldenburg, Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962), New York: Something Else Press, 1967, accessed 26 August 2013 from http://userpages.chorus.net/burleigh/art/iam4.html. 21 My source for this information was Jane McFadden, ―Toward Site‖, Grey Room, No. 27, Spring 2007, 41, who sourced it from Robert Morris, ―Traveling Sculpture (A means toward a sound record)‖ (1960). According to McFadden the printed pages of ―Traveling Sculpture‖ were removed by Morris from Young, An anthology (the collated versions of which were stored in Morris‘s loft prior to

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distribution in 1963). McFadden herself (note 11, p. 52) consulted a copy of Morris's removed pages at the Getty Research institute. 22 Robert Smithson, ―A sedimentation of the mind: Earth Projects‖ (1968), in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson, The complete writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 101. 23 Nittve, ―Energy‖, in Nittve, Walter De Maria, 83. 24 De Maria, Archives of American Art interview, 22. 25 Ibid., 13. 26 Celant, Walter De Maria, 195. 27 Ibid. 28 De Maria was a member of The Primitives (with Lou Reed and John Cale) which ultimately became the iconic New York band the Velvet Underground from the end of 1965, after his departure. 29 McFadden, ―Toward site‖, 47. 30 For instance, see Valentin Tatransky‘s review discussed below. 31 David Bourdon, ―Walter De Maria: The singular experience‖, Art International, Vol. 12, No. 10, Christmas 1968, 43. 32 Wim A. L. Beeren, Walter De Maria, exh. cat., Rotterdam: Museum Boymans–van Beuningen, 1984, 8. 33 These were shown at De Maria and Robert Whitman‘s gallery at 9 Great Jones Street, New York in 1963. Josef Helfenstein traces the sources of De Maria‘s geometric or ―pure‖ shapes through Malevich, le Corbusier and Mondrian, and although they fulfilled his stated desire for complete and unemotional forms, they contrasted with his interest in the free form of Happenings and with his rock music playing. Josef Helfenstein (ed.), Walter De Maria: Trilogies, New Haven: Yale University Press (for the Menil Foundation Inc.), 2011, 18.) 34 McFadden, ―Toward site‖, 46. 35 De Maria was determined that these boxes were unrelated to those of Joseph Cornell whose works he deemed to be Surrealist. 36 De Maria, Archives of American Art interview, 11. 37 Ibid., 17. 38 The second Channel Series, a trilogy of Circle, Square and Triangle (1972) was exhibited as a complementary work to the Bel Air Trilogy (2011) at the Menil Foundation, Houston where the same geometric shapes were reproduced as four-metre long stainless steel rods inserted through the front and rear windows of three 1955 Chrysler Bel Air automobiles. 39 J. C. Cooper, ―Swastika‖, in Nittve, Walter De Maria, 90-1. 40 De Maria‘s 25 tonne red granite Large red sphere (2010) is placed at the Turkentor, Munich, an abandoned military barracks that were occupied by, amongst others, Adolf Hitler in the years following World War 1. This placement gives the work an unmistakable socio-political dimension, countering any ambiguity from the first Channel Series. 41 The precise number has not been revealed.

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42 A High energy bar was auctioned in Stockholm in 2009 and brought $31,000: http://angelfloresjr.multiply.com/journal/item/2992. 43 The pun of the title is another reference to American advertising culture and to their industrial manufacture. 44 De Maria, Archives of American Art interview, 17. 45 Wakefield, ―Walter De Maria: Measure and substance‖, 91. 46 De Maria cited in Calvin Tomkins, ―Onward and upward with the arts: maybe a quantum leap‖, The New Yorker, 5 February 1972, 42. 47 Thomas B. Hess praised the precision and subtlety of the work while disparaging The New York Earth Room in the same review. Art News, 31 October 1977, cited in Andrew Russeth, ―Walter De Maria‘s Equal area series in 1977‖, accessed 15 January 2013 from http://www.16miles.com/2010/11/walter-de-marias-equal-area-series-in.html. 48 De Maria, Archives of American Art interview, 20. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 23. 51 Lucy Lippard, 557,087 exhibition catalogue, Seattle: Seattle Museum of Art, 1969, cited in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.), Conceptual Art: A critical anthology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 52 Edgar Arceneaux‘s poster Detroit (2009) (illus. 34), reworking the 1968 image, shows the seminal status of this photograph. 53 McFadden has judged this as the physical representation of La Monte Young‘s notes for Composition 1960 #10 which was devised as the musical equivalent of an enormously long line drawing: McFadden, ―Toward site‖, 48. 54 As stated in the previous chapter, Heizer presented a large two-dimensional transparency of Dissipate 2 and other photographs from Nine Nevada Depressions. 55 Yellow Painting / The color that men choose when they attack the earth (1968) was given a new status forty three years later, in 2011, when De Maria created the overtly political paintings Red Painting / No War No and Blue Painting / Yes Peace Yes in the same format and dimensions, and summarily titled the three The Statement Series for his Trilogies exhibition at the Menil Museum, Houston. 56 G. Robert Deiro stresses the differences in the work practices of both De Maria and Heizer and calls De Maria ―ethereal‖, ―elegant‖ and ―Eurocentric‖ because he preferred to draw upon a lake rather than cut into it and because he was not concerned to embed works into the land. (G. Robert Deiro Transcript, 5 January 2009, 9, Nevada Museum of Art. Center for Art + Environment Collections. Gift of G. Robert Deiro.) 57 The earth from the void that Heizer had already dug, for part of his contribution to the exhibition, was then used by David Medalla (b. 1942) for his own earth work. (Sharp, ―On the ‗Earth Art‘ exhibition at Cornell University‖, 39.)

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58 Their rivalry over suitable sites was partially resolved by Deiro leasing Jean Dry Lake, Nevada from the Nevada Bureau of Land Management so that both artists could work on it. (G. Robert Deiro Transcript, 29 December 2008, 4.) 59 There is an interesting parallel here with the contemporaneous paintings of Lucio Fontana (1899– 1968) which worked against the illusory two-dimensional nature of canvas paintings by cutting into their surfaces: a reference suggested by Dr Alan Krell of UNSW / Art & Design. 60 Rosalind Krauss says that linear Land Art ―functions within the metaphysical expression of the self that has been the concern of a completely post-Expressionist art‖. (Rosalind Krauss, ―Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ‗60s sculpture‖, Artforum, November 1973, 51.) 61 Swastika was destroyed shortly after completion and no photographic records were made of it. 62 It is curious that in response to an enquiry from Arcy Douglass who had located the work, De Maria reportedly stated that he ―requests that people neither try to locate it or visit it‖, preferring that it be left to be subsumed by the environment. (Email from Lynne Cooke, Dia Foundation, New York to Arcy Douglass, 11 August 2008), accessed 2 February 2013 from http://portlandart.net/archives/2008/11/revisiting_mich.html/. 63 Jonathan Crary has noted that although ‗globalization‘ connotes space and the large scale, it no longer refers to locations. (Jonathan Crary, ―Foreword‖ in De Oliveira et al, Installation art in the new millennium, London: Thames and Hudson, 2003, 7.) 64 McFadden, ―Toward site‖, 37. 65 De Maria conjectured about a new political order where artists could create work free of financial limitations, but how this was to happen was not explained. (Archives of American Art interview, 18.) 66 Live in your head exhibition catalogue, 1968, cited in Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon Press, 1998, 202. 67 Germano Celant ―remade‖ the 1968 When attitudes become form exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Venice in 2013. 68 Gerry Schum, Land Art , (1968-69), PAL transferred to DVD; black and white and sound, 35.30 minutes, Archive Gerry Schum and Ursula Weavers, Cologne (these details from Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the earth, 231.) 69 Schum‘s film Land Art featured four American artists: Oppenheim, Heizer, De Maria and Smithson; and four European artists: Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Marinus Boezem and Jan Dibberts. Because of its affinity with cinematography and its resonance with the European interest in the large scale, the film‘s emphasis is upon the creation of art in the gigantically scaled wilderness and many of the shots are aerial. The artists are portrayed as tiny figures exerting great efforts in their creations of art in natural landscapes. The film premiered on 15 April 1969 on German public television and was later shown at Land Art exhibitions and art house cinemas. All US television networks at that time were commercially owned, so it is difficult to imagine any network showing this film because of its perceived small audience. The German network believed either that it would be of interest to a larger audience, or else marketed it as another topical documentary film. 70 Roberta Smith, ―De Maria: Elements‖, Art in America, 66 No. 3, May–June 1978, 104.

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71 Michael Archer, Art since 1960, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, 92. 72 Julienne Lorz, ―The case for Munich 1968–1972‖, in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the earth, 163. 73 De Maria, Archives of American Art interview, 20. 74 De Maria in the press release for the ―Walter De Maria‘s Land Art‖ exhibition, Munich: Heiner Freidrich Gallery, 1968, cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 117. 75 The support of individual European gallerists and contemporary art expositions was critical in the promotion and appreciation of Land Art. As early as 1970, following the creation of Double Negative, Swiss gallerist Bruno Bischofberger commissioned Michael Heizer to create Vertical Displacement in the Santis Alps of north eastern Switzerland. Despite the project being abandoned for technical reasons, Bischofberger was aiming to create a work somewhat akin to Casper David Frederich‘s painting of a figure capturing the sublime moment when looking at a sunrise from a mountain top, The wanderer above the mists (1817-18). Virginia Dwan, the New York gallerist of nine of the early Land Artists encouraged her artists to travel extensively and airfares and expenses were deducted from the sales at subsequent exhibitions or from future commissions. Travel brought these American artists to the direct attention of European galleries and many came to be represented by them, particularly in Germany. De Maria called this an ―export‖ process since American artists had traditionally gone to Europe to experience the museums and to ―pick up the vibrations‖ of Europe, so to be exhibiting and selling art was a radical change in emphasis. (De Maria, Archives of American Art interview, 21.) De Maria believed that despite contemporary German art having been largely ignored in the United States, there was heightened interest and resultant funds for American art in Germany, primarily to make that country feel to be ―a part of the art scene‖. (Archives of American Art interview, 21). He further claimed that European galleries were more adventurous in showing Land work because it was avant-garde, and would therefore enhance their reputations among the international contemporary art world. In addition, according to De Maria, Europe had no suitable land for sale and all of the land had been walked upon and cultivated for many centuries so that achieving anything artistically new with it would be dissatisfying. (De Maria, Archives of American Art, 22.) For a history of European interest in Land Art from Heinz Mack‘s Sahara Project (1959–61) to Jean Tinguely‘s Study for an end of the world, No. 2 (1962), see Jane McFadden, ―Along the way to Land Art‖, in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the earth, 43–59. 76 Valentin Tatransky, ―Reviews‖, Arts 52, No. 4, December 1977, 16. 77 Benjamen Walker and Andrea Silenzi, A loft filled with dirt, the man who’s cared for it for 19 years, (4‘ 52‖ film), New York: WNYC Culture, 2008. 78 The vertical earth kilometer was offered to the city of Kassel by the Dia Foundation, with stringent maintenance and care conditions, in 1997. The city declined the offer. 79 De Maria‘s shaft works were anticipated only by Oldenburg‘s proposed underground funeral monument for President John F. Kennedy, which would have sealed the President‘s body inside a plasticized photograph of him and which would have been suspended upside down inside a larger

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container of the same shape. The body would then rotate in gyrostatic harmony with the Earth‘s rotation. 80 De Maria, ―Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics and Statements‖ (1980) reprinted in Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, London and Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press, 2010, 118. 81 Walter De Maria, ―The land is not the setting for the work, but a part of the work‖, Artforum, Vol. XVIII, No. 8, April 1980, 52–57. 82 Jeffrey Kastner (ed.) and Brian Wallis (surveyor), Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1998, revised 2010, 109. 83 Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, 21. 84 Liza Bear and Peter Eisenmann, in Richard Serra, Richard Serra, Writings Interviews, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, 13. 85 Chris McAuliffe, ―Pilgrimage and periphery: Robert Smithson‘s Spiral Jetty and the discourse of tourism‖, in Jaynie Anderson, Crossing cultures: Conflict, migrations and convenience: The proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art, Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009, 766. 86 De Maria (1980) in the notebook at The Lightning Field site, cited in Cornelia Dean, ―Drawn to the Lightning‖, New York Times, 21 September 2003. 87 Ibid. The accommodation and visitor program were established by Helen Winkler and Robert Fosdick, two of the assistants who worked on the sculptural installation. 88 Ibid. 89 Smithson, ―A sedimentation of the mind: Earth Projects‖ (1968), in Flam, Robert Smithson writings, 101. 90 Ratcliff, Out of the box, 79. 91 Kathleen Shields, ‖An essential solitude: Walter De Maria‘s Lightning Field‖, from an unnamed source in the Walter De Maria artist‘s file at the Dia Foundation, New York, accessed 18 October 2013. 92 Recent extensive mainstream press articles have included Dean, ―Drawn to the Lightning‖, and Geoff Dyer, ―Poles apart‖, The New Yorker, 18 April 2011. 93 Dyer, ―Poles apart‖, 65. 94 Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field, 1. 95 Baker has also detailed how interest in the site has peaked at various times and lists music clips and literary works which use it as a backdrop, as a feature and even as a title. (Baker, Ibid., 31.) 96 Ibid., 24. 97 Walter De Maria, 5 Kontinent Sculptur, exh. cat., Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1987, 106–7. 98 Helfenstein (ed.), Walter De Maria: Trilogies, 12. 99 John Bowsher, Deputy Director of Museum Planning LACMA, interviewed by author, November 2013.

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CHAPTER FOUR Dennis Oppenheim: The adventure of scale

Is your piece a large area of land with a hole in it or is it a hole? Is your piece

the entire globe with a hole in it?1

Dennis Oppenheim‘s years of concentrated Land Art practice (1966–70), and the returns he made to it throughout his career, were characterized by the utilization and invocation of the capacities of the large scale for the physical realization of broad and imaginative concepts that could not be produced in galleries. Yet he often employed the gallery space to present smaller versions of his colossal projects as well as his seemingly irreverent and whimsical propositions and therefore infused his conceptual works with an imagined gigantic scale that others created physically. His question ―Is your piece a large area of land with a hole in it or is it a hole? Is your piece the entire globe with a hole in it?‖ implied that Land Art was essentially of a limitless scale and invoked the essentiality behind it.

The massive works were matched by concepts that might best be described as equally immense and the unlikelihood or virtual impossibility of progressing some ambitious concepts to realization did not deter his continued development of them.

His practice can be divided into four categories: the realized cuts, voids and interventions in the land that made the works ―bound‖ to their locations—that is, they were an integral part of their sites and made the sites part of the works; ―proposals‖ and maquettes for larger architectural works that were responses to special purposes and locations; ―subversions‖ which played with actual commercial

168 concepts at their places of business; and Body / Performance Art which explored concepts within and on the body of the artist and others.

Land Art sites were selected because of their proximity to other natural or built forms and by the notion that whatever could be encompassed by the viewer within a single gaze must be considered as part of the compositions. Oppenheim‘s summation of his own works as ―It wasn‘t the cut, but where it ended‖ showed that they were not envisaged as ending at their edges or perimeters, nor the furthest point from where they could be visualized.2 That his works were temporal and needed explanations for audiences to be aware of their implications did not deter him from claiming their ambitious and ambiguous relationships with the world.

Oppenheim described the movement of sculpture to the large scale in the late 1960s as ―necessary‖ so that artists could engage in new and ―more complex systems‖, but unlike Heizer and De Maria, whose practices culminated in permanent gigantic interventions that emphasized mass and often dwarfed their surrounding landscapes, Oppenheim‘s body of immense ephemeral conceptual interventions, transplants and imprints onto the landscape, in the air and even in the sea, denied the grandeur or dominance of the sites and any invocation of the picturesque or the sublime.3

Oppenheim acknowledged that Dada was the catalyst for the explorations and realizations of both his whimsical and serious concepts, and he incorporated its use of irreverent methods, its juxtaposition of unrelated materials and its lack of concern for critical response. He also drew inspiration from Minimalism and Arte Povera, and

169 his openness and curiosity about exploring a variety of concepts expanded his unique form of Land Art into the seemingly unrelated areas of installation, film, and especially into Body / Performance Art. While this eclecticism rendered suspect a

―signature style‖, it seems to me that his oeuvre‘s ―larger than life wackiness‖ (to quote Dorothy Spears) could indeed be called his signature style.4 Oppenheim presented maquettes for large Land Art projects; produced documentation related to concepts that can best be described as gigantic; and used miniature elements such as phials of poison, dye and mosquitoes to realize schemes of an enormous nature.

In so far as many of Oppenheim‘s projects were in fact realized, although very few would have been seen due to the works‘ remote locations and brevity, it could be argued that they negated their status as Conceptual Art. Jonathan Crary, for one, has even suggested that Oppenheim‘s practice implied ―the very dissolution of concepts‖. In other words, Crary says the artist took concepts and explored them as if they were physical material which could be manipulated.5

While other Land Artists took from Abstract Expressionism its scale and the desired t immersion of viewers within the paintings‘ overall decentred patterns, Oppenheim, like Smithson, expanded its physicality. Smithson reworked Pollock‘s pouring of paint onto the horizontal canvas into an industrial process by having molten liquids poured onto sites from trucks, using the random elements of time, gravity and the contours of the sites to determine the final shapes of the works. Like lava, the thermodynamic forms stabilized only when the liquids cooled. Asphalt rundown (Rome 1969),

Concrete pour (Chicago 1969) and Glue pour (Vancouver 1970) transferred the processes of Action Painting outdoors to create permanent interventions into everyday sites.

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These seemingly casual production methods, like those of Arte Povera, can be cited as the inspiration for the roughness or unfinished nature of much of Oppenheim‘s work, despite the precise measurements undertaken for Land works such as the ice

Time line cut and the Mount Cotopaxi transplant (both 1968).6 Revealingly, despite his utilization of such spectacular elements as fire and explosions, discussed elsewhere in this chapter, Oppenheim claimed that Land Art fundamentally lacked ―a high visual quality‖ and that its concerns were more with ideas.7 Unlike Smithson, De

Maria and Heizer, who explored the implications and methods of Land Art continually, Oppenheim‘s practice, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, has always been hybrid.

There are many seemingly contradictory statements made by Oppenheim over the course of his career: his attitude to the importance of concepts over aesthetic effects; the worthiness of the rehabilitation of debilitated sites; and a lack of interest in natural environments, but these statements must be understood as being the result of a frenetic and continually-evolving practice. New ―conjuring‖ explorations and new conditions meant that many new allowances had to be made in the execution of work and Oppenheim‘s stated attitudes necessarily changed, resulting in the reversal at times of some of his earlier declarations.8

―I see the earth as sculpture‖, Oppenheim said, ―flying over the earth is like viewing existing painted areas or pictorial surfaces‖.9 Fanciful though it might seem, such sentiments equate him with the status of a giant playing with concepts and having the resources to realize them—and always clearly relishing the adventure of art

171 making. Certainly, Oppenheim‘s statement differentiates from the more considered or labour-intensive works of Heizer and De Maria, for whom precision of planning and execution and longevity were dominant concerns.10 The large scale suited large- scaled concepts, but in 1995 Oppenheim curiously complained that the implications of the expansion of Land Art in 1968 into the gigantic scale threatened to subsume the movement‘s style and integrity. He took some responsibility for the expansion and for the loss of art‘s ―delicate nuance‖ that had existed before Allan Kaprow‘s

Happenings.11 His concern was that the expansion to giantism was uncontrollable, as it freed Land Art from its otherwise sequential development from Minimalism, thereby losing traditional sculptural integrity.12 Although he continued to work in the large scale, Oppenheim‘s emphasis was always on the gesture and on the conceptual, thereby overriding aesthetic and longevity concerns.

Land Art inspired Oppenheim to explore what could be possible in art, to ―demystify‖ it, to challenge himself in a new terrain, and later to use his own body as a creative space.13 A wide range of materials was used, landscapes were chosen for their physical or socio-political characteristics, and humans, animals, insects and vegetation were incorporated. In this way he acted like a scientist , continually exploring and testing the possibilities of concepts in their surroundings , all the while making decisions, correlations and resolutions. His notebooks, Catalyst 1967–1974, illuminated the capturing of the ideas behind his Land Art and early Body Art practices.14 Divided into annual Sketch Books, they are brief chronological listings of the components required for works such as ―thermograph‖, ―excavated strip‖,

―coloured yarn used to relate field‖ and the initial concepts that would later be

172 realized: ―salt flat to be removed by wind acting melting forest‖ and ―isotherms cut into field until complete field is removed‖.

At his first meeting with Robert Smithson in 1967, Oppenheim unknowingly predicted his subsequent progression to Conceptual Art by expressing his disappointment in the ―zero point‖ reached by Minimalism, where both artists had begun their sculptural practices. Minimalism‘s self-referentiality and its declared absence of sentiment provoked Oppenheim into an original and innovative practice of enigmatic and conceptual works that both negated and affirmed conventional analyses. In works from the 1960s and 1970s he held to the principle of the dematerialization of the object—an aim he achieved by creating temporal works from the existing ephemeral materials in specific sites, despite them necessarily being in the large scale.15 Like

Heizer with his early voids, he was not contributing to the amount of art that already existed, although this was not specified as a consideration. He claimed that his contribution to Minimalism was the transference of its concerns from being object- oriented to being place-oriented.16

Influential exhibitions such as The Third International Exhibition of Figurative Artists in Amalfi, Italy in 1968 presented physical realizations of many of the concepts that were beginning to intrigue Oppenheim. Ideas and concepts that could sound whimsical or pointless became physical challenges for him and they were manifested through art in the large scale. As the realization of the concepts became the finished work, and the roughness or casual nature of them is unmistakable, it is reasonable to consider that the concepts were of equal or even of greater importance to him than the art itself, and their non-directive titles are perhaps evidence of this.17

173

Oppenheim‘s art had little relevance to the gallery system, even if he had been concerned about audience‘s reactions to it. However, unlike Heizer and De Maria, he was not motivated by a reaction to contemporary cultural or political events to abandon the gallery system, but rather, by the making of grand gestures in the realization of intriguing concepts, which would be compromised or impossible in a gallery. Land Art liberated his practice from size limitations, museum policies and schedules, and civic safety and legal restrictions. This in turn allowed him to create works on an unprecedented scale, in publicly inaccessible sites from a wide range of non-traditional materials. Exhibition of the documentary photographs, as evidence of their actions, further dematerialized the object but Oppenheim pronounced the photographs to be ―contradictions‖ as they often depicted the works as grander than they were (although much of his practice aggrandized what could be considered mundane or pedestrian) and that, as his Land Art was primarily an art of ideas and a combination of unrelated elements, photography was an inadequate medium.18 This limited documentary presentation as well as the work‘s execution and location prevented attention being given to aesthetic finishes, although the panels of photographs and maps, in both colour and black and white, themselves created a sense of visual harmony.

Oppenheim was an extraordinary advocate for his own art. The fervour of his practice is illustrated in the words: ―Why not begin the sculptural process by tunnelling mentally to match the material‘s stimulus from the earth‘s magnetism? The act of mining ore can be seen as analogous to creative thought,‖ thereby equating art making to an intense amalgam of physicality and intellectual rigour that implicitly

174 denied any limitations to the possibilities of the large scale.19 The analogy of tunnelling underlines his innate confidence in working in this manner.

“Bound” works

―All of a sudden this notion of a sculpture as place was manifest.‖ 20

Oppenheim‘s almost accidental entry into Land Art was through the explorations of voids in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii—explorations that were later developed into major works. With little attempt at composition or consideration of form, he dug voids and filled them with alien materials such as rusted metal and plaster and then burnt the materials. These experiments, ―identifying…with remnants of the Abstract Expressionist sensibility‖, investigated how fugitive elements reacted together, and they represented, for Oppenheim, attempts to do something that no other artist had done.21 These initial crude attempts were formalized in his first Land work, Excavator’s work (1966), a series of voids filled with steel rectangular box forms at Napa Valley, California, in the manner of Heizer‘s later Nine Nevada

Depressions (see Chapter Two, pp. 54–59). Unlike Heizer‘s stark voids, however, the boxes were later joined by pipes and covered with organic material and vegetation to integrate them with their setting. Interestingly, Oppenheim planned to return to the gestural and interventionist processes of his early practice as late as

1977 with the proposed Star Skid where a 61 metre long and 9 metre wide trench was to be cut into a lake bed in the ―Western United States‖ and filled with 9 metre concrete fragments and broken glass in the shapes of stars. The work could only have been read aerially and was meant to resemble the results of stars falling to

Earth. He was perhaps invoking and referencing Smithson‘s unrealized Island of

175 broken glass (1969) which was to be of one hundred tonnes of green tinted broken glass strewn across Miami Islet, near Vancouver, that would gradually be water- etched and swept into the sea, to return to its original form of silicate. Smithson‘s rejoinder to the official rejection of the proposal was that ―the island is not meant to save anything or anybody, but to reveal things as they are‖—a sentiment that accords with much of the idiosyncrasies of Oppenheim‘s practice.22 Oppenheim would have been fully aware that in the interim eight-year period, the environmental movement had become more of a mainstream concern, so that any chance of realizing his proposal would have been unlikely.

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 39, Dennis Oppenheim, Site marker. (Milled anodized aluminium, felt, plastic cylinder, location and description on parchment paper). (1967). From Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2001, 36.

The desires both to eliminate the object and to achieve full site integration were achieved by Sitemarkers (1967), where the ―sculptural objects‖, like ready-mades, already existed. The immediate catalysts for this series were Oppenheim‘s interest in

Carl Andre‘s use of the horizontal; the concepts raised in Smithson‘s essay Towards

176 the development of an air terminal site (1967), which envisaged large scaled art work integrated with the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport buildings and which was intended to be viewed aerially; and accompanying De Maria on an architectural tour of New York, where he noted De Maria‘s interest in combining architecture and art. Oppenheim‘s quotation at the beginning of this section expresses the excitement that he felt when executing Sitemarkers, with the realization that he was pronouncing or designating art in existing urban sites in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia, in the most fundamental fashion, through the addition of markers for them. Thomas McEvilley has written that Oppenheim was expanding Duchamp‘s designation of an artwork through contextualization: a progression from designating mundane objects as artworks to designating non-art sites as art spaces, thereby embedding art into the

―real‘ world.23 In this sense, these non-descript sites became galleries and were marked by the insertion of milled aluminium markers inside sacks, like land survey pegs (illus. 39). Although regarding the works only as ―tests‖, Oppenheim‘s deconstructing of Minimalism meant placing photographs of the sites with their specific architectural features and details into plastic cylinders (illus. 39 ).24 Like time capsules, they captured a specific moment in time, thereby giving the sites an exaggerated importance, all done, I would suggest with Oppenheim‘s typical sense of play.

The sites chosen, as pointed out above, were nondescript urban ones, at a deliberate distance from residential or areas of more human interactivity; and the works created were ―to explore the nature of meaning rather than form‖.25

Oppenheim had long declared a lack of interest in natural or aesthetically-pleasing sites but he did acknowledge the positive value in an artist reworking sites that had

177 been degraded previously by other human activity.26 Although large, the scales of the sites were indeterminate as he presented only cropped images of them. Some sites resembled Arte Povera assemblages while others exhibited interesting fragments of architectural features, usually of debilitated Minimalist-type forms.

Fragment sites included: Site #1, a metal and wooden grandstand with raked seating, anticipating the later Viewing Stations series; Site #4, a concrete staircase placed onto a shaped road embankment, anticipating the later Landslide; Site #6, an earth bunker with a large roof into which two voids were cut; and Site #8, a concrete platform piled with an octagon and a 1.21 metre high mound of concrete. The ―Arte

Povera‖ sites included: Site #3, a 3.05 x 4.57 metre rectangular void cut into a concrete slab and into which steel rods were placed, in the manner of reinforcing steel within a void for a concrete pour, Oppenheim‘s early voids and Heizer‘s

Collapse; Site #5, an assemblage of wooden boards and a broken pallet leaning against an industrial brick wall: another casual work that could be found anywhere; and Site #11, an area strewn with rubble. Oppenheim clearly saw the sculptural integrity of all of these sites and, despite their degraded and temporal natures, the markers noted them for posterity.

For exhibition, panels depicting photographs of the sites, and listing their numbers, titles and precise descriptive and location details, were presented. Each panel was signed and dated by the artist with a vacant space for a future ―Holder date of transfer‖, with the possible ―sale‖ of the panels imitating official land purchase records, works that paralleled De Maria‘s High energy bars examined in Chapter

Three, reducing art to the status of records and removing as many references to Art as possible. The exhibition of Sitemarkers in a gallery ultimately gave it a degree of

178 accessibility while in effect creating a new work by reducing its original enormous scale to a domestic one.

Although working as directional features, the markers were integral parts of the sites and compositions with their precise Minimalist forms contrasting with the gestural and unfinished natures of the sites. They clearly referenced Smithson‘s designations of Sites and Non-sites, and the dialectic between the real locations of his exhibited minerals and the galleries where they were shown. Unlike Smithson, however,

Oppenheim viewed Land Art as ―subversive‖ and this view is evidenced in

Sitemarkers. These works seemed simply to appear in their locations, in the manner of later anonymous urban artists such as the British artist Banksy, whose site- specific stenciled paintings blend graffiti, Pop Art and political comment.27

Oppenheim, however, was indirectly criticizing his own practice of dematerializing the object.

The 1.5 metre Oakland wedge (1967) at Oppenheim‘s parents‘ home in Richmond,

California, was a direct response to his studies of Minimalism (and to his concern that it was an unfavoured and underrated movement in California), to his studies of phenomenology and to the writings of Smithson, Andre, LeWitt and Michael Fried.28

This simple geometric void, cut into a hill and lined with Plexiglass, advanced his concerns at exploring the dematerialization of the object and awakened in him an understanding of the possibilities of the large scale. Boettger describes Oppenheim‘s desire as being ―to shed all of those more emotional references and social references, and [wanting] to open up this sort of secret dialogue with this new conceptual landscape‖ encapsulating his ideas to form a new kind of art.29 Such

179 thoughts may not have been foremost in Oppenheim‘s mind but Oakland wedge was free of the ―emotion‖ of the first voids, which were filled with objects and burned. It was, however, only a temporary lapse, so to speak, as the interventions and

―transplants‖ created from 1968 were distinctly affective. Oakland wedge was important for Oppenheim‘s development as both a Land and Conceptual Artist as he had created for the first time a work that was ephemeral yet intrinsically ―bound‖ to the earth.

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 40, Dennis Oppenheim, Landslide (1968). From Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 49.

Interest in objects entering new physical spaces and becoming part of those spaces led to Oppenheim‘s first large scale intervention, Landslide (1968) (illus. 40). On the embankment of the Long Island Expressway in New York, lines of wooden boards were placed in increasingly wider bands down the slope to a length of 304.8 metres—their placement in a cascading triangular shape making them appear as

180 erosion buttresses. Oppenheim meant them as references to latitude lines, imagining and embedding his art into the broader world and invoking gigantic and invisible but universally understood concepts. This was one of the first examples of Land Art to be seen by a mass audience, who presumably thought of it as having an industrial purpose until it was featured widely in the media.

After the urban series, Oppenheim moved his practice to remote and specific rural locations and began the large scale realization of concepts where the transposition and ―re-contextualization‖ of alien materials and interventions into the landscape created unique and enigmatic conceptual incongruities.30 He enjoyed the conundrums—the motive behind them being the self-made challenge to realize actual and imagined concepts through the physical transposition of real symbols..

Contour lines scribed in swamp grass (1968), was a ―crop circle‖ projection (filled with aluminium filings) of the topographic contours of a Connecticut mountain onto to a field that was regularly submerged by water. The entropic work lasted only a few months, and the use of metal and the ―destruction‖ of the site created a pseudo- industrial wasteland. By transposing topographical mapping symbols onto a real geographic feature, so that mountains or other three-dimensional features were plotted onto a flat surface, Oppenheim was exploring ―the abstract qualities of height‖

—an exploration of an imaginative concept of real implications that was obviously meaningless in its new setting.31

His enthusiasm for more direct interventions into the land was increased by his participation in the Dwan Gallery Earthworks show (1968), where he presented his model for the Mount Cotopaxi transplant: a ―transplant‖ that had proved too difficult

181 for him to execute. He described the competitiveness amongst the exhibiting artists and felt that his representation was diminished because he had not worked in the large scale. Although represented only by a backlit transparency, the physicality of

Heizer‘s Nine Nevada Depressions and its desert location impressed him greatly and, as he said later, inspired him to attempt huge works in the land.32

Oppenheim‘s winter 1968 interventions were the first of his gigantic Process works.

Unique as all but one were created entirely of water, they were overt demonstrations of the capacities and necessity of the large scale to realize extraordinary concepts.

In specific and deliberately inaccessible sites, through mechanical and physical means and in conditions of ice and snow, art was made out of a play with recognizable concepts that, however, are impossible to visualize. Although these were deeply considered formal and meaningful explorations, and Oppenheim‘s clearest examples of lateral works that did not ―protrude‖ from the ground, they were fantastical juxtapositions.33 Oppenheim was behaving like a giant with a sense of humour, enjoying the adventure that the sites and technology made possible and forging new relationships between systems. As the works were temporal and seasonal, they were necessarily documented and exhibited through photographs, maps and diagrams.

Negative board was a trench cut from ice and filled with sawdust, thereby partially filling the negative space with a processed but quickly decomposing material: returning the processed material to its origin within the Earth. A real line, by way of a perpendicular trench cut through ice, gave real form to the invisible but legal latitudinal border between the USA and Canada in Boundary split (illus. 41). The two

182 parallel 4.87 kilometre snowmobile cuts of Time line and the complementary Time pocket, extended the physical implications of time zones since cutting the lines meant straddling a real border, thereby simultaneously creating artworks that straddled the two time zones of one hour‘s difference, giving the works specific references to maps, two different countries and to the globe, but all negated with the melting of the snow. Accumulation cut, a 30.48 metre trench cut perpendicularly to a waterfall in Ithaca, New York, played with the concept of temporarily expanding the size and shape of an existing natural feature. The aesthetic was created by the natural processes of freezing and refreezing of the water over twenty four hours. The composition of One hour run was the random pattern of the 9.7 kilometre linear track made by a motorcycle over an undulating site for a one hour period.

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Illus. 41, Dennis Oppenheim, Boundary Split (1968). From Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 59.

183

In equating the performance of the creation of a work with the work itself,

Oppenheim, re-created Time line as Time track, following the border between the

United States and Canada for Gerry Schum‘s Land Art film (1969). For this new work, a snowmobile marked the border with pushed snow along the St John‘s River.

On the same border, at Maine and New Brunswick, Oppenheim cut Annual rings, schemata of concentric circles like the annual growth rings developed within the trunks of trees. This juxtaposed the physical study of dendrochronology and the conceptual marking of official time, since the cut channel marked the point where that particular time zone was delineated. The natural geometric patterns of the tree rings were enlarged, reproduced and relocated from their original locations to a ground site, where they came to symbolize a larger obscure concept.

These imaginative works were Oppenheim‘s first attempts in a continuous quest to realize tangible concepts and manifestations of science in his artistic practice by exploring the randomness and order of the imagery of the natural world, and as ―land wounds‖ they established within him a dialogue that would later manifest itself in his

Body Art.34 However, he stressed that the emphasis of these works was on their demonstration of physicality and that, as romanticized as they may appear, they made no reference to notions of the picturesque or the sublime. He viewed them as

―disruptions‖ which related as much to the physicality of their sites as they did to imaginative concepts.35 In further attempts at the dematerialization of the object, only photographic records of the work could be experienced, although in the following year he described photographs as a ―kind of panacea of the earthworks‖, where ―a certain loss‖ has been experienced and called for the art to be left as it was made.36

184

The snow works suggested to Oppenheim the idea of ―transplants‖: the transmogrification and fusion of aspects of natural and synthetic phenomena onto large-scaled alien environments. These amalgamations of Land, Body and

Performance Art resembled scientific experiments or the methodical testing of theories—although Oppenheim stressed that art was always predominant in his projects and it should distance itself from science, to avoid the risk of becoming a ―by product‖ of it.37

The proposed gigantic Mount Cotopaxi transplant (1968) referenced Frederick E.

Church‘s (1826–1900) ten grandiose landscape paintings of Mount Cotopaxi in

Ecuador (at Church‘s time the world‘s highest active volcano), through a 16 kilometres wide schematic re-creation of the concentric rings of the volcano mown in wheat fields in Smith County, Kansas. In an ambitious attempt to re-create the sublime image of the painting into a three-dimensional intervention, the centre of the volcano was to be ploughed exactly in the geodesic centre of the United States, a direct geographic correlation to the actual volcano which was close to the centre of the globe, the Equator. Typhoid (1969) saw the burial of a 1.39 square metre swath of grass, and Branded mountain (1969) was a hillside ―skin‖ in San Pablo, California scorched with an 11 metre diameter cattle brand, provocatively stamping an abstracted but widely recognized symbol of ownership onto a natural landscape.

Like Smithson, Oppenheim found an affinity with polluted sites and waste lands. He was opposed to the moral stance taken by many subsequent Land Artists who were commissioned to rehabilitate degraded sites through art, believing these gestures limited the scope and full expression of the works (see Chapter Two, endnote 50, p.

185

110). In Identity stretch (1970–75) he enlarged and overlapped the pattern of his fingerprints with those of his son to the scale of Peruvian earth drawings and imprinted them in hot tar, in rhythmic patterns, onto a spoilt industrial site in

Lewiston, New York. In this work he replaced the cattle brand of Branded Mountain with individual human and personal marks, symbolically invoking temporary ownership of the land, which would eventually be reclaimed by nature. As with the tree rings and contour lines transplants, this process of transferring ―information lines‖ (that is, natural phenomena operating on a conceptual level to another environment), added a unique realism to the art and exhibited the inherent artistry of the prosaic. Although of course still subject to weathering, this work is one of the few to have had any longevity. Wound (1970) fused ephemeral Land and Body Art. A real scar on Oppenheim‘s leg made in 1954 was recreated as a mound in the land— a transplant that attempted to merge time and the correlation of the body with the

Earth. Similarly, Polarities (1972) was an aerial drawing that juxtaposed the artist‘s deceased father‘s supposed last drawing of a formal geometric diamond shape with the organic curve of his one year old daughter‘s drawing. They were plotted onto a field with magnesium flares, the first introduction of fire into Oppenheim‘s work, and aerially photographed at night.

Salt flat (1968) (illus. 42) was a three part work that explored the transplanting of a fundamental material in equal dimensions across great distances, linking its different sources, examining its state in different locations and commenting upon its modern usage. In an urban, desert and ocean intervention, 454 kilograms of salt were spread in the manner of desert surface paintings in a rectangle of 15.24 x 30.38 metres across a carpark in New York (the scale being limited to Oppenheim‘s funds), and

186 blocks of 30 centimetre square salt were excavated from a 15.24 x 30.38 metres rectangle in the Salt Lake Desert in Utah and laid on the ocean floor in the Bahamas, to a depth of 30 centimetres, in the same sized rectangle. This mathematical precision for a displacement and transplant that could be labelled as whimsical, invoked scientific methodology and showed a profound determination for symmetry, although the results of the work would be seen only by the artist and his assistants.

Anticipating the later shaft works of De Maria, as addressed in the previous chapter,

Oppenheim invoked the gigantic scale that must be accepted on trust.

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 42, Dennis Oppenheim, Salt flat (detail) (1968). Photograph by David Sundberg, from Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 76.

The indeterminate results of chemical reactions were the major element in the interventionist and performance work, A report–Two Oceans project, executed in conjunction with Peter Hutchinson (1969). In a project that ignored the principles of

187 ecological responsibility, magenta dye and gasoline were poured into the sea in a line off Tobago and set alight. The residue then floated back to shore where it made contact with strategically-placed hotel towels on the beach which, when laundered, dyed the hotel‘s supply of sheets pink. This spectacular work gained its impact from the accidental juxtaposition of the timing of natural forces and chemical properties.

Two other Tobago works left the ―transplant‖ up to the ocean: Trap Piece saw the transplant of a wooden box by the tide and Blanket Piece photographed a blanket as it floated to the ocean floor. Both works affirmed Oppenheim‘s maxim that: ―The work is not put in a place, it is that place.‖38

Further examples of ―transplants‖ involved the re-creation of architectural designs onto natural and manipulated landscapes. Garage extension (1968), for example, transposed the floor plan of a Maine garage onto the snow outside it, creating a work that resembled a cast shadow and integrating the structure fully into the landscape.

As Oppenheim‘s outdoor component of the 1969 Earth Art exhibition, Gallery transplants scored the floor plans of a gallery of the A. D. White Museum at Cornell

University onto the ground of a nearby bird sanctuary, and a gallery from

Amsterdam‘s Stedelijk Museum onto a field in Jersey City, making the created spaces elements of the compositions and not just backgrounds for art. These

―transplants‖ were dated and signed by the artist and later exhibited in their commissioning galleries via panels showing photographic records of the sites and their activation, the durations of the ―transplants‖, topographic maps with stamped location markers and the floor plans of the entire museum buildings. These works reversed Smithson‘s dialectic of Sites and Non-sites since, as Simon Dell notes, the

188 sites in effect became the works; Oppenheim had dispensed with filling the gallery space, using it simply as a reference point.39

At the Monuments, tombstones, trophies exhibition (1967) at the Museum of

Contemporary Crafts, New York, Carl Andre poured sand from a balcony onto the floor and exhibited the resultant mound, Grave, through its collapsing shape; Robert

Morris exhibited Continuous project altered daily (1969), a changing mound of earth and rubble at the Castelli warehouse in New York; and in 1977 Walter de Maria would make The New York Earth Room, the most significant and lasting work of the displacement of alien material into a gallery space.40 Oppenheim explored similar concepts in his Gallery Decompositions (1968–9), which displayed paints in their pigment forms, plaster as powder and timber as sawdust in forms that resembled landscapes. These raw materials became malleable entropic cones, the most fundamental of shapes, and subject to atmospheric forces, as they reduced the finished products to their unprocessed states and stood as aesthetic groupings of the essences of everyday materials. The materials had literally ―decomposed‘ (that is, they had been reduced from their usual compositions), and were displayed as artworks themselves within the ―de-architecturalized‖ spaces that traditionally housed their finished forms.41 The Decompositions anticipated the later Reverse processing which aimed to reverse the processing of cement.

Anticipating his later interests in blending Body and Performance Art, sound was invoked in works like Ground mutations (1970) where three performers marched around an excavated square trench, 30 metres square and 2 metres deep, drumming in eight-hour shifts over a twenty-four hour period, invading the landscape

189 both physically and aurally. Sound enclosed land area (1969) recorded Oppenheim‘s footsteps in four points in a rectangle of 500 metres by 800 metres in Paris, integrating the artist intimately into his environment through the sounds of his presence, extending Land Art by ―dissolving [its] boundaries.‖42 Ground mutations

(1969) photographed the patterns made by the artist‘s grooved shoe prints mixed with those of thousands of other pedestrians, in suburban New York and New Jersey over three months; and Block for future energy (1969) mixed marks of jumping on sand with those of other pedestrians, a concept used later in the Dead Dog Creek works (1970).

Making the negation of sites more permanent, the evocatively-titled Relocated burial yard (1978) revived the Smithson practice of pouring asphalt primer directly onto a surface. A 610 metre cross was painted onto the El Mirage Dry Lake surface, where

De Maria made Desert Cross a decade earlier, invoking both the fundamental

Christian symbol and the symbol of negation as used in Cancelled crop and Reverse processing (see pp. 201–203). He was not ―cancelling‖ potential commercial transactions, but an area itself.

Emulating Heizer‘s Dye paintings and Powder dispersals, Oppenheim made Target

(1974), Cobalt vectors—an invasion and Devil’s hole (both 1978). The 30.5 metre diameter Target referenced the Pop imagery of Jasper Johns as well as science fiction cinema, the latter also echoed in the tiles of the other two works. Cobalt vectors–an invasion and Devil’s hole on El Mirage Dry Lake were, respectively, four

610 metre lines of asphalt and cobalt blue dry pigment, and a series of concentric circles scored into the lake bed, which was planned to be increased over a ten year

190 period. Like the poisons used in the Infected Zone works (1969), and discussed below, Oppenheim intended these pigments to be used simply in their own right as pigments.43

Reminiscent of the integrated and lateral works from the Sitemarkers series, Wishing the mountains madness (1977) was the placement of hundreds of 0.37 square metre metallic stars over a 1.62 hectares site at Missoula, Montana and the large message works like Trench fever (1969) Wolf it down (1977) proposed scoring huge slogans

(5.48 metres high, 3.65 metres deep and 91.4 metres in length) in sand, concrete and tar and placing them in appropriate locations. Like the Nazca lines, the scorings and contours were ―information lines" and not primarily deliberate aesthetic considerations.44

The largest and most ambitious ephemeral drawing was the airborne Whirlpool (Eye of the storm) (1973) where a plane discharged liquid nitrogen in a 1.2 kilometre circle and then in a decreasing vortex above El Mirage Dry Lake—producing a white cloud drawing of continually-changing geometric shapes, invigorating the otherwise still and cloudless sky.45

In further explorations of the possibilities learned from Land Art, Oppenheim created gallery-scaled works which were devised from Land Art initiatives such as the manipulation of gallery spaces through the removal of floorboards and other fittings, a process which was defended by the claim that sculptures in a gallery space were

―protrusions‖ and ―unnecessary additions,‖ continuing the dematerialization of the object and denying the commercial role of the galleries by making works that were

191 difficult to sell.46 The transferences reduced the scale of the outdoors while still maintaining their ambitious concepts, and were seen as consequences of the processes of dematerialization. In the style of the Arte Povera works of the Dutch artist Ger Van Elk (1941–2014), Oppenheim muddied gallery floors to make them resemble desert floors and created miniature landscape constructions resembling maquettes for larger works. Inspired by his earlier works within polluted grounds,

Sterilized infected zone (1969), an installation of concrete bleach applied to a city block, was recreated in Infected Zone (1969) on a clean floor in a Milan gallery where rat poison powder was spread to highlight the difference between infection and sterilization. These works continued the series of displacements or the removal of materials (in these cases bacteria), to create absences.

Establishing new correlations between the outside and the inside, the 1969 Branded mountain‘s complementary installation consisted of branding irons and branded animal hides; the unrealized Mount Cotopaxi transplant, itself a re-creation, was remade as Mt. Cotopaxi transplant (1968), the truncated title making a pun on its reduced scale, and incorporating a cocoa mat, wood, maps, letters and collage. The ephemeral sound and footprint works of 1969 became physical installations of photographs and plaster casts when displayed as Condensed 200 yard dash. Cast plaster plates were arranged like a dry stone wall and the white cube reverberated with ―solidified vibrations‖. In an early amalgamation of Land Art and Performance

Art, Two jumps for Dead Dog Creek (1970), Oppenheim long-jumped across a

Wisconsin creek twice, fusing his body with the site‘s dimensions which directed his required energy, and then repeated the jump in a sand box on a gallery floor (Block for future energy). His footprints were left in the sand, but a wall was constructed

192 behind the jump to prevent it being repeated. Here, the artist was fusing concepts from the outdoors and the indoors as other Land Artists had done, and was relinquishing the boundaries of the self by transporting the cognition of the jumps. In

2000’ [feet] shadow projection (1972), a light installation in homage to his father,

Oppenheim back lit himself blowing on a trumpet and being projected 610 metres in shadow—in effect, destabilizing the body‘s location by being in two places at once and symbolizing his father‘s spirit within him.

Image deleted for copyright reasons

Illus. 43, Dennis Oppenheim, Three Downward Blows (Knuckle Marks) (detail) (1977). Photograph by David Sundberg, 1977 from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 190.

The scoring of slogans, or ―fragments‖, was recreated in Oppenheim‘s sporadic series of nitrate flare works from 1974 to 1977 where flares were ignited to make titles readable from a distance and from the air, like neon effects, and the works

193 were framed within quarries. The mild socio-political messages of Radicality, Do further with fiction and Avoid the blues would seem to imply that the works were driven essentially by their effects and their theatricality. The tendency for play was evidenced with Pretty ideas and the pun of Narrow mind where the message was burned between two railway tracks. This series culminated in the underground explosions detonated to form five craters up to three metres in diameter, in Montana, in Three Downward Blows (Knuckle Marks) (1977) (illus. 43). Spectacles differentiated Oppenheim‘s practice from those of most other Land Artists for whom the long-term effects of time are integral to the works‘ effects. The sounds produced during the creation of the works were an essential part of the exercise; in this respect

Three Downward Blows contrasts with works by other Land Artists, for whom silence was a critical part of their auras.

Oppenheim viewed fireworks conceptually as being

…like thoughts [in that they] carry their own intelligence if you let

them…feelings work best here, in the sky, acknowledging the drama of

chance inherent in the processes of fire and its capacity to grow according to

its spatiality.47

In his continual examination of where sculpture ―should be‖ he created the Fireworks series of large outdoor assemblages or ―armatures for projections‖ (1979–84), which were activated at night into public firework displays.48 Their ―force line‖ trajectories echoed the ―information lines‖ of his Land Art works. In a return to the gallery, Hot voices (1989) represented the ―voices‖ of the three large fibreglass relief heads, like

194 land forms, via propane gas flames, and the oxymoronic Sweet wars (1993) froze the effects of the fireworks through a floor-based star pattern emanating from guns.

Proposals

From demarcating sites and art spaces and reworking the primary geometric shapes of Minimalism, Oppenheim began constructing scaled architectural models, for larger works that were not intended to be realized, an interest that he would continue throughout his practice, and which he later called ―preludes‖ to his Land Art.49 He was developing a uniquely analytical practice of creating art and attempting to create spaces in which to display it.

Called Viewing Stations (1967–68), these models were initially isometric elevations and designs for the display of art (indoors, in galleries), but developed to become outdoor structures imposed on the land, from which to view art. All were of precise measurements and while they were maquettes, they were exhibited as elegant professionally-finished Minimalist forms not unlike very small works by Donald Judd.

Gallery Structure #3 and Variations on Gallery Structures were architectural diagrams and plans to be assembled on location, which expanded the rectangular white cube into new shapes, highlighting open massed forms. These were then realized as maquettes with suggested dimensions, lighting effects, surface finishes and reasons for the suggestions.

Further Viewing stations were a series of maquettes of platforms from where the audience would view art, but if stood upon, in effect they disappeared, meaning that they were unable to be seen and therefore there was no art to be seen. McEvilley

195 summarized this characteristic as ―the act of beholding is itself what is beheld,‖ which underlines Oppenheim‘s interest in paradox and in exploring concepts which eliminated objects whenever possible.50 Dead Furrow and Ground Systems were drawings and models of platforms above ordered rows of pipes or wooden elongated forms, presumably representing seating for an audience. Referencing military installations or industrial complexes, they were to be industrially manufactured and finished interventions into landscapes. Envisaging a gigantic installation, Dead

Furrow was meant to be sited on flat land cleared to 1.6 kilometres on all sides.

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Illus. 44, Dennis Oppenheim, Excavated Sculpture #3 (1967). Photograph by David Sundberg, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 33.

The Excavated Sculpture and Excavated Structure (1967) series were steel-plated rectangular forms with further steel additions placed into voids at ground level, to represent forms recently excavated but not removed from the ground (illus. 44). They could only be viewed from above and Oppenheim provided detailed notes on how they should be positioned. Variations of Excavated Structure was to be placed in a

196 flat field of at least 1.214 hectares so that it would dominate and activate the surrounding landscape. Plans, location details and photographs of the sculptures in capsules were exhibited.

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Illus. 45 , Dennis Oppenheim, Falling Room (1979). Photograph by Earl Ripling, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 199.

Oppenheim‘s interest in architectural models did not diminish and he produced many further examples throughout his practice. Two curious examples were Study for Exit for the South Bronx (1979) a full scale model (20 metres x 80 metres) of a freeway flyover in the form of a roller coaster descending from an apartment building, and A station for detaining and blinding radio-active horses (1981), a large scale mobile

197 assemblage which scored lines on the land. Three examples that related to previous interests were The Studies for launching structures (1981–2), elaborate assemblages of towers on casters that invoked fireworks, Falling Room (1979) (illus.

45), a ladder and platform structure, in the manner of a fire escape that was attached to a multi-storey building, and Study for Accelerator for Evil Thoughts (1983), a large machine of rotating parts. These were all maquettes and life-size models that attempted to create art from utilitarian structural forms. It is characteristic of

Oppenheim‘s practice that these were exhibited as sculptural forms with precise measurements and instructions and were not submitted to civic or corporate authorities for consideration in real contexts: again, the emphasis was upon the demonstration of concepts.

Oppenheim‘s description of a void as ―a microscopic indentation that is relative to the globe‖, demonstrated his concern that his art had an integral relationship with the world at large.51 Voids were made as a reaction against protrusions which were

―embellishment[s] of external space‖ and ―disruption[s] of interior space[s]‖ and their creation was of the most fundamental process in the dematerialization of the object.52 The ambiguity of voids as both negative and active spaces, in terms of their relationships with their surroundings, as well as their unity, resonance and multiplicity of meanings, led to the development of the Indentations series of 1967–8. The subjects of these ―negative sculptural acts‖ were reductions or absences, since discarded objects were removed from vacant lots in New York, Paris and Amsterdam and the remaining indentations were photographed.53 Here, Oppenheim was demonstrating that these random objects in random sites helped in the demystification of art or, to put it another way, art was everywhere in the real world,

198 albeit ―invisible‖. The accompanying photographs are evocative collages that highlight the artist‘s vision of the innate beauty of the mundane as seen through abandoned objects and places.

Although it could describe most of Oppenheim‘s oeuvre, Kim Levin‘s comment that it was ―a witchy cohabitation and symbiosis between mental processes and physical effects‖ and ―the bastard descendant of Duchamp‘s bride‖, seems particularly appropriate to the interactive but preposterous assemblages that he created as maquettes from 1979.54 They were both complete environments and theatrical

―events‖, combining many of the elements from his Land Art practice: the large scale; the juxtaposition of unrelated concepts; and the fusion of surreal and everyday imagery. For Oppenheim, this ―mental‖ Factory series, as he described it, was all about chance and possibilities. 55 Nonetheless, he proposed providing lengthy explanatory notes to assist audiences in their understanding of the works. Because of their enormous size, they were intended to be sited in the land, where they could be walked through. The unrealized architectural assemblage, Waiting room for the

Midnight Special (A thought collision factory for ghost ships) (1979), proposed as part of a sculptural reclamation project for a debilitated landfill and military site for the

King County Arts Commission in Washington State, was Oppenheim‘s concept of creating an environment for channelling and transforming thoughts and ideas. After entering a tunnel, a non-existent form would be channelled to either a ―ghost ship‖, a smoke chamber, or to the sea: the implications being that according to chance one goes to the after-life, incineration or freedom. The switchman’s dilemma–The raw and the cooked (1979) is an assembly line series of gates and paths that aimed to explore the processes of a ―surrogate mind‖ through the transference of energy.56

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In 1995 Oppenheim planned three large projects, Six steps on a section, an untitled

Bayonne, New Jersey displacement and a Franklin Furnace Mines project. These unrealized works would have revived Smithson‘s practice of exhibiting mineral samples and maps indicating their locations and labelling the sources ―Sites‖ and the artworks ―Non-sites‖. The first project was to establish a dialectic between two points by a geographic survey of the minerals found along a line drawn from Manhattan to north New Jersey. Onto the lids of six bins would be drawn maps of identified sites from the line and the bins would contain mineral samples from the sites. The

Bayonne displacement was to exhibit fragments from previously-built forms, such as asphalt and concrete rubble, with the interpretation of the cycle that these fragments had returned to a similar state as their natural states when they were loose natural elements. From this state they were made into solid construction materials and used in building projects, then demolished and returned again to a loose state. The

Franklin Furnace Mines project was to display minerals in interior spaces and to play upon a viewer‘s ―mental or mind involvement‖ to determine the scale of their sites. In a return to the scales and presentations of the Ground system works of 1968, Land net and Tulip run–a jogging course (both 1999), were models for larger interactive civic Land Art projects.57

Subversions

Oppenheim made symbolic interferences and comments on the world of commerce and trade through large scale ―transplants‖ and interventions. Directional cuts and

Directed harvest (1968), a series of wooden slats and paths imposed onto crop fields, showed Oppenheim playing with incongruities and puns, although as these

200 ambiguous interventions clearly damaged both land and agriculture, their significations were diluted.

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Illus. 46, Dennis Oppenheim, Directed seeding, Cancelled crop (1969). From Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 50.

This series was continued in Europe where agricultural areas were more accessible to museums and art expositions than in the United States. Directed seeding–

Cancelled crop (Holland, 1969) (illus. 46) was a colossal geometric surface intervention within an agricultural landscape, which attempted to challenge established processes and commerce. While variously a physical pun, stunt or large- scale ―drawing‖, Directed seeding–Cancelled crop examined the nature and exploitation of food products. The wave-like patterns created by the tractor in the

Directed seeding component reproduced the shape of the road linking the field and the silo storage, and in the Cancelled crop component the tractor symbolically

―cancelled‖ the field through the cutting of a giant ―X‖ (similar to a scored mark on an etching plate). The grain was harvested but not processed. It was then stored until

201 the Prospekt exhibition in Dusseldorf, where sacks and a weighing scale were displayed and the harvest sold. Non-art material had been converted into art commodity. In this provocative work, Oppenheim was effectively questioning the scope, interplay and organized complexity of human and commercial activity.

The proposal for Void. Proposal for Flinsterwolde, Holland (1969) was the removal of

400 square metres of sugar beet from a field, while its equivalent of 25,000 boxes of sugar were to be placed into the field surrounding a void of the size of 50,000 sugar cubes. The boxes were then to be dispersed to neighbouring markets for sale.58 A scaled model of the work and documentation were exhibited. In Removal transplant–

New York Stock Exchange (1968), four tonnes of paper data were relocated from the

New York Stock Exchange floor to a similarly-scaled area on a fenced roof on Park

Avenue. Here Oppenheim was exploring the ―force‖ of paper scraps on which transactions were recorded, changing them from symbolically to physically active elements, thereby reducing the Stock Exchange‘s business to litter. From the roof, the papers moved undirected, subject to ―distributional‖ wind movements, yet still were responsive to pre-existing bounds.59

In Reverse processing: Cement transplant, East River, NY, 1970 Oppenheim, without permission, drew ―X‖s of white refined cement powder on six barges carrying unrefined cement in New York Harbour, symbolically stopping the cement from the chemical process of becoming rigid. Maze (1970) referenced the behavioural studies of B. F. Skinner (1904–90) by attempting to train cattle, like laboratory rats, to find food in a 152 metres x 305 metres maze of hay bales in Wisconsin. As the subject of the work was the potential cognitive processes of cattle, Oppenheim had added

202 scientific research content to a 1968 Arte Povera installation by Mario Marotta, where hay bales were placed in a public square in Amalfi. In Protection (1971),

Oppenheim placed twelve guard dogs around a designated space outside the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—a wry comment on museum guards and alarm systems whose raison d‘etre is to protect that which is considered to be precious.60

Body Work

According to Oppenheim, Land Art made him aware of his body, which in turn became ―a vital area of fertile possibility‖ for further explorations.61 In utilizing the body as the singular vehicle for producing art, Body Art would seem to be the antithesis of Land Art. Yet in the hands of Oppenheim, the Body, more often than not his own, was intimately integrated into the land. He became an active participant, so to speak, rather than an ―additional" figure and, in effect, entered into an equal relationship with the site and its geographical features.

In Sitemarkers, Oppenheim briefly entered environments to place alien materials into them. In his Body Art he integrated himself into environments and became the artwork. The resulting documentation of these interactions became the manifestations of the works—a necessary result as the physically visible consequences such as the marks or ripples made would disappear rapidly. The pun of the titles of Preliminary test for 65’ [feet] Vertical Penetration and Vertical

Penetration (both 1970) refers to the artist ―vertically penetrating‖ a hill and a swimming pool by sliding and diving, making himself the subjects of these combinations of Land Art and Performance Art.62 In the transplant Parallel stress

(1970) (Illus. 47) he suspended himself between two masonry walls on a pier

203 beneath Brooklyn Bridge for ten minutes and then recreated the arc achieved by his body in a Long Island dump site for one hour, claiming to activate the areas involved as ―events‖ themselves, and classifying himself as a performer through stress and then the physical indentation of matter.

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Illus. 47, Dennis Oppenheim, Parallel stress (1970). Photograph by Joshua Kalin, from Celant, Dennis Oppenheim Explorations, , 109.

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The work displays the capacity of the body, as Oppenheim was subjecting himself to the same gravitational forces that produce entropic forms such as mounds and photographs reveal the true physical stress upon him, as he set himself the challenge of aligning himself to these same fundamental forces that affect and change the Earth. This physical self-absorption was not unlike the earlier performance works of Vito Acconci (b. 1940) and Giovanni Anselmo (b. 1934) which explored vulnerability and danger. Expanding the transplant concept of Branded mountain and treating all surfaces as entities for art, Reading position for second degree burn (1970) saw the artist burn his skin (‗painted‖ according to Oppenheim), through a five-hour exposure to the sun, protecting only part of his chest with a book.63 In a gesture incorporating massive scale into Body Art, Oppenheim was making himself a part of the Earth and interacting directly with the solar system.

If here the body is acting as a receptor, then in Gingerbread man (1970–71) it both

―accepts‖ and expels. Examining the progress and processes of the body‘s digestive functions, Oppenheim exhibited slides of his faeces that had been produced following his consumption of several gingerbread biscuits. This self-evident excursion into the abject, albeit one which is characterized by black humour, is picked up again in Material interchange for Joe Stranard (1970) where Oppenheim had a man place his arm into a transparent chamber which contained a mosquito.

The man ―watched‖ the mosquito extract blood from his limb and then hover above it.

In this process the human subject / object of the work has had a virtual, although microscopic, aspect of his physical being removed and given new life, as it were, in another living organism.

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In Weight displacement at the Art by Telephone exhibition (1969), held at the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Oppenheim expanded on his Indentations series of 1967–68 where imprints of former objects were photographed, and the

Decompositions works of 1968–69. Building materials used in the construction of the gallery were placed on the floor in piles equal to his weight at the time of installation and were adjusted to his weight at the time of his weekly phone calls to the gallery, thereby equating the artist‘s physical bulk with that of the gallery space itself.

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Illus., 48, Dennis Oppenheim, Two-Stage Transfer Drawing. (Advancing to a Future State). Erik to Dennis Oppenheim (1971). Photograph by Dennis Oppenheim, from Celant Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 72.

Oppenheim‘s interest in a presence through implication was further developed by the use of his own children as ―surrogates or agents‖ in the making of art.64 In the placement inversion: Two-stage transfer drawings. (Returning to a past state),

Dennis to Erik Oppenheim and (Advancing to a future state). Erik to Dennis

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Oppenheim (1971) (Illus. 48), he simultaneously drew a shape onto his son‘s back while his son drew the same shape onto a wall—an exploration of the ―transference‖ of genetics‘ capacities beyond the artist to his son and beyond him. In the subsequent A feed-back situation (1971), father and son drew the same drawing on each other‘s backs.

Oppenheim saw a further link in the photographic documentation of Land Art and the filming of body manipulation, and depicted this in a series of short films from 1969 to

1974, which reversed his previous work by turning Body Art into Land Art; again small in realization but huge in concept.65 Back track recorded his interaction with beach sand, manipulating the material as closely to his body as possible. Rocked hand, Glassed hand and Leafed hand directly blended the body into the landscape as his left hand was progressively covered with natural materials by his right hand.

Wrist used the image of his flexing wrist fading into a landscape, resembling its shape and exploring the ―relationship between the initiator and recipient of an act.‖66

In an expansion from the Land Artwork of the same name, the interventionist Wound correlated a scar on his leg with the landscape by the artist deliberately falling onto a rock and wounding the leg, using the same scratching and cutting techniques from his Land Art on his body. This process eliminated the divisions between them: a point of immersion that led to a heightened awareness of self-absorption.

Of the three artists discussed in this thesis, Oppenheim is the odd man out. Difficult to characterize, as this chapter has demonstrated, he moves between conventional

Land Art, performance / body art, conceptual proposals, and work that may be temporal or permanent, although the latter, like all other examples of Land Art, is

207 necessarily subject to the vagaries of weather and time. Linking these disparate practices, however, is a concern with the large scale, both literal and figurative.

There are the enormous works like Time track, Directed seeding–Cancelled crop and the Sitemarkers, on the one hand, and adventurous conceptual leaps, on the other, into such phenomena as time lines, chemical reactions in the sea, sky drawings, genetics and the transference of body fluids. Oppenheim is a mercurial artist. His oeuvre is unpredictable and his pronouncements at times appear contradictory. Yet both are always testing-grounds for an over-arching interest in size and scale.

Endnotes

1 Oppenheim in conversation with Patricia Novell, 29 March 1969, in Alexander Alberro and Patricia Novell (ed.), Recording Conceptual Art: Early interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 22. 2 Oppenheim in Lynn Hershman, ―Interview with Oppenheim‖‘ Studio International, November 1973, 196. 3 Oppenheim in an interview with Carter Ratcliff 16 March 2000, cited in Carter Ratcliff, Out of the box: The reinvention of art 1965 – 1975, New York: Allworth Press, 2000, 247. 4 Dorothy Spears, ―Dennis Oppenheim‖, Arts Magazine, Volume 66, Issue 7, 1991, 74. 5 Jonathan Crary, ―Dennis Oppenheim‘s delirious operations‖, Artforum, Vol. 17, November 1978, 36. 6 Oppenheim‘s 1979 comment to Village Voice magazine that if he were younger he would be getting into the Punk scene, perhaps the musical equivalent of Arte Povera, led Kim Levin to describe some of his key works disparagingly as showing ‗rough amateur awkwardness‘, ‗viciousness‘, ‗hostility‘ and ‗disregard‘. (Kim Levin, ―Dennis Oppenheim: Post-performance works‖, Arts magazine, Vol. 53, September 1978, 123). 7 Alanna Heiss, ―Another point of entry: An interview with Dennis Oppenheim‖, in Heiss, Dennis Oppenheim: Selected Works 1967-90, New York: Institute of Contemporary Art, Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1992, 145. 8 Peter F. Spooner, ―Drawing, delirium‖, Dennis Oppenheim – Drawings and selected sculpture, Normal, Ill.: University Galleries, Illinois State University, 1992, 6. 9 Oppenheim at the Earth Art symposium, Cornell University 6 February 1969, cited in Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 113. 10 Suzann Boettger, ―Dennis Oppenheim‖, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 12 July 1995 http://artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/oppenh95.htm.

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11 Oppenheim cited in Harold Rosenberg, ―Time and space concepts in Environmental Art‖, in Alan Sonfist (ed.), Art in the land: A critical anthology of Environmental Art, New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1982, 194. 12 Kim Bradley, ―Interview with Dennis Oppenheim‖, in Carla Piscitelli (ed.), Dennis Oppenheim, Milan: Ierimonti Gallery, 1995, 109. 13 Ibid., 16. 14 Dennis Oppenheim, Catalyst 1967–1974, published in 1977, cited in Germano Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1997, 90-95. 15 Nick Kaye, ―Dennis Oppenheim‖, Art into theatre: Performances, interviews and documents, Lausanne: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996, 60. 16 Op Losse Schroeven exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam: Stedelijik Museum, 1969, p. 21, cited in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 49. 17 Oppenheim was concerned that his Land Art was seen as related to Formalist sculpture and not to performance based work, such as Happenings, although many of his gestural works resembled these through their concerns for concept realization above more formal considerations. 18 Heiss, ―Another point of entry‖, 145. 19 Oppenheim in Steve Wood, ―An interview with Dennis Oppenheim‖, Arts Magazine, June 1981, 133. 20 Oppenheim in ―Conversation between Germano Celant and Dennis Oppenheim‖, in Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 29. 21 Boettger, American Archives website interview, 26. 22 Smithson, ―A rejoinder to Environmental Critics‖, Collapse, no. 2, 1996, cited in Simon Dell (ed.), On location: Siting Robert Smithson and his contemporaries, London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2008, 93. 23 Thomas McEvilley, ―The rightness of wrongness: Modernism and its alter-ego in the work of Dennis Oppenheim‖, in Heiss, ―Another point of entry‖, 8. 24 Ibid., 29. 25 Kim Levin, ―Preface‖, in Dennis Oppenheim—Drawings and selected sculpture, Normal, Illinois: Illinois State University, University Galleries, 1992, 8. 26 Heiss, ―Another point of entry‖, 139. 27 Oppenheim in Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 52. 28 Celant, Dennis Oppenheim: Explorations, 28. 29 Boettger, American Archives website interview, 28. 30 Ibid., 17. 31 Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 26. 32 Oppenheim cited Heizer‘s Double Negative as the Earthworks exhibit when it was Dissipate 2 from Nine Nevada Depressions, in ―Conversation between Germano Celant and Dennis Oppenheim‖, Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 32. 33 Oppenheim in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 160.

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34 Heiss, ―Another point of entry‖, 150. 35 Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 30. 36 Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 24. 37 Ibid., 18. 38 Sharp, ―Discussions with Oppenheim, Heizer, Smithson‖, 70. 39 Dell, On location, 53. 40 The title of Andre‘s Grave was both a comment on the ongoing Vietnam War and a pun on ―gravity‖. 41 Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 39. 42 Levin, Post-performance works, 122. 43 Oppenheim in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 26. 44 Heiss, ―Another point of entry‖, 138. 45 This work showed Oppenheim utilizing the greatest space available, and it is viewed by Crary to be in homage to Smithson. (Jonathan Crary, ―Oppenheim: delirious operations‖, 40). 46 Sharp, ―Discussions with Oppenheim‖, 3. 47 Heiss, ―Another point of entry‖, 183. 48 Assumpta Bassas, ―Interview with Dennis Oppenheim‖,in Dennis Oppenheim: Obra 1967-1994, Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1994, in Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 337. 49 Ibid., 332. 50 Thomas McEvilley, Sculpture in the age of doubt, New York: Allworth Press, 1999, 16. 51 Oppenheim in Lynne Hershman, ―Interview with Oppenheim‖, Studio International, November 1973, 196. 52 Oppenheim in Lucy Lippard, Six years (1966–1971), cited in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 160. 53 Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 29. 54 Levin, ―Dennis Oppenheim: Post-performance works‖, 4. 55 Dennis Oppenheim (16 March 1982) ―And the mind grew fingers‖, Bulletin, Oberlin, Ohio: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, XL1, 2, 1983-4, 100. 56 Ibid., 104. 57 There are clear comparisons with Claes Oldenburg‘s Proposed Monuments which were inspired by the huge inflatable creatures of the annual Macy‘s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York and the monument sketches of eighteenth century French designers Etienne-Louis Boullee, Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Leqeu. The spectacles of Oldenburg‘s and Oppenheim‘s works often subsume their messages. 58 These works were expanded in Agnes Denes‘ Wheatfield – A confrontation (1982), where a two- acre field of wheat was harvested in Battery Park, New York and exhibited in 28 cities around the world and fed to New York Police horses. 59 Oppenheim in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 26. 60 That these two latter works ‗failed‘ in their resolutions, as the cows ignored the layout of the maze and forced their way through the bales and that the dogs slept through their shift, was not a concern for Oppenheim as the concepts had been physically realized.

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61 Oppenheim in Ratcliff, Out of the box, 234. 62 Oppenheim was working with concepts that have long established linguistic correlations. Personified terms such as ―mouth of the river‖, ―heartlands‖, ―foothills‖ etc. indirectly classify the world as an enormous body. Societies have long resorted to mythical human terms to name specific geographic formations such as Giant‘s Causeway. (Stewart, On longing: Narratives of the Miniature,, 71.) 63 Oppenheim in Celant, Dennis Oppenheim, 148. 64 Kaye, ―Dennis Oppenheim‖, 347. 65 Ibid., 35. 66 Ibid., 187.

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CONCLUSION

This thesis has demonstrated that readings of Land Art focusing on monumental works in isolated, desert regions, the results of intense physical energy that for some commentators bring to mind the (mythical) efforts that went into conquering the

American West (not for nothing does Michael Kimmelman describe Michael Heizer, as recently as 2005, as ―Art‘s last, lonely cowboy‖) are readings that require revisiting and expansion.1 Size and scale, the central concerns of all three artists examined in this thesis (Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim) manifest themselves in different ways—certainly in the work of Dennis Oppenheim, the odd man out, as Icity have described him—who translated giantism into projects that, while residing chiefly in the realm of the imaginary, still have tempting implications for everyday reality.

As Chapter One shows, where the works of the three artists are seen through the lens of Ozymandias and Gulliver’s Travels, questions touching on absence and presence, longevity and death, utopianism and dystopianism, are never far from their works. The invocation of the two literary texts, however, must also be understood in terms of the ―imaginary‖ that seems to me to underscore the work of all three artists, but especially that of Oppenheim.

Land Art, created in the deserts of the USA in the late 1960s and 1970s with the intention of intervening directly into the land to create massive works out of the earth, was later expanded into other landscapes, such as prairies and snowfields and to interior and exterior spaces including galleries and corporate and civic sites—a practice that this thesis has distinguished from traditional and / or conventional land

212 art that, to repeat, consists of gigantic work made out of doors in the desert. In the process, Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim variously pursued Performance and Body

Art, created works that touched on elements of risk and threat, explored scientific and mathematical concepts and, in the case of Heizer, created an entire environment, City.

City

Heizer‘s City, discussed in Chapter Two, is an appropriate work to conclude this thesis as it embodies many issues raised in the expanded reading of Land Art advanced here. The ―lone and level sands‖ of Ozymandias continually erode

―conventional‖ Land works, which of course are themselves subject to entropy—but

City, under construction since 1972, has been continually increased in size and has had its walls reinforced; to this day it remains unfinished. City invites comparison with Roden Crater, a work also in progress by the Los Angeles-born James Turrell

(1943). Located near Flagstaff, Arizona, and commenced in 1979, it is a project that, like City, holds endless interest for its creator. While ―remoteness‖ links both the sites, they were selected for different reasons. For Turrell, it had to do with a specific landform found only in the area, an extinct volcano. For Heizer, as we have seen, it was familial and economic factors that attracted him to the desert of Lincoln County,

Nevada. Isolation obviously limits visitation, but this is compounded by the fact that neither Heizer nor Turrell allow visitors, nor do they seek reactions from either the general public or from critics.

Although Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim all originally moved from the city to the desert to create their works and then back and forth, Heizer remains the artist whose

213 engagement with Land Art understood as immense interventions in remote areas, is the most consistent. He has worked directly from the stuff of the earth, which he calls

―original source material‖ and situated most of his monumental works in the deserts of Nevada.2 It therefore comes as a surprise to find that finally Heizer returns to a concept of the ―city‖ in the hugely ambitious work, City, located, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a desert site in Nevada, in a place called Garden Valley.3

City, notwithstanding the great paradox that it is not intended to be inhabited, nonetheless can be viewed historically in terms of early twentieth-century avant- gardes, and their preoccupation with the re-imagining of the city. The Italian Futurist architect, Antonia Saint Elia (1888–1916) envisaged the Citta Nuova (‗New City‘) as a Utopian construction consisting of skyscrapers, freeways and air travel, encompassing sleek lines, industrial finishes, speed and noise—the essentials of modernity. Tatlin‘s Monument for the Third International (1919–20), was a design for a monumental tower, both symbolic and functional, to be erected in (the then)

Petrograd after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. By contrast, the German Fritz

Lang‘s 1927 film Metropolis presented a dystopian view of modernity in which automation, control, and mass hysteria dominated. In similar but very different ways, chiefly through the medium of humour, Charlie Chaplin‘s film Modern Times (1936) offers a serious but light-hearted look at labour disputes, the vagaries of prison life, industrialization, consumerism and the notion of the ―tramp‖ (the outsider) personified in Chaplin himself, a ―victim‖ of modern life. The Bauhaus, that hugely influential School of Art and Design established in Weimar, Germany in 1919 and closed down by the Nazis in 1933, championed modern design for modern people by focussing on industrial production and the utilization of materials such as tubular

214 steel and glass. In similar ways, Le Corbusier‘s Villa Savoye in Poissy, France

(1929), embraced and acted as a manifesto for an architecture that could

(supposedly) change lives—architecture of open and flexible spaces, non-weight bearing walls, huge windows and rooftop gardens.

For Michael Heizer, City, was to be devoid of people, but the construction does assume issues to do with human scale. While he has said that an artist could never create anything that would challenge the scale of the natural world,4 City‘s vast lowered plaza level, which ―erases‖ 5 all of the surrounding landscape, and ―subverts‖ the idea of the earth as ground,6 leaving only the sky visible (a device Heizer learned during the making of Munich Depression in 1969), would indeed make viewers feel enveloped within a total environment and their lowered position would increase its perceived scale. City is clearly not intended to relate to its site. While the ―landforms‖ at the rear imitate natural mounds and swales they will become increasingly

―naturalistic‖ over time, but viewers will continually be made aware that they are within a completely fabricated environment.

City represents a series of contradictions. It stands as a representation of human activity but it is really the opposite of this: a play between fantasy and reality. It is sited within a remote desert, using Egyptian and meso-American architectural forms, deliberately non-European,7 and it represents (hyperbolically) ―all civilization to this point‖, as claimed by the artist.8 Heizer‘s aim for City was the creation of a formal complex of buildings as an immovable and permanent artwork free of symbol, nuance or utilitarian purpose and where ―narratives do not exist and are not possible‖.9 This is surely wishful thinking. The complex would seem to be the

215 antithesis of what early Land Artists envisaged: a permanent structure imposed rather than embedded into the landscape, one which is only meant to be viewed from an internal perspective—ironically, as Heizer himself has said, ―similar in intent to a museum or a gallery‖, and one which in effect re-creates the city environment that was abandoned by the artists at the beginning of their careers.10 Additionally,

City, inasmuch as one is able to make such a statement in the absence of a direct experience, is dystopian in spirit. The initial optimism of the adventures of Land Art was initially sublimated by Heizer into ―funereal‖ voids and then into mounds, and ultimately into the intimidating City.

Contrasting with the danger inherent in Heizer‘s Double Negative and in the re- created North, East, South, West and, indeed, in De Maria‘s The Lightning Field and

Bed of spikes, City‘s all enveloping nature is protective, although its atmosphere remains sombre and menacing. This ―protective‖ quality, however, was originally to counter the effects of the desert climate but arguably became more evident with the expansion in the late 1980s of the nearby Nellis Air Force Base. There is a double- edged sword here. The Base now conducts ―black programs‖ (the testing of its most secret weapons).11 Furthermore, in 2003 the Department of Energy announced the construction of a nuclear waste railway, still to be realized, to run through Garden

Valley, where City is located.12 That is to say, ―protection‖ could be perceived now to have been taken out of Heizer‘s hands. To put it still another way, the presence of military aircraft, missiles and nuclear waste in close proximity to City and indeed to the ranch nearby where Heizer and his family live, translates the site into a potentially dangerous one which ironically underscores City’s dystopian character.13

So (seemingly) aghast is Heizer at the thought of a nuclear waste rail line passing

216 the complex—I say ―seemingly‖ because he may simply be averse to activities that may impinge on City‘s isolation—that he has threatened to dynamite the complex if this eventuated.14 In this extreme (albeit speculative) action, Heizer goes against almost an entire career premised on both the belief in this work and his sustained efforts at maintaining its longevity. The early desert works of all three artists—Heizer,

De Maria and Oppenheim—embraced entropic effects, but Heizer through his threat

(real or not) replaces entropy with self-willed destruction.

Photography has long been used to document modernist practices such as

Performance Art and the large-scale work of artists such as Christo and Jeanne-

Claude. For Heizer, De Maria and Oppenheim, this tool, however, was problematic.

Photography was the only possible medium for showcasing the temporal work of

Oppenheim, while Heizer and De Maria commissioned and disseminated only selected images of their art. Indeed, Heizer would claim that his early work such as

Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) was never meant to be photographed as this served only to increase its ―exotic‖ value for city audiences and journalists.15 That said, photographs of the first two stages of City, Complexes One and Two, were distributed during and soon after their creations in 1972–74 and 1980–88, but visitation, as previously noted, was prohibited. In effect, Heizer controlled the imagery of the work. De Maria similarly guarded reproductions of his works and did not discuss any of their features other than dimensions and materials, but apparently he was entranced by the reproduction of his oeuvre on an I-pad shown to him in the last few years of his life.16

217

Today, digital reproduction and the Internet have made authorial control over the reproduction of artwork complicated, to say the least. Technology (unimagined at the time of City’s conception) and evolution has impacted on this work in significant ways. As soon as satellite images of the complex became available and began to be distributed digitally, at the beginning of this century, Heizer naturally lost control of

City’s imagery. Made easily accessible through Google Earth and Google Maps in

2005, these aerial images, a perspective literally always frowned upon by Heizer and

De Maria, introduced a new dimension to the discourse on ―traditional‖ Land Art— there are now even websites devoted to discussing the work from these new viewpoints.17 As noted, Heizer claimed that City is ―pointed at the future‖.18 He could not have foreseen, however, in what manner this would be determined. Now, regardless of its eventual attrition by the surrounding desert, City, it would seem, has at least a digital future.19

Notes

1 Michael Kimmelman, ―Art‘s last, lonely cowboy‖, 33. 2 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 14. 3 City upholds the early principle of the rejection of the commodification of art, however, as we have already seen, Double Negative was donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1985, so that principle cannot now be guaranteed in perpetuity. 4 Heizer, cited in Bell, ―Positive and negative: New paintings by Michael Heizer‖, 55. 5 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 38. 6 Ibid., 16. 7 Heizer in Wagstaff interview, The Samuel J. Wagstaff Jnr. Records, 28. 8 Heizer in Earl C. Gottschalk Jnr., ―Earthshaking news from the art world: Sculpting the land‖, The Wall Street Journal, 10 September 1976, 1. 9 Heizer in. Tiberghien, Land Art, 73. 10 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 18. 11 Kimmelman, ―Art‘s last, lonely cowboy‖, 3. 12 Ibid., 6.

218

13 Kimmelman explains that in 2004 Department of Energy officials thought City was ―a military project‖ and he himself describes the complex as a ―bunker‖. (Ibid., 3.) 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 43. 16 Information provided to the writer by Steven Evans, Director of Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas in an interview conducted on 6 October 2013. 17 See Nick Tarasen‘s site: double negative: a website about Michael Heizer, http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/. 18 Heizer in Brown, Sculpture in reverse, 34. 19 It has been suggested that the United States Internal Revenue Service, which granted taxation concessions for the construction of City, will eventually demand public access to the site, since at least some of the construction funds have been subsidized by United States taxpayers. An overnight visitation program similar to that of The Lightning Field which is organized by the Dia Foundation, could be established. (Hedger, interview with William L. Fox, Reno, 27 October 2011.)

219

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