August 21, 2022
"Nearly everything about Michael Heizer’s land art megasculpture called 'City' can seem hard to fathom."
"That it’s a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, smack in the middle of a remote stretch of the high Nevada desert, where what passes for a neighbor is Area 51. That the nearest blacktop is an hour’s drive away, on a dusty, bumpy, former livestock trail, across a couple of mountain ranges. That it cost $40 million to build.
Even that it’s called 'City.' It’s a city in name only. Exquisitely groomed dirt mounds, roads, buttes and depressions like dry lake beds spread out in no immediately obvious order and in different directions.... It’s meant to be trekked and explored on foot, slowly, at eye level, where the site swallows you up.... There are moments I’ve resented trudging from one end of the site to the other, through the dirt and the heat or cold, waiting for an epiphany.... It is bravado, awesome and nuts...."
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24 comments:
I read this this morning. Amazing project. Little background on the artist who has committed fifty years to this effort. Where did he get the money for what turned out to be a forty million dollar work of physical consequence.
Smaller versions of such useless but nature-enhancing architecure, done on English country estates in past centuries, were sometimes called "follies." Then there were the hidden ditches, a recessed landscape design element, called a "haha" that creates a vertical barrier while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond.
Getting into more serious landscaping and architectural features, from ancient times forts had mazes as entrances, hidden passageways and apertures, blind alleys, ditches, walls, traps and holes and so on to create kill zones when enemies attacked. Serious use of architectural and landscaping indeed.
Have a Christo fabric wrap done around it and call it done!
Good thing there are still crazy people in the world.
Not everyone is a conformist sheep...
Absolutely fascinating. I'd love to see it in person.
It's really interesting how, because the NY Times finally noticed something in flyover country that's been there for years, it only now exists and only now can it revealed.
Megadouches.
The vast empty stretches of the high Nevada desert have a beauty to me that no other area can touch. This looks no better than the tailings, structures and settling ponds of the big mines. Plus it's a lot less useful.
Get Christo to drape it in something.
Tomorrow's Nazca Lines.
I see a bit of Brasilia and a touch of Cahokia or Teotihuacan. He's a mound builder -- this time in concrete.
But it's also too eerily reminiscent of Hitler's reviewing stand at Nuremberg.
Is it aligned with the Summer Solstice??
Now alignment would be very cool. It would make heads pop.
I wonder if he did an environmental impact statement report for the project. One would certainly be required, but I assume that an “artiste” would never be raided and jailed by the epa.
Like his other works, it looks intensely boring. Maybe that's what he was going for. Well done, sir!
Desert labyrinth.
I think he should have moved those triangles a couple of inches to the left.
Hopefully no one will get killed there, as happened with Christo's umbrellas.
Did the NYT tell us how many hungry people could be fed with those millions?
I wish he would have asked me to do the job for him. I could have found a better place for it and produced $500MM worth of Lithium along the way.
I guess you have to be there
You can see it on google earth at N38 01’ 33” W 115 24’ 16”. Pretty much in nowhere. I had to look hard to find it.
My mother often said: "Some people have more dollars than sense."
This is great for those who love the aesthetics of a dried out reservoirs and hydroelectric project dams.
If you enter Michael Heizer's name in google maps, then you see that there is a second Michael Heizer art installation called "Double Negative" also in Nevada. It looks like a trench cut into the bluff.
It doesn't make any sense either.
On Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0341393,-115.4386271,1898m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en-US
On Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0341393,-115.4386271,1898m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en-US
I really like Heizer's mega-sculpture. The Nevada desert isn't interesting to me. There is a lot of desert, so people who don't like Heizer's work, can look a different direction.
After we've all had a chance to gaze at his work, it would be interesting to watch people play on it. Let the parkour, trial bike and paint ball people have at it.
Thanks, DLNE!
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