* 1944 in Berkeley, California. Lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, USA
American artist
Bekannt für: Large-scale projects
Art historical context: Land-Art
Exhibited works
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GF | B | "During the late 1960's and early 70's, art began to move outdoors from galleries, and Mr. Heizer, among American artists, helped lead the way. He started as a painter, making shaped canvases with spaces carved out of the middle of them. In 1967, he completed North, East, South, West 1 which included several holes he dug in the Sierra Nevada, the holes akin to the shapes in his paintings. He did similar works in the Mojave desert, and in 1968 he did Nine Nevada Depressions: big, curved and zigzagging trenches, like abstract doodles on the earth, placed intermittently over a span of 520 miles."(1) The work was originally created in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was the first "negative" in Heizer's work, produced in wood and sheet metal, putting two of the four elements (North and South) in the ground in the Sierra Nevadas. The work has been recreated in its entirety as a permanent feature of Dia:Beacon Museum, New York. Its dimensions are: North (square): 522 x 533 x 610 cm East (truncated cone): 467 increasing to 668 cm x 610 cm) South (cone): 533 tapering to 406 cm x 610 cm) West (wedge): 340 x 813 x 610 cm; below floor level 43.3 m x 11.9 m x 610 cm overall | |
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Double Negative, 1969. GF | B | "There is nothing there, yet it's still a sculpture" (Michael Heizer) 240,000 tons of earth and rock (mostly rhyolite and sandstone) had to be displaced for the construction of the trenches. This was only an act of construction, in so far as something was removed. "Heizer's Double Negative (1969) comprises two giant rectangular cuts (and the space in between them) in the irregular cliff edges of a tall desert mesa near Overton, Nevada. This monumental piece is iconic of the period and of works made in and oft the landscape, as are Roberts Smithson's later Spiral Jetty (1970), in Utha, and De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977), in New Mexico. Facing each other in the cliffs on either side of a wied cleft in the mesa, the cuts define rectilinear spaces from which bulldozers have removed the sandstone strata and rock. These spaces, which would roughly absorb the Empire State Building lying on its side, might as aptly be compared to the large-scale feats of modern engineering, or to the monumental earthen architecture of ancient times, as to sculpture. Thus, Heizer's work constitutes a challenge to sulpture's long history. Although the "sculpture volume" of Double Negative was created by a massive movement of earth, performed with the help of heave machinery, it isn't physical at all. Instead it is made literally of nothing, of negative space: the volume that traditionally defines a sculpture is described in these works by a void, by absence rather then presence."(2) "Double Negative is a hole, and the idea of a hole. It isn't an object, but what remains of an action, a gesture. It doesn't represent the action. It has no content, ironically perhaps since man made holes in the ground are usually containers of some kind - wells, graves, mines, foundations. It doesn't do anything; it's kind of passive, inert […]. In Double Negative, the figure/ground binary of object based work is turned upside down; the figure is an absence rather than a presence."(3) The work belongs to the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), but among the terms of the agreement with the museum is the fact that MoCA is not allowed to undertake any conservation of the piece as Heizer wants nature to eventually reclaim the land through weather and erosion. | |
| Links Gagosian Gallery | Ace Gallery | Dia Art Foundation | LACMA | Further informations 1 | 2
Quotes (1) Michel Kimmelman, (2) Michael Govan, (3) Chris Fortescue
Credits All reproductions © Michael Heizer
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