ABSTRACT
Vertical space and the logics of abandonment in Michael Heizer’s City Convinced by the need to protect the originality of his ideas, Michael Heizer left the New York art scene in the 1970s to continue his production of earthworks in the solitude of the Nevada desert. He settled on a patch of land some 300 kilometres north of Las Vegas and east of Yucca Mountain, but long before the Mountain became a nuclear waste repository and the subject of ongoing contestation, including by Heizer himself (Knight 2009). Finding solace from the manufactured consent that he sensed was prevalent among his New York colleagues, which included Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, and several others, Heizer began in earnest to build a structure so great that it would eventually challenge the art movement to which his work has long been associated. Known
today as City, this project is often regarded as the largest of any previous earthworks structure built before. It depicts an urban ruin composed from massive concrete slabs that have been situated in various ‘complexes’, distributed with geometrical precision along fabricated valleys and hills across roughly two kilometres of desert land. Precedents for this work can be found in Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), a massive desert trench that he made entirely of empty or negative space, and Effigy Tumuli (1985), which represents an attempt to repurpose the space of an abandoned mining facility. Both of these efforts very clearly follow the earthworks tradition of moving ‘outside the gallery’ and ‘into the land’ (Kuebler-Wolf 2013), in yet another return to the avant-garde motifs of rejecting art institutions and standardized frameworks of interpretation (Bürger 1994). City, however, is notable in this regard for its curated remembrances of ancient monuments, allusions to native mysticism and attempts to imagine the space of human activity through a time capsule, as it were. With its endlessly deferred completion mentioned in every occasional attempt to publicize the site, City has become a bona fide ruin in the making. Less a work of art as ‘a work-inprogress’ (Heizer 2014), this site’s public availability will only happen, if it does happen at all, according to the express wishes of the artist. Barring exhibits or visitations of any kind, Heizer, in partnership with the Dia Art Foundation and others, has managed to finance the project independently during the course of five distinct phases of development. In fact, though City may appear to be a development project, which it is, the site has also managed to secure protection under Nevada conservation law (Heddaya 2014). Indeed with each expansion of the work, the newer structures establish deepening points of contrast and conjuncture with the surrounding environment. While in earlier phases Heizer focused on building massive concrete structures or buildings, the newer phases have become ‘more pneumatic’, resulting in ‘raked dirt formations resembling hills, valleys and mountains’ (Kimmelman 2005). Combined, these various sites give the impression of a total environment, an urban space that has been delicately arranged in the absence of any desire to be encountered, discovered, or contested. With his attachment to the aesthetics of the monument, the artist has voiced hopes that City will be admired both in its absence and erasure. For, as the site is composed from a series of shapes that ‘align visually to make a frame around the structure’ (Kimmelman 2005), it creates distinctions and relations that contest or interrogate the boundary between inside and outside, distinction and erasure. The uniqueness of City is owed in part to the way that it contravenes the historically situated relationship between earthworks sculpture and questions of the urban; in fact, City challenges the assumption that earthworks sculpture should be classified as works of art at all. Because the site in question has been carefully protected from public view since construction began, Heizer has successfully challenged the long-held assumption that earthworks are made with the desire to stage encounters for a viewing subject or audience. In the absence of such a desire, I argue that City has acquired an element of cityness that paradoxically results from the site’s abandonment, not from something that has taken place in
spite of it. In other words, the consequences of this reversal are profound if we consider urban abandonment in general terms, beyond its artistic application or potential. Though the design of Heizer’s site is premised on relations with the natural environment through a process of techne, these relationships serve the greater purpose of approximating ritual and ceremonial practices that are inherent to the social fabric of urban space. In effect, the cityness of City is determined by Heizer’s musealization of the urban, which among other things acknowledges generational ties to the land. Now, because of this attempted musealization, City in turn cannot be determined by the criteria established by Henri Lefebvre (1991), for whom the spatiality of the urban constituted a privileged site for the production of the social, including the specific cleavages or tensions that accompany that production. To put it another way, I argue that City poses a methodological problem for Lefebvre’s analysis of urban study, as abandonment according to that model has to be premised on the destruction of the social, and this destruction if anything becomes a design feature that Heizer exploits. Granted, the tradition of urban study that relies upon the spatial dialectic that originated with Lefebvre is crucial to the analysis of cities in general. As Edward Soja argues, for instance, by defining cityspace as a built environment, we tend to concentrate only ‘on the distilled material forms of urban spatiality, too often leaving aside its more dynamic, generative, developmental, and explanatory qualities’ (2000: 9). City not only fails to abide to these criteria, but it also exceeds the formalist and reductive alternative, whereby cityspace is reduced or reducible to a set of ‘measureable and mappable configurations’ (Soja 2000: 10). Situating abandonment as parallel to the socio-spatial dialectic that Edward Soja (2000, 2011) proposes throughout his work, I suggest that Heizer’s City is defined in fact by considerable activity. In spite of its desertedness, it is a location defined primarily by the creativity and originality of the artist, and, more concretely, by urban development. It is true, for instance, that City could not be understood exclusively as a reflection of Heizer’s antagonistic relationship with the New York art scene, including his ongoing claim of being misrepresented and misappropriated by his peers. For Kimmelman (2005), Heizer’s project is ‘propelled by anger and resentment and monomania but also by Eros’. Though it contains the vitriol of Heizer’s severed relationships, it also includes the seductive notion of ‘sculpture as voluptuous, unspoiled and ecstatic’ (Kimmelman 2005). Crucial to this vision is Heizer’s generational memory of the land. As Kimmelman (2005) has observed, Heizer frequently describes the Nevada desert ‘as virgin land’, in the sense that ‘he obsesses about the originality of his conception, about protecting his property and his art from violation by the rail, from developers hunting for underground water’, and so on. In fact, Heizer developed a theory of ‘cumulative observation’ (Kimmelman 1999) in which to illustrate his resolute protectionism. Having inscribed optical illusions and permanent mirages into the monochromatic lieux de mémoire, he says that one must ‘walk around [the sculpture], climb over it and later put it together in your mind’ (Kimmelman 1999). In this, we are no longer dealing with ‘the old convenient
art object’ (Kimmelman 1999). On the other hand, the urgency and necessity with which Heizer describes this interpretive framework is one that also corresponds to the impossibility of its execution. It is limited above all by a single gesture that both extends and limits the gaze of the onlooker. New methods have been devised to contravene this requirement. It has become well known, for example, that Heizer’s paradoxical demands have been maligned by unforeseen circumstances at least since 2005, when Google Earth made satellite images of the work publicly available. Earlier images dating back to 1986 belong to the United States Geological Survey (Tarasen 2014). These mappable designs have indeed produced a representation of City that is capable of previously unimaginable mechanisms of specular control, having reoriented, challenged, and even disregarded the specific hermeneutic operation that Heizer insisted upon years ago. The satellite images of City connect the work to a larger perspectival shift that Heizer could not have predicted at the time of this work’s auspicious beginning. The viewer has once again returned to the frame, but this time with significant powers of exploitation, having acquired a vantage point that is situated high above. Anathema to cumulative observation, these images confound the artist’s method of observation by visualizing City in its perpetual state of unfinishedness, while revealing its precise location in the desert for everyone to see. In a sense, the satellite images of City transform the site into an urban formation just like any other, falling victim as it does to the fluctuations of entropy, change, and surveillance. Connected to this epistemic shift is the sheer accessibility of a vantage point that has otherwise redefined the world picture by enhancing our capacities of attunement, having done so in ways that also risk the onset of incoherence and amnesia. In other words, by representing empty space through the interface of the satellite image, there is significant risk of replicating Walter Benjamin’s famous pronouncement of a homogenous and empty time (2007: 262). The epistemic criterion of these images has been lucidly described in attempts to historicize diverse cultural associations of ‘public vertical space’ (Parks 2013). In a recent article on this subject, Parks refers to the geopolitical challenges of keeping orbital space in the public domain from the time it was discovered back in 1927. Though an international treaty was eventually signed 40 years later with the aim of securing the orbital context for ‘international peace, cooperation and collaboration’, it has from the outset become a mere extension of the territorial divisions that line the surface of the planet below (Parks 2013: 65). Not surprisingly, orbital space today has become a playground for military infrastructures, telecommunications, and other corporate interests. For Parks, these competing actors on the orbital stage are implicated in a larger history that is itself ‘firmly grounded in terrestrial politics’ (Parks 2013: 68). Despite any repeated connection to the universalisms that I described in my introduction, Parks acknowledges that ‘ “outer space” became a new historical, geographic, and theatrical/performative stage for shaping a discourse about rights and responsibilities, war and peace, security and risk’ (2013: 66). With the popularity of Google Earth and the more recent efforts to make orbital space available to
the public, the strategic elements that Parks describes have only been extended to serve the desire of private corporations, as the ‘satellitization’ (2013: 77) of the web has been directly tied to consumption patterns and profit margins. Acknowledging the terrestrial and political component is important here, in appreciating both the critical potential of the mappable arts as well as its limitations. In other words, by occupying the Archimedean point, as it were, the satellite image that represents vertical space for the public gives an impression of the urban that is remarkably abstracted from city life. City, on the other hand, performs a kind of double duty in this case. For, by reflecting the emptiness of space that results from the application of these technologies, the abandonment of City that is pictured by the orbital lens invites us to reconsider how any such urban space is socially produced and historically situated. Just like Double Negative, the work of City confronts the social production of space both in its absence and its erasure. As Kurgan writes, because maps not only represent space but construct spatial environments, because maps have become critical infrastructures in which we come to know the world, it is ‘through a certain intimacy with these technologies – an encounter with their opacities, their assumptions, their intended aims – [that] can we begin to assess their full ethical and political stakes’ (Kurgan 2013: 14). In this sense, a detour through mappable space allows us to assess the relation between urban abandonment and the artistic movement from which City came.
