Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass

In early August, a 340-ton boulder will be driven from a quarry in Riverside to LACMA to become art: Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass.

(See also the 200-ton BofA Plaza segmented chunk of Swedish marble.)


In 1969, I looked on as Heizer did the ur-version. Here is my previously unpublished account: 


Alakali flats or dry lakes are smooth, isolated, canvas-colored surfaces that dot the deserts of California and Nevada. Snow covers some dry lakes in winter and turns them to chocolate pudding in spring, but most of them dried up forever 12,000 years ago and are now used, if at all, for joy rides, TV commercials, speed trials, and landing the X-15.


Since 1967, Michael Heizer (born 1945) has explored the possibilities of making art on these surfaces. He has sunk minimalist boxes and troughs, dug hug curlicues, zia zags, and depressions ("negative objects"), and even painted—with water-based dye—and done drawings—with a motorcycle.


At the simplest level, his art rejects the indoor, precious object, the portable commodity so conveniently handled by dealers, collectors, and museums. His desert pieces are quite obviously inaccessible. And they derive much of their beauty from this isolation. 

"In the desert," Heizer says, "I can find that kind of unraped, peaceful, religious space artists have always tried to put in their work."


Heizer's move is out of the tightly circumscribed art world with its tiny, stuffy galleries into a near-empty situation so essentially artless it might even be called Nature. The grandeur of the setting—the clear hot air in a sky the color of Nevada's license plates, the silence, the faintly cracked, powered-milk mud walled in by scrubby brush and barren hills is undeniable. 

As Robert Scull, who has commissioned two Heizer projects, said after one visit, "Nobody back there realizes how much fun—and how beautiful—this kind of art can be."


Still, Heizer is far from being a scenic tour guide or neo-romantic nature freak. His blasted vision of pastoral may seem appropriate in an age of lunar landscapes, but that is not his prime concern.


While many avant-garde sculptors are currently concerned with "process"—showing how the work is made—Heizer is not. His material is identical with its location, not transformed or performed. It falls within the great sculptural tradition of carving and modeling, the earth being treated as a monolith to be manipulated by shovels, bulldozers, and earthmovers.


Object-sculpture in general is also defeated because a Heizer piece is its location. No disengagement from the site is possible. The work is where it is, and the implicated space—or place—has no specific limits, the equivalent of the edges of the canvas. A piece on a dry lake is no more determined by the boundaries of that lake than it is by the ring of mountains that surround that lake.


Making his crude marks as far from civilization as he can—"my holes should be indeterminate in time and inaccessible in place"—Heizer returns sculpture to its primitive, archaeological roots, the way Andy Warhol, in his early films, returned cinema to the austere purity of Lumiere.


Much of Heizer's work an be traced through what might be called family background. There are mining engineers and geologists on both sides of the family.  His father is a noted UC-Berkeley anthropologist/archaeologist, an expert on Indian rock drawings who recently discovered an important pyramid in Mexico. 

See also Robert F. Heizer's "Ancient Heavy Transport, Method and Achievement," Science, August 19, 1966, which describes the means used by engineers in antiquity to move huge rocks—for obelisks, Stonehenge, and other monolithic monoments.


Robert Heizer's article might serve as the text for his son's most recent work—moving a 130-ton, 30-foot chunk of granite blasted from the Sierra Nevada above Lake Tahoe by construction crews.


The Heizer family has had a cabin at Tahoe for 15 years, and Heizer frequently uses it as base camp for his ventures into the desert. When he discovered this giant rock, he decided to move it and three lesser, 30-ton companions some 70 miles: past the former Mint in Carson City, past the ghost town of Dayton, past the century-old Sutro Tunnel (drilled to drain the silver mines of Virginia City), past a corral used for the movie, The Misfits, out a gravel road cut by the Break-a-Heart ranch and onto a dry lake nestled in a box canyon beneath Churchill Butte and the Pine Nut Mountains.


The giant rock would be dropped over a slot 15-feet deep, 30-feet long. And, because only the ends would rest on the banks, it would be called "levitated mass." The lesser rocks would be dropped into three lesser holes, to become "replaced mass."


The operation would require a blasting drill—to lop the giant down to manageable size—two cranes, three heavy equipment haulers, and a skip-loader. A real estate agent would be consulted because Heizer, who used to raid whatever dry lakes took his fancy, now feels he must own the land of which his art is deployed. "I'm reversing myself," he declares, explaining he could no longer be pleased that his works were temporary and unsaleable.


(The wood liners of one hole have been pirated for firewood; many of the unlined holes have been eroded to the point of disappearing.)


To help ensure saleability and permanence, Heizer would try to buy the lake. And he would make his holes into hardened silos, using high-quality concrete and reinforcing rods. Thus, he hoped they would even be capable of withstanding a nuclear attack.


"Artists have always been frightened by things like the Grand Canyon," fellow earthworker Dennis Oppenheim once declared. "These forms may be impossible to duplicate or rival, but they are important. And we have to take them on in their own ballpark."


How large, then, must a trench in a dry lake or a rock on a trench in a dry lake have to be to have massive scale? At one point, Heizer proposed digging a 30-foot "shaft," a mini-mine. But a 130-ton rock—as large as any the ancients were able to handle—would surely be big enough.


The central issue, though, is time. Ephemerality has become the standard in recent art: carpets of graphite laid down to be swept away; performances that are neither recorded nor repeated... Heizer, however, is after truly monumental art, something that will survive—monolithic, mysterious, and as durable as the Easter Island heads.


Heizer is very literal in his determination to outlast the holocaust he sees as imminent. "The only way to destroy this piece," he says, "is to bury it. And you can trust the empirical mind to find it again."


The audacity of Heizer's obsession can be measured in terms of its cost—not simply for transportation, real estate, or equipment rental—but in almost criminal danger and destruction. The day before the big move, he wiped out the underbelly of his rental car while reconnoitering the terrain near the rock. Coming to the job, one crane sideswiped a car and a camper-trailer. Later, the brakes of one hauler slipped, and it smashed into a truck. Later still, another hauler's fan belt broke, tearing its radiator apart.


Because of the delays—ultimately, the cranes were too weak to lift the giant—night fell before the lesser rocks arrived on the site. So the unloading was performed by half-moon and headlights. It was a scene from Wages of Fear, Yves Montand bouncing along with a truckload of nitroglycerin.


It seems strange, but necessary, to report that no one was physically injured.

Floors & Ceilings

Allegory of Faith
Music Lesson
Art of Painting
Concerning these three paintings, Daniel Arasse points out that Vermeer did "only three paintings with floor and ceiling...it is tempting to recognize in this disposition a type of presentation, of framing, that Vermeer would have reserved to the allegorical statement— for reasons which remain, however, difficult to understand."

Violence

Speaking of Vermeer's complex life, about which we know virtually nothing, Bryan Jay Wolfe, professor of American Studies and English at Yale, in Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, in a chapter titled "Transgression" goes:

    "Vermeer's private life was filled with violence. His maternal grandfather, who worked at one point as an engraver in a counterfeiting ring, later turned state's witness and provided testimony that led to the beheading of the scheme's two leaders. Vermeer's father, as a young man, had twice been involved in public brawls, both times with knives, one leading to the death of a soldier garrisoned in Delft. Catharina Bolnes, Vermeer's wife, came from a family traumatized by domestic abuse. Her father, Reynier Bolnes, once attacked his wife, Maria Thins, who was then pregnant, with a 'stick.' Reynier Bolnes verbally assaulted Maria Thins and forced her to eat her meals alone. She in turn sent several petitions to the magistrates at Gouda in an effort to secure a judicial separation. The sparring between husband and wife divided the Bolnes family into partisan camps. Maria received the support of her sister and brother (who was himself stabbed in a fight with one of Reynier Bolnes's brothers), while Reynier enlisted the assistance not only of his siblings but of his son, Willem, who consistently sided with his father.

    "Years later, after the warring couple had separated, Willem came to lived with his mother in Delft—at the same time that Vermeer and his wife shared her home in the Catholic quarter of the city. Wellem's violent behavior toward his mother so frightened her—he called her, among other things, an 'old Papist sow' and a she-devil'—that she retreated to her room, where, in a sad repetition of history, she had her meals brought up to her. According to subsequent depositions, Willem also attacked  his sister Catharina (Vermeer's wife), 'threatening on a number of occasion to beat her with a stick, although she was in the last stage of pregnancy.' Willem had previously beaten her with a 'steel-tipped stick.' Maria Thins eventually petitioned the Court of Delft to commit her son to a private house of correction. She won her suit; Willem, however, would later taunt the family with threats of marriage to a servant of questionable reputation who was employed by the house of correction.


    "I wish to understand the constructed nature of Vermeer's serenities, the way that his silences incorporate rather than neutralized aggressions internal to the act of painting. If Vermeer domesticates the forces of history, if he renames truth as something mundane and housebound, then he also rewrites violence as more than the clash of armies by night. His painting reach into that inner violence, that heterodox mixture of love and aggression, that animates not only domestic life in burgher cultures, but those forms of painting that spring from domestic life."

Lisa Vergara

How exciting to hear Lisa Vergara, who teaches at Hunter, articulate how Vermeer's "composition and rhetoric coincide," in "Antiek and Modern in Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid."

She speaks of how his "famous formal manipulations work expressively: for each painting he invented a special decorum of scale, space, color, light, focus, and touch, keyed to the figural subject." 


And of his "devices—visual comparisons, echoes, rhymes, repetitions, concatenations, whatever we choose to call them..."


And, "the whole chiaroscuro arrangement, down to the floor of black and white tiles, confirms the densely plotted nature of the work." 

Later, unfortunately, she goes a bit overboard, speculating that the picture "might represent on one level Vermeer's complex response to his own personal circumstances...aspects of Vermeer's life discovered through archival study and intimate social history...."


Namely, his financial instability, his living amongst Catholics, his many children, the illiteracy of his wife, his mother-in-law's "patrician income," his own rise from "the artisan class of his family...."

Lawrence Gowing felt differently: "Vermeer is well protected; little of life or personality ever pierces his armour. And when some disturbing experience does penetrate within the shell he proceeds to enclose it in a pearly covering of style until its sharpness is assimilated." 

I go with Frank Stella: "What you see is what you see,"

although, unfortunately, in Stella's case, he saw less and less, and showed more and more.

What I Didn't See

When I was in the Rijksmuseum in early April, it was, of course packed, not like this. (be patient, this link takes a second to load up)


It's impossible to see, during the pan, but on the wall just after the Vermeers are three de Hooch's of ever-increasing complexity and depth, quite wonderful.


What I didn't see was the third Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter.


I remember when I got home, leafing through a Vermeer book and wondering why the Rijksmuseum hadn't put up that great painting.


I suppose I was distracted by my absorption in its neighbors, Little Street and Milkmaid.


Or maybe I can blame the crowds.


I am absolutely sure I didn't see the Rijksmuseum's fourth Vermeer,  Love Letter, which is one among many treasures in storage during the eternal restoration.

Morgan, Havemeyer, Oakes

Not to dwell unduly on provenance, but I was pleased to note that A Lady Writing was once owned by J.P. Morgan, and later by Henry Havemeyer, and, between them, by Sir Harry Oakes, who, according to Vermeer scholar Arthur K. Wheelock (and Ben Broos) was "apparently murdered [in 1943] by the Mafia, because he would not tolerate a casino on the island" of Nassau.


Actually, there are lots of versions of the murder: Novelist William Boyd, noting that the Duke of Windsor was governor of the Bahamas at the time [sent into exile because of his Nazi sympathies] has recently suggested a possiblity that was filmed by the BBC.


In any case, Oakes's daughter, Nancy, learned of her father's death from Merce Cunningham; she had been on her way to Bennington to study for the summer with Martha Graham.


Nancy's husband was accused of the murder (motive: for the money), but was acquitted. Deported to Cuba, they stayed with Hemingway.

The Glory or Shame of the Mauritshuis?

It's the masterpieces that make a museum great, but the unknown surprises, the stuff you didn't expect, are also essential.

For example, a painting the Mauritshuis puts on the wall, but doesn't bother to supply with an image on its website:

François Bunel II (attributed to)  
title    The confiscation of the contents of a painter's studio   
period    c.1590?   
material    panel   
dimensions    28 x 46.5 cm   
inventory number    875   

Here it is, and here is a translation of the text (click on the "translate" button).

It's a little hard to read the image, but it shows the contents of an artist's studio being seized (for debt?) by porters schlepping off wrapped-up paintings, using wonderful carrying frames; the text details the paintings confiscated from the Jewish dealer Goudstikker by the Nazis and still in public collections.


The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco recently showed a selection of works from the Goudstikker collection.

Has the Mauritshuis been awarded The Confiscation, I asked the museum's Head of Public Affairs, who had earlier this month replied to my query about the terrible lighting of View of Delft et al. 

She replied:
In answer to your question regarding The Confiscation, the answer is that at this moment we simply don’t have good quality images of all our artwork. We’re currently working on a project to digitalize our collection, as to ensure that in the future the whole collection is also available online.
   With regards to the Goudstikker collection; it’s only the restitution commission who can answer that question, not the Mauritshuis.


If you search the website for the museum's holdings, 1575-1600, 24 paintings show up. The only one without an image is The Confiscation.

How ironic for a painting about confiscation.