American Cosmism – Weekend – Kommersant
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In September, in the Nevada desert, Michael Heiser’s “City” opens to the public, the largest and longest created work in the history of land art – the artist worked on it for half a century. No more than six people a day will be allowed in, and only in good weather, all sessions for 2022 have already been reserved.
The City will be allowed in during the day, in bright sunlight, when the noble simplicity and calm grandeur of its abstract geometry, the clarity of the lines of the borders separating one plane from another, and the depth of the shadows cast by a few structures reach their maximum expressiveness. In the dazzling sun, the “City” seems to be an elegant hybrid of antiquity and high-tech, as if the architects of Chichen Itza, invited to design supports and interchanges for some cyclopean highways, worked here. No excursions are provided, no routes are laid – the viewer remains completely alone and left to himself. Can imagine being the last person left on Earth after a nuclear war, or an astronaut landing on a spaceport on a distant planet. Critics admitted to the “City” on the eve of the opening, unanimously recalled the early episodes of “Star Wars” and “Dune” by David Lynch.
“City” is considered the largest work of modern art: the whole complex is a giant wound on the body of the desert, 2 kilometers long, half a kilometer wide. However, Michael Heizer would not have liked the metaphor of a wound. The “city” is built from what the desert gives – from stone, clay, sand, compressed earth, and concrete, in essence, is a natural material. But that’s not the point. In 2015, the part of Nevada adjacent to the “City” – an area of 704 thousand acres – was declared a protected area, Basin and Range National Monument, excluded from the plans for the economic development of the region. And it was a great victory for the artist and the Triple Aught Foundation founded by him in 1998, the owner and management company of Gorod.
Heiser began working on his opus magnum in 1970, buying land in a remote, untouched part of Nevada, tract by tract, but soon a big federal plan to develop the area was planned: a railroad was going to be built in the vicinity of the “City” in order to deliver nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain repository. The Triple Aught Foundation, whose board includes art world aces like the directors of MoMA and LACMA, not only helped the artist raise money to complete the work (the “City” cost $40 million), but also got involved in his environmental struggle, and although the battles of environmentalists with Since the repository project continues to this day, a large piece of Nevada, which became a national natural monument thanks to Heizer, was saved. The statement, published on the Triple Aught Foundation website, emphasizes that these were the ancestral lands of two Indian tribes and that Heiser is also not completely an outsider here – his ancestors moved to Nevada in the early 19th century.
The “City”, which was built from 1970 to 2022, can be called the most grandiose long-term construction in the history of contemporary art. At least until James Turrell broke Heiser’s record with his Roden Crater: he has been working on the project since 1974, in 1979 he acquired a piece of land with an extinct volcano crater in northern Arizona, the opening is scheduled for 2024, but quite it is likely to be delayed. Roden Crater promises to be the largest of Turrell’s observatories – a space for contemplating the light of the Sun, the Moon, the constellations and for thinking about the starry sky above us and other Kantian matters. Heiser’s creation also involves communication with space, and it seems to be mutual – judging by the published photographs, the most spectacular views of the “City” open from a bird’s eye view, but perhaps space images taken by representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations would look even better. Heiser is called a sculptor, but in fact he is a painter, he just needed very large planes for painting, and, as you know, a large one is seen from a distance.
In 1967, Heiser, who began with geometric abstraction on canvases of complex geometric shapes, so that the paintings-objects looked enlarged and fragments cut out from maps with roundabouts or road loops, began to perceive the earth as an endless canvas on which his “depressions” (recesses ) and “negatives” (excavations) can leave indelible features. Earth’s best canvases were, of course, deserts: Heinz Mack set up his mirror-aluminum kinetic structures in the Sahara, Nancy Holt built “Solar Tunnels” in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, Walter De Maria used lightning rods to make an entire “Lightning Field” in western New Mexico – the artist fled from galleries and museums to hell, galleries and museums ran after him. Heiser’s first “earthworks” appeared in Nevada in the late 1960s – his ancestors really were from these parts, and besides, they worked on the ground: both grandfathers were engaged in geology, and his father – in archeology and anthropology. When Heiser was twelve, his father, a prominent expert on the indigenous cultures of the Americas, took him on an expedition to Mexico, saving him from school for a whole year – he has had a love for Chichen Itza since childhood.
Today it is hard to believe that this harmless escapist archaeologist, with a relatively modest work by the standards of even his then work, caused a real scandal at the exhibition “When Relationships Become Form” – because of Heiser and other brawlers to Harald Szeemann, the author of the legendary exhibition and director of the Kunsthalle Bern, I had to leave the director’s post for independent curating. The exhibition, which opened in 1969, was perceived by many in the spirit that it was angry youth who turned universities upside down, now they took up museums. Heiser with his “Bern Depression” looked like a typical rebel: a wall-beater was driven to the Kunsthalle and the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to the museum was destroyed with a balloon, so that, to paraphrase the well-known slogan of May 1968, under the asphalt, though not a beach, but damp, rough ground.
Zeeman’s exhibition was indeed made from the point of view of the art of the 1968 era, which refuses to produce things that have a “commodity status”, as leftist-minded young artists used to say, and is engaged in the production of communicative situations, “relationships” in Zeeman’s terminology. Following the logic of the material, it was necessary to turn the museum from a temple with columns into an open workshop – the “Bern depression” in front of these very columns warned that work was underway in the temple. The art of the 1968 era seemed to the curator to be a worldwide international – Zeeman will go down in history as the first who managed to find a common denominator for all the avant-garde practices of the revolutionary decade in the Old and New Worlds, from Fluxus, New Realists and Arte Povera to minimalism, land- art and conceptual art. It is characteristic that land art, in contrast to abstract expressionism or pop art, was not then perceived as specifically American art, suggesting a special relationship with space – pushing the artistic space to cosmic dimensions.
Meanwhile, already at Relations, national differences were identified between British land art, which acted in the genre of a walk, a path trodden in a field or a path lined with pebbles, and American land art, which was just preparing for its future achievements. And while the Englishman Richard Long was walking in the surrounding mountains, exhibiting photographic travelogues in the Kunsthalle, the American Walter De Maria, a colleague of Michael Heiser, was waiting by the phone in his New York workshop. There was a telephone set on the floor in the Kunsthalle – the audience could dial the artist’s number and chat with him about this and that. Of course, this was a communicative situation, a “relationship” situation. At the same time, a sound axis was formed between New York and Bern, penetrating the entire globe. In general, De Maria could argue with Heiser, which of them is the author of the greatest work of modern art.
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