America was still fighting the Vietnam war when Michael Heizer started working on “City”, which is now ready for (a few) visitors in Nevada
project in the Nevada desert, is so big and has taken so long that it has become something of a myth in the art world. Some observers thought it would never be completed. It is more than a mile and a half long and half a mile wide . Yet “City” sits so discreetly in the landscape that from a distance it is almost invisible. Only when you step into it, and walk the length of the pebbled cinder base, do you get a sense of how vast the artwork is.
Theirs was a particularly American art, full of energy—the land equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. “I don’t think there’s ever been such invention in art as the late 1960s,” says Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a crucial supporter of America’s land artists. “You’d have to go back to the early teens of the 20th century, when abstraction was invented, or maybe to the invention of perspective.
When Mr Heizer conceived “City” he began at one end, with a section he called “Complex One”—a rectangular slope surrounded by concrete struts. “I worked entirely intuitively,” he says, “with no ongoing thought or consecutive way of planning.” For years he operated diggers and earthmovers alone or with a small band of construction workers, breaking off only to do commissioned works for other people in order to raise money.
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