Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments - Rilegato

Fox, William L.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1580935206 ISBN 13: 9781580935203

Casa editrice: The Monacelli Press, 2019

Riassunto

The most comprehensive account available of Michael Heizer's art by a writer and curator who has critical experience with the artist and his work.

Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible, American artists. As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement, his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical understanding. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments spans the breadth of Heizer's career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of this titan of American art.

Author William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, has alternately been a sponsor, advocate, and critic of Heizer's work for decades. Fox's understanding of the artist's history and connection to landscape, his time spent with Heizer at the remote ranch where Heizer is finishing his magnum opus--the mile-long sculpture City--and his access to some of Heizer's key associates give him a unique position from which to discuss the artist's work. Fox has also made numerous site visits to Heizer's work--including early pieces in the Nevada desert now largely lost to the elements--to correct the often inconsistent accounts of their locations. Last, Fox imparts a crucial new understanding of Heizer's work by elaborating on the artist's bond with his father, the famed archaeologist and cultural ecologist Robert Heizer, who enlisted his son on important digs in Mexico and Peru, providing the young man with an appreciation of site, landscape, and geology that would thoroughly inform his work. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments is a long overdue addition to the critical and biographical literature of this major figure in American art.

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Informazioni sull?autore

William L. Fox is founding Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art and has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. Fox has researched and written books--sixteen in all--on cognition and landscape, often set in the extreme environments of the Antarctic, the Arctic, Chile, Nepal, and other remote locations. He has published hundreds of essays in art and photography monographs, magazines, and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Among his nonfiction titles are Aereality: On the World from Above; Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent; In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle; and The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin. Fox is also an artist who has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in eight countries since 1974.  He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club and he is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation.

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1. Introduction to a Difficult Relationship
 
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Michael Heizer developed a new vocabulary of sculpture, which had traditionally been defined in terms of solid forms presented in space. Heizer devised a body of work based on negative space, created by excavating holes in the ground. The medium he could afford to work in was dirt, which he moved at first by shovel and then with heavy equipment. He did this work mostly in the American West, primarily in the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, terrain with which he was familiar and in which he could work for free or relatively cheaply. He brought with him other artists — Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, and Nancy Holt, for example — who then began to make their own sculptures in and on the land. The work of these artists and their colleagues opened up an arena of dramatic possibilities, not only within the formal dialogue of the art world, but also in the practices of other artists who were beginning to work with ecological and environmental concerns.
 
I first met Michael Heizer when I visited his New York studio on Greenwich Street in December 1987. As director of the Nevada Arts Council, the state agency responsible for supporting the arts, I was exploring whether there might be a way for the Council to fund the construction of City, the artist’s magnum opus in south-central Nevada — or at least help him to raise money for it. Heizer showed up on the dingy street as I was ringing his doorbell that evening, and told me that he’d been accosted by aggressive panhandlers several times right outside the door. Inside, however, the place was a marvel of heavy equipment, stacks of drawings and geometric paintings from the 1970s, and more recent blueprints and posters, all pervaded by the smell of cut and welded steel. There was far more than I could possibly see (much less absorb) in a single visit, but over hamburgers at a nearby cafe we started a conversation that would continue for several years.
 
The following April, Barbara Heizer invited me to visit the property in Garden Valley, Nevada, where they were living and where Michael was building City. It wasn’t until the fall of 1989, however, that I was able to take her up on the invitation. I drove out with Kirk Robertson, poet and program director at the Arts Council, and David Wharton, a young reporter from the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper was keen to have Wharton bring back images and a story, but Heizer’s condition for our visit was that none of us could take photographs. We ate lunch around a table in the yard outside Heizer’s cement-block ranch house. Heizer talked, drank beer and Jack Daniels, occasionally chased a cat off the table with a splash of beer on its head; the smells were sage and rabbitbrush, warm dirt — and cut and welded steel.
 
Heizer made it clear over lunch that to see and understand his work you had to experience it in person; a photograph or a written account was unequivocally not an actual encounter with the work. This strict philosophical stance also provided an economic advantage for certain artists: what few images they allowed to be taken of their major earthworks, such as De Maria’s Lightning Field or Heizer’s City, would generate funds to support their practices, or create press leverage when needed. They had decided to erect their major works outside of the physical confines of the gallery-and-museum world, but that didn’t relieve them of the need to monetize the work.
 
Lunch was a lesson in cowboy etiquette. Heizer carried a pistol on his waist as a matter of course. (He favored revolvers at the time, eventually switching to a .357 Sig Sauer automatic; then, as his strength declined, a more easily managed 9mm Glock). According to Heizer, the weaponry was available to shoot at the mountain lions who occasionally came into the yard seeking his livestock, and the more numerous but less formidable coyotes; reputedly, however, the annoying overflights of small aircraft were likewise fair game. After lunch we toured Complex One, the bunker-shaped first component of City on the eastern end of the site, and looked over his plans for future complexes within the enormous sculpture.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: The Monacelli Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2019
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1580935206
• ISBN 13: 9781580935203
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 256
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile