Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contributes to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Tresspuss Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [15 July 2026-17 Jan 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed Leo, attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character of Blue Heaven, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]

On Broadway: Fake News

  

[New York Times culture correspondent Jesse Green is taking a look at what he finds is a new phenomenon on stages in the Western world.  It’s related to documentary theater, but has some intriguing differences, according to Green’s analysis. 

[As regular readers of Rick On Theater will have noticed, documentary theater is of special interest to me, and I have blogged on the subject quite a few times since I started ROT.  (Hence my inclination to post this article.)  Some of the previous posts on the blog regarding documentary theater are: “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama” (9 October 2009), “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017), “Documentary and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025).

[Below, there are a couple of embedded links to posts on ROT that touch on theater of fact or verbatim theater, variations on documentary plays.  I didn’t include them in the list here because they’re placed where Jesse Green’s article treats a closely related point, but also because those posts aren’t strictly about documentary theater.  Nonetheless, I urge interested ROTters to check them out.] 

“FAKE NEWS”
by Jesse Green

[The article republished below was originally seen in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026; it was also posted on the New York Times website as “On Broadway Stages, a New Kind of Fake News” on 12 May.  Author Green was the New York Times’ chief theater reviewer from 2020 until 2025.]

A new style of theater has emerged in which the characters and events are real — even when the dialogue isn’t. Or is it?

Recent plays are approaching the archival density of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Mark Rosenblatt’s [British; b. 1978] “Giant” [2024], about the children’s book author Roald Dahl [1916-90; British author of popular children’s literature and short stories, poet, and screenwriter], arrived on Broadway this season [23 March-28 June 2026] bristling with monstrous excerpts from published accounts of Dahl’s antisemitic screeds. Off Broadway earlier this year, the director Daniel Fish [b. 1967] devised “Fauci/Kramer” [sic; program and reviews have Kramer/Fauci at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 11-21 February 2026] from the transcript of a brawlsome 1993 C-SPAN debate between the AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci [b. 1940; physician-scientist and immunologist; director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1984-2022] and the AIDS activist Larry Kramer [1935-2020; playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist]. Last year’s “Liberation” [Laura Pels Theater (Roundabout Theatre; Off-Broadway), 20 February-30 March 2025; James Earl Jones Theater (Broadway), 28 October 2025-1 February 2026], by Bess Wohl [b. 1975], about the hopes and failures of second-wave feminism, is based partly on interviews with participants in real meetings of a 1970s consciousness-raising group. In 2024, Mario Correa’s [b. 1969 in Chile] “N/A” [Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City, 27 June-4 August 2024] — the “N” for Nancy Pelosi; the “A” for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — offered ferocious, mile-a-minute yet totally imaginary depictions of private conversations between the two congresswomen.

I could go on: The 1933 obscenity case against James Joyce’s 1922 “Ulysses” [The United States vs Ulysses by Colin Murphy; premiered in Ireland in November 2023; U.S. premiere: JL Greene Theatre (Irish Arts Center; Off-Broadway), 30 April-1 Jun 2025], the secret back-channel negotiations behind the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords [Oslo by J. T. Rogers at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater (13 April-16 July 2017)], a woman’s taped recollections of being held captive for five months and an FBI transcript of another woman’s arrest for leaking classified information have all been remixed for recent drama [Is This a Room, conceived and directed by Tina Satter; premiered at The Kitchen on 4 January 2019; Off-Broadway premiere on 21 October 2019 at Vineyard Theatre; Lyceum Theatre, 11 October-27 November 2021]. And we in the audience have been left like reporters in darkened rooms to judge the resulting dialogue for ourselves. Is it real or does it just sound as if it might be?

This isn’t entirely new. Peter Morgan’s [British; b. 1963] 2006 play, “Frost/Nixon,” borrowed liberally from the British broadcast journalist David Frost’s [1939-2013] grilling of Richard M. Nixon [1913-1994; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74] in 1977. David Hare’s [English; b. 1947] 2004 play “Stuff Happens” featured another U.S. president, George W. Bush [b. 1946; 43rd President of the United States: 2001-09], conferring with members of his administration during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. (Some of the dialogue, not to mention the title, was drawn from the public record.) And since 2001, the Civilians, a Brooklyn-based “investigative theater” company, have been creating narratives from interviews conducted with evangelicals, porn workers, prisoners and politicians.

But then the line starts to dwindle. Other than the verbatim collages of Anna Deavere Smith [b. 1950] starting in the 1980s [see “Fires in the Mirror (Signature Theatre Company)”(12 December 2019)] and the occasional nostalgia act (like Hal Holbrook’s [1925-2021] “Mark Twain Tonight!” from 1954) or courtroom drama (like Jerome Lawrence [1915-2004] and Robert E. Lee’s [1918-1994] “Inherit the Wind” from 1955), 20th-century plays didn’t generally try to borrow, or simulate, the actual speech of historical figures. No evidence suggests that [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616] consulted 11th-century Scottish transcripts to create “Macbeth” some 600 years later. The Greeks kept the muses of theater and history distinct.

[In point of fact, the Greeks did, at least in one instance, combine history (as distinct from myth) and theater. The first known true history play, Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) The Persians (premiered 472 BCE). is based on actual events rather than myths. The oldest extant ancient Greek drama, the play focuses on the defeat of Xerxes’ (ca. 518-465 BCE; fourth Emperor of Persia: 486-465 BCE) navy at the Battle of Salamis (26 or 27 September 480 BCE) and the Persian reaction to the battle.]

So why are playwrights now so eager to eavesdrop on reality, offering audiences facts and quasi facts in the form of dialogue? It’s hardly the purpose, and rarely the case, that theater should profit by telling us what real people said. Drama has historically been considered a form of fiction or poetry. Yet as recent plays approach the feeling of reportage, what’s surprising isn’t that so many fail to convince but that several succeed, in the process inventing a new style befitting our time.

Take “Giant.” Set on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1983, it presents Dahl (John Lithgow) dealing with the repercussions of having made anti-Jewish comments in his review of a book about Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. A lunch at his home with representatives of his British and American publishers has been organized to encourage him to walk back the comments before they affect sales of his own book “The Witches,” set to be published later that year. Instead, he doubles down, referring to the media, for example, as “a nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews” [Brian Appleyard, “The Master Storyteller,” The Independent (London, Eng.) 20 March 1990].

Hearing that line, one would like to take comfort in the idea of dialogue as fiction. But in “Giant,” one cannot. The worst of Dahl’s antisemitic comments are verbatim — and when not verbatim, close enough. “They control the media,” he said of Jews in a 1990 interview eight months before his death. “Jolly clever thing to do” [Hugo Williams, “The Big Friendly Giant and the Kids,” Independent (London) 18 March 1990]. Yet Rosenblatt writes in a preface to the script that the play is “never striving to be documentary.” The lunch with the publishers’ representatives is plausible but invented, and one character, the American, who’s Jewish [Jessie Stone, played on Broadway by Aya Cash], didn’t exist.

That’s why it makes good drama. The combination of direct quotation from published accounts and close approximations in fully imagined scenes creates a compound glue that’s stronger than its components. Having Dahl say awful things at home, in front of his fiancée and within earshot of his housekeeper and handyman, suggests more about his character than similar things he wrote for public consumption. His antisemitism isn’t just a sound bite, it’s embodied — and thus more absolute and complex.

The paradox recalls Marianne Moore’s [1887-1972; American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor] description of poetry as a form that presents “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” [“Poetry,” first published in Alfred Kreymborg, ed., Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (N. L. Brown, 1920)]. Regarding “Giant,” the phrase “real toad” is especially apt. But in “Liberation,” it’s the garden that’s real: a feminist group in an Ohio gymnasium 50 years ago. I say “real” because Wohl based most of the play’s characters on women who were part of an actual consciousness-raising group from that era, and drew additional inspiration from her mother’s own circle of friends. What they say sounds real too. In their meetings, the women argue about how to respond to the unenlightened men in their lives (“I think you should kill him”), what the goal of feminism should be (“If we don’t take action, we have no group”) and whether it’s permissible for one character to open the top button of her blouse to get a promotion at work (“She has to get through the day somehow”). Eventually, the narrator figure, a semifictionalized stand-in for Wohl, has a debate with her late mother, who materializes to say the play has “some funny lines” but “you got most of it wrong.” That scene is heartbreaking, even if you know that Wohl’s mother is alive and attended the Broadway production eight times.

[Liberation was nominated for the 2026 Best Play Tony, though it didn’t win the award; however, it did win the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Off-Broadway, it won the 2025 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, and it was nominated for the 2025 Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play.]

The acknowledgment of the blurry space between quotation, paraphrase and guesswork — the subtitle is “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember” — makes “Liberation” feel more accurate. “It has to do with the way theater rewards emotional truth over literal truth,” Wohl told me. “The invented dialogue is all in support of the emotional truths I’m investigating, which spring from tons of research and firsthand conversations.”

Wohl’s method, like Rosenblatt’s, works because, even if the dialogue sounds accurate and is sometimes verbatim, the playwrights take a freer hand with the characters, inventing some and compositing others. Notably less successful are those plays, like Stefano Massini’s [Italian; b. 1975] “The Lehman Trilogy,” which opened on Broadway in 2021, that work the other way around, putting fake speech into real mouths, in this case those of three generations of the American banking family. Even putting real dialogue in real mouths can be a problem, though: The historic political statements in “Stuff Happens” are never as convincing as what Hare invents because you cannot reach the depths of character with language designed specifically to be shallow.

Current events have rarely been theater’s forte. Catastrophes that once seemed epochal have over the past two decades merged into one continuous sludge. But it’s not just the pace of the events; it’s how we now encounter them. Social media and A.I. have flooded our field of attention with hot takes and chaotic imagery, leaving us to extract the truth on our own. We learned of the killings of George Floyd [1973-2020; African-American man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 25 May 2020], Renee Good [1988-2026; American woman fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, 7 January 2026] and Alex Pretti [1988-2026; American intensive care nurse for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs shot and killed by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis, 24 January 2026]  within hours, with disinformation, false narratives and even, in some cases, deepfake videos soon following.

What the English poet William Wordsworth [1770-1850] described as his poetic ideal in 1800 — “emotion recollected in tranquillity” [sic; British spelling] — was for almost 200 years drama’s watch cry as well. But with no tranquillity left in which to recollect emotion, it’s no wonder that playwrights have looked for workarounds. Many have discovered, or rediscovered, the way older crises can serve as analogues for newer ones: AIDS can speak to Covid, Dahl to the antisemitic tropes of today, second-wave feminism to third-wave and beyond. What’s new is that playwrights have begun leaning into the objective techniques of nonfiction to sidestep the noise of fake news.

The best works to emerge from this movement toward facts are those that nevertheless manage to exploit the expressive opportunities of fiction. It may have been Smith, in her verbatim plays, who provided the inspiration, paradoxically achieving the imaginative weight of pure invention while observing strict verbal fidelity. The potency of that approach was established by two of her works from the early 1990s: “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities” (about the riots [19-21 August 1991] following the death of a 7-year-old Black boy when a car driven by a Hasidic Jew struck him [19 August]) and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (about the violence that ensued after police officers who attacked Rodney King [1965-2012; African-American victim of police brutality on 3 March 1991 in Los Angeles] were acquitted in state court). But their power also derived from Smith herself, who was usually the only performer onstage, filtering as many as 40 oppositional voices through her own singular lens. The filtering was itself the drama, making the point that any of us contain the possibility of all of us.

Smith’s achievement has been difficult to replicate in other formats, only partly because of her extraordinary mimetic skills. With a strong enough actor, like Michael Benjamin Washington [b. 1979] in the 2019 revival [see also link above] of “Fires,” the play remains overwhelming. But a 2021 Off Broadway revival of “Twilight,” which divided the play’s characters among several actors, dissipated much of its strength. That may be why interview-based dramas in her wake, like those devised by the Civilians and by Tectonic Theater Project (most recently “Here There Are Blueberries,” a 2022 play about the discovery of an album of concentration camp photographs), have inched toward more familiar territory with elaborate settings, projections and song [see also my reports in Rick On Theater on 26 May 2024, 29 May 2024, 1 June 2024, 4 June 2024, and 7 June 2024].

Now playwrights are fudging the line between transcription and transformation even further. Often enough, the result, like an A.I. image in which someone has extra fingers, doesn’t pass the most elementary smell test. But handled properly, the combination of “maybe real” and “Could it be?” and “OK, yes, this actually happened” feels strangely right for our time — and serves as good practice for life. When we can no longer trust what real people say, the fictional facts and factual fictions of plays like “Giant” and “Liberation” make for a new kind of realism. Like little else onstage, they feel true.

[Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for the New York Times.  He was previously the chief theater reviewer for the Times from 2020 until 2025, having been co-chief from 2017.  Previously, he was the theater reviewer at New York magazine.]

Michael Heizer: Land Art Pioneer

 

[I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘land art’ until I was working on my report on “Sphere” (Part 1, 24 December 2023), when I read the review of the Las Vegas entertainment venue by Jackson Arn in the New Yorker.  Arn balanced his appraisal of the high-tech Sphere with one of a nearby artwork, City, by Michael Heizer.

[Heizer’s City is a monumental installation in the Nevada desert which I leaned was land art, constructed of elements of the natural environment.  The art is made directly in the landscape by sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials found on site, such as sand, earth, rocks, twigs, and water.

[I introduce Arn’s review in Sphere, Part 2” (27 December 2023), but I didn’t repost it at that time; it is, however, republished below, following the piece on Heizer.  I subsequently learned more about land art, also known as earth art, in an article in the New York Times about a site-specific environmental sculpture by Mary Miss (b. 1944), posted on Rick On Theater as “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (22 February 2024).]

“OUT THERE”
by M. H. Miller

[The profile of land artist Michael Heizer below was originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 8 March 2026; it’s posted on the Times website as “Michael Heizer Measures His Art in Miles and Tons” (18 February 2026; updated 27 February).  Though the headline above is from the print edition, note that the text below is emended to reflect corrections inserted in the online version after the print version went to press.]

It took the artist Michael Heizer a half-century in the most remote parts of Nevada to build what may be the most extreme contemporary artwork ever made. Now what?

“There’s a lot of things about the modern world that I don’t like,” the artist Michael Heizer [b. 1944] said. We were sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment near the southern edge of Central Park in New York City, which is not where his admirers might expect to find him. Heizer is one of the central figures of the land art movement, which began in the late 1960s when artists, in some strange mix of ego and humility, threw themselves before the elements to create work out of the natural landscape. He spent much of the past 50 years way off the grid in the American Southwest, especially the deserts of Nevada. His preferred materials are multi-ton rocks and dirt, and he uses heavy machinery — cranes, excavators, bulldozers — the way other artists use paintbrushes. Now 81 and in poor health, he finds himself much more at the mercy of society. He shares this apartment, which has a view of the park and Columbus Circle, with his fourth wife, Kara Vander Weg, 54, whom he married in 2022 and who is a managing director at Gagosian, the gallery Heizer joined in 2013. (They split their time between the city — “Kara has to work in town,” Heizer said — and a house on Shelter Island, at the eastern edge of Long Island [in Suffolk County], because, as Vander Weg told me, “he wanted to be near water.”) As we talked, she prepared snacks from a half-wheel of Parmesan. There was a Jasper Johns [b. 1930; American painter, sculptor, and printmaker] print on the wall and a small shrine to Tomato Rose, Heizer’s beloved Border collie, that included a wooden box with the dog’s ashes. There were also clues to his life in the desert: a golden key to the Las Vegas Strip given to him by the mayor; 3-D printed models of rocks; maquettes [prototypes for unfinished or planned sculptures] for various works in progress at his ranch in Nevada. His hair was thinning and he wore an oxygen mask. In a plaid shirt and jeans, he was still handsome but depleted, his face weathered from the last half-century of exposure to harsh winters and 120-degree summers. I asked him if, after all those years out West, New York is ever a culture shock. “I’m an American,” he said. “I don’t make New York art and I don’t make Nevada art. I’m transnational. I’m not trying to brag. I’m just trying to give you an accurate description.”

“Difficult” is an overused word in contemporary art, though if there has ever been an artist to earn the label, it’s Heizer. (“Unpredictable” and “grumpy” were other words those in his orbit offered up to describe his personality.) He’s rarely granted interviews, and he doesn’t allow reporters to tape him. “Let me put it this way,” he told me in his gravelly voice: “I don’t like being recorded.” Heizer’s art can be difficult too — difficult to make, to see, to categorize. For 1967’s “South,” part of a larger work titled “North, East, South, West,” he dug into the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and installed a metal cone in the earth, creating a hole. The following year, he made “Nine Nevada Depressions,” a series of large-scale trenches dug out of dry lakes and the desert across Nevada, using a shovel to carve Cy Twombly-esque markings — a zigzag, a big loop — with dimensions so enormous they were best viewed from an airplane.

[Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer. His works are typically freely-scribbled, calligraphic, and graffiti-like.]

Along with moving contemporary art from the constraints of the white cube exhibition space to the outdoors, he also brought the desert inside; in the 1980s, he began framing large rocks — in some cases more than 40 tons worth — with steel slabs and installing them in galleries and, later, museums. (“Earth,” he once said, “is the material with the most potential because it is the original source material.”) Though Heizer’s work can be found in such museums as Dia Beacon in upstate New York and Glenstone, outside of Washington, D.C., some of his most important contributions should not be experienced firsthand without at least a day’s supply of water, food, a 4 x 4 vehicle and maybe a prayer or two.

He’s most famous for “City,” which he began conceptualizing in 1970 and took a half-century to build. It’s possibly the most artwork to ever exist: the most ambitious, the most logistically complicated, the most remote, the largest. For the piece, Heizer bought more than 2,000 acres of land over the course of decades in Garden Valley, Nev., about 100 miles north of the Nevada Test Site, where the government detonated nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It’s around 160 miles north of Las Vegas in Lincoln County, which is roughly the size of Massachusetts but with fewer than 5,000 residents, “one of the emptiest spaces in a state famous for its emptiness,” in the words of The Las Vegas Review-Journal. At first, Heizer lived there in an 8-by-40-foot trailer. Over time, he built a ranch (named Sleep Late Ranch because the artist, unlike most ranchers, wasn’t much of a morning person) and, in the vast expanse of what counted as his front yard, created his masterpiece, a sculptural installation that borrows techniques from pre-Columbian architecture and stretches nearly a mile and a half end to end.

It took a toll. He has respiratory problems from years of smoking and physical labor at high elevation (“City” is more than 5,000 feet above sea level). Garden Valley was harsh, but it had all the raw materials he’d need: sand and gravel that he could make into concrete, running water and, most of all, space and quiet. “I make decisions off the cuff,” Heizer told me. He’d gone in with no set plan, only an ambition to build something more than “some show in an art gallery.” He would work on an architectural scale. “City” wasn’t designed or engineered but “built directly one to one,” he continued. “I didn’t know what I was making, so I had to try things, and if they didn’t work, I had to change. I changed a lot of stuff. I kept the project loose.”

As “City” grew, so did its mythology: To some, Heizer was a contemporary Western legend, the art world’s Buffalo Bill, drawn to the endless possibilities of a harsh but fecund horizon; to others he was a colonialist on the ancestral lands of the Southern Paiute and Shoshone peoples. Either way, he was a man outside of time, an old buckaroo who stumbled out of the Great Basin and somehow found himself, against all odds, alive in modernity. And “City” was, quite simply, the greatest artwork that no one would ever see. Within certain corners of the art business, Heizer was discussed in the same hushed tones that U.F.O. conspiracy theorists use to talk about the classified military installation Area 51, which is, incidentally and unofficially, one of his neighbors in Nevada. The ranch is so isolated that Heizer described nearby Rachel, Nev., as not so much a town as “just a name given to a couple of trailers south of my valley. A kid was born there and they named her Rachel, and then they called the place Rachel.” He was obsessive about keeping out trespassers seeking a glimpse of his vision.

But then in 2022, to the surprise of everyone who’d been paying attention over the years, Heizer announced that “City” was finished, or at least finished enough to start welcoming visitors. It was like Captain Ahab returning to New Bedford holding aloft the bloody tail fin of Moby Dick. After spending much of the pandemic at the ranch, he and Vander Weg returned to New York, and moved into their current apartment in 2023. Heizer hasn’t been back to “City” since. He spent decades tending horses and cattle in a lonely valley in Nevada, and he now lives in one of the more populated ZIP codes in America, in a nice apartment paid for at least in part through his association with the world’s largest commercial gallery. “I was in a network of nobody back when I built it,” Heizer said. “This is a different time.” Now at his ranch there are drivers and caretakers and a team of workers to deal with repairs and maintenance. Recently, he let Vogue do a photo shoot at “City” with the actor Timothée Chalamet [December 2025] in, among other looks, Tom Ford-designed glamping [a portmanteau of ‘glamorous’ + ‘camping’; a style of outdoor living that combines the immersive nature experience of traditional camping with hotel-style luxuries and amenities] gear. “It’s becoming a different thing,” Heizer continued. “I’m divesting myself of my ownership, of my property, of my artwork, of my equipment. I’m giving it over to the public trust. I keep nothing. I have nothing. I don’t want anything. It’s great to divest. I can’t get rid of stuff fast enough.”

He continues to operate on an ostentatious scale. His “Covid project,” as Vander Weg described it, was a series of sculptures called “Rock/Steel” that appeared at Gagosian in 2022: He extracted rocks, the heaviest weighing 23 tons, from a quarry near the San Andreas Fault and bolted them to angular steel plates. His new show, now up at Gagosian, features two steel-framed trenches, “Convoluted Line A” and “Convoluted Line B” — a flashback to “Nine Nevada Depressions” — that were constructed at Heizer’s ranch and transported across the country; the aim was to make the concrete floors of the gallery’s location on West 21st Street in Manhattan look like they’d been carved into. The size of his art, the sheer anticommercialism of its unceremonious installation and his general refusal to discuss it are, on one level, largely incompatible with the art world’s inherent idolatry. Heizer’s work has more in common with cave drawings and Mesoamerican culture than it does with anything contemporary. In the art world, Heizer told me, “you’re subject to the winds of the economy. If you do what I do, you’re really exposed, because I have a lot of overhead. I build things and I have to have a lot of equipment, materials and help. Expensive business. Nobody wants it.”

But as with a lot of cowboys, there’s something calculated about his stance too: The artist who says “I don’t give a [expletive] about money” has also had powerful supporters throughout his career, including Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Nevada senator Harry Reid; the New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and the gallerist Larry Gagosian, who’ve all bolstered the idea that something important was happening on Heizer’s ranch that the world would one day be lucky enough to see. Govan, who over the last couple of decades helped Heizer raise the funds to finish “City,” the total cost of which has been estimated at $40 million, told NPR in 2023 that “there’s no duplicate” for the project. “After working here with Mike, it really is hard to go back to a museum with paintings and frames. It just doesn’t sometimes satisfy.”

Heizer was raised in the Bay Area, but he always had close ties to the desert. His maternal grandfather was the state geologist of California, and his father, Robert Heizer, was an anthropologist and archaeologist who studied, among other things, ancient techniques of large-stone transport. Heizer was a lousy student who never finished high school and considers himself proudly uneducated in the traditional sense. When I asked him how much high school he’d completed, he said, “The better question is ‘Why didn’t you ever show up at all?’” For a while, he worked as a carpenter and took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute before realizing that what he wanted to know couldn’t be taught. Mostly, his father took him on the job to digs in California and Nevada, as he also did with Heizer’s brother and sister. When he was 19, they traveled with the geologist Howel Williams [1898-1980; British and American geologist and volcanologist] (whose specialty was volcanic rock formations) to Bolivia and Peru, where Heizer made sketches and took pictures of the dig sites. He described this trip to me as “the origins of the work I do.”

From an early age, he was “determined to be a contributor to the development of American art,” as he said in a 1983 conversation with the curator Julia Brow [b. 1951]. His formative years as an artist were in the era of the space race and the 747 jumbo jet, and he knew that he wanted to make art on an expansive scale. In the mid-1960s, around age 21, he moved to New York and soon started working with the dealers Virginia Dwan Dwan [1931-2022; Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1959-67) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965-71)], whose grandfather was a co-founder of the industrial conglomerate 3M, and Richard Bellamy [1927-98; ran New York’s Hansa Gallery (1955-59), Green Gallery (1960-65), and Noah Goldowsky Gallery (1965-74)], who was funded by Robert Scull (1915-86), another high school dropout, who’d made a fortune off the taxi business and whom Heizer described as “one of three people in New York who collected art and had a couple bucks.” Heizer wasn’t making a lot of money — back then, no one really was — but he still thought New York was fun. “Downtown Manhattan was pretty neat back in the old days, before any of these artists even met each other,” Heizer told me. “Then there was a mass influx and it kept getting bigger, like a waterfall.” He began to think of living there as being a part of “the absolute city system.” New York was a larger ecosystem over which an individual had no control. “You may help develop it, but that’s arbitrary,” he said. Ultimately, “there was no give in the absolute city system. It was cut and dried. Take it or leave it. Conclusion: Leave it.”

His impulse to make monumental art was driven in part by a sense of precariousness, against the backdrop of the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War. “Living in the postnuclear age informed everything,” as he told Brown. “The clock was ticking.” (Heizer was drafted multiple times but eventually rejected by the Army because of spinal issues.) The progress of the modern world had gone so far that it might kill everyone, putting the culture on the precipice of having to return to something much more primitive. “We’re living in a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously,” Heizer told Brown, and he wanted to create something that reflected that. In the late ’60s, he began making regular trips to California and Nevada, effectively retracing his father’s footsteps. He made a series of works in the desert, most of which have eroded back into dirt. He’d paint directly onto a dry lake bed, or create a hole that looked like a window or dig a pit and place a rock inside of it. With the help of Bellamy and Dwan, he began accumulating more heavy machinery, and his ambitions grew.

Most of the sculptors who emerged after World War II owe some debt to Heizer. The size of his work would influence Richard Serra’s [1938-2024; American sculptor] steel contortions, and it was Heizer who brought the other major land artists of the time — Walter De Maria [1935-2013; American sculptor, illustrator, and composer] and Robert Smithson [1938-73; American sculptor and land artist] — to the desert in the first place. And yet he was also a singular figure in contemporary art. What he was doing was a kind of protest art, but it was unlike much of the art of that era, which tended to be more overtly topical. He was protesting against nothing less than the very conditions of modern life, against having to get up in the morning and go to a job and interact with other people. “I don’t make political art,” he told me. “I believe in the very simple, primitive definition of art: You’re a cave man sitting on a rock in front of your cave with nothing to do, so you might pick up a rock and shave it and grind it on a piece of another rock. You get in your cave and eventually get a piece of ash out of the fire and draw a water buffalo on the wall.”

He liked violent contrasts: a giant object and the absence of an object; a trench in the desert next to a pile of rocks; positive and negative. “If you’re making sculptures, those are positives,” he said. “Space-filling, intersecting positives. It’s conceivable you could project an alternative to that: the negative.” It was Dwan who funded Heizer’s most important effort up to that point, “Double Negative,” which he completed over a couple of months in 1969 in Nevada. With a small team of workers and engineers, he used dynamite and construction equipment to create two trenches, each about 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep, in the side of a bluff known as Mormon Mesa, which overlooks the Virgin River near Moapa Valley, about 70 miles from Las Vegas. The sculpture looks like two enormous doorways facing each other across the desert, the distance between them roughly the length of the Empire State Building lying flat on its side. Heizer was 25 years old and resembled Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” [1950]. When it was finished, he and Dwan celebrated by seeing Elvis Presley perform at the International Hotel on the Strip [1969-71; renamed Las Vegas Hilton, 1971; then Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, 2014].

[This pairing of “positive” and “negative” as described by Miller is reminiscent of a concept applied by Abstract Expressionist painter and art teacher Hans Hofmann (1880-1966). He described “positive” and “negative” space in terms of the presence or absence of “visible matter.”

[As I discuss in “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater” (9 May 2012), playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-83), who was an amateur painter, knew Hofmann and credits him by name with the concept of “plastic space” in the novella Moise and the World of Reason (1975). “Plastic space” is defined by the relationship of “positive” and “negative” space, as Williams explains in his 1969 short play Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? (premièred 1980; first published 1997).]

People will go to great lengths to see “Double Negative.” The fashion designer Rick Owens once rented a helicopter to get as close as he could after failing to make it by car. There’s no sign announcing the existence of “Double Negative,” and no easy route to get there. I had a very knowledgeable driver in Brent Holmes [b. 1978], an artist who works for Heizer’s foundation, and it still felt dicey at times, both of us wincing as another rock scraped the transmission of Holmes’s Subaru hatchback. In a way, “Double Negative” is of its era, reflecting the waning days of the ’60s counterculture and the burgeoning environmentalist movement. By dynamiting the land, he’d somehow drawn even more attention to its beauty. “It’s got a lot to do with a return to the earth,” Heizer said. “The return to the hippie. Smoking weed, going camping, hiking.” He paused before conceding, “I was a hippie.” The work has the mathematical precision of minimalist contemporaries like Serra and Carl Andre [1935-2024; American minimalist sculptor]. Heizer was treating the desert as a kind of readymade, much like what Pop artists were doing with commercial advertising, like the Brillo Box sculptures Andy Warhol [1928-87; American artist and filmmaker] showed at Dwan’s gallery in Los Angeles in 1964. (Heizer scoffed at the comparison. “There’s nothing readymade about what I do,” he said. “The amount of work that goes into handling a rock is phenomenal.”)

[Homes is an African-American multidisciplinary fine artist, curator, writer, and activist who organizes local events, curates community art spaces, and writes about Black history in the American West to actively reshape Nevada’s culture.

[‘Readymade’ (or ‘ready-made’) is an English term used for the first time in the field of art by French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). An artist appropriates a manufactured object as is, depriving it of its utilitarian function. French poet and writer André Breton (1896-1966) defined the ready-made as an “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”]

There were few real precedents for what Heizer accomplished, though he named Tony Smith [1912-80], the architect and sculptor who made large-scale abstract forms out of steel, as a contemporary influence. There was also little understanding of how to preserve such art once it was made. Heizer described “Double Negative” as being in a state of “deterioration,” gradually collapsing in on itself. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles acquired “Double Negative” from Dwan in 1985 for its collection, “but they do nothing about it,” he said. He wants to get an engineer to help stabilize the piece, “to put it back in the state it was in when it was built,” to clear the excess debris from the trenches that have compromised “the crystalline morphology of the inside of that sculpture,” as Heizer called it. (A representative from the museum responded in an email, “When the work was acquired by MOCA in 1985, it was our understanding that it would continue to be subject to natural erosion. In recent years, the artist and his foundation have reached out to MOCA about conservation of the work, and we will continue to have these conversations with them.”)

[The conservation of environmental and land art works is the subject of the article in my post “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” referenced above.]

“It’s not hard to do,” Heizer went on. At the same time, his feeling was: “I have other things to do. I can’t do it all.” He’d fought hard to make it, but “if the work doesn’t command enough respect for someone else to take care of it, then it’s not that respectable. It’ll suffer the fate of being ignored.”

It wasn’t unusual for him to be self-pitying, but he also understood that “Double Negative” was the turning point in his career. He was no longer in a league with other artists. He was competing with Stonehenge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Soon after, he started buying up land in Garden Valley.

Las Vegas turns into barren desert abruptly. Up Interstate 15 and Route 93, past the Apex Regional Landfill (the largest in the world by area), there’s not much else to see until, after about 100 miles, you reach the community of Alamo, population roughly 800, and the office of the Triple Aught Foundation, which Heizer started in 1998 with help from benefactors including the financier Patrick Lannan and later the [Las Vegas] hotel billionaire Elaine Wynn [1942-2025]. The foundation owns and oversees “City” and manages the complicated logistics of getting people to and from the outer reaches of what might still be considered civilization. In Alamo, Triple Aught is directly next door to the Christian Bible Fellowship Church. To visit “City,” guests have to sign a waiver warning of various potential causes of harm or death, including “attacks or bites by insects, spiders, snakes, cattle, horses or other forms of wildlife . . . and the remoteness to cities and medical care.” The foundation is run jointly by Heizer’s third wife, Mary Shanahan, who’s worked for his studio for decades, and Heather Harmon, a curator and the executive director of the future Las Vegas Museum of Art, which is scheduled to open in 2029. It was here that I met my driver, Ed Higbee, 71, a rancher who’s spent most of his life in Nevada. After another 30 miles, through which the only landmark is a fork in the road with a sign reading “Extraterrestrial Highway,” is the turnoff for the long dirt road into Garden Valley that leads to Heizer’s ranch. Sleep Late Ranch currently has 28 cows, four goats, four cats and, in Higbee’s words, “five very spoiled dogs.” At the front of the property, which is powered by solar panels, was a huge gantry that was holding a large rock upright. There was an adobe bunkhouse where employees slept. Heizer’s own residence was small and understated, full of railroad tie furniture that he’d made himself. In an office, Heizer had hung a copy of “Gene Autry’s Code of Honor,” something like the house rules, which included “A cowboy never takes unfair advantage — even of an enemy” and “A cowboy never betrays a trust. He never goes back on his word.”

[For those who aren’t up on American, and especially UFO—pardon me, unidentified aerial phenomenon or UAP—pop-culture (or have been living under a rock for 70 years), Area 51, because of the intense level of government secrecy surrounding the base, has continually been the subject of myths, UFO rumors, and conspiracy theories regarding captured extraterrestrial technology and even captive aliens or their corpses. Among ufologists, Area 51 shares prominence with Roswell, New Mexico, the general vicinity of the crash in 1947 of an allegedly extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien occupants.

[The base was established by the CIA in 1955 for Project AQUATONE, the development of the U-2 spy plane (does anyone remember Francis Gary Powers [1929-77]?). It wasn't even officially acknowledged by the CIA until 2013. The remote base has spent decades serving as the nation's premier installation for testing experimental, cutting-edge aviation and stealth weapon systems.]

The distance between the gate of the ranch and the gate of “City” is 354 feet. Heizer started building the eastern end first, with a trapezoidal structure made of concrete and dirt known as “Complex One” that looks like something his father might have dug up in Guatemala or Luxor. Heizer has described it as “surprisingly primitive” and compared the sculpture to a blast shield; it was designed to withstand “seismic conditions.” “Complex One” is about a mile away from the other major installation at the western edge, “45°, 90°, 180°.” Throughout, the site alternates between dirt mounds and depressions, each outlined by concrete curbs that emphasize the geometry of Heizer’s creation and curve around “City” like line drawings. He’d transformed the flatness of the desert into rolling hills. “45°, 90°, 180°” is a bafflingly enormous structure that is 241 feet long, 72 feet wide and 27 feet tall at its highest point. Heizer told me that the ball court at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico was a point of reference; at times, visiting “City” felt like stumbling upon the remnants of an ancient culture, long extinct, its mysteries never fully attainable. It was clear to me on my visit that he has no artistic heirs, no one who’s taking up this kind of absurdly ambitious work and carrying it forward. An artist mad enough to make something like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Silence is a big part of the experience of “City,” a silence so complete that occasionally the sound of my boots against the dirt startled me into thinking that someone was coming up behind me, though no one was. You can almost hear the shadows shift as the sun moves across the sky. But the biggest surprise was just how much generosity was built into “City,” that to reach such intense isolation requires the kindness of many well-meaning strangers: the drivers, the workers at the ranch, the employees of the Triple Aught Foundation. And in this way, Heizer, never much of a social person, had created a kind of community. For all his supposed difficulties, people (including even his ex-wife) remain intensely loyal to him. With “City,” he’s manufactured a quasi-religious experience, and to see it is to have been converted to his strange and outlandish dogma. He’s made a great American monument as well, not to a particular place or person (not even to Heizer) but merely to the idea that something like “City” can exist at all — that if you work hard enough, a dream can be fulfilled, despite every impulse of nature, both human and elemental.

At his apartment in New York, I asked if he felt a sense of relief that “City” was finally done. “It’s not done,” he shot back, to my surprise. “It’s still active. I’m working on that place and issues there every day.” Heizer seemed to be anxious that he wasn’t in Nevada, but also coming to terms with the fact that he probably didn’t have many more trips left. (“I think this might be my last go-round,” he said at one point.) Now he had to supervise from afar. There were several perimeter curbs that needed to be finished, and some mounds that required maintenance and plans to build a small utility building with a kitchen, a bathroom and a septic tank. “An outpost to stay alive at,” he called it. For a while, Heizer’s ranch manager, Shane McVey, a former analyst for HSBC [British universal bank and financial services group; founded in 1865 as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation] who changed his life path after meeting Heizer, was keeping the site meticulously maintained after each visit, going so far as to rake away evidence of visitors’ footprints along the paths. “I told Shane to knock it off,” Heizer said. “I don’t know if it needs to be that perfect. It needs to be real.”

What Heizer described as “detailing” and “refining” would continue for years and might not stop at all. Even though he was 2,500 miles away, he seemed to have left so much of himself out there in the desert. He could never truly divest, not as long as he was alive. “It’s my home,” Heizer said. “That’s where I live.”

[M. H. Miller is the features director for T Magazine.  He’s widely known for covering the art world, frequently profiling major artists and exploring the cultural history of New York City's gallery and studio scenes.  Miller’s writing often blends investigative journalism with deep art historical context.]

*  *  *  *
“MADE YOU LOOK”
(excerpt)
by Jackson Arn

[This is an excerpt from Arn’s review of the Las Vegas Sphere and Heizer’s City; I’m reposting the second part of the review that dealt with the land art work which M. H. Miller discusses at length above.  Arn’s review appeared in the New Yorker of 20 November 2023 and was posted as “The Sphere and Our ‘Immersion’ Complex” on 13 November.]

The concept has become ubiquitous in art and entertainment. But is it about capturing our attention—or deceiving it? 

Put on some sunscreen and drive north [from Las Vegas], first on the I-15 and then, watching out for deer, the 93. With no traffic or construction, it should take about ninety minutes to reach the offices of the Triple Aught Foundation, in Alamo, Nevada, population 1,154. From here, a foundation employee will drive you another ninety minutes or so, past purple mountains and a flat, yellowish expanse that used to be a lake, into an arid land where no cell phone can find purchase, until you reach “City,” a mile-and-a-half-long, fifty-years-in-the-making, forty-million-dollar sculpture by Michael Heizer, who turned seventy-nine this month. You have three hours to explore. There are no benches. Enjoy, but please don’t take pictures.

This last rule is a smart move on the foundation’s part—it says, Accept no substitutes. “City” wouldn’t photograph particularly well anyway. It’s vast and sometimes overwhelming, and there’s no convenient place to stand and drink it all in; the only way to see everything is to keep moving or to find a helicopter. The bulk of the sculpture consists of deep, gently sloping trenches and tall, wide mounds of gravel, marked off with concrete curbs. From the trenches, the purple mountains look like they’re yards away instead of miles. “City” pulls quite a few of these perceptual tricks, scrambling near and far and old and new. This is, simultaneously, the quietest place I’ve ever been and one of the loudest—every breath and pebble-crunching step is deafening, in the same way as someone wrestling with a sweet wrapper at the movies. The slanted sides of the trenches suggest ancient ruins, but also the I-15. It’s not always obvious where the art ends and the desert begins. Toward either side of “City,” however, you’ll find big, straight-edged structures: to the west, a flock of concrete fins; to the east, a trapezoidal slab with concrete beams poking out. These objects look plainly more man-made than natural—“man-made” being the strange, polished stuff that refuses to admit that it’s natural, too.

If “City” is land art, the usual term for remote, monumental, durable sculpture in this part of the world, it is an especially fussy, rule-oriented kind. Unlike, say, “Spiral Jetty” [1970], the defining creation of Heizer’s rival, Robert Smithson, it cannot be explored at the visitor’s leisure; you can’t climb on the gravel mounds, you have to reserve a slot in advance, and no more than six guests are allowed at once. (The day I went, I was the only one.) As with Smithson’s sculpture, though, the sheer inconvenience of “City” can seem part of the point. It’s difficult to separate Heizer’s work from the experience of getting to and around it—burned calories are crucial ingredients, no less than sand or granite.

Insofar as it demands a reshaping of attention, and takes that process as one of its subjects, “City,” like the Sphere, is an immersive experience. You have to do more of the immersing yourself, but, partly for that reason, it ends up making a more successful attack on your senses. For three hours, your perceptions dilate and time slows down. The mere fact that “City” is an outdoor sculpture gives it a flicker of unpredictability that’s rare in immersive art. The usual sense of artifice is balanced, or at least tempered, by the entropy of the surroundings—I have a hard time believing, for instance, that Heizer planned the endless spiderwebs covering his mounds and trenches. It occurred to me, while I was staring at some of these strands, that I couldn’t recall how long I’d been standing there. As I snapped out of my trance, the sculpture felt not large but infinite.

The differences between “City” and the Sphere are deep, true, yet narrower than you might suppose—the works are trying for the same things but in opposite ways. Both are big, expensive, geometric structures in the desert that offer visitors a vivid encounter with the natural world—one with exquisite footage of jellyfish and the like, the other with deftly roughened rock and concrete. Both were funded by the same sort of people (“City,” for example, got money from Elaine P. Wynn, the ex-wife of [casino and real estate billionaire] Steve Wynn [b. 1942], whose casino sits across the street from the Sphere), and both have been craftily peddled to the world, one with a deluge of images and the other with a tantalizing lack of them. Heizer has described his sculpture as “a masterpiece” and “art for the ages”—these being, to the best of my knowledge, the two most Vegasy claims that anybody involved with the Sphere or “City” has made about either.

What’s the price of art for the ages? In dollars, 1.2 million in annual maintenance costs. In another currency, one pale cloud of dust per day. This cloud was the first sign of “City” that I saw when the foundation’s designated guide, Mark, drove me the last few miles there, and, if I had to guess, it will be what I’ll most remember years from now. “You’re early,” a voice coming from Mark’s walkie-talkie said. The voice was correct, and possibly a little irritable. Before visitors arrive, Mark told me, “City” is purged of footprints and litter, and its mounds are carefully raked. He called the process “dragging.” I didn’t ask about the mechanics of dragging (something involving a desert Zamboni?) or why it launches so much dust into the sky. Even now, I don’t especially want to know: that concept, somehow mystical and mundane at the same time, may be the best thing about Heizer’s sculpture. It’s easily the most poignant.

Walking through the semi-dragged terrain, I saw footprints that I’m fairly sure weren’t mine, and a tattered price tag, for a hammer from Vaughan & Bushnell [Manufacturing, also known as Vaughan Manufacturing and branded as simply Vaughan, is an Illinois company specializing in the manufacture of hammers, axes, prybars, and hand saws], camouflaged by pebbles. Millions of dollars and hundreds of Sisyphean man-hours were required to preserve the illusion of calm, untouched beauty in harmony with nature. This entire place, I thought, is a simulation, and the tag is a glitch. But glitching is one of the most interesting things that immersive art can do—it’s when the work ceases to be one size fits all, and yields, finally, to interpretation. I’d been on the road for hours that day, I was in a place dry enough to kill me, but it wasn’t until I squatted down and read “VAUGHAN” that I appreciated how far I was from my normal life. The bar code was what got me: this single, useless sign of civilization, designed for talking with machines that weren’t there, made me feel the absence of everything else. It spoiled the illusion of the sculpture, and the more it did the more the illusion persuaded me.

It’s odd that, even when almost everything is presumed to exist on a spectrum, we still talk about deception as though it’s binary. You’re indoctrinated by fake news or you see through it; you have an immersive experience of art or you don’t. Las Vegas—a place whose economy depends on people who realize that gambling is for suckers but who strut into the casino all the same—knows better. Illusion mixed with disillusion can be more intoxicating than either. So it goes with Heizer’s desert magic trick, and perhaps with the Sphere, too. You watch “Postcard from Earth” [2023 4D science fiction and documentary film directed by Darren Aronofsky, created specifically to be screened on Sphere’s 160, square-foot video screen] to marvel at the tonnage of this thing built to deceive you, to feel yourself half-suckered, and to gasp at the same giant bug, not for surprise so much as for the joy of doing anything in perfect harmony with thousands of strangers. Why settle for immersion when you can be waist-deep? 

[Jackson Arn was the New Yorker’s art critic from August 2023 until March 2025.  Previously, he wrote about books, paintings, and tiki bars for Art in America, The Drift, Artforum, The Nation, and various other publications.  He’s returned to freelance cultural criticism, contributing to several prominent literary and art journals like Harper’s Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Art in America, Liberties, New York Review of Architecture.]