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 hotel billionaire Elaine Wynn. 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 Steve Wynn, 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.]