A Rare Journey to Michael Heizer’s Land Work ‘City’

After a greasy brunch amidst the fake trees, stained-glass flamingos and gambling machines of Las Vegas’s Peppermill diner, we hit the road north for 150 kilometres. When we arrived in the tiny town of Alamo, the man who would drive us the rest of the way to Michael Heizer’s City (1970–2022) didn’t have much to say about the mammoth earthwork that we four Londoners had travelled so far to encounter. He did, however, want to point out two things on the map. First: Area 51, the top-secret Air Force base renowned in alien lore, whose existence went unacknowledged by the US government for decades. Second: the many craters of the nearby Nevada Test Site where, between 1951 and 1994, almost 1,000 nuclear explosions scarred the land with lunar pockmarks.

As we made our way down a dirt road, this genial man still said nothing of land art. He told us about abandoned silver mines, the local names for certain plants and how his family’s property had been passed down through generations. How he had lived in this arid, sparsely populated county his entire life, at one point working on Heizer’s ranch. Some say that City is in the middle of nowhere, entirely disconnected from its surroundings. We had an altogether different experience from the start. The stuff of science fiction, the spectre of atomic annihilation, the militarization of the desert, the remnants of extraction economies, the specificity of an ecosystem: all this came with us and stayed with us as we passed through a gate with three ‘No Trespassing’ signs and approached the sprawl of concrete and dirt that preoccupied Heizer for some 50 years.

The beginnings of City are roughly contemporaneous with the production of Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), two immense trenches carved out of a mesa near Overton, Nevada. Although part of the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Double Negative is seemingly not maintained in any way and is accessible day and night, for free, to anyone willing to make the trek. When we visited, we noticed that the crisp cuts visible in archival photographs had given way to a partially crumbling mass, as if nature were in the process of reclaiming the site.

City is a different story. Situated next to Heizer’s home on private land, it opened to the public only in 2022. The Triple Aught Foundation, which administers the work, imposes a strict limit of six visitors at a time, at a cost of US$150 per person, by prior appointment only. Visits do not take place every day or at all times of the year and photography is prohibited. Elitist art tourism? Sure. But the reasons for such restrictions range from the logistical to the meteorological to the aesthetic. The small foundation must arrange transportation to the remote site, which is expensive to maintain and can be uncomfortably hot or cold depending on the season. Given Heizer’s emphasis on vacant expanses, the experience of City would surely be diminished if it were overrun with crowds and monitored by security guards. We arrived just after 4pm, with three hours to wander through the artwork, before departing at sunset.

City is located within the Basin and Range National Monument, a conservation area that the presence of the artwork helped bring into being in 2015. (Heizer said he would dynamite the site if a proposed train line transporting nuclear waste were to be built, which the proclamation of the National Monument eliminates.) A sign refers to this stretch of desert as a ‘landscape in motion’ owing to its history and geology. The phrase felt apposite to City, too – albeit in a different way. Even when we were standing right next to it, we could see almost nothing of the work. Its array of avenues, ramps and plazas are revealed only by moving through them and, even then, only ever partially. It is an emphatically durational experience. There are spectacular photographs to be found online, but none of them captures being there in the dust and the heat, small and alone, engulfed in something so inhospitable yet beautiful. Our three hours passed at an unnerving speed, perhaps because City seemed to be in constant metamorphosis, with features appearing, disappearing and transforming as we roamed. I felt dominated by the artwork, which shies away from providing the kind of privileged vantage points that are such an integral part of mass tourism and which are often associated with a claim of mastery over nature.

A city is always so much more than what appears in any kind of picture, and this one was no exception.

As its title suggests, City confronts how humans transform the environment through settlement, ironically doing so in a location at a vast distance from the nearest town. Thin concrete curbs – at times curvilinear, at others starkly geometric – sketch the abstract outlines of a vacant polis. Although largely made from local materials, the work’s smooth, decidedly anthropogenic shapes contrast jarringly with the surrounding environment. It is neither kind nor gentle. Mounds and pits of dirt evoke burial sites, mining operations and nuclear craters. At each end of the 1.5 mile-long site are what Heizer calls ‘complexes’: sculptural interventions fabricated from concrete and a cement that mimics the appearance of hardened earth. The architecture of ritual meets the defensiveness of the bunker. Every now and then, we would stumble across small metal plaques bearing a debossed outline of the site, reminiscent of the Voyager Golden Record, sent into space in 1977. Whenever we tried to use them to orient ourselves, it never quite worked: a city is always so much more than what appears in any kind of picture, and this one was no exception.

Considered solely as an exercise in form, City astounds in its precise deployment of texture, colour, light, scale and shape. Yet, as we walked through the site, we babbled on, lightly delirious, about the many references that came to mind: the pre-Columbian architecture of the Americas, the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, ancient Egyptian mastaba tombs, the various adaptations of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic Dune (1965). We spoke of sports fields and sundials, motorways and racing tracks. Mute and empty, City absorbed all this while remaining enigmatic – a refreshing thing today, when so many artworks insist on communicating an unambiguous message, only to be all-too-rapidly exhausted. Were we encountering a plan for a latent habitation or the abandoned remains of an obliterated civilization? If City is a ruin, it is one made uncanny by its pristine exactitude. The structures hint at the deep past, recalling worlds already vanished, while stretching into the future of a planet made uninhabitable for humans by humans. It felt eerie, violent, apocalyptic. Neither critical nor affirmative, it is an obstinate provocation without answer, a monument to transience, perseverance and destruction. Contrary to some of what I had read, I experienced it as an intimate reflection on place.

Heizer’s mounds also recalled a shape that seemed to pop up no matter where we went in Las Vegas: the illuminated dome of Sphere, a US$2.3 billion entertainment venue that offers a 55-minute cinematic ‘experience’ by director Darren Aronofsky, for which average ticket prices creep towards US$200. Of all the things that could be shown there, Postcard from Earth (2023) struck me as especially cynical. In a tale of planetary exile, space travellers are awoken by voices who tell them about Earth, recalling how its natural wonder was destroyed by humans to the point that they had to move elsewhere in the galaxy. Trips back to the regenerating planet are available only to an elite few, who experience awesome landscapes bearing no trace of human intervention.

Touted as ‘the first multisensory film with its own weather’, this cautionary tale of ecological disaster plays in a building illuminated 24/7, often with advertisements, located right next to the air-conditioned inferno of overconsumption that is the Las Vegas Strip. Imagine the energy use. Visitors are encouraged to buy branded Sphere merchandise while gawping at holograms and robots before being ushered into the 4-D show – a gimmicky, computer-generated spectacle that feels like a weak hybrid of The Blue Planet (2001) and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Between the mode of production and the message, a discordant note begins to ring out, only to be tamped down by the end. Are visitors meant to recognize the error of their ways and do something before it’s too late? Unlikely. According to this idyllic ‘postcard’, there is nothing we can do to save Earth, but that’s okay because there will always be somewhere else to colonize if things get bad. You might as well spend more and crank the A/C. I wasn’t holding my breath for a masterpiece, but I did expect something more visually impressive and less ideologically poisonous.

If City is a ruin, it is one made uncanny by its pristine exactitude.

One could say that City is the anti-Sphere, but that would be too simple. Both find their roots in the impulse of the late 1960s, shared by land art and expanded cinema, to break out of the quadrilinear frame and explore the possibilities of immersive art. Both point to vanished civilizations and draw attention to the peril of our own. Yet, Heizer unsettles where Aronofsky pacifies; City heightens one’s attunement to the land, where Postcard from Earth offers the stereotypical falsity characteristic of its titular souvenir images and so prevalent in Las Vegas – in the artificial trees of the Peppermill, in the simulations of Venice or Paris and in, well, everything. Not all forms of immersion are created equal.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Mounds and Spheres’

Michael Heizer’s City is on view at The Triple Aught Foundation, Nevada

_{Main image: Michael Heizer, 45°, 90°, 180°, City, 1970–2022. Courtesy: © Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation; photograph: Ben Blackwell}