Michael Heizer: An American in Valais

            If one makes the trek into the Val de Bagnes region of the Swiss Alps, winding through the natural beauty of the Mauvoisin valley beyond pastures, forests, a one-lane bridge, and a small inn on an isolated dirt road, something unexpected comes into view: Michael Heizer’s only extant earthwork in Europe, Tangential Circular Negative Line (1968/2012). Consisting of three interlocking circles made of Corten steel recessed into the ground, the work measures 112 ½ by 75 feet and is surrounded by fill gravel, creating negative space. The largest circle, measuring 75 feet in diameter, dominates the composition; two smaller circles, identical in size at 37 ½ feet in diameter, each connect tangentially to the large circle, one within it and one outside it. In this case, “small” may be misleading, and yet, when compared to the enormity of the mountain range in the background, the sculpture appears restrained and balanced. Its monumental scale and sublime location recalls the artist’s late 1960s and early 1970s excavations in the Nevada deserts, which were similarly set against the expanse of nature. Perhaps what is most impressive about Heizer’s three rings is how they are situated: embedded within, yet fully integrated into a magnificent landscape of mountains, rivers, and ravines, creating a sense of harmony between the natural and manmade.

Heizer ventured to create a uniquely American art fully divorced from European art history.² To accomplish this, he devised his own visual language consisting of numerous shapes and forms that he would repeatedly explore across varying materials and circumstances. By 1968, at only 23 years old, Heizer had fully developed his vocabulary and embarked on a five-decade journey to explore how these marks could translate into art. Perhaps some of his practice can be traced to his upbringing as the son of a prominent archaeologist. At age 12, Heizer took a year off from school to accompany his father on a series of digs across Mexico, drawing the sites as his father excavated. There he encountered a form of language and communication that existed outside the history of Europe. This exposure to a world of monumental and primordial sites that have long outlasted their people inspired the artist’s lifelong interest in history, materiality, scale, and leaving an indelible mark during one’s lifetime. Thus his fascination with altering the landscape and exploring the way gestures could be indexed into the earth was born. Though Heizer was interested in doing so at a large scale, he has never felt his enormous works leave a significant impact: “Man will never create anything really large in relation to the world — only in relation to himself and his size. The most formidable objects that man has touched are the earth and the moon. The greatest scale he understands is the distance between them, and this is nothing compared to what he suspects to exist.”³

For many land artists, the Earth was viewed as both a vast wasteland and an empty canvas, malleable and subject to an act of man over nature. In this sense, land art became an outlet for many artists whose public image revolved around appearing rugged and masculine. Perhaps a holdover from abstract expressionism, the first “distinctly American style”⁷ of art, often associated with toughness, land art artists embraced “masculine” acts of art making, as the techniques needed to create such Herculean works often mimicked those in the mining and construction worlds.⁸ In addition to using simple tools such as shovels and hoes, they detonated explosives, drove trucks, and rode motorcycles. The fact that many earthworks were concentrated in the West, an expanse frequently romanticized and mythicized as an undiscovered frontier, only fed into this perception. Notions of the frontier hero became so pervasive in popular culture during the 19th century that Frederick Jackson Turner recognized the Western frontier as an underlying principle that shaped American identity and culture going forward into the 20th century.⁹ Heizer, in particular, leaned into this mythology in both his artistic practice and public image, often posing for photographs in denim, cowboy boots, and Stetsons against the backdrop of the vast desert.

    Despite the mythology surrounding him, Heizer’s impetus for travelling out West was merely for practical purposes, as he grew up in Nevada and was familiar with its landscape.¹² From his perspective, the only locations that could accommodate his large-scale sculptures were in the desert, where the land was unregulated and easily obtained. Nevada was a prime location for his works, as it was underdeveloped, desolate, and difficult to visit. Its natural materials, namely the unique sands and gravels that could be used make concrete, also attracted Heizer. In 1968, the year the artist solidified his visual lexicon, Heizer developed and executed his interlocking circle motif for the first time on Mirage Dry Lake, titled Circular Surface Drawing. To produce this experimental drawing, the artist shoveled out two 1,500-pound piles of backfill remnants from a previous earthwork out of a pickup truck while a driver steered in circles. Such a simple act of displacing earth and assessing its resulting imprint appeared to be a study for something much larger, as its end result seemed uncontrolled and imprecise in a way that Heizer usually was not. Because of this, it was never intended to have been viewed in person or have any sense of permanency. Entropic forces soon swept over and erased it.

One year later, in 1970, Heizer executed a more methodical version of his circular motif in Circular Surface Planar Displacement Drawing at nearby Jean Dry Lake. He moved to this location at the direction of his friend Count Guido Roberto Deiro, a Las Vegas pilot and head of aviation for Howard Hughes, who leased the surface rights to the lake from the Bureau of Land Management for only $50.¹⁴ For this work, Heizer exchanged the bulky truck for a smaller, more nimble motorcycle, allowing for a more tightly controlled surface area onto which he could draw. With the support of professional racer Hank Lee, who operated the motorcycle, the duo traced a 900-by-500 foot work consisting of multiple drawings, including one almost identical in appearance to Tangential Circular Negative Line. The process was more precise this time around as the course was predetermined by strings connected to Lee’s motorcycle, anchoring the five central points of the linked shapes. This allowed Lee to drive mechanically around and around over the same tracks, embedding deep circles within the landscape. For Heizer, this gesture was intended purely for self-expression and discovery, an exploration of materiality and a connection to the natural world that usurped any interest in preservation or immortality. Once again, this work was overrun by natural forces and is no longer extant.

Around the same time, Heizer was interested in creating a lasting mark in the desert, the result being the monumental sculpture Double Negative (1969). Similarly located in the Nevada desert, this time on a mesa outside Overton, the project remains one of the artist’s most ambitious to date and is considered the first permanent earthwork. In order to acquire the land rights for the sculpture Heizer received funding from New York gallerist and 3M heiress Virginia Dwan, who one year later would finance Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Consisting of two incisions in the earth separated by a vast, eroded valley where the mesa falls away, the piece measures approximately 1,500 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 50 feet deep. In order to excise such immense trenches, 240,000 tons of rock were blown up using dynamite, with their remnants removed by bulldozer. In between the trenches lies the naturally eroded space between the artist’s interventions, which constitutes nearly one-third of the entire sculpture. This vast empty space takes on its own form that suggests a through line connecting each end of the valley. This implied volume is integral to the piece, as the artist notes, “Double Negative is the literal description of two incisions, but it has metaphysical implications, since a double negative is impossible. There is nothing and however it is still a sculpture.”¹⁵ Double Negative exemplifies the attitude towards materiality that Heizer preached to Germano Celant in 1996: “place is material, material is place.”¹⁶ To the artist, human intervention and natural surroundings are intimately intertwined—each site has not been positively or negatively affected but merely displaced and reimagined. Environmental changes over time are intrinsic to their existence.

Heizer was keen to this phenomenon, using photography in his own way to not only document his land art, but concoct a narrative. For him, photography overcomes both temporal and performative aspects of land art’s creation. Because he insists that the only genuine way to experience his work was in person, Heizer has used photography to create a separate artwork in itself. These are not working drawings or studies, as they are created after the sculpture. For example, Circular Surface Planar Displacement Drawing / 90 degree Planar Rotary (1970) consists of 50 photographs collaged together of his corresponding earthwork, depicting the motorcycle’s tracks section-by-section in great detail. In order to create the work, the photographer had to strap a camera to a 24-foot scaffold, which was then pushed around 16 feet at a time for each shot. Presented in a circular pattern measuring 72 inches in diameter, the work echoes his gesture in the Nevada desert, taking on a visual presence beyond documentary photography. Even when Heizer is working outside of sculpture, he is still exploring the same vocabulary of shapes and forms, emphasizing how the same form can take on new meanings in different contexts.

In 2009, Heizer was approached for the first potential commission by the Air & Art Foundation, a Swiss organization dedicated to “develop[ing] contemporary art projects related to territory.”²¹ One of the foundation’s core tenets is to break down the hierarchy between viewers and institutions by placing public art in heavily trafficked areas, ones in which viewers may find themselves unexpectedly face-to-face with an artwork. Jean-Maurice Varone, a Swiss designer and project manager of the foundation, hoped to entice international artists to produce large-scale, in situ works that “interact with nature, the environment—a site—by relying on its history, its identity or other characteristics of the place.”²² Over the next few decades, Varone aspires to commission 13 sculptures throughout the Canton of Valais, one for each of its districts, to develop a traversable map of public art across the region. These projects are intended to be permanent alterations to the landscape, inviting an active exchange between viewers and their environment. They are intended to complement the fruitful output already instituted by Varone’s other public art program focused on Swiss artists, R&Art, which has already commissioned works by Felice Varini, Lang-Baumann, and Chapuisat Brothers, among others. In his initial pitch to Heizer, Varone noted that “he considered the mountains of Switzerland to be analogous to the American deserts in terms of scale and sublimity.”²³ Heizer was selected for the municipality of Bagnes, which up until 2011 was the largest in Switzerland, fitting for what would be Varone’s most ambitious and substantial commission to date.

As discussions for the realization of Tangential Circular Negative Line progressed, certain concessions and limitations had to be put in place, especially since the work would be the largest recreated Heizer drawing to date. Originally, the artist was optioned four potential sites by the foundation. Regardless of the chosen location, another monumental sculptural presence—the concrete Mauvoisin Dam—would overlook the drawing. At 250 meters (820 feet) high the dam is the eighth tallest in the world, providing not only hydroelectric power generation but also flood prevention and sediment control, both of which would allow Heizer’s sculpture to exist in situ without any major natural interferences. Though he received photographs and maps of each site, Heizer was not capable of travelling to Switzerland due to health issues. In his place, he sent Peter Freeman for an in-person evaluation. 

After selecting site “C,” Heizer was informed that it was no longer viable as it was located within a “red zone,” presenting an active danger of falling rocks. A proposed solution was to move the work closer to the dam. This prompted a lengthy exchange, during which the artist emphasized that he did not wish for his drawing to be overshadowed by the sculptural presence of the dam. Site “B,” which sits 280 meters (918 feet) further away from the dam than site “C,” was chosen as a compromise, allowing the two structures to coexist. In order to make the new location function, the sculpture had to be scaled down slightly and a dirt road had to be relocated further south. Another complication arose when the budget was confirmed, as the initial quote for the steel’s fabrication and shipping exceeded expectations. For much of his career, Heizer used a company in Los Angeles known for their precision and efficiency to produce materials for his works. Just as Heizer set out to create a uniquely American form of art, he likewise insisted that his artworks should only be fabricated in America.²⁸ However, Varone argued that local manufacturing was the only way to stay within the Swiss government’s budget. After several rounds of negotiations, Heizer accepted Varone’s proposal knowing that Swiss engineering would meet his high standards.