I started a text on Michael Heizer on January 24 but never advanced. So much to say! I didn't know how and where to begin. Then, on February 6, The New York Times Magazine published a long, very long (11 pages and 8355 words scattered in various parts of the magazine from the cover to the back and in between) article on Michael Heizer and his ever-going "City". Penned by Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic for the paper, this story follows an article published in 1999 by the same author that marked the renaissance of "City" after years of lack of funding and the artist's attention diverted to many other projects. Many of us Earthwork-lovers and Michael Heizer admirers treasure that almost-mythical and widely-circulated 1999 article as a unique source on "City" and its endless avatars, loops, problems, excentricities.
Now, in 2005, this extensive, in-depth coverage comes as surprise, a very welcome surprise. Not in vain Mr. Kimmelman’s reports of his visits there are almost the only information available on “City” and the Michael Heizer whereabouts, despite his desert sculpture and he himself being generously (and undisputedly) funded by Dia Art Foundation and its satellites of the Lannan Foundation and Brown Foundation (as well as by Leonard "Mr. Barnes & Noble" Riggio) Nobody says a word.
Michael Kimmelman reports that Michael Heizer plans in taking at least another decade to build and finish his “City”, which I imagine as an essay- one cannot stop adding a word here and a comma there, correcting, revising, writing some more… but if you're getting paid, is your patron going to wait forever? Dia said he would fund Michael Heizer "to help complete this epic project over the next few years"... (Writing, anyway, is inexpensive and classy; building a huge city-sculpture in the middle of the highest desert of the American West drains you fast. And it’s very dirty)
There are so many lessons to extract from Michael Kimmelman’s story of “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy” as the title of the article says. I first saw the magazine in Dia:Beacon, where it was proudly displayed (“Do Not Remove”) at the front desk. In Beacon I had a feeling of excitement and eagerness for reading the piece- I’m always eager for news on “City” and Michael Heizer. Then at home in New York, and after having finished the article, a quite different thought came to my mind: it has to be Michael Kimmelman and The New York Times and not Dia who informs about “City”. I wrote e-mails signaling the issue to Michael Govan, Lynne Cooke and Sarah Thompson (Director, Curator, and Public Affairs Associate of Dia Foundation, respectively, though “Public Affairs” and “Dia” do not seem to match well), not having received yet an answer (I won’t).
At the same time, Michael Heizer told Dia not to divulge anything about his “City”. The artist also made them shut down the web section devoted to his project and is relying exclusively in carefully screened friends among the journalism (Kimmelman) and the curatorial affairs (Germano Celant) to leak some news and photos of what’s going on in Garden Valley, Lincoln County, Nevada. Foundation funds the artist, artist wants no coverage; Foundation pledges, gives no info; artist talks and opens his ranch and sculpture to critic-journalist friend. An awkward cycle of hidings, egos, funding and a Manhattan newspaper that goes to the desert. It would be easy to blame the whole mess in Michael Heizer and his eccentric ego, but I’ll point at everybody involved (and yes, I am jealous of Michael Kimmelman).
The responsibility of informing/not informing is a first thought. A second one follows rapidly: the (mental) state of Michael Heizer. It is bad. I wish I wouldn’t have to write about it and focus on the astonishing sculpture he is building in the high desert of Nevada. But no one can intend to write about him and skip the mental issue. It’s part of Michael Heizer’s zeitgeist. Furthermore, one of the biggest appeals of him is his weirdness and paranoia, his mystery and secludedness (definition from Webster 1913, “To shut up apart from others; to withdraw into, or place in, solitude; to separate from society or intercourse with others”; it seems like it was invented for him specifically).
If Michael Heizer were accessible as James Turrell and his place open to the public like Walter de Maria's The Lighting Field, we wouldn’t be trying to chase him so bad. The lure of the secrecy and hideaway is strong- it calls and awakes our senses and minds.
The 1999 piece on the Times was a fascinating portrait of an embittered, contradictory and angry-against-all man. He cussed on Robert Smithson for the first time that I know (at least in a public statement), calling him and other earth artists “high-speed hustlers” and asking himself, "What was some guy from New Jersey doing building a sculpture like mine on a lake in Utah?". I don’t know where in Earth can Michael Heizer see a similarity between the "Spiral Jetty" and any of his own earthworks in the West, whether "Double Negative", "Nine Nevada Depressions" or "City" itself. What was Smithson doing in a lake in Utah is well known: creating the most famous of the Earthworks, an icon of the work with dirt in the vastness and openness of the American West. Ah, that hurts. How can anybody else dare to achieve fame and surpass me. ME. Michael Heizer is all about ME.
His next confession to Michael Kimmelman in 1999 was: "But I figure, how much more original can you get than having nine different people doing what I did first, and none of them giving me credit? Actually, it's the academics who did not do a good historical job who are really to blame. I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented."
That left us all speechless, worried for his sanity, amused and kind of bothered. “Nine people doing what I did first” means “we were a series of different artists and friends working with dirt, participating in group shows, being funded by the same patron and dealer and admiring each other”. “It’s the academics who did not do a good historical job” means “the few exhibitions on my art that have ever taken place are those I personally authorized and supervised; many critics have written about me without being monitored by me and I hate them all and they’re all wrong”. “I wasn’t political enough to write articles about myself” means “I published an article on my work in ArtForum in 1969 and a number of statements and controlled-interviews and essays in the catalogues approved by me and published about my art”. “Or to go to cocktail parties” means “I was a friend of Andy Warhol and a figure in the New York art scene of the 70’s and 80’s along my chic wife Barbara, check the portrait Andy did of my tough face and don’t miss the photos of parties and artists socializing where I appear, cocktail on hand”.
Suzaan Boettger, historian of the Earthworks, wrote a letter to the Times after the 1999 story on “City” appeared rebating (and making kind of fun of) some of the self-attributions of Michael Heizer. She does not like Mike, not in small part due to his ban on granting permission to publish any photo of Heizer’s art in Suzaan’s “Earthworks”, the one and only (even photo-less) magnificent chronicle of those dirty years that dug the desert and beyond. She even includes a section in her book to “the issue of Earthworker’s Priority” where she gives credit to Michael Heizer as been “the first to work in the western desert”, in the spring of 1968. Well, Mike, you were first, at least in that.
Suzaan Boettger whacks Michael Heizer in her book for whacking Robert Smithson, in a footnote that also calls Michael Kimmelman “a gullible critic”. Take no prisoners, but that 1999 piece in The New York Times was indeed a non-critical, well-served, all-praise to Michael Heizer that disappointed as much as enticed- Kimmelman seemed not to argue about Heizer’s insults and personal issues, being just a microphone for the artist’s loudmouth. Now, five years and a month after that visit and too-domesticated chronicle, Kimmelman goes back (a visit in the summer of 2004 in between) to Garden Valley and reports. This time he gives it all and involves himself when treating Heizer’s paranoia and anger towards the world- more accurate, more real, more in-depth, more human, failure and success. The result is fascinating, compromising, devastating. “Michael Heizer makes me sad” was a choice for this writing when I first started it before Kimmelman interposed himself between my subject and me. Now, national coverage in between, the feeling stays, even accentuated.
Heizer appears in the NYT Magazine story heroic and epic in photos and (some) words sometimes; pathetic and nearly defeated in others; paranoid and aggressive almost always. When a moment of humanity and normality is depicted, one cannot believe that Michael Heizer laughs and stays homey around his wife, the artist and ex-assistant of him (before they married) Mary Shanahan.
But most of the time we assist to the weird and mostly unrewarding spectacle of Michael “I was first, you better write that down and clear” Heizer talking about him and his work and his deeds and how he and only he himself was a pioneer and the one and only. He does not help himself to look better before the expansive number of people that avidly read and look at him in the world's-best-known newspaper. The first caption gives the sense of what follows: “You just don’t get it, do you? This is a czarist nation, a fascist state. They control everything. They tap my phone. They’ll do anything to stop me.”
It’s all about ME, you listen? I did it first, the rest are copycat rats violating my rights and brilliancy. This is not an actual dialogue of him, but it would perfectly among its peers included in the Times piece: “Double Negative” was the most incredible sculpture I’ve ever seen or done. When I finished I laughed. I knew I’d done it. There was no precedent in the history of mankind”. Kimmelman writes in the next paragraph, “as he sees it, he single-handedly, without influence from any other living artist, started a “revolution”. And Michael Heizer goes, “I’m self-entertaining”. “My dialogue is with myself”.
Indeed it is, and that, as Kimmelman points at the end of his long story and journey, might be his problem- the lack of people out there in the desert to talk back and respond him, pinpointing the contradictions and failures of his macho, never-confronted aggressiveness and putting him a bit down, lowing him. His nest and his circle and his friends and his patrons will always say “yes, Mike”, “whatever you want, Mike”. His fragile invincibility needs to be exposed; probably a good thing to do for him and the humanity.
Yet another “Mike the pioneer” moment in the NYT Magazine story: “I burned hot and was making something totally original”. “It was a moment of genius and unprecedented” (and then, the typical insulting Robert Smithson that complements his self-portrait as an isolated genius).
Virginia Dwan, her patron and dealer, who gave money to Heizer to (un)build “Double Negative”, met him at 24 and says he was “a young 24, sensitive and vulnerable. He has changed over the years, as a result of defending himself from attacks, real or imagined”. Paranoia acknowledged.
It is her, Virginia Dwan, saint and revered patron of the Earthworks, who gives the best depiction of Michael Heizer I can imagine, portraying him as a hero (and so a victim) of the loneliness and toughness of the desert and his enormous sculpture there, always drawn to criticism for its grandiosity, as well as his mission: “building what he must”. Dwan says that that “takes courage”, and it really does, but it is eventually, for me, as castrating as Heizer finds the New York art world to be. I distrust and am very skeptical of personal missions that take a life to fulfill, though his having a dream come true is a fact to identify myself with (but at what price)
The article, it’s got to be said, was fueled by the news of last year that loosely reported Michael Heizer as threatening (to whom?) to destroy “City” if the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Train eventually passed by his ranch as it’s been scheduled. An article in Las Vegas Review Journal in April 25 2004 showed three things: a rare photo of him, the first public one I know since the 70’s and 80’s; a very rare tranquil and normal Michael Heizer talking about the Yucca Mountain Rail and his impact on the area; and an apparition on a Las Vegas paper after he more or less (Las Vegas Mercury reported) made clear his decision not to talk to any Nevada media (the piece also showed his dirty cattle jacket and baseball cap, which in the piece for The New York Times have been substituted by an impeccably new cowboy outfit, though I suspect the jacket is the same but washed).
What in December 1999 was an all-open, no-boundaries to Michael Heizer to spit his fury against everyone out of himself and his people in the desert, in February 2005 is an emcee for him and a commentary for the world. Mike from Nevada talks, Mike from Manhattan remarks. “Soliloquy crescendos”, “even paranoids may be right sometimes”, “his usual gratuitous whack at Smithson”. Heizer is not anymore the “only one and pioneer”, Kimmelman gives credit to other Earth artists and fits Heizer in, tightly adjusting his story, Heizer’s story and the Earthworks’ story. Not easy, when your friend’s name is Michael Heizer, lives in the high mountainous desert and is considered by most people as a nuts freak with a rifle ready to shoot you if you try to visit and a Caterpillar for building something around (which is, of course, not untrue)
Now we know that the grave disease that affected Heizer in 1995 –so much that he had to be flown in an helicopter from his ranch and then to New York- and still does was a “neurological disorder”, which makes me think if it was that disgraceful fact what causes his strange mental state and behavior- it was in the middle nineties, I would say almost exactly in 1995, when he started to be a weirdo, divorced his long-time wife Barbara and defected from New York, the art world and the world in general to hid himself in the ranch (while Barbara Heizer, by the way, who always loved the New York art world and commodities and luxury much more than living in a trailer in the desert of Nevada continues to enjoy the life of a socialite in her loft that was theirs in Tribeca, with her portrait by Andy (Mike the Cowboy’s one whereabouts unknown), her Manolos and her Guccis. Michael Heizer is grateful to her, says Michael Kimmelman at the end of his story)
It was probably that disease and a sudden sense of mortality that prompted him on one hand to isolate himself and distrust the world outside his mind, and on the other hand to feverishly build his sculpture as never before, trying to finish his artistic and personal consecration before time runs out while trying to reassess and confirm his status and leave a definitive, permanent trace in this world and the world to come: a monumental sculpture and a larger-than-life ego and aim to be acknowledged. Both shall grant him the long-craved transcendence.
What a difference (in work and ego) with Christo and Jeanne-Claude! These days I can see them supervising his monumental The Gates installation in Central Park. Totally opposite to Michael Heizer, these urban New Yorkers work for the public and within the public, no barriers whatsoever: you can go to Central Park and watch them, the construction crew, the cameras, the cranes, the whole thing is there, open and free. No secrets, no hidenness, no mysteries. In your face to enjoy, built for your enjoyment and pleasure.
Mike builds for himself and his ego. He doesn't want us to peek at his weird and in-a-hurry soul.
Since I discovered Michael Heizer’s art recently (a year ago I barely knew who this Heizer artist was, no fault if you know how much of the Earthworks subject reaches Spain), I've dipped into his art and persona, sank and dived inside his fascinating attraction to making trenches and cuts and bulldozing the desert. I was amazed to know that he built (or un-built) his monumental "Double Negative" at the tender age of 25, and at 28 he already had purchased the land in Garden Valley and started the construction of his “City”. His revolutionary concept of "negative sculpture", his building sculpture on the void, being the core an absence, an empty space. One can think that being so groundbreaking and thought-provoking at such an early age can disturb and distort your mind and sense of being. That could have been the beginning of his Napoleon complex.
Michael Heizer broke in the perfect moment, found the wealthiest and most cultured and interested of the patrons and dealers and was admired. He also loved the desert, the American West, Nevada. When I first read about his career a year ago, I was craving to jump into the art world and was slowly but deeply falling in love with the desert of Nevada. Later, I visited his "Double Negative" in Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada, and inadvertedly passed by Hiko, the closest point on a highway to “City” and site to his post office. Further on, I became obsessed with his project and his living in Garden Valley, away from everything.
I still now find myself many times wandering around a Nevada map, looking for traces of him and his cryptic monument, even though I have found the precise location of it, published on more than one site on the web. The exploration of his persona, his difficult character, his contradictions, his issues, his denials and insults to former friends followed.
The image I have of him is nitid, I know him well, I admire him. I feel sad for him, the more I read the worse I feel for him and his paranoia. I would love to visit him and declare my total admiration for him and his art, but at the same time I criticize his incoherence and point his mental fragility. I respect his privacy but believe his project should be given more information since it is funded by foundations that intend to make the place accessible. I deconstruct his miseries and failures, but I would love to be in Garden Valley giving him a hug. At times, he has possessed me, invaded me, oft-obsessed my soul, my brain, my mind. I devour any word and line, rumor and gossip about him. I search for him and he does not want it. With Michael Heizer is all or nothing. I take it all. For that and for being as passionate and contradictory as him, for devoting my time and words to him, for admiring him and cherish him and even almost love him, I think I deserve a visit to “City”.
Mike? You hear me?
