rock of ages
by Douglas Messerli
Michael
Heizer Leivitated Mass, Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 2012
The other day, with out-of-town friends,
we visited Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” a work of art that is famous in
Los Angeles for its long, complicated journey—given local road constrictions
throughout the region and the impossibly large machine it took to carry the
rock to its location—from quarry to museum. Along the way, in its many daytime
pauses (the machine could only travel on late night empty streets), numerous
communities came out to greet the oversized manifestation of expensive “art,”
celebrating its journey through their streets, and further promoting this
over-the-top art manifestation. Although the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
and its dynamic director, Michael Govin, insisted that no public money had gone
into the support of this multi-expensive project, some people could only
wonder, was it worth the hype! Govin insisted it was, declaring the work a
piece that would last centuries and would represent the museum into a kind of
artistic eternity, alike, perhaps, the very popular Chris Burden piece, “Urban Light” which greets the visitor to
the LACMA site which, in location, is now backed, in the opposite museum entry,
by the "Heizer" rock.
So much publicity aroused public interest, that the museum gracefully
invited people from all those neighborhoods through which the “rock” had
traveled free visitation to the opening, which Howard—a former curator at the
museum—attended; I had another event on that day). The crowd was so intense,
that Howard did not even walk “under” the monumental natural force—which is
what the whole experience of this earth-works-based piece is all about.
I’m delighted, actually, since the installation exists across the street
from our condominium, that the “rock” is so appealing to audiences. One hopes
for the museum’s success. It defines our neighborhood. But there are some
doubts. My intelligent typesetter, Pablo, visited it with great
consternation: "I didn’t want to walk under it and it seemed just like a
cold concrete tunnel.” Others had had similar responses.
Indeed, the tunnel under which one needs pass to experience the
“intense” feeling of walking under such an expression of the size and power of
natural forces, is rather cold,
certainly not endearing to the exploration of nature: a long concrete tunnel,
even if well-designed, that puts one in an intense opposition to nature itself.
The rock stolidly sits on two struts imposed upon the concrete bunker, but one
feels in the process of the long trek through the “tunnel,” that at any moment
the natural, the “rock,” might crumble into its historical inevitability. On
the day we entered, I muttered, “God forbid that a major earthquake were to
occur as we walked below,” while the next day temblors shook throughout the
nearby Orange Country.
Yet, it wasn’t the fear that made this impossibly
large project so memorable: I was much more awed by the two (now one) Richard
Serra (Band, 2006) sculptures
embedded in the basement of the Eli Broad Gallery nearby. This large “rock,”
which can never be properly perceived as immense as it truly is, seemed like a
place to simply “duck and dodge,” a massive natural image that didn’t quite
belong to the space upon which it was impaled. It may be, as director Michael
Govin has stated, it is an art piece that shall survive for a very long time,
but one can only wonder at the poised rock: will the major earthquake we
certainly will suffer in the next several years crack that natural symbol in
half? And, if that rock were to survive, we can only ask what it might tell us
about its own natural existence, now so carefully positioned into a museum
installation. Is nature truly an expression of the large natural manifestation
such a constructed situation? What does it mean to be poised there? And, most
importantly, we must ask, why has a significant force of nature been brought to
be installed there for millions of dollars? The question is not whether or not
it is art, but whether it is an expression to capture our pagan need to worship
natural images? Can one absurdly transferred rock compare to the millenniums of
constructed stone pyramids? The comparison is, of course, ridiculous. As
wonderful as Heizer’s rock may be, it is clearly not a rock of ages.
Los
Angeles, August 8, 2012
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (August
2012).
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