Written by Benjamin Sutton
This article was originally published by The Art Newspaper, an editorial partner of CNN Style.
“City,” a vast complex of outdoor structures and landmasses that land artist Michael Heizer began building in the Nevada desert in 1970, will finally begin welcoming public visitors next month. The opening of the site on September 2, more than 50 years after work began on the site, marks the accomplishment of Heizer’s most ambitious and career-defining project.
“City” has been described as probably the world’s largest contemporary work of art, spanning more than a mile long and half a mile wide, evoking the grandeur of ancient sites such as Native American mounds, Mesoamerican metropolises and Egyptian worship complexes . It is located in the remote Basin and Range National Monument in east-central Nevada, within the Nuwu (Southern Paiute) and Newe (Western Shoshoni) ancestral lands, approximately 160 miles north of Las Vegas.
For the first year of public access, only a limited number of visitors will be admitted, with mandatory pre-registration.
“City” has been described as possibly the greatest work of contemporary art in the world. Credit: Ben Blackwell
Originally funded by Heizer himself, the construction of “City” eventually received the support of many influential collectors, institutions and dealers through the establishment of the Triple Aught Foundation in 1998, which will manage and maintain the site for years to come. The Foundation — which includes Heizer himself, Los Angeles County Museum of Art director and executive director Michael Govan, Museum of Modern Art director Glenn D. Lowry, Glenstone collector and co-founder Emily Wei Rales, and the Gagosian Executive Director Kara Vander Weg — has set up a foundation for City with nearly $30 million in initial funding.
“Over the years I have sometimes compared Michael Heizer’s ‘City’ project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities,” Govan said in a statement. “But now I only compare it to itself. It is a work of art, aware of our original impulses to build and organize space, but it includes our modernity, our awareness and our reflection on the subjectivity of our human experience of time and space and the many histories of civilizations we have built.”
Heizer’s quest to build “City” has a complicated five-decade history. The artist, now 77, believes it will last for centuries. Credit: Mary Converse
The path to building a “city” has never been an easy one, which involved sculpting huge piles of earth, moving rocks, and building huge concrete structures. This process has at times been further complicated by external factors. In 2014 and 2015, a coalition of museum leaders and the late Nevada Senator Harry Reid fought through amid fears that the Basin and Range would shrink, potentially allowing for disruptive development near the “City” site presented a public petition and legislation for protection of the area to Congress. And in 2017, as the Trump administration moved to open up previously protected land for resource extraction, some feared that Heizer’s project would be among vulnerable sites.
Perhaps in response to such threats, Heizer envisions “City” as a project that will last well beyond the lifespan of even the most valuable and hardy contemporary art.
“My good friend Richard Serra builds with military-grade steel,” he said in a 2016 New Yorker profile of the project, speaking of the American sculptor’s large-scale site-specific works. “The stuff is all melted down. Why do I think that? Incas, Olmecs, Aztecs – their finest works of art were all plundered, razed to the ground, broken apart and their gold melted down. If you come here to f* * if you pick up my ‘City’ sculpture, you’ll find it takes more energy to destroy than it’s worth.” Read more articles from The Art Newspaper here.