The boulder to be used in Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass has been placed in its final position, or very close to it. It’s supported from above by the apparatus you see here and from below by two massive columns. Some of the rock itself is now visible beneath the plastic shrinkwrap.
The 2.5-acre site, an integral part of the piece, is to be re-landscaped in compressed decomposed granite. That has yet to begin, and at last word the museum was talking about a late spring or early summer opening.
The Rock has been getting all the attention, but there’s another, larger component of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. It’s the so-called Slot, the 456-foot long trench that will run beneath the Rock. The Slot has been all but invisible during its construction, cordoned behind netting and chain-link fence. This weekend, to celebrate the Rock’s arrival on campus, LACMA removed parts of the netting, permitting views of the Slot as well as the Rock. The museum is billing this as a one-weekend pop-up deal: The netting supposedly goes back up Monday.
A few quick reactions:
• The Slot is huge. I know this sounds weird but… from the enforced distant perspective, the Rock looks smaller than I’d imagined, and the Slot looks bigger. The Rock is diminished in comparison to the transporter, and the hype.
• The Slot is a serious earthwork in its own right. Heizer’s Double Negative, the classic Land Art piece in the Nevada desert (at left, owned by MOCA), is 30 feet wide, 50 feet deep, and 1500 feet long. The concrete-lined Slot is 15 feet wide, up to 15 feet deep, and 456 feet long. That’s not bad for an urban earthwork.
• The Slot’s slants, bevels, and cut-outs are reminiscent of the Heizer-designed Corten steel pedestals for two Olmec stone heads in LACMA’s 2010 exhibition “Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico.” The ancient Olmec heads are themselves massive monoliths, 7 to 10 tons.
• It appears that Heizer is leveraging the “haunted shack” principle in the Slot. We tend to experience the angles of human constructions as right and true even when they’re not. (Last year Julian Hoeber played on this theme in an installation at the Hammer.) The downward journey through the Slot will likely be experienced as approximately horizontal. This misperception may help “levitate” the Rock, perceptually speaking.
• The bottom of the Slot will be a great room with maybe ten feet of air between your head and the Rock. Worried about it collapsing in the Big One? It will have 10 feet to accelerate before it crushes you. I know, the engineers have sworn up and down it can’t happen. The Sublime isn’t about what happens, it’s about what you think might happen.
The LACMA-bound boulder, to be the focal point of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, will be the largest moved monolith in the Western Hemisphere. But it’s not the biggest humanly moved rock by a long shot. Consider the 1250-ton Thunder Stone in St. Petersburg, Russia. It’s the base for the famous Bronze Horseman, Étienne Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great (1782). Besides being over three times heavier, the Thunder Stone has a green credential the Heizer Rock lacks: It was moved by human power only.
Catherine the Great had married into the royal line and grabbed the reins of power before her late husband’s body was cold. She decided she needed a heroic statue of Peter the Great to legitimize her rule. Her art-advisor friend, Denis Diderot, suggested Falconet. The project came to encompass a red granite boulder as pedestal. The chosen boulder had to be moved four miles and then carried by barge up the Neva River. A 1770 color engraving by I.F. Schley after a drawing by Y. M. Felten (top of post; via the Observatoire du Land Art), gives the basic method.
The first thing you notice about the print is that there are people riding on the rock. A lot of people. Falconet wanted to shape the rock to emphasize its resemblance to a cliff. Since the shaping would reduce the weight, the sculptor figured it would make sense to do it before the move. Catherine was too impatient for that. She decreed a fast-track plan in which stone cutters would work the rock even as it was being pulled by Russian muscle.
The transport method, devised by Greek-Russian engineer Marinos Carburis, had the boulder resting on ball bearings—bronze spheres about 6 inches in diameter—that sat in metal tracks. The bottom part of the track had to be continually torn up from behind and rebuilt in front of the slowing advancing rock. To pull the rock forward, two teams of 32 strong men rotated a spool that wound up cables attached to the boulder. The move began in Russian winter, lest the boulder and apparatus sink into the marshy soil. The Thunder Stone took nine months to get to St. Petersburg.
A few comparatives:
Weight of granite boulder: Maybe 1500 tons or more, originally, and 1250 as reduced (St. Petersburg) v. 340 tons (Los Angeles)
Length of transport apparatus: 330 ft. of track (St. Petersburg) v. 200 ft. transporter (Los Angeles)
Length of route: 14 miles, of which 4 were on land (St. Petersburg) v. 105 miles on surface streets (Los Angeles)
Daily progress: 1/10 mile per day (St. Petersburg) v. 9.5 miles per night (Los Angeles)
Cost of the move: a claimed 70,000 rubles (St. Petersburg) v. an alleged $10 million (Los Angeles). I don’t know what a ruble was worth in 1769-70. Today 70,000 rubles is only $2385.
Artist’s visibility: Zero (St. Petersburg and Los Angeles). Reported the L.A. Times: “Noticeably missing from Tuesday night’s festivities marking the beginning of the rock’s trip was the reclusive artist, who lives in Nevada. ’There’s nothing he can really do to help now,’ said LACMA Director Michael Govan. ‘But he’s excited.’”
Falconet was not present at the completion of the Bronze Horseman (below, Vasily Ivanovich Surikov’s painting of the monument). He’d had a falling out with Catherine. In later years, Catherine spoke of the Bronze Horseman as a creation of her own incomparable genius, and Falconet’s name was not to be spoken.
Last November I wrote about the politicization of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. At that time it was mainly Tea Partiers and libertarians who were miffed. They felt that paying $10 million to move a 340-ton boulder was the epitome of nutty liberalism. OK, no tax dollars were spent… it was the principle of the thing. Now that the boulder is on the road, it’s incurring a liberal backlash, too. Pomona College environmental professor Char Miller, writing on KCET’s blog, asks,
“What’s the going price for the prostitution of nature? In the fall of 2011, the art world discovered that $10 million would do the trick.”
Miller’s concern isn’t money so much as machismo. For Miller “the most troubling thing” about Levitated Mass is “an imperial reach, a chest-thumping sense of conquest: Nature, from which this imposing rock has been ripped, is manipulable, acted upon.”
This echoes a strain of critical thought that finds Land Art to be Street Photography writ large, an artist’s louche power game with that powerless shopping bag lady, Mother Earth. One can follow that argument, to a degree, with Double Negative or Spiral Jetty. But the Levitated Mass boulder came out of a quarry supplying granite for countertops. Tons of that granite are shipped to IKEAs everywhere. Miller concedes that a working quarry is “hardly a pristine landscape.” The victim of Levitated Mass, he seems to say, is… the rock itself?
“…its ultimate presentation at LACMA – trussed up, harnessed – only reinforces its decontextualized state, its uprootedness. With its geological referents obliterated, its integrity gone, it has become a commodity whose sculptural value is that which Heizer grants it: Now a mass; no longer a rock.”
All art is political? Witness the comments to yesterday’s L.A. Times‘ update on Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. At this writing, there are 41 comments, maybe 3 in favor and 36 against. Most writers are conservatives who have decided the rock is “liberal.”
(For the uninitiated, LACMA donors have supplied around $10 million to move a 340-ton boulder to the museum campus, to become part of a permanent installation by earth art pioneer Heizer. No tax dollars are being spent beyond the fact that various functionaries had to answer their phones and e-mails to approve a logistically complex, nighttime move on public highways. Pictured at left, Michael Govan with the boulder.)
Typical of the negative comments:
“Sheer unadulterated idiocy. Ego. Hubris. Lunacy. Some sort of pathological testicle envy.… Surely this will go down in retrospect as one of the more absurdly bizarre and hilarious efforts of the death throes of a dying empire. And NO, I am not a Tea Partier. I am a progressive Libertarian with common sense. Am I alone ?”
Since s/he asked: No, the writer isn’t alone.
One commenter bridges the political divide better than the Super Committee:
“I am a Tea Partier and… If millionaires and billionaires are willing to blow their money on crap like moving boulders, then they should be taxed at much higher rates.”
Don’t think it’s just Tea Partiers. There’s a liberal backlash too:
“Yet another bombastic artwork by an old white guy aquired by a museum under the direction of an old white guy. Pathetic in 2011. Seriously, can LACMA at least act like 1970-2011 happened?”
A few posters prefer kibitzing to politics. They’ve got better ideas on how to move a 340-ton rock. (“Just build a proportionally large slingshot–problem solved.”) An idea proposed more than once is faux earth art:
“With all they are doing with faux stone, I wonder why the artist didn’t choose this route? You can’t even tell the difference between the real and the faux anymore it is so well done.”
What does this prove? Almost nothing. Museums spend eight-figure sums for paintings and no one bats an eye. It’s $10 million for a “rock” that’s getting the reaction.
The Heizer haters are basically saying that they don’t care for this type of art and can’t imagine why anyone else does. Fair enough. Someone who’s not a football fan must be perpetually mystified at the c. $100 million spent on the Super Bowl each year. In today’s shrill on-line discourse, few settle for saying “I don’t get it.”
Art is political, but sometimes it’s less political than its Internet 2.0 criticism.
“Mr. Govan left little doubt when asked if this was [to] be a permanent exhibition at the museum. ‘Try to move it,’ he said.”
—Adam Nagourney, in The New York Times, on Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass
The boulder to be used in Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass will begin its road trip to LACMA on or about Oct. 3. The completed piece is expected to go on view in November. It’s not just a rock, of course. The boulder will be suspended on two rails above an excavated slot in the LACMA campus, and visitors will be able to walk underneath it. It promises to blend earthwork and sideshow spectacle.
Officially, Heizer’s 21.5-foot-high rock is said to weigh 340 tons (though I wouldn’t bet on the two-digit accuracy of that or any of the tonnages in this post). Michael Govan told the L.A. Times that “It’s much contested, the movement of monoliths in ancient times. The estimated weights of certain objects are speculation. But it is pretty clear that this is one of the largest monoliths that’s ever been moved.”
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia has a “List of largest monoliths in the world.” Going by it, the Heizer rock would be the 11th largest “moved monolith” in the history of the world. Or the 14th, given that some entries in the Wikipedia list are matching sets.
A “moved monolith” is distinguished from such objects as Mount Rushmore, carved in place, and the Washington Monument, composed of over 36,000 separate blocks. The world’s largest moved monolith seems to be the “Thunder Stone,” the base for Étienne Maurice Falconet’s bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great (1782) in St. Petersburg, Russia (top of post). The Thunder Stone is 1250 tons and was moved 4 miles by human power alone—no machines, no animals. It had been closer to 2000 tons and was carved to facilitate the trip.
The “Trilithon” in Roman Baalbek (modern Lebanon), part of a retaining wall for a temple to Jupiter, is three stones estimated to be 800 tons each. The famous paired Colossi of Memnon in Thebes, Egypt (left above), are about 700 tons each. Counting each of these monoliths separately, the Heizer stone would be the 14th most massive ever.
All the monoliths on the Wikipedia list are in the Old World, and all date from antiquity save for two monuments of the Czars. I suspect that the biggest moved monolith in America today is the ancient Egyptian “Cleopatra’s Needle” moved to New York’s Central Park in 1880. That weighs a reported 193 tons. It’s barely half the mass of the Heizer boulder.
Takeway: Neither the Digital Revolution nor the Industrial Revolution has done much for us in the moving-big-rocks department. All the biggest monoliths were moved with human muscle, millennia ago or in the Russia of the Czars.
(Below, Mark Tansey’s Triumph Over Mastery, 1986)
Coming this fall and in 2012:
Robert Irwin’s Black on White, a 20-ton, polished black granite wedge, to span the entrance hall and courtyard of the Getty Center, Sept. 1, 2011,through March 18, 2012.
De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column, a 1.75-ton slab of polyester resin, at the Getty Sep. 13, 2011 to March 11, 2012
Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, a 340-ton, granite boulder, to be displayed on the LACMA campus starting this November (boulder at top, near Riverside, Calif.)
Stanley Kubrick show at LACMA, 2012.
One of LACMA’s more inspired innovations is using contemporary artists to help install exhibitions of older art. It’s the sort of idea that could have fizzled (remember Jim Dine at the Getty Villa?) but so far, the results have been both good and unpredictable. For the latest commission, Michael Heizer has designed monumental supports for two of the Olmec heads going on view Oct. 2 in the Resnick Pavilion. LACMA’s Unframed blog has pictures. Heizer is becoming the go-to guy for supporting big monoliths. His Levitated/Slot Mass, planned for the northwest corner of the LACMA campus, will allow vistors to walk under a 350-ton boulder.
The Getty Center’s “Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture: Inspiration and Invention” tells the story of art too big to succeed. Leonardo frittered much of his time and genius on envelope-testing equestrian monuments that were never realized. His most outlandish notion was a 24-foot-high bronze statue of Duke Francesco Sforza on a rearing horse. Not only would it have been the biggest statue of the Renaissance, but 70 tons of bronze would have been supported on the horse’s two hind legs — in the early drawings, anyway. The invading French army destroyed Leonardo’s full-size clay model before it could be cast.
The tale the Getty show tells has resonance in today’s Los Angeles. Two artists are planning expensive, logistically challenging outdoor works for LACMA. Michael Heizer’s Levitated Slot Mass is to be a pyramidal granite boulder suspended on concrete rails above a pit carved into the northwest corner of the museum campus. Daring visitors will be able to walk underneath the 340-ton rock. Heizer’s boulder is nearly as high as the Sforza monument and almost five times its would-have-been weight. With Barnum-worthy bluster, Michael Govan promises that the Heizer will be “one of the largest monolithic objects moved since ancient times.”
Despite that, the lion’s share of publicity is going to Jeff Koons’ Train, a laser-scanned simulacrum of a 1943 locomotive to be suspended from a 160-foot crane and supposedly visible from practically everywhere south of Mulholland Drive. The locomotive alone is 70 feet long (high).
Will Heizer and Koons succeed where Leonardo failed?
Pro: Technology has come a long way since Leonardo’s time. There’s not much to build with the Heizer: just move a really big rock.
Con: The Great Recession. The Koons seems to have lost momentum, with feasibilty study funder Wallis Annenberg suddenly turning hater (“I personally think Los Angeles deserves a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane.”)
???: Eli Broad loves Koons to death. Does Broad still care what happens in the Miracle Mile?
