Michael Heizer: absence of presence

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Michael Govan
In the mid-1960s, during the same period that Michael Heizer was making large-scale, shaped, “negative” paintings in his New York City studio, he began a series of trips to his home states of Nevada and California to experiment on the expansive raw canvas of the American desert landscape, where he created “negative” sculpture. The genre that he and his colleague Walter De Maria invented there—later dubbed “Earth art” or “Land art”—changed the course of modern art history. Working largely outside the confines of the gallery and the museum, Heizer went on to redefine sculpture in terms of scale, mass, gesture, and process, creating a virtual lexicon of three-dimensional form.

Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) comprises two giant rectangular cuts (and the space in between them) in the irregular cliff edges of a tall desert mesa near Overton, Nevada. This monumental piece is iconic of the period and of works made in and of the landscape. Although the “sculptural volume” of Double Negative was created by a massive movement of earth, performed with the help of heavy machinery, it isn’t physical at all. Instead it is made literally of nothing, of negative space: the volume that traditionally defines a sculpture is described in these works by a void, by absence rather than presence.

It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. . . . I think that large sculptures produced in the ‘60s and ‘70s by a number of artists were reminiscent of the time when societies were committed to the construction of massive, significant works of art.

Ancient sculpture may have specific commemorative or religious meaning to convey, but for Heizer it generates its sense of awe through its intense “commitment” to making an “architecturally sized” work that becomes “both the object and the atmosphere.” Those issues of commitment and scale can equally be embodied in the contemporary artist’s intense and self-reflexive process of abstraction—even negation— with the same overall results.