1. Introduction to a Difficult Relationship In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Michael Heizer developed a new vocabulary of sculpture, which had traditionally been defined in terms of solid forms presented in space. Heizer devised a body of work based on negative space, created by excavating holes in the ground. The medium he could afford to work in was dirt, which he moved at first by shovel and then with heavy equipment. He did this work mostly in the American West, primarily in the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, terrain with which he was familiar and in which he could work for free or relatively cheaply. He brought with him other artists -- Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, and Nancy Holt, for example -- who then began to make their own sculptures in and on the land. The work of these artists and their colleagues opened up an arena of dramatic possibilities, not only within the formal dialogue of the art world, but also in the practices of other artists who were beginning to work with ecological and environmental concerns. I first met Michael Heizer when I visited his New York studio on Greenwich Street in December 1987.
As director of the Nevada Arts Council, the state agency responsible for supporting the arts, I was exploring whether there might be a way for the Council to fund the construction of City , the artist''s magnum opus in south-central Nevada -- or at least help him to raise money for it. Heizer showed up on the dingy street as I was ringing his doorbell that evening, and told me that he''d been accosted by aggressive panhandlers several times right outside the door. Inside, however, the place was a marvel of heavy equipment, stacks of drawings and geometric paintings from the 1970s, and more recent blueprints and posters, all pervaded by the smell of cut and welded steel. There was far more than I could possibly see (much less absorb) in a single visit, but over hamburgers at a nearby cafe we started a conversation that would continue for several years. The following April, Barbara Heizer invited me to visit the property in Garden Valley, Nevada, where they were living and where Michael was building City. It wasn''t until the fall of 1989, however, that I was able to take her up on the invitation. I drove out with Kirk Robertson, poet and program director at the Arts Council, and David Wharton, a young reporter from the Los Angeles Times . The newspaper was keen to have Wharton bring back images and a story, but Heizer''s condition for our visit was that none of us could take photographs.
We ate lunch around a table in the yard outside Heizer''s cement-block ranch house. Heizer talked, drank beer and Jack Daniels, occasionally chased a cat off the table with a splash of beer on its head; the smells were sage and rabbitbrush, warm dirt -- and cut and welded steel. Heizer made it clear over lunch that to see and understand his work you had to experience it in person; a photograph or a written account was unequivocally not an actual encounter with the work. This strict philosophical stance also provided an economic advantage for certain artists: what few images they allowed to be taken of their major earthworks, such as De Maria''s Lightning Field or Heizer''s City , would generate funds to support their practices, or create press leverage when needed. They had decided to erect their major works outside of the physical confines of the gallery-and-museum world, but that didn''t relieve them of the need to monetize the work. Lunch was a lesson in cowboy etiquette. Heizer carried a pistol on his waist as a matter of course. (He favored revolvers at the time, eventually switching to a .
357 Sig Sauer automatic; then, as his strength declined, a more easily managed 9mm Glock). According to Heizer, the weaponry was available to shoot at the mountain lions who occasionally came into the yard seeking his livestock, and the more numerous but less formidable coyotes; reputedly, however, the annoying overflights of small aircraft were likewise fair game. After lunch we toured Complex One, the bunker-shaped first component of City on the eastern end of the site, and looked over his plans for future complexes within the enormous sculpture. I next saw Heizer in July 1993, when he came to Reno to present his proposal for a sculpture outside a new federal courthouse. I was on the local panel advising the General Services Administration (GSA) Art in Architecture project for the building, part of a percent-for-art program that required half of one percent of the construction budget for each new federal building to be spent on art. In this case, the winner of the competition would receive $125,000 or more. Some panel members had initially favored a proposal from Nancy Holt, but she had already completed a sculpture for the GSA''s federal courthouse in Saginaw, Michigan, and the agency preferred that we pick an artist whom they hadn''t yet commissioned for a project. Heizer arrived with his assistant, Jennifer Mackiewicz, who carried several rolls of drawings under her arm.
His proposal was to greatly enlarge a small artifact unearthed by his father, the prominent archaeologist Robert F. Heizer, into a massive weathering steel sculpture that would stand in front of the Reno courthouse. The original artifact, a piece of animal horn about the size of a human hand and pierced with ninety holes, was found in what Robert Heizer had described as a shaman''s pouch. Michael, who had been creating several versions of the "perforated object," wanted to explode the dimensions of this presumably sacred Native American object in front of the most important federal building in northern Nevada. It was a smart and elegant, somewhat in-your-face gesture that would be by far the most important contemporary sculpture in the state (apart, that is, from Complex One , and his earlier earthwork, Double Negative ). Several of us, including Marcia Growdon, then the curator and acting director of the Nevada Museum of Art, had pushed hard for the panel to accept the Heizer proposal. Our preference was based, in part, on the fact that Heizer was living and working in Nevada, and that we shouldn''t miss a chance to memorialize that fact with the largest art commission in the history of the state. In 1980 Growdon had curated an exhibition for the Museum titled Artists in the American Desert , and had included Heizer in the show with images of Double Negative and Complex One (images which he had approved).
She had long been advocating for the Museum to acquire any of the artist''s work that might be available, not only because of the fact that he was working in Nevada -- and that his family had been in the state since 1880 -- but also because Earthworks (or, as they would become more generally known, Land Art) constituted an important international movement with foundational roots in Nevada, the American West, and American art history. After meeting with Heizer, the panel recommended that the GSA accept his proposal. Perforated Object #27 was installed in 1996 (at a final cost of about $166,000), standing a block away from the Museum on Reno''s major downtown thoroughfare, Virginia Street. Ninety rusted steel rings, representing the holes in the twenty-seven-foot work, were arrayed in a line on the ground on Center Street, on the opposite side of the courthouse, a play on the positive and negative spaces of the work. The essay that I wrote for the project''s GSA brochure later became the basis for a chapter on Heizer and Perforated Object in my book Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (1999). Soon after the acceptance of the proposal by the GSA, Heizer invited me to meet with him and Charles Wright. Wright, an attorney from Seattle and a scion of the family that was the major patron of the Seattle Art Museum, had been director of the Dia Art Foundation since 1986. (In 1994 Wright shifted from staff to the board of the foundation, and he would later serve as its chairman; Dia would become the key organizational supporter of Heizer and his work.
) Wright and Heizer were still hopeful that the Arts Council could fund Heizer''s work, which I was eager to do, but at the time Heizer had no Nevada nonprofit corporation through which they could legally apply to the Council for funds. Nonetheless, we kept in touch in an effort to involve Nevada art patrons (as few as they were) in the support of Heizer''s work, as I had done when I helped fund his book Double Negative , published by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991. I left the Arts Council later in 1993 to return to writing full time, and in June 1997 began to visit Garden Valley to write about Heizer''s work for a book about human cognition and landscape. The Void, the Grid & the Sign (2000) investigated relationships between and among the perceived void of the desert (exemplified by Heizer''s work), the human cartographic imperative stretched across it, and cognition. That book was an early entry in a series of works I am still writing about how humans transform space into place, land into landscape, and terrain into territory; Heizer''s City was a primary topic for the book, but so was rock art -- hence the work of his father, a world-renowned authority on the rock art of the Great Basin, was also critical. I made six trips to Garden Valley through March 1999, which marked the second meeting of the board of the nonprofit Triple Aught Foundation, an organization founded in 1998 to raise funds for Heizer''s work. The founding members of the board were Heizer, Jennifer Mackiewicz, his other assistant (and, later, third wife) Mary.