In the City
Scott Dickensheets
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“One eye sees, the other eye feels.”
—Paul Klee
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Michael Heizer, 45°, 90°, 180°, City, 1970-2022. Copyright Michael Heizer. Photo: Ben Blackwell. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation.
It’s been 900 days since I walked into City, Michael Heizer’s enormous and complicated work of land art, situated in the Nevada outback three hours north of Las Vegas. It’s 299 breathtaking acres of precision-manicured plazas, hillocks, terraces, pathways, mounds, viewsheds, and berms, sculpted mostly from compacted dirt and gravel excavated on-site, and punctuated here and there by massive concrete objects, sharp Euclidean counterponts to the site’s organic swoops and curvatures. Somehow the artist’s implacable minimalism coheres these many elements into a holistic experience.
That was June 21, 2023, and I can still conjure the physical inhalation and emotional exhalation of wandering in and being absorbed into City’s immensities of space, time, isolation, and intention—some of which I had expected to encounter, given the gale-force PR of its opening nine months earlier, but which, once there, I was immediately unable to transcribe. That was one of City’s first effects, to deflate the speculative vocabulary I’d prepared ahead of time; none of my synonyms for really fucking big would do. “My main problem will be finding the words for this,” I told another visitor—six people are allowed on the site at a time—shortly after we entered. I’m not an art critic, so my linguistic grip on the nonverbal aspects of the experience was already loose, and the more I wandered the multileveled expanse, a mile long and half-a-mile wide, trying to reconcile my seeing and feeling eyes, the more words fled my brain.
Leslie Jamison once explained that “to me the defining trait of the essay is the situation and problem of encounter.” That’s certainly the case here. Nine hundred days later I’m still trying to pin it all down, from my perch in a city that’s the exact opposite of City: dense with people, noise, marketing, and distraction, profligate and garish, mercantile in the extreme, deep-faked, and riddled with surveillance. As is yours, no doubt, mine is a life saturated by screenloads of media, so City’s unplugged power chords served, and still serve, as a resonant outlier. It doesn’t try to mediate much beyond your experience of it, and that to no insidious effect; it stimulates no consumer desire, fritters none of your attention, promotes no bogus facsimile of reality, encourages no brain rot; the only algorithms at work there are the original ones—time, space, geometry, awe.
On one hand, I don’t want to oversell the experience; it’s not like I met god or anything. On the other hand, if I haven’t thought about it every one of those days since, I have more than I haven’t. Which is to say, it delivered as heavy, complex, enveloping, and sublime an aesthetic wallop as I’ve ever received. I’ve been trying to affix words to it ever since.
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Michael Heizer, City, 1970-2022. Copyright Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Eric Piasecki.
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Hang on for a moment while I speed-run the backstory. City is the career summation of land art pioneer Michael Heizer, the supersize payoff on everything he learned about the uses of mass, scale, geometry, geology, light, and time during decades spent making art out of massive boulders and negative-space excavations. (His father was an archaeologist who studied ancient cultures in Nevada and Central and South America, with a particular interest in the quarrying and moving of large stones for ceremonial purposes.) Notably cantankerous and private, Heizer spent 50 years building City while guarding its secrecy, mostly on his own, at considerable cost to his health and finances (though ultimately much institutional support arrived, in the form of the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art and others). I’m pretty sure he intends it to last forever.
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4/5 Pit, City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Mary Converse
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Okay, so let’s encounter. You’re given three hours to wander the site at will. The first thing I saw and felt were the long sightlines. In the foreground: the idealized curvature of City’s edge hills—something I read claimed that Heizer used satellite-linked graders to scrape everything just so. The backdrop: the rugged, chaotic mountains of Nevada’s basin-and-range geography, the whole scene overtopped by central Nevada’s huge, empty sky. Among other effects, this shrewd horizon-management sets up an enlivening duality between inner and outer, between wild nature and perfected abstractions of it. There are no conclusions to be drawn from this, I don’t think—my fugitive vocabulary notwithstanding, City vibes primarily on a preverbal wavelength. One eye sees, the other eye feels.
The second thing I perceived were its magnitudes of time. As I strolled through a lowered gravel plaza with a massive raised terrace at one end of the installation, it wasn’t hard to imagine this space filled with pre-European peoples in the throes of a religious fervor. It struck me that Heizer, familiar with those ritual gatherings, is trying to use the secular tools of geometry and engineering to access that same capacity for human awe in the presence of a larger reality.
And so one of the maximalist aspirations of Heizer’s minimalist project began to reveal itself, at least in retrospect: using space and time to confront and astonish you with your true, small place in the cosmos.
You needn’t take my word for it. Look at the December issue of Vogue. It has page after page of sumptuous Annie Leibovitz photos of Dune star Timothée Chalamet wandering in various fashionable outfits through Heizer’s sere, serene vistas. And yet, despite his interstellar celebrity and charisma, when Chalamet isn’t depicted as literally too small to matter, he is, as my friend the author and cultural geographer William L. Fox notes, “simply in the way of the view, and your eye slides around him.”
Whatever you’re wearing, walking City is both an intensely physical undertaking, keeping you aware of your body at all times, and remarkable cerebral: you notice that, while indisputably of this place (Garden Valley, Nevada), City’s smooth perfection renders it oddly placeless, too, as though you’re in the middle of every desert. Despite its ambient enigma, there’s no sense of inherent folklore here, either, which is perhaps curious for an installation proximate to the quasi-occult mysteries of Area 51, the mythology-generating machine that is Las Vegas, and the tech-bro shamanism of Burning Man—Nevada may be rich in modern signifiers, but this place traffics in deceptively simple effects:
The front of “Complex 2,” a 24-foot-high trapezoidal mound, seems, from a distance, to be framed by solid concrete beams. It’s only when you approach that you see the truth: the “frame” comprises separate beam-pieces protruding from the structure at different distances, each carefully sized and place so as to appear solid from a distance. At this point you might feel meh about such a basic optical illusion—or you get that it bookmarks a fundamental truth about the desert, and maybe life: You can’t trust your eyes. Perception out here is tricky, and distances are rarely what they seems to be.
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Michael Heizer, City, 1970-2022. Copyright Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome.
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“Yeah,” one of my companions said when I mentioned that business about feeling small. “But the desert will make you feel that, too.” I didn’t have a good response.
Here, 900 days later, is what I wish I had said: Before pop culture downgraded the word sublime into a synonym for cool, it generally denoted a beauty so vast it evokes both awe and terror in the powerless viewer. In that sense, yes, the raw desert doesn’t need Heizer’s help to impress your insignificance upon you, and its venomous creatures and potential for deadly exposure will certainly sharpen the point.
The magic of City, as I grokked it, is that Heizer has retained the sublime but changed its terms — more awe, less terror—to create a site that deliberately makes you feel small, even as you examine yourself feeling small. But Heizer’s minimalism gives it a twist. Yes, you’re rendered miniscule, but, as you and your companions trudge through City, the lone active, living elements in this vast setting, you also become the entire focus of the place. This has been created explicitly to make you grasp your place in the cosmos. So, sure, you’re tiny. But insignificant? No. I found this discombobulation of the self profoundly affecting, and I’d like to think Timothée Chalamet would back me up on that. (Or not. “It’s just a totally remote experience” was all he had to say to Vogue about his time at City. Eh, give the kid another 900 days, I’m sure he’ll level up.)
Smallness has a kind of power here. Late in my three-hour visit, as I shambled along a wide pathway lined with concrete curbing, the sunlight slanted in low over what, just a few moments before, had been a plain, monochromatic beige hillside, tranches of larger gravel began throwing thickets of tiny shadows, dramatically shifting the visual aspect of that hillside—simple light and the logic of ruthless subtraction altered what counts as dramatic. You can brain up a life lesson from that if you like, or just marvel at it, as I did. Doesn’t matter. Like Donald Judd once said, “Intellect and emotion, thought and feeling, and form and content are the same false dichotomy."
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4/5 Pit, City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Mary Converse
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Not everyone feels as well-disposed as I do toward City. It’s drawn heavy criticism: as an example of white-male megalomania; as too elitist and exclusive (it costs $150 to visit and isn’t easy to get to); as reifying the colonial mindset that stripped Indigenous peoples of their homelands; as exemplifying American technological imperialism by laying a heavy hand on the environment. All are valid discourse points that simply did not follow me onto the site, nor did they arise from it when I was out there. The effect of Heizer’s determined minimalism, late art critic Dave Hickey wrote in Gagosian Quarterly after visiting City, is that “you are forced to distinguish between what you see and the preconceptions you brought with you into the desert.”
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Complex One and Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome
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My visit to City occurred early in a devastating run of family losses: five deaths, six if you count my favorite dog, plus a rabid political party gone off-leash, the abandonment of decency and American principle—and no, I’m not going to turn this into a trauma narrative; no need to involve Parhul Sehgal. I’m quite sure that Heizer, who dislikes his own biography being used to discuss his work, wouldn’t appreciate me ladling my pathos onto his creation to score points with Essay Daily readers, either. He didn’t spend 50 years breaking himself and his bank just to make something that’s fucking therapeutic. Anyway, while many believe art can heal, I’m not all-in on that one. Art’s elevated my mood, enhanced my mind, and improved my manners, but I can’t recall an instance in which it truly healed me. Reader, I’ve tried.
But I do believe art can model alternative ways of being in the world.
In my case, accumulated grief, while viscerally writhing in my chest, also frequently propels me deep into anxious, abstract reveries—after all, what’s death but the ultimate abstraction?—in which I am often adrift, depressed and detached from the world, small against the despair. It’s just a totally remote experience.
But my long-tail takeaway vibe from City has been the inverse equivalent: floating in a realm of abstractions, yes, but leaning into those wordless contemplations, and finding the whole process levitating in such a way that it returns me to the real world. No doubt that’s why I reflect on it so often. I’m not saying the one sensation dispels the other, not at all. Actual time might heal, but art about time probably won’t. Still, on some stubbornly inarticulable level, I sense a useful feedback loop between the two...
I know, I know, sounds iffy when I type it out like that. I guess I’m still looking for the right vocabulary.
But maybe, over time, my encounter with this massive art project is slyly proposing different ways to inhabit formally similar experiences until the awe I saw and the sadness I feel work themselves into another false dichotomy—just another instance of things not being what they seem.
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Scott Dickensheets is a freelance writer and editor living near Las Vegas. His work has appeared.
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