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David and Art - “The Art of the City”

Sofie Hernandez-Simeonidis


Asking “What is it?” in a grand new artwork that engulfs its viewers.

Last week we talked about an artist named Michael Heizer who has just finished a work of art that took 50 years to complete. It’s called City and it’s a vast landscape sculpture in the deserts of Nevada. It’s a mile and a half long and to take it in, you have to walk through it; you literally exist inside it.

ArtNews notes that “Portions of it are composed of dirt, rock, and concrete, and there are parts that are labeled “Complexes” because they appear to resemble urban units from a long-lost civilization. Like many works by Heizer,” says the journal, “the project has involved direct interventions into the landscape, which the artist has transformed via elegant, minimalist forms.”

Heizer finished the first part in 1977 and it’s known as “Complex 1.” As he continued creating, other parts emerged that today tower above you and call to mind pyramids and ancient ruins of Mayan cities. Interestingly—and perhaps not entirely surprisingly—Heizer’s father was a professor of archeology who taught for 30 years at the University of California. When he was younger, Michael accompanied his father on research expeditions to Egypt and the Yucatan.

Michael Kimmelman, an award-winning critic for the New York Times, writes that the viewer of the work is “meant to suffer its distances, its depressions and swells, and hear the crunch of gravel—to give yourself over to the peace and quiet, which itself takes on a sculptural presence.” “’Masterpiece’ is a loaded, dated term,” Kimmelman says, “but at the very least it implies something memorably singular, and that’s City.”

As we’ve talked about this, a note of skepticism has surely been present in the minds of many of you. What does it mean? What is it? What is it supposed to be? These are questions that we often ask when confronted by modernist works, particularly those of minimalism.

But we also tend to overlook that each of those questions can be asked of artworks that we automatically accept as art, from the Mona Lisa to George Washington Crossing the Delaware, to Rodin’s Thinker, to the Washington Monument. We only tend consciously to ask them when we encounter something that doesn’t fit our own qualifications of what art should look like. But like every piece of art—from that of Mozart to Miles Davis, from Rembrandt to Stuart Davis—it is what it is. It’s not something that is supposed to be at the service of anything else other than the experience it creates in the viewer or the listener. The experience engendered by City in the silence of the American west is that of encountering a work of art so unique and grand that it engulfs us.