How Do You Sell a Work of Art Built Into the Earth?

Robert Smithson’s “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” in Emmen, a town in the Netherlands.

Almost 50 years ago, Robert Smithson, along with his fellow artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria and other adventurous colleagues, pioneered earthworks, an audacious — and short-lived — movement of the 20th century. Named for a sci-fi novel that Smithson read in 1967, earthworks represented a new genre of landscape art. Instead of painting a view of nature, sculptors created their own massive works outdoors on mesas, moraines and even the floor of the Mojave Desert. In 1971, r. Heizer told me: “You can’t really find a harsher climate than where a majority of my work exists right now. It’s in semi-arid, flat, windy, heavy rainy season areas.” Read more...

A Monument to Outlast Humanity

Heizer, a pioneer of the earthworks movement, began “City” in 1972. A mile and a half long and inspired by ancient ritual cities, it is made from rocks, sand, and concrete mined and mixed on site.

“I’m trying to tell you the story of my strange life,” the artist Michael Heizer said to me. “I’m not sure how much I want everyone to know, but it’s all going to come out.” It was March in New York, a cold, long-shadowed afternoon, and Heizer, who has spent much of the past half-century on a remote ranch in Nevada, working on “City,” a mile-and-a-half-long sculpture that almost no one has seen, had finished an omelette and a Tarte Tatin at Balthazar. With his dealer, Kara Vander Weg, of the Gagosian gallery, he shuffled down Spring Street toward Greene, where he’d been renting a loft since the fall. He is seventy-one, and walking pains him. Read more...

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art

Michael Heizer’s “Circular Surface, Planar Displacement Drawing,” 1969, located at El Mirage Dry Lake. Image by Gianfranco Gorgoni and Getty Research Institute

Troublemakers uncovers the history of land art during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film features a cadre of New York artists that sought to transcend the limitations of painting and sculpture by producing earthworks on a monumental scale in the desert spaces of the American Southwest. 

Featuring: Germano Celant, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci and Carl Andre among others. 

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art