Reflections on City
City is now available in video game form at your local library.
I think copyright is the worst thing that has ever happened for art, other than money itself. The fact that there is no way to watch ie The Clock on the internet dooms fine art to the irrelevance it enjoys today. We understand that knowledge should be accessible, so we care about things like public libraries or anna’s archive. If this freedom of information doesn’t apply to art, we are either admitting that art is useless or privileging something useful.
City took Michael Heizer 50 years to complete. One thing to learn from art of the last 50 years is that there are so many more ways to be wrong than we could possibly imagine. And some of those ways to be wrong feel so good that we'll follow them down their winding paths, make a bunch of friends with the same hopeful but wrong ideas and make it a whole genre, or spend millions of dollars making an inaccessible city in the desert. In the end, our desires were liberal at best and reactionary at worst, and what was once a drive to try something new and see if it did anything becomes a monument to failure. That failure becomes a new landscape with its own misguided allure, its own winding paths to pour your time into.
Is City good? I don’t expect anyone to see past the critiques when they can’t see it. Maybe turning the corner to see a banana taped to the wall was a really disarming joyful experience, but very few people can know that. The definitive viewing experience for it was reading an article about it shown to you by an algorithm designed to make you angry and push you to the right. It is ultimately the artist’s responsibility to work with the world we live in and undermine it or not. City isn't trying to do anything for you.
President Obama designated the area around City as the Basin and Range National Monument in 2015, meaning Michael Heizer had to open it to the public. Several museums worked together to pressure the federal government to make this decision, but it was ultimately a political move about allegiances and pushing problems down to other people. It feels crazy to me that a piece of art seen by maybe 2000 people has this much neoliberal influence. Especially when there’s so much other land in the southwest that the federal government and their beneficiaries destroy on purpose. Reading any of this completely justifies anyone in thinking City is bourgeois trash, especially when we can’t see it to get anything positive out of it. Materially it is an artificially important piece of private land.
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There is LIDAR data for City online. I used this to get a model of the terrain and overlaid the google maps satellite imagery to see the different gravel / dirt lines. Then I cut out the areas for different textures and modeled the border concrete and sculptures in blender.
This project took me about a week. I’ve probably spent more time looking at City than anyone but Heizer, his contractors, and his security. I didn’t like City when I started, and I saw this project as a way to undermine its power. It’s emblematic of a lot of things I don’t like about art. If there was some powerful aesthetic experience to have with it, I guess I would be happy to give a lower resolution version of that to a lot of people.
First thing I realized about City once I really saw it - this bourgeois scar on the earth is very beautiful. I don’t think that’s contradictory. Land art is often aesthetically beautiful while holding this settler colonial stance toward nature. Art is often reactionary.
It's easy to not have an ounce of empathy for this rich landowner. By all accounts I "deserve" to hate this man because of his position. Which is to say, having empathy is the challenging thing. I don't know if it's a challenge worth anyone's time, but I've found myself with the time as I comb over the same curves and angles he did.
I do feel like making this free version of City is forgiving him in some way. Bringing it to a wider audience might allow his art to mean something to someone.
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This image keeps coming to me of Michael as a kid, at one of his father's archeological sites, getting ignored while he plays with a capgun. Heizer’s fascination with mound building and mesoamerican architecture and his father's business come through in City. All of these interests feel equally childlike, reverent, and distant. I might be projecting, but that distant awe toward your parent feels very lonely to think about for 50 years. I feel like I'm putting this man to rest. I'm fixing his mistakes and making his bed for him. I feel like his mom or something.
I want to see City paved over and turned into free housing or a nuclear waste repository or something else that helps people. I want Heizer to see his land taken back in his lifetime. But why does this have to be a punishment? I want him to be happy when it happens. Anything else is a failure of imagination.