#ANCIENT SPACE FIGHT PAINTING FULL#

“Growing up with his father’s work,” says Mr Govan, “he knew there were other ways to think about art: especially architectonic-scale art, which has a different feeling to it. Mr Heizer may be playing with geometry and sightlines, but he is also teasing self-important galleries and museum curators. From one angle, “Complex One” seems to be a simple earthen wall with struts sticking out move farther back and the struts come together to frame the wall as if it were a painting. Your perceptions, as you stand at the foot of the rising steles or lie at the bottom of the huge pebbled bowl known as the “Teardrop”, are constantly jolted. There are mounds and walkways, as well as discrete spaces that could be neighbourhoods. Now finished, the work is as much a garden-albeit one with no flowers-as a city. A new $30m endowment, partly funded by lacma, is meant to secure its future.) (The Lannan family have contributed half of the $40m that the project has cost. For his part, in 2015 Mr Govan spearheaded a campaign to turn the surrounding land into a conservation area.

When Mr Heizer went back to work, Mr Govan says he had recast the project to make it much larger.

A small initial donation solicited by Mr Govan from the Lannan Foundation, a family foundation that supports artists and culture, helped reinvigorate him. “Complex One” was crumbling and Mr Heizer was broke and in hospital. “I worked entirely intuitively,” he says, “with no ongoing thought or consecutive way of planning.” For years he operated diggers and earthmovers alone or with a small band of construction workers, breaking off only to do commissioned works for other people in order to raise money.Īfter more than two decades, the project reached a crisis point. When Mr Heizer conceived “City” he began at one end, with a section he called “Complex One”-a rectangular slope surrounded by concrete struts. Its influence can be seen in the long tapered memorial to the casualties of the Vietnam war created by Maya Lin in Washington, and in the seemingly bottomless pools at the centre of Michael Arad’s tribute to the victims of the attacks of September 11th 2001 in New York. In 1969 Mr Heizer gouged out over 200,000 tonnes of earth and rock from the Mormon Mesa in Nevada. His partner, Kara Vander Weg, a senior director at the Gagosian gallery-and co-vice president of the Triple Aught Foundation, which owns and runs “City”-says he wants his tombstone to read “Totally Negative”. He called his new works “ultra-modern art”. He was descended on both sides from men who had made a living from mining, and was gripped by the idea of digging into the ground to create “negative sculpture”. Like others, he looked West but in his case the landscape was part of his family’s story. But he was most interested in the uncharted possibilities of monumental sculpture. “You can’t go to school and learn about art by looking at a bunch of slides projected on a wall.”Īfter taking a few courses at the San Francisco Art Institute, he focused on making large geometrical paintings. Then he spent a year in Paris, mostly in its museums. Fascinated by drawing from an early age, as a young teenager he helped his father, an anthropological archaeologist, who was excavating at La Venta, an ancient Olmec site on the Yucatan peninsula. America was still fighting the Vietnam war when Mr Heizer started work on it in 1972. “City” is the most ambitious land-art project of the lot. “You’d have to go back to the early teens of the 20th century, when abstraction was invented, or maybe to the invention of perspective.” “I don’t think there’s ever been such invention in art as the late 1960s,” says Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ( lacma), a crucial supporter of America’s land artists.

#ANCIENT SPACE FIGHT PAINTING FULL#

Theirs was a particularly American art, full of energy-the land equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

Ancient space fight painting