![]() Perhaps it's the imminent completion of Heizer's masterpiece that has inspired a new generation of artists to take as their muse these colossal open spaces. Also in the vastness of the Nevada Desert and even more ambitious in scale is Heizer's 'City', a mile-and-a-half-long sculpture carved by bulldozer that looks like the ceremonial centerpiece of an ultra-modernist Aztec dream city, that will have taken half a century to build by the time it opens to visitors in 2020. It is an absence that will in the distant future be eroded back to another sort of nothing. ![]() The thunderbolts that occasionally illuminate the work may be ephemeral but the work itself is a paean to the endurance of the desert ( you can still visit it from May to October each year).Īs is Michael Heizer's 'Double Negative' (1970), a trench dug in the Moapa Valley in Nevada that involved the displacement of 244,000 tons of rock. Take Walter De Maria's seminal 1977 'Lightning Field' in New Mexico, 400 stainless-steel poles driven into the ground in a grid one mile by one kilometre in an area prone to lightning storms. And nor is it surprising that the desert's gigantism has provoked colossal, heroic responses. ![]() It's not hard to see why the desert is the dream blank canvas, the ultimate, irresistible challenge, the greatest test of the land artist's swaggering machismo. ![]()
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