What is your favorite piece of art by your least favorite artist? When I ask others this question, they often bring up individuals with questionable, convictable, or canceled personalities and behaviors. For me, it isn’t a judgment of character but rather of creative output. What artist’s
oeuvre do I find uninspiring or unappealing, yet has a singular work that stands apart? My favorite piece of art by my least favorite artist is Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass.
I don’t have anything personally against Heizer. I only know him by his previous monumental land art, which I dislike with conviction. To avoid burdening what I want to celebrate with what I otherwise dismissively despise, I simply offer that my impulsive critique of his work is that it leans ecologically sadistic, chauvinistically delusional, a full-grown man with large machinery playing in the sand.
You could say the same about shutting down streets to move a 340-ton boulder from the desert to suspend it in the heart of Los Angeles, but this is more than a show of strength and engineering ingenuity. There is a necessary and profound poetry that requires the municipal choreography and logistical complexities of moving a big rock. Levitated, it offers a ritual of passage that provokes the humility of our resounding mortality.
It is terrifying that logic, science, and empirical evidence are no longer applicable to the national conversation regarding responsible and productive governing. It is a high tide of partisan contrarianism, historical reductionism, ideological arrogance, and moral hegemony. However, a chunk of billion-year-old diorite granite weighing the equivalent of 75,000 pounds is evidence against these fallacies. Its hoisting into place leaves no room for conspiracy with its undeniable reminder of time, volume, weight, and gravity.
In its raw materiality, the fundamental building block of our planet, a piece of the earth’s mantel, it becomes spiritual. By spiritual, I mean a transcendent view of the world that sits outside our immediate passions and current events, centering on the material reality that we scramble to cover with our borders and strip malls. We can’t seem to shake our collective pursuit and awe of civilization, the product of servitude of the many to benefit the few. Civilization isn’t a story of progress but an amplified and compounding calcification of our best and worst tendencies.
Our problems are not unique to this moment; they are fundamentally part of our humanity. But beneath it is rock, and it will eventually swallow us. This is our future, and I find comfort in this.