Monument
Initial Interpretation
Source Material
Secondary Interpretations
To place a “useless” object in a specific place, that is to locate it in situ, or to build a structure of architectural scale with no practical function is the first step toward the creation of a monument. Of course, naturally occurring phenomena such as mountains (e.g., Mount Fuji) or forests (e.g., the sacred groves of the ancient Germanic peoples) can become monuments by setting them aside and protecting them from the exploitation of their resources, as in the case of the Basin and Range National Monument, which protects Michael Heizer’s City. (One could say, however, that creating monuments by exploiting the resources of their locations—which is to say work, material, and location are coextensive—is Heizer’s modus operandi.) Nonetheless, to create an object or building (the differences between the two having become more blurred in the era of Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava and of Land art.) and to install or exhibit it permanently someplace upon the Earth is an act of meaning. Acts of meaning are categorized as hermeneutics and individually are called interpretations.
Monuments are hermeneutic buildings, which comprise both portable objects, i.e. artworks, and what can be loosely called architectural structures. Thus, hermeneutic buildings do not necessarily resemble buildings in the usual sense. A hermeneutic building can be a sculpture commemorating an event that took place at a particular location or place (a meaningful event having rendered a location upon the Earth a place). It can even be an artwork permanently exhibited in a museum, such as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. In both cases, the act of creating a thing (“thingliness” being important in Heidegger’s conception of art, more so than its performative aspects) and installing it in a specific place, whether it is a small painting or an architectural structure, “gathers” meaning, which in Heideggerian terms is the act of building. Hence, an act of building—that is, a gathering or act of meaning—is a building.
Interpretations of monuments or hermeneutic buildings can take different forms. In the case of pre-existing natural monuments, interpretations can take the form of ritual acts. Thus, the centuries-old ritual climbing of Taishan in Shandong Province, China, renders it a monument. But it can also take the form of a record, a record being the thingliness of the interpretation, of a ritual act, which can itself take different forms. In the case of Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967), the record takes the form of a photograph of the artists ritualistic treading of a path in a grassy field. (Photography, in the context of Heizer’s and Heidegger’s work with regard to its relationship to technology, was intrinsic to the practice of Land art and other related idioms.) Another example is the film Mono Lake (1968-2004) made by Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Nancy Holt on the shores of a desolate alkaline lake in California which records the artists interpreting the natural environment in ways that could be described as forms of play.
Records of acts that serve to gather meaning and build monuments through their thingliness can also take the form of writings. Works such as The Void, The Grid, & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin and Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty engage directly with Heizer’s interpretative buildings in the context of the Great Basin region while serving as interpretations themselves. Other examples include the writings of Rebecca Solnit, such as Savage Dreams and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which gather meaning from within a somewhat wider point of view, delving more deeply into the history and economic development of the region. Along with Solnit’s work, Erin Hogan’s Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West in particular brings into focus a type of meaning gathering: the journey.
The flight of the Israelites from Egypt as recounted in the Book of Exodus may be the journey par excellence in Western culture, but there are other examples with closer parallels to Heizer’s work. One need not focus only on the ritualistic movement of people across distances, as in the case of ancient Greek processions or Medieval pilgrimages to holy sites. There are also the movements of objects across distances, especially heavy stones. Heizer’s father, the archaeologist Robert F. Heizer, conducted research into pre-modern technologies used by various cultures to move massive pieces of stone ranging from the colossal heads of the Olmecs in Mesoamerica to the Moai of Easter Island. This research may have had some influence on Michael Heizer’s decision to participate in the making of a documentary film about the transport of a 340-ton boulder that is the centerpiece of Levitated Mass (2012). The film documents not only the complex planning and engineering that was required to move the nearly 22-foot-tall stone 106 miles from the quarry to its destination 15 feet above a 456-foot pathway outside LACMA, but also the reception of local residents—some celebratory, some skeptical—as it passed through the streets of Los Angeles. It is the behavior of the residents that are of particular interest here, as they illustrate the meaning produced by not only the object itself, the thingly artwork, but by the travel it underwent. At its original location in the quarry, the boulder would have been considered meaningless beyond its potential as a source of raw material. But in the act of transporting such an enormous object over such a long distance together with the act of designating it art by locating it within the context of a museum, an unfinished stone underwent a kind of transubstantiation and became a monument.
A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. The presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation.
—Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”
I have no interest in landscape in terms of art. I think American landscape art is one thing, but my work doesn’t have anything to do with that, it has to do with materials.
I found new materials and new conditions by working outside. I became involved with phenomenological impact rather than interior artifice.
—Michael Heizer, Sculpture in Reverse
We’re also driven to understand, to make images of and represent it, as if we don’t fully possess a place until we understand what it means. The primary way we try to understand the playas, apart from drilling cores in them and measuring their chemical composition, is by making art on and about them.
—William L. Fox, Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty
Despite all the journeys in it, the Old Testament reads more like a train schedule than a travel book: Few other books so completely lack a sense of place. The various patriarchs move through a series of places that are no more than names, abandon homes for unseen lands, receive territories from God as though the land were newly made for them, prepare the way for a world of poured-concrete trailer parks.
—Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West
