Time

Initial Interpretation

Source Material

Secondary Interpretations

Martin Heidegger’s thinking about time had its own beginnings; indeed, we all have our ways of being in time before we thematize it, if we ever do. Before the event that was the publication of Being and Time in 1927, he had given a series of lectures two years earlier at the University of Marburg later published as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. He began the course with a discussion of the shared origins of the natural sciences and the human sciences, origins that modern scientific disciplines had lost sight of, creating an existential crisis. Did scientists really know what they were doing, not merely from the standpoint of methodology or research trends within a particular discipline, but from the standpoint of the human search for understanding and meaning?

When his work makes obvious references to ancient civilizations, such as the ball game courts of Mesoamerica, indeed when he explicitly states his interest in the primordial, Michael Heizer seems to be asking similar questions, questions at the heart of the current project. Heidegger was concerned with the origins of European (or “Western”) and specifically German civilization, which, despite its techno-scientific tendencies toward objectification at the expense of being, still had some idea of itself. Can the same be said about American civilization in the narrow sense that citizens of the United States think of it? When, or even where, did “America” originate? 1776? 1492? With the arrival of the Vikings from Europe a thousand years ago, or with the arrival from Asia of those who would come to be called Native Americans 14,000 years ago? Or perhaps to think of history in terms of human civilization is too limiting. With the advent of “deep time” and the so-called Anthropocene, as well as a philosophical movement known as Speculative Realism, it has become fashionable to attempt to think about the world beyond human conceptions of it. Dasein has been knocked off its perch.

One need not think about time in terms of history, whether on a human or a geological scale. Another way of thinking about time is entropy. Heat dissipates; order becomes chaos. Atoms decay. But the cat cannot be put back into the bag, so to speak. The second law of thermodynamic states these processes move in one direction only, an arrow of time. We can see time and entropy still at work in Double Negative, the collapse of which is well underway. Barely a trace now exists of Nine Nevada Depressions, if any. Heizer’s erstwhile friend Robert Smithson had a similar interest in the effects of natural processes not only on his work, as in the case of Spiral Jetty, but within it, as in the case of Asphalt Rundown. And we would be remiss not to mention that Walter Benjamin famously articulated his view of history not as progress toward some higher order, or forward-facing on a foundation of building-dwelling-gathering as in the thought of Heidegger, but as a pile of debris continuously piling up at the feet of his friend Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus or “angel of history.” The common thread connecting the historiological thinking of all of these figures is a skepticism about the Enlightenment idea that progress in the sciences is progress for humanity and that scientific knowledge will “solve” the ultimate systemic collapse: the end of human existence.

However, looking at time and human history from the perspective of the end does not mean the end of meaning.

Indeed, for Heidegger, being aware of our mortality was fundamental to our authentic existence. For those who conceive of history in a linear way, there is, for example, the Messianic view. For those who conceive of it cyclically, there is the notion of rebirth. And for many, even in societies oriented toward material development and a vague idea of progress, the past is a wellspring of meaning for the present. Retirees in Chinese city parks practice writing in 2000-year-old scripts. Children in North America and Europe celebrate, with varying degrees of awareness, holidays such as Easter and Halloween that have origins in ancient Roman and other pre-Christian civilizations and cultures.

In Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object and especially Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, the art historian Lucy R. Lippard chronicled a widespread tendency in the contemporary art world of the 1960s and early 1970s toward a “return to basics” of which Heizer’s work was a part. In particular, the exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors organized by Kynaston McShine at the Jewish Museum in 1966 was a landmark event that helped to establish many of the attributes of what is now most often referred to as Minimal Art. One of the artists whose work was featured in the exhibition, Donald Judd, in his essay “Specific Objects” defined art ontologically, as “three-dimensional work.” That is to say, he did not aim to represent objects “realistically” as a seventeenth-century Dutch still life might; instead, his works are simply real objects in themselves.

In his seminal essay “Art and Objecthood,” art historian Michael Fried addressed what he saw as Minimal Art’s unique relationship to time, famously describing it as “theatrical” because the works of Judd and other Minimalists rely entirely on their presence (Anwesen) within the space of the viewer (Mitsein) through their materiality and the specificity of their configuration. One might also refer to this phenomenon as Minimal Art’s haecceity or “thisness,” a property that is perhaps not coincidentally is associated with the Medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, who had an early influence on Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, since there are no references to decode or rhetorical messages to receive, there is no natural end to the experience, which in Fried’s view causes the viewer to become more aware of time passing, an experience one is also apt to have between the silent walls of Double Negative or on the vast central axis of City.

However, Cityis very different from Double Negative in that it has been engineered to endure; entropic decay was not part of Heizer’s plan, at least for the near future. What about the view from the distant future? How will archaeologists 10,000 years from now interpret such enormous constructions with no evident purpose? These are not academic questions when designing warning messages for long-term nuclear waste storage sites, such as the one proposed at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, located not far from City, giving rise to a field of research known as nuclear semiotics.

...an original and undivided context of subject matter remains hidden...
—Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena

What remains hidden is not simply a lost unity, but the ground from which all disciplines, practices, and constructions emerge. Modern knowledge divides and specializes, producing discrete objects while severing them from the conditions that made them meaningful. Across archaeology, landscape, and art, this loss appears as fragmentation: sites without worlds, data without origin. The undivided context does not disappear—it withdraws, leaving behind traces that must be reassembled, though never fully recovered.

In our times there’s a real question about modernity and how far it stretches. My real feeling is that we have returned to a primitive stage.

I work with primordial materials—they’re modern if you agree with the idea that we are not really progressing.

We live in a schizophrenic period. We’re living in a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously. I guess the idea is to make art that reflects this premise. My original impetus for getting out of the city and working with these basic materials had to do with the idea of the insecurity of society, the frailty of systems, the dependence upon interdependence.
—Michael Heizer, Sculpture in Reverse

Heizer collapses the distinction between the primitive and the modern, revealing them as coexistent conditions rather than stages of progress. Technological systems extend across the planet, yet remain fragile, dependent, and prone to collapse, while the materials of the earth persist beyond them. In this tension, his work aligns with both ancient monument-building and contemporary landscape intervention: a practice that exposes modernity not as advancement, but as a temporary configuration within deeper geological and cultural continuities.

Monte Albán persists as a constructed landscape severed from the world that once made it intelligible. Its ordered forms remain, but their original meanings have receded, leaving a fragment that hovers between archaeology and projection. Like the monumental works that echo it, the site no longer transmits a stable message; it exposes a condition in which construction, erosion, and future misreading converge—situating us within the same temporal horizon that will one day render our own monuments opaque.

City removes, displaces, returns, and otherwise reverses the ground upon itself. It lifts up one portion and drops another to create an emptiness. Most remarkably, it does this with a sculptural vocabulary that is not European, but one derived from the sunken courtyards, massive stoneworks, and curbings of the ancient Olmec culture of Mexico and the funerary complex of Saqqara in Egypt.
—William L. Fox, The Void, The Grid, & The Sign

City reworks the ground as both material and memory, displacing it in ways that unsettle any singular origin. Its forms draw from ancient monumental traditions, yet do not revive them; instead, they recombine distant temporal and cultural strata into a new configuration. What emerges is not a return to the past, but a construction within deep time, where architecture, archaeology, and projection converge. In this reversal, the ground itself becomes unstable—no longer a foundation, but a medium through which meaning is continually displaced.

Michael Heizer, *Complex One*, part of *City*, 1970-2022

Complex One appears as a monument already displaced in time, a structure that anticipates its own archaeological future. Its forms recall ancient construction, yet refuse any fixed cultural origin, situating the work within a continuum where past and present converge. Like the landscapes studied in archaeology and reworked in Land Art, it does not present a stable meaning but a condition: one in which material persistence and interpretive uncertainty coexist, and where the monument is encountered less as a message than as a remnant.

This piece [Hydrate] is inside a dry wash located exactly on the Nevada-California state line. The dried crust of the desert cannot always absorb sudden rainfall, and it pools and spills down the hills, gathering in quantity and velocity. A flash flood can erupt during even the slightest rain. This work was gone within two weeks.
—Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties

Hydrate exists less as a monument than as an event, shaped by forces that exceed artistic control. Its disappearance is not incidental but constitutive, revealing a landscape defined by volatility rather than permanence. In contrast to works that project themselves into deep time, this piece collapses into it immediately, aligning human intervention with processes of erosion and flux. What remains is not the work itself, but the condition it exposes: a world in which material, meaning, and intention are continually subject to dissolution.

Robert Smithson, *Asphalt Rundown*, 1969-70

Asphalt Rundown abandons the stability of the monument, allowing form to emerge through uncontrolled descent. The work unfolds as a process rather than an object, shaped by gravity, heat, and material flow. In this alignment with entropy, construction gives way to dissolution, and authorship disperses into the landscape itself. What remains is not a fixed structure, but a trace of transformation—an index of forces that continue beyond the moment of the work’s making.

Angelus Novus figures history as accumulation without resolution, a continuous piling of debris mistaken for progress. The angel faces the past, where destruction gathers, while being propelled into the future by forces beyond control. In this reversal, time is no longer a forward movement but an ongoing collapse, aligning human construction with entropy rather than advancement. What appears as development reveals itself instead as sediment: a landscape of ruins through which meaning must be continually reinterpreted.

The Aztec calendar stone materializes time as a structured totality, binding cosmic cycles to ritual, power, and place. Unlike modern conceptions of time as linear progression or irreversible decay, it presents a world in which destruction and renewal are inseparable, each cycle containing the possibility of collapse. Yet, as an artifact, it now stands outside the system it once ordered, its meanings only partially recoverable. What remains is both a record of cyclical time and a reminder that even the most comprehensive cosmologies become fragments within history.

As Robert Rosenblum has pointed out, the spirit of drastic reform often coincides with the return to extreme simplicity or a “therapeutic geometry.” The Minimalists’ and Conceptualists’ obsession with simple word and number systems, with basic geometry, with repetition, modules, measurement and mapping, laid the ground for “primitivizing” artists of the ‘70s to explore more complex areas of myth and history.
—Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory

Reduction here is not an end but a clearing. The stripped-down forms of Minimalism suspend inherited meanings, making space for a return—not to the past as it was, but to deeper structures of myth, ritual, and spatial order. In this movement, geometry becomes a bridge between modern abstraction and ancient construction, aligning contemporary practice with archaeological and cosmological thinking. What appears as simplicity reveals itself as a re-entry into complexity, where history is no longer linear but layered and recursive.

Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism.
—Donald Judd, "Specific Objects"

Judd’s insistence on real space rejects representation in favor of direct presence, grounding art in material and spatial conditions rather than illusion. This shift does not resolve meaning but relocates it, aligning the work with the same physical world it occupies. In doing so, it opens the possibility for later practices to extend beyond the object altogether—into landscape, archaeology, and construction—where space is no longer depicted but actively formed. What begins as reduction becomes a reorientation toward the ground itself.

Untitled occupies space without representing it, asserting itself through repetition, proportion, and material presence. Its modular structure resists narrative or symbolism, unfolding instead through the viewer’s movement in real time. In this emphasis on direct encounter, the work situates meaning within spatial experience rather than interpretation, aligning object and environment. What appears as simplicity becomes a condition: one in which space, perception, and duration are inseparable.

You don’t have to relate to it. It’s not a requirement. All you have to do is just be there. It doesn’t matter what you think when you see it.
—Michael Heizer in conversation with John Gruen in The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists

Heizer rejects interpretation as a prerequisite for experience, shifting emphasis from meaning to presence. The work does not ask to be decoded or related to, but encountered directly, within the shared space of viewer and object. In this suspension of interpretation, the artwork aligns with the same condition as the landscape itself: something to be inhabited rather than understood. What is encountered is not a message, but a situation—one in which perception, scale, and being-there take precedence over explanation.

Proposed pictogram warning of the dangers of buried nuclear waste

This image attempts to communicate danger across a temporal horizon in which language, culture, and context cannot be assumed. It confronts the same condition seen in ancient monuments: the inevitability of misreading. Yet here, failure is not interpretive but material, carrying consequences beyond meaning. The pictogram reduces communication to gesture, seeking a universal legibility that may not exist. In doing so, it exposes a paradox—how to construct a message for a future in which all messages risk becoming unreadable.