Editing Time

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<div><h2>Initial Interpretation</h2></div>
<div><h2>Source Material</h2></div>
<div><h2>Secondary Interpretations</h2></div>

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<p>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 <i>Being and Time</i> in 1927, he had given a series of lectures two years earlier at the University of Marburg later published as <i>History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena</i>. 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?</p> 
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Double Negative</i>, the collapse of which is well underway. Barely a trace now exists of <i>Nine Nevada Depressions</i>, 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 <i>Spiral Jetty</i>, but within it, as in the case of <i>Asphalt Rundown</i>. 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 <i>Angelus Novus</i> 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.</p> 
However, looking at time and human history from the perspective of the end does not mean the end of meaning. <p>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.</p> 
<p>In <i>Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object</i> and especially <i>Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory</i>, 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 <i>Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors</i> 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.</p> 
<p>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 (<i>Anwesen</i>) within the space of the viewer (<i>Mitsein</i>) 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 <i>City</i>.</p>
<p>However, <i>City</i>is very different from <i>Double Negative</i> 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 <i>City</i>, giving rise to a field of research known as nuclear semiotics.</p>
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<div><p><b>...an original and undivided context of subject matter remains hidden...</b><br>—Martin Heidegger, <i>History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena</i></br></p></div>
<div>What is concealed is not simply a theory, but an origin: a unity prior to all distinctions. Modern disciplines divide and measure, but no longer grasp the whole from which their objects arise. Time becomes something counted rather than lived. The originary context persists, but only as hidden—withdrawn from a world that no longer gathers meaning as a whole.</div>

<div><p><b>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.</b></p>
<p><b>I work with primordial materials—they’re modern if you agree with the idea that we are not really progressing.</b></p>
<p><b>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.</b><br>—Michael Heizer, <i>Sculpture in Reverse</i></br></p></div>
<div>Modernity does not unfold as progress but as fracture. Technological systems and primordial materials coexist without reconciliation. To work with earth and stone is not to return to the past, but to confront temporalities that exceed human history. The work becomes a site where geological duration, technological acceleration, and human finitude collide.</div>

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