Technology
Initial Interpretation
Source Material
Secondary Interpretations
Why the need to question concerning [my emphasis] technology? It is notable that Heidegger does not question technology directly. That is, he is not criticizing technology by pointing out its detractions, at least not to begin with, and not so overtly. Rather, he says, “Questioning builds a way.” Thus, one might have in mind the figure of a bridge or road traversing two points, a place of departure and one of arrival. Where will we arrive? (And who is this “we” who builds and traverses the way? Has Heidegger not already blazed this path?) No matter, because with the first question we are already on the way, each “answer” a step further.
Heizer’s works often take the form of a line of one kind or another. The line is the basis of drawing. Drawing delineates objects, setting them apart from the rest of the world, creating a distinction between object and not-object, between art and not-art. According to legend, Giotto won a commission by drawing a perfect circle without the use of tools, thus demonstrating mastery of his body. More than 600 years later, in the wake of scientific revolution, Heizer drew enormous circles on the dry bed of Jean Lake in Nevada with a motorcycle, thus demonstrating mastery of the Earth. He called this drawing Circular Surface Planar Displacement, a name redolent of the clinic or laboratory, its dispassion itself a displacement disguising the brutality of the artist’s gesture.
Many of Heizer’s lines are in fact cuts. As such, they eschew abstract ideas, their geometrical rigor notwithstanding. They are more or less violent interventions in the physical environment. Double Negative is a cut, a line, a subterranean path paradoxically floating above sea level, having been gouged out of Virgin River Mesa, also known as Mormon Mesa, some ninety minutes outside of Las Vegas. A path off the beaten path, beginning and ending in a landscape uninhabited by human beings, connecting nothing. A Holzweg, it would seem, though one not trodden by feet, but rather blasted out of the rock by explosives and “sculpted” by heavy machinery of the type used to build roads, which are another kind of line. It was a new kind of artistic practice, leveraging, with modern technological tools, his power as an individual creator, as homo faber, a practice that Heizer would continue with City.
Heizer has never been shy about his reliance on tools, or about the unromantic, industrial nature of his practice. At times, he seems to take pride in its gritty materiality, as one might expect from a civil engineer. Indeed, he has in several cases foregrounded the “toolness” of his work, if indirectly. Pieces such as Biface Perforator #3 resemble ancient stone tools, but only superficially, their size and scale rendering them as useless as Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental reproductions of everyday objects, perversions of Heidegger’s concept of Zuhandenheit, or the ready-to-hand.
Heizer’s relationship with modern tools and technology has also been problematic on occasion, specifically regarding what is arguably the most powerful tool ever developed by human beings, if it can be called a tool at all. Wind farms, hydroelectric dams, and geothermal plants all harness elemental forces, but none have the destructive potential of nuclear fission. Faced with the prospect of a railway being built near City for the purpose of moving nuclear waste to a planned depository at Yucca Mountain, Heizer threatened destroy his decades-long project, partly out of safety concerns, and partly out of aesthetic ones; the proposed “Caliente Corridor” rail line would, he feared, create noise pollution in addition to the radioactive kind. His threat evidently had the desired effect when in 2015, after a lobbying campaign by Nevada Senator Harry Reid and others, President Barack Obama created the Basin and Range National Monument, granting protection to the region in which City is located and helping to preserve the pristine experience that was Heizer’s aim as a result.There are other connections between Heizer’s work and Nevada’s long involvement with nuclear technologies. Together with the cratered landscape of the Nevada Test Site, created by years underground nuclear weapons testing, Heizer’s Munich Depression (1969) forms a dialectical image. In both cases, the goal is, to appropriate a phrase, civilizational erasure: one permanent, one temporary. As for many of Heizer’s early earthworks, such as the above-mentioned Circular Surface Planar Displacement and to some degree Double Negative, the only traces of Munich Depression in its intended form still in its existence are photographs. Therefore, one has to imagine descending into a manmade crater 30 meters wide and 5 meters deep (dimensions whose ratios appear in other Heizer works) while watching the buildings on the outskirts of the city gradually disappear from view, an experience similar to that of descending into Double Negative, though in that case the suburban apartment buildings are replaced by the surrounding mountains. Those with a certain cast of mind might claim that the combination of, on one hand, an ersatz bomb crater located just outside a city central to the history of the Nazi movement and, on the other, the experience of having one’s brain washed, in a sense, by Heizer’s controlled perceptual environment provocatively evokes the specter of fascism. Though a compelling interpretation this may be, it is worth mentioning that the aim of James Turrell’s own decades long project Roden Crater (1977-) is also a kind of controlled sensory experience. As already mentioned, photographic technology has been vital for the preservation of Heizer’s oeuvre, if not for his practice. For example, life size prints of photographs taken from inside Munich Depression were later used in the installation Actual Size: Munich Rotary (1970), a recreation exhibited at LACMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, far removed from the original work’s physical and environmental context, an unusual distillation of his materialist idiom. Beyond preservation, photography has also been crucial for bringing remote, large-scale earthworks into public consciousness. The photographs of Gianfranco Gorgoni, who documented the work of Heizer and other fellow travelers such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria, are so iconic that in the minds of many, perhaps, they are the work…
In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way.
—Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
When I was teaching at the Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three student and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art.
I view art as something vast. I think highway systems fall down because they are not art.
—Tony Smith in conversation with Samuel Wagstaff
I wanted to make an American art which was trans-national.
—Michael Heizer, Sculpture in Reverse
The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum.
The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.
Sculpture, paintings, and drawings using the materials of the earth, are to my mind, a proposal and a projection about a period that may exist on this planet when synthetic and amalgamated industrial products will be unobtainable because of social dysfunction. This approach is a common practice in societies that have not developed technologically.
“Well, you might say I’m in the construction business. To begin with, I have a tremendous real-estate file on every available piece of property in six Western states. I look for climate and material in the ground. When I find the right spot, I buy it. I chose where to work in Nevada after a three-year survey, which cost some 30 or 40 thousand dollars. But I wasn’t just buying real estate. I was buying gravel, clay, rock, water drainage.”
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Biface Perforator #3, Paula Cooper Gallery
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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Shuttlecocks, 1994
A piece of equipment, a pair of shoes for instance, when finished, is also self-contained like the mere thing, but it does not have the character of having taken shape by itself like the granite boulder. On the other hand, equipment displays an affinity with the artwork insofar as it is something produced by the human hand. However, by its self-sufficient presencing the work of art is similar rather to the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is self-contained. Nevertheless we do not count such works among mere things. As a rule it is the use-objects around us that are the nearest and the proper things. Thus the piece of equipment is half thing, because characterized by thingliness, and it is something more; at the same it time it is half artwork and yet something less, because lacking the self-sufficiency of the artwork. Equipment has a peculiar position intermediate between thing and work, assuming that such a calculated ordering of them is possible.
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Munich Depression (Final Stage)
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Jean Tinguely
End of the World II
Preparatory drawing
1962