At long last, Michael Heizer’s installation City (1970–2022), a vast complex of sculptural interventions in the Nevada desert, is finally complete.
On Friday, the Triple Aught Foundation, the nonprofit Heizer had founded to help fund the epic project, announced that visits can be made to City starting on September 2 by reservation only. It will be the first time that the general public is allowed to see the piece —an iconic work of the Land art movement—in full.
Millions of dollars and years in the making, City is more than a mile and a half long. Few other contemporary artworks in the world equal it in scale, and because of that, many have been anticipating it for years.
Portions of it are composed of dirt, rock, and concrete, and there are parts that are labeled “Complexes” because they appear to resemble urban units from a long-lost civilization. Like many works by Heizer, the project has involved direct interventions into the landscape, which the artist has transformed via elegant, minimalist forms.
Because Heizer’s ambitions were so grand for City, the project involved figures from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, and other organizations, as well as dealer Virginia Dwan, one of Heizer’s earliest and longest supporters.
In a statement on Friday, Dwan said, “Michael Heizer is one of the greatest innovators of our time and I still believe today what I thought when Heizer began the City, that this work demanded to be built. It is extraordinary that he has completed one of the most important artworks of this century, over decades in the making, and I have been fortunate enough to witness this transformative sculptural intervention from the very beginning.”
See inside City via the below slideshow.
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Image Credit: Photo Mary Converse/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation Complex One was the first part of City that Heizer created. He began working on it, along with a team of workers, in 1972. Asked to explain the process for it, he told ARTnews in 1977, upon this part’s completion, “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.”
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Image Credit: Photo Joe Rome/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation Complex One was begun following a visit by Heizer and his father to Luxor, Egypt. The form of the raised structure intentionally recalls the stepped pyramid of Zoser.
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Image Credit: Photo Joe Rome/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation Complex One gives way to Complex Two, another segment that brings to mind pyramids and ancient Egyptian architecture. During the ’80s, as he was constructing it, the project nearly came to standstill when it became too difficult to fund its making. Then the entrepreneur Patrick Lannan stepped in and became one of its most significant supporters.
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Image Credit: Photo Joe Rome/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation Beyond financial challenges, there have been other difficulties. Heizer threatened to destroy City altogether when a railway line was proposed nearby. That line would support trains carrying nuclear waste. Luckily, plans for the line were scrapped in 2010.
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Image Credit: Photo Joe Rome/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation 45°, 90°, 180°, yet another element of City, is composed of towering concrete forms similar to those created by ancient peoples. “In sculpture I attempt to maintain the venerable tradition of megalithic societies,” Heizer once said.
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Image Credit: Photo Joe Rome/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation According to a 2016 New Yorker profile of Heizer, City contains 14 miles of concrete curbing. In that piece, Dana Goodyear described the primordial quality of it all, writing, “Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?”
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Image Credit: Photo Joe Rome/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation Despite the size of City, the piece has remained cloaked in secrecy for years. The Utah-region radio station KSL once said that it is “even more secret than Area 51.”
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Image Credit: Photo Ben Blackwell/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation In recent years, politicians have made attempts to conserve City and the land on which it’s set. In 2015, Senator Harry Reid and then President Barack Obama signed a proclamation that protected the 700,000 acres, making City a part of the Basin and Range National Monument.
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Image Credit: Photo Mary Converse/©Michael Heizer and Triple Aught Foundation There is no sense that City is going anywhere anytime soon. As Heizer told the New Yorker, “When they come out here to fuck my City sculpture up, they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.”