Levitated Mass Details

‘God is in the details’ to quote Mies, and some of the details and craft of Levitated Mass are the devil. If art can be defined by the highest level of craft, then more should be expected from Michael Heizer’s team – especially the engineers and the welders. Almost seems that the trench was designed before they found the rock, and the brackets were the ‘make-it-work’ solution with some of the sloppiest welds this side of a vocational school. So here is a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Levitated Mass installation at LACMA.

Concrete – the good

The concrete work is highly refined at the level of a James Turrell Skyspace (but not equal to Tado Ando or other concrete masters), with a very smooth skimcoat on all exposed surfaces.  I’m puzzled by the triangular notches at the ends of the trench (see above), as they are gratuitous interruptions to the visual pull of the rock. The integral ADA mandated handrails are quite elegant, and again invoke Turrell.

Earthworks – the good

The grading around the trench is quite precise, but seems designed for easy maneuvering of the bulldozer, not for visual or tactile effect. From the Cor-Ten rail edging, there is a gentle slope to the walls of the trench. This puts the Rock at waist height when standing next to it. First impression is that the soil of the slope towards the trench has been treated with a polymer stabilizer as it has a slight sheen and is darker (see below) then the adjacent decomposed granite surface. While suppressing dust and minimizing erosion are worthwhile goals, the desert that the decomposed granite is intended to evoke is a dusty and eroding place, so soil stabilization works against the larger intent.

That edging strip could be the crown of a railroad extrusion, if weathering steel was used for train tracks.

Metalwork – the bad and the ugly

Unvailing Levitated Mass

The official dedication ceremony for Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass is set for 11am on Sunday, June 24th at LACMA. Christopher Knight of the LATimes has an early review of the work with photos by Mel Melcon (all the images used in this post). Knight’s piece is a solid review that pulls in a myriad of non-obvious precedents, potential influences and narratives that haven’t been part of the discourse to-date.

“Levitated Mass” is a piece of isolated desert mystery cut into a dense urban setting that’s home to nearly 10 million people. A water-hungry lawn north of LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion was torn up and replaced by a dry, sun-blasted expanse of decomposed granite. A notched gray channel of polished concrete slices 456 feet across the empty field, set at a slight angle between the pavilion and 6th Street. Like a walk-in version of an alien landscape painting by Surrealist Yves Tanguy, quiet dynamism inflects a decidedly sepulchral scene.

What really, really surprises me about the installation are the hefty steel brackets that the monolith is mounted to. All preliminary descriptions evoked a rock sitting directly on the concrete walls of the trench, not mounted on massive steel corbels. The maximalist brackets are a significant shift towards structuralism and away from from Heizer’s minimalist material palette of soil, stone, and concrete (artificial stone). If hidden mountings and connections had been utilized for the rock (I’m thinking about Brian Murphy’s Hopper House) or other highly refined mininalist architecture, then we could have experienced the illusion that the boulder was hovering. As detailed, those gusset plates express the shear mass being supported and bring the levitating mass crashing back to earth.

Lots of architects have used similarly proportioned gussets with Cor-Ten structural elements – this is no Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, or Thom Mayne building though – perhaps Michael Rotondi is part of their lineage. (Here are some images of similar details: 1, 2). The artists that pop to mind from these brackets include Mark di Survero with his structural steel sculptures and Serra for his pioneering use of weathering steel.

Heizer interviewed

The LAtimes scored a rare interview with the reclusive artist of Levitated Mass (opening June 24 at LACMA).

Photo: Mark Boster, Los Angeles Times / May 24, 2012)

“I think there is a draw from the rock itself, a magnetism we will see when the sculpture is completed,” he said. “But will the artwork have the same interest value as moving the rock around did?” … “I make static art, not dynamic art. That’s what I do.”

Static art” is Heizer’s shorthand for the longevity or durability of projects like the boulder installation, designed “to last 3,500 years,”

…”What I liked about this rock was 98% size, 2% looks.”

“The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work,” Heizer said. “Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.”

“The history of American art in a way begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings,” he said. “This theme of bigness — all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.”

“My paintings are big too. I’m not very good at making small stuff,”

Touchdown of Heizer’s Rock

Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass touched down on April 17th over its 15′ deep trench reported LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

“It landed perfect,” [Heizer] declared to Govan, observing that the rock hit the grout “exactly as it was intended.” Then, not missing a beat, Heizer turned to one of the seven engineers on the project to discuss the myriad ways in which the sculpture is being seismically secured…

Late last month… Heizer quietly arrived from his remote compound in the Nevada desert, where he has been working for the past four decades on “City,” a vast, Stonehenge-scaled project near Area 51, the secret military installation.

Since then, he’s been living with his wife and dog in an Airstream trailer on the LACMA campus, just a stone’s throw from his artwork, which will allow visitors to walk down the trench and under the boulder, positioned 15 feet overhead. Heizer’s expected to return to Nevada later this week[.]

Funny that the only picture of the artist is with Frank Gehry! What does Frank have to do with the installation or even LACMA???

Original Levitated Mass

via Observatoire du Land Art, here are the original drawings by Michael Heizer for Levitated Mass from 1969.

Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 1969 (detail). © Volker-H. Schneider / Marzona

Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 1969.  © Volker-H. Schneider / Marzona

(Based on Paper – Die Sammlung Marzona. Revolution der Kunst 1960-1975,  p.154)

Visiting Heizer’s Truck

Infrascape Design visited Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass while it took the weekend off in Chino Hills as it heads to LACMA.

Levitated Mass on the move

Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass has started it’s journey on Tuesday, Feb 28th at 11pm, and it will arrive at LACMA ‘(very) early in the morning on Saturday, March 10.’ More on twitter: @LACMARock. I’ll be updating this post and tracking the move.

LACMA’s Gawker Guide has details for viewing the rock as it moves along the streets of Los Angeles. LATimes slideshow, and on flickr.

Monday, March 5th Layover

Location on Friday, March 2nd

Thursday March 1st layover location

Wednesday Feb 29th Layover

Layovers include:

…at Chino Avenue, just east of Chino Hills Parkway in Diamond Bar around 4 a.m. Thursday (March 1) and stay there the entire day, according to museum and city officials.

It will resume in a westerly direction into Rowland Heights Thursday night and into Friday, where a stopover is planned at Buttonwood Lane and Pathfinder Road for the third and fourth day of the journey, Friday and Saturday, according to the museum.

The boulder will park at La Mirada Boulevard and Leffingwell Road in La Mirada on March 4. – Pasadena Star

And:

 A weekend stopover is planned at Buttonwood Lane and Pathfinder in Rowland Heights for the third and fourth day of the journey, on Saturday and Sunday… – Whittier Daily News

Originally on Infrascape Design here. Via Zev. Official LACMA news of the move here.

LAtimes

Heizer’s Rock

Note: this blog is not affiliated with LACMA nor the artist Michael Heizer, no matter what Kunstler wrote. Updates on the Levitated Mass move are here.

update 12/27 –the NYTimes reports on the continued delay in securing permits to move the rock as it gets re-routed to avoid a bridge in Pomona that might not have the structural capacity to support the load.

Perhaps the heaviest work of art ever moved, Michael Heizer has finally found a 340 ton bolder to hover over a trench at LACMA to complete ‘Levitated Mass’ (not to be confused with his 1982 work of the same name). This is a work of art where the logistics (like most pieces by Christo) are just as interesting as the physical object. Moving the 21′ boulder will require a 22 axle truck moving at 6 or 7 miles per hour to cover the 120 mile route between the quarry and the museum. While the boulder was purchased for $120,000, the total cost of the installation (including the move) is around $10 million dollar. The move has been delayed several times already as the local municipalities and regulators grapple with the permitting process and trying to minimize disruptions to the public.

“You can’t cowboy this through,” said Rick Albrecht, the project manager for the move, leaning against a ladder, his sunglasses and hard hat covered in dust. “You have to be meticulous about this.” [LAtimes]

Emmert International, the megamover making this happen, has an impressive record of transporting buildings and various industrial artifacts. The move is as much about infrastructure as it is about art – the route was determined by height clearances and weight limits on roads and bridges, moving powerlines and other utilities out of the way, finding parking spaces for the 295′ rig, and other uses of the urban systems that are beyond their design specs. All the relocation and displacements are temporary, it is a missed opportunity to leave the streetscape in better shape by permanently reducing the spiderweb of tangled wires hanging above most of the streets along the route. Can art be found in burying telephone lines, co-axial cables, power lines, and all those other wires in a giant trench?

View the larger map of the route.

Infrastructural Art

A brief visual survey of infrastructure in art . (I’m gonna skip most of the great landscape photographers like Burtynski, Maisel, Adams, and Maclean).

Drawing from WEIGHING…and WANTING, 1997-98. Charcoal, pastel on paper.
Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
© 2000 William Kentridge.

A Nicely Built City Never Resists Destruction, 1995, etching and aquatint, 11 1/2 x 15" © 1995 William Kentridge.

Hockney, Brooklyn Bridge

Hubert Blanz, Roadshow #5

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day's End, 1975

Gordon Matta Clark, Day's End, 1975, Pier 52, Gansevoort Street and West Street, NYC

Michael Heizer, Complex One

Robert Smithson, Fountain (Passiac, NJ)

Yutaka Sone