Michael Heizer Sightings

I recently watched the documentary, Black White & Gray, about Sam Wagstaff, the New York curator, collector, and photographer who was Robert Mapplethorpe’s partner in a variety of ways.  It’s a really compelling study of a complex human being.  It's insightful, vivid and smart, and really honors Wagstaff's life and legacy without oversimplifying it.  It streams on Netflix.  In addition to all the ways that I really enjoyed the film and respect it as an excellent documentary profile, I was delighted and surprised to learn that Wagstaff had represented Michael Heizer during the (short?) phase of his life when he worked and made a splash on the east coast (later, Heizer would say, “I’d been to the east, and didn’t like what I saw.  It looked like it was degenerating.”).  

Wagstaff put Heizer’s works in his shows, and set up a famous earthwork exhibition at the Detroit Art Institute, where Heizer was to drag a heavy mass across the lawn, causing the mass to sink into the ground and kind of embed itself there (as in the photo, here, of a successful "Dragged Mass" by Heizer).  But it didn’t sink, and instead only tore up the institute’s lawn.  D.A.I.  was so irrationally pissed off about this that they not only removed “Dragged Mass” (i.e., the big rock that ruined the lawn) from the premises, but actually dynamited it into smithereens at a remote location.  Ha.  “A triumph for manicured grass over fine art,” Wagstaff reportedly quipped.  I loved seeing the photos of a young Heizer working on “Dragged Mass,” and the movie even includes a beautiful color shot of Heizer’s Complex City, which was great to see in documentary, although I think it’s one of the photos featured in the New York Times spread on Heizer from a few years back.  

Heizer recently installed a massive object called “Levitated Mass,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  I’ve only seen pictures, and videos about the process of installing it (I believe I read that it weighs over 300 tons), but it looks amazing.  I was really grateful when Kelli Anne Noftle, writing for the online Lit Mag, The Offending Adam, noted the relationship between my recent poems and Heizer’s work.  The full text of Kelli's essay, w/ pictures, is available on the TOA site, here, but I wanted to put the text on my blog, just because I’m really happy it exists.

"Anything Becomes a Part of Where It Is If You Take It and Put It There": William Stobb, Michael Heizer, and Articulated Absences

                                                                                                The only way out: create
objects that float.                                                   The size of a spirit remembered in land.

                                                            It wasn't big enough. I kept working.

Today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a 456-foot trench cuts across the north lawn. Directly over the deepest portion of the granite channel, a 340-ton boulder rests on two shelves bolted to the inside of the trench, allowing visitors to walk beneath the massive rock. Levitated Mass is artist Michael Heizer's most recent earthworks sculpture--an idea conceived decades ago and attempted once before, but the boulder was so heavy, it caused the lifting crane to snap. Recently, I visited the site to traverse the channel and take photos of the megalith. Standing just below the rock, the surrounding landscape disappears from view. For a moment, it's only me and a few other visitors, the boulder, a vast blue sky.  The feeling is initially awe--have I ever stared at the underbelly of a displaced monolith situated in a city of millions? It's both ecstatic emptiness and the logical impossibility that this monumental boulder is somehow buoyed overhead. Or, in Heizer's words via the poetry of William Stobb, it's "Physical truth in isolation / of material from source...Size is real."

In some of the poems from his recent collection Absentia, William Stobb excavates, compiles, erases, and levitates Michael Heizer's words:

As my ideas developed I defied gravity. Without trying.

Obviously pointed at the future, all it is is

absence.

These poems were built by removing language from interviews conducted with Heizer and then relocating them within a new context. The work seems accreted rather than composed. Lines are sometimes bulky and dense; the weight of the text pushes across the page to form striations in the white space:

                                                                                    Fragments, 
forms of evidence interest me--beautiful gravel, broken processional.

            Visualize the voids combining--if you can, then you understand. 

Complete the cycle--tame something wild                a rough wild rock might 
fall at the base of a cliff.                                       Articulate that. 

Heizer is perhaps best known for Double Negative, an earthwork comprised of two trenches 50 feet deep and 1,500 long, cut along both sides of a natural canyon at the Mormon Mesa in Nevada. Double Negative asks us to contemplate art outside museum walls where the act of creation is subtraction, an erasure.  This sculpture is essentially the displacement of 240K tons of rock, considered as both the act of removal and the negative space left inside the existing canyon and man-made rifts. "Anything physical becomes a statement / about absence."

Stobb's use of Heizer's "negative vocabulary" also plays a part in the tradition of erasure poetry--mining a text to reveal another narrative, creating space for new interpretations that question the ownership or authority of the original text. Within these particular poems, Stobb seems to be reaching to "feel that something has transcended,"  an out-of-body experience, erasure of self. A similar "vanishing act" occurs in other poems in the collection ("Holiday," "Up Kingston," and "Absentia") entire poems in quotation marks. These quoted poems aren't lifted from Heizer's language, but run-on monologues, like dreams retold from memory. Here Stobb continues to negate the "I, " making it unclear who the speaker is and who is being spoken to. Heizer: "There is nothing there, but it is still a sculpture." By erasing, we always leave something behind.

Performance artist, musician, and sculptor Laurie Anderson says: "Emptiness to me is expansive. And I don't have to be there. I can't exist in it." Stobb knows this emptiness, a vastness internalized. He is a poet of the desert. Just as Heizer's work not only references the western landscape, but is made up of and by that landscape, Stobb takes the "inundated or eroded, extended or developed" language and repositions it into lyric. The relocation of a 340-ton boulder. Size is real.


                        Just lay out flat and wait.
Some dormant electrical pattern mistriggers,
circles inward like birds.                         Light-blind 
and immersive as in the channel.

I won't want to forget this and then I won't
be able to.