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MICHEAL HEZIER

One of the founders and most prominent practitioners of the "land art" or "earth art" movement, Michael Heizer has, since the 1960s, challenged the art world to escape the confines of the gallery or the museum and inhabit nature itself -- and dared viewers to experience art on a super-human scale.

 With colleague Walter de Maria, Heizer went west in 1967, and created a new genre of "land art" or "earth art," which used the earth as its medium. Far from the cramped studios of New York, and outside the confines of the museum's white walls, his works reached unprecedented size, culminating in what is perhaps his most famous work, Double Negative. He collaborated with many of the early earth artists, even appearing in Robert Smithson's film about Spiral Jetty, perhaps the most widely recognized example of earth art.
Double Negative is Michael Heizer's first prominent earthwork. It consists of two trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70.
The trenches (seen as dark lines or shadows below in the Google Maps satellite imagery) line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide). A reported 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, was displaced in the construction of the trenches.
Map data ©2018 Google Imagery ©2018 , DigitalGlobe, U.S. Geological Survey, USDA Farm Service Agency
Double Negative was among the first "earthworks" -- artworks that use as their canvas or medium the earth itself. In keeping with the mission of modern art, Double Negative blurs the distinction between sculpture ("art") and normal objects such as rocks ("not art"), and encourage viewers to consider how the earth relates to art. The sheer size of Double Negative also invites contemplation of the scale of art, and the relation of the viewer the earth and to art itself. How does art change when it can't fit in a museum? How does one observe an artwork that's a quarter-mile long?
Double Negative, though a notable piece of art, is essentially no more than a big trench (and even then, not a complete trench, as it crosses empty space). In that, it consists more of what was than what currently is. Constructing Double Negative was an act of "construction" only inasmuch as something was taken away, and that this removal constituted a creative act. In that the artwork is itself negative space (and when it crosses empty space, it is doubly negative space, as the title suggests), it begs meditation on the principle of art as creation, when Heizer has not in fact added but subtracted.
Double Negative belongs to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through the gift of Virginia Dwan.

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