A Tale of Two Spaces: New York and Los Angeles

TWO SPACES
A New York museum's popular Michael Heizer installation has roots, and a cousin, in L.A.

(This ran in Los Angeles CityBeat, which has ceased publication so I'm trying to save some stories posted on its site.)

By Steven Rosen

LOS ANGELES -- Minimalism and installation art have become major museum draws here this year - next month's Robert Smithson retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art at California Plaza looks to be L.A.'s biggest show since MOCA's much-praised Minimalism retrospective.

Yet a fascinating, crucial link between an overlooked piece of downtown public sculpture and one of the most popular Minimalist installations in the country goes unrecognized. It shouldn't.
Last year, the Dia Art Foundation opened a new museum of such challenging contemporary work in the New York town of Beacon - in a still-rugged 300,000-square-foot converted industrial space similar to L.A.'s own MOCA at Geffen Contemporary.

Crowd expectations were modest. But Dia officials were shocked and elated when 100,000 people visited by year's end. Beyond its art-world following, Dia: Beacon had become a sizeable tourist destination and merited international press. And one key reason - in many ways, the star attraction - was a mysterious installation with a primal pull: Michael Heizer's "North, East, South, West."

The reclusive, Berkeley-born Heizer is best known for several giant earthworks in the Nevada desert. His 1969 "Double Negative," part of MOCA's permanent collection, consists of massive cuts in facing mesa sides. And, since 1970, with support from New York-based Dia, he has been creating a monumental desert "City."

"North, East, South, West" comprises four separate geometric shapes cast in weathered steel - two stacked cubes, a wedge, a cone, and an inverted cone. They gain extraordinary meaning because Heizer sank them deep into the floor of Dia: Beacon's unadorned basement - 20 feet down and 125 feet across. They are holes, essentially - or "negative space." Viewing them is like looking down the dark well of art itself, searching for the source.

"It wasn't our intention that one artist be more important than another, but if you see the work, it isn't surprising," says Jennifer Mackiewicz, Dia: Beacon's office administrator and a former assistant to Heizer. "The initial grab is an element of fear: You can't deny standing on the precipice of a 20-foot hole. But more than that, the shapes are so basic to our collective memory, the building blocks of sculpture, that they draw you in. They're very powerful."

"North, East, South, West" represents the realization of Heizer's first - and possibly the first - experiment with earthworks. In 1967, he created "North" and "South" in painted plywood and sheet steel and buried them in the frozen ground of California's Sierra Nevadas. Weather prevented him from going further.

Back then, Mackiewicz says, "Michael had plans drawn up with an engineer for this work made of steel to be permanently placed somewhere. But he had no idea where. This was the seminal earth-art sculpture, or land-art sculpture."

Yet, Heizer did find a place for "North, East, South, West" before creating the Dia: Beacon piece. It's here in Los Angeles, outside the downtown Citigroup Center office tower at Fifth and Flower streets - one of several pieces commissioned in 1981 for the then-new Wells Fargo building.

According to a public-art website maintained by the University of Southern California, Heizer was paid $200,000. L.A.'s version has the same elements as Dia: Beacon's but lacks the impact because it's "smaller" in scale. Each of its seven-and-a-half-foot-high, burnished-steel objects occupies positive rather than negative space, mass rather than void.

And that makes L.A.'s piece, for better or worse, corporate public art. "It's a form of public art that is an inevitable outcome of the earthworks of the 1960s, which at their time were radical," says Connie Butler, the MOCA curator working on the show about the late Smithson, Heizer's fellow earth-art pioneer. "

In the end, the arena of public art flattens things out and makes them less interesting." Ultimately, the tale of "North, East, South, West" reflects the power of negative thinking. But L.A.'s sculpture has more star power than Dia: Beacon's in at least one regard, as Mackiewicz notes: "It's in the movies Fight Club and Heat."

Published: 08/19/2004