Michael Heizer’s exhibition at Gagosian in Chelsea, “Negative Sculpture,” calls to mind a famous remark by Paul Klee: “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”
Heizer, the master of monumental land art, is not usually associated with Klee, the exquisite miniaturist. But removed from the wilds of the Sierra Nevada in California, and reduced in scale from miles to feet, Heizer’s art, which is thought to be quintessentially macho, becomes delicate, almost tender.
When you enter the gallery, it takes a while to understand that you are the dot Heizer is taking for a walk, and to figure out where he is taking you. The centerpiece of the show, “Convoluted Line A” and “Convoluted Line B,” consists of two continuous 87 ½ foot long steel-lined trenches, incised in a concrete floor and partly filled with brown gravel.
“A” and “B” are presented side by side, so they are easily regarded as one piece. But like fraternal twins, they have distinct personalities. In “A,” a long curve trifurcates into three lines. Two of the lines compose the boundary of an island that is shaped like a porgy without a tail. Alongside that oval form, the third line loops around and connects with one of the first two lines, to create a figure eight, a teardrop or a widening crescent, depending on your vantage point. The line then proceeds, meandering like an ancient river until it ends by enclosing another, smaller island.
In contrast, “B” is dominated by a straight channel. It has the character of a manufactured canal, not a sinuous stream. After a long run, it loops back on itself, forming two ovals, one that it encloses and one it slices through, before it drifts off in a long line that is bent slightly like a pipe cleaner.
Nineteen graph-paper drawings hang in a side room off the main exhibition space, including sketches and plans of large-scale sculptures and paintings that Heizer produced in his youth, such as “Collapse,” a tumble of wood planks that he dropped in El Mirage Lake, a dry bed in the Mojave Desert of California in 1968.
Now 81 and in frail health, Heizer can no longer oversee the mammoth excavations on which his reputation rests. This exhibition is a domesticated version of pieces he made with earthmovers, such as “Triple Landscape” (1969), his snakelike gouge in the Mojave Desert, and “Double Negative” (1969-70), two trenches that displaced 240,000 tons of rock and sand on opposite sides of a canyon in the Mormon Mesa of Nevada.
Inevitably, “Negative Sculpture” fails to conjure the sublime that animates such titanic landmarks of land art, or the vastness of his achieved ambition in “City” (1970-2022), Heizer’s magnum opus (a term that takes on literal meaning). It enraptures those who are lucky — and brave enough — to risk the Nevada heat, bone-jolting drive and occasional rattlesnake to experience it.
But aside from the ease of seeing the art in Chelsea, there is another advantage to encountering Heizer at this scale. Walking in the desert on a visit to a work of land art, you can savor the details, but ideally you would also fly overhead in a plane to comprehend the larger patterns.
To take in “Convoluted Line A” and “Convoluted Line B,” you need only pace up and down the floor, careful to avoid falling into a trench (but reassured to realize that, even if you do, the consequences will not be dire). From the corners of the gallery, you look across and detect the cloverleaf curlicues of the design. In the middle of the room, close to the incisions, you focus on the details of the craftsmanship.
And you also notice the stress cracks on the concrete floor, which began to appear shortly after the works were installed. Just as in the desert, the force of Heizer’s intervention has ruptured the scene.
Michael Heizer: Negative Sculpture
Through March 28, Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, Manhattan; 212-741-1717, gagosian.com.
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