Garden City

Members of the CLUI recently visited City, Michael Heizer’s mile-and-a-half-long sculpture in southern Nevada, which had been under construction since 1972. It was finally completed in 2022, and opened to public visitation.

ONE THING THAT CAN BE said about City is that it is nicely sited. It’s in Garden Valley, 30 miles down a dirt road, far from most things and most people, where the closest thing to a garden, in the valley, are the alfalfa fields of Heizer’s livestock ranch.

When you go there, as a visitor from the public, you meet at a storefront office in the town of Alamo at a specific time, either before dawn, or later in the afternoon, depending on the time of year, where you can leave your bags, sign the very interesting guestbook, meet your fellow visitors, load up on water and snacks, and chat with the driver who will take the group to the site in the Triple Aught Foundation’s SUV, a trip that takes an hour and a half each way.

Arriving just as the sun is coming up (or in the afternoon as it goes down) enables light and shadows to change the vast and static sculpture, which is a landscape unto itself. Visitors fan out, soon becoming specks, reencountering one another periodically over the allotted hours spent walking over the shadeless expanse of meandering pads, mounds, slopes, and depressions, punctuated by three rigid concrete sculptures within the sculpture, familiar from images published in books decades ago (Complex 1 and 2 at the southeast end, and 45°, 90°, 180° at the northwest end).

Between are anonymous curving and pitching swaths of graded gravel, edged by slopes, some up to the angle of repose, frozen tufa-like by a crusty shotcrete fixative. All are bounded at the base by curvaceous ribbons of concrete curbs, miles and miles of it, like physicalized contour lines, defining the edges at each change in attitude, as if from a continuous extrusion, though they were all poured in place, as becomes clear around some peripheral bends, where curbs are still being cast, the big job of concrete work not completely complete.
 

City is, underneath it all, a pit, from which its material, earth and gravel, was extracted, and mounded around it. Its verticality subtle, but significant, in places doubled by the slope of pit and pile combined. City is big enough and tall enough and low enough to be immersed in it, and to lose sight of the context, but not for long.

Like Manhattan, City is long and narrow, and in the middle, a patch of desert has been allowed to remain, worked around, untouched, an omission, like an island, or a park. Though this is an inversion, as it is the desert that surrounds the City, but here, in Garden Valley, Nevada, the park is the city. Just as New York’s Central Park is an Olmsteadian construction of romantic nature made in a hole in that urban landscape, City is a Heizerian park of urbanity, built in a hole in the rural landscape of the West.

The berms can all be climbed, enabling views inwards and outwards, as if the whole City was an overlook for looking at itself, from here and there, and away and beyond. Outside the mounds, standing on the low ground of its periphery, it feels like being on a ship of built space in an ocean of sagebrush that is lapping at its flank. Though it’s bigger than a supertanker, skyscraper, or interstate cloverleaf, it feels puny in the vastness of Nevada.

Full of rigid hubris, City feels vulnerable, too, and insufficiently protected from erosion. It is a lucid assertion of the western tale of Man Versus Nature, doomed to failure, abandonment, and ruin, like the Mesoamerican cities it is said to evoke.

City is hard to see. Not just because it is far away for just about everyone, but because of a restrictive visitation policy (and a no-photography policy). This is in contrast to much of Nevada, which is the most open and accessible state in the union, as it is nearly all federal Bureau of Land Management land, open to the public. It is even more in contrast by the fact that City actually is in the middle of a park—the 704,000-acre Basin and Range National Monument, created by presidential decree in 2015, in part to preserve the sculpture. Yet in the middle of this open protected area is a rare piece of private land, owned by Heizer, enclosed by a cattle fence, and one heavy duty gate, where access is restricted.

Visitation is officially made through reservations, available annually on a first-come, first-served basis. With spots for six people per day, three days a week, over a six-month season, and weather permitting, this means that around 500 people a year are able to see the site first-hand. That's around 30,000 available slots for everyone on the planet over the entire lifetime of the average adult (people under 16 are not permitted). The odds are good that you will never see the work in the flesh.

For decades it seemed likely that City would never open to the public at all, at least while Heizer was alive, and that made it even more compelling to consider, and imagine. If a sculpture is made in the desert, and nobody goes there to see it, does it even exist? Or is it just a notion? If it remained unfinished by the time it opened, would that have woven it into the unfinished future of the planet?

Now that it is open, and its existence complete and confirmed, the artwork has been birthed, and has joined the slope to obsolescence, like the rest of us. This makes it real, honest, and even, perhaps, human. A good thing, despite its flaws, and because of them. ♦