In the span of one day, I was able to see two land art pieces: Michael Heizer's Double Negative and Ugo Rondinone's Seven Magic Mountains. They straddle Las Vegas and, in-between them, I enjoyed some chicken tenders in a Vons parking lot, feet dangling out of my car's hatch back as I witnessed a rare desert rain. That's where I started thinking about the comparison of the two.
Double Negative was a pilgrimage destination for me, and Seven Magic Mountains just happened to be on the way, and this seems to fit with what they are respectively attempting to do.
Double Negative has no directional signs (I was following Google Maps / the MoCA directions), no interpretive plaque, and exists tucked behind a mesa, pretty easy to miss. It's about as remote as you can get in the United States outside Alaska. In the 50+ years since Heizer carved the canyons, they have done exactly what they were meant to do: erode into the landscape and behave much like any other canyon would. That is some of the point of the piece: it becomes a particular destination that demands you ask how the landscape will respond over time, even though you could do the same at any arbitrary cliff edge. It's difficult to take a picture with the piece, to get good perspective on its volumes. Maybe it is just hard to capture and photograph a hole (but this does a good job). I was there entirely alone, aside from a cow grazing on the mesa when I woke up.
Seven Magic Mountains, on the other hand, has signs that tell you where to get off Interstate 15, where to turn, where to park, as well as plaques that indicate the artist and his intent. The piece is squeezed between two enormous metropolitan tourist destinations. It stands tall in the valley floor with its fluorescent colors: you can see it from the freeway. It's virtually built to be instagrammed, as energetic colored forms that stand totemic, in dialogue with more traditional sculpture forms. I was surrounded by folks taking selfies and doing photoshoots, with the obelisks serving as backdrop. I wonder if the paint gets touched-up as it chips.
I am exhilarated by Heizer's challenge of how to interact with his piece. I spent my time at Double Negative trying to sleep and then make coffee despite the howling winds; essentially, figuring out how to co-exist with the environmental conditions, and I can intellectualize this into some kind of joy. At Seven Magic Mountains I took a selfie, walked around for a few minutes, and got back on the freeway. I wonder how it would have been different if I had stayed a while, sitting with the piece longer.
I hold enough romanticism for the 60s/70s land art movement that I feel favoritism to Double Negative, and that Rondinone's piece and its cultural context are garish in comparison to Heizer's understated expression. But I also think it is insane to say that anything is showy relative to the audacity of scale that Heizer has brought to his work, and I perhaps didn't approach Seven Magic Mountains with a very open mind. Telling coworkers that I was visiting Double Negative exposed the weight of explaining just what the fuck it is and why I would care: Heizer's piece mostly exists an intellectual experiment for those in the know. In contrast, Rondinone's is broadly enjoyable: when I show pictures of the piece, it is immediately clear "what it is" and how to interact with it; it's candy colorations need no overthinking to be fun.
Quoting Jordan Carver's essay on Land Art vs. Google Maps:
Double Negative was a pilgrimage destination for me, and Seven Magic Mountains just happened to be on the way, and this seems to fit with what they are respectively attempting to do.
Double Negative has no directional signs (I was following Google Maps / the MoCA directions), no interpretive plaque, and exists tucked behind a mesa, pretty easy to miss. It's about as remote as you can get in the United States outside Alaska. In the 50+ years since Heizer carved the canyons, they have done exactly what they were meant to do: erode into the landscape and behave much like any other canyon would. That is some of the point of the piece: it becomes a particular destination that demands you ask how the landscape will respond over time, even though you could do the same at any arbitrary cliff edge. It's difficult to take a picture with the piece, to get good perspective on its volumes. Maybe it is just hard to capture and photograph a hole (but this does a good job). I was there entirely alone, aside from a cow grazing on the mesa when I woke up.
Seven Magic Mountains, on the other hand, has signs that tell you where to get off Interstate 15, where to turn, where to park, as well as plaques that indicate the artist and his intent. The piece is squeezed between two enormous metropolitan tourist destinations. It stands tall in the valley floor with its fluorescent colors: you can see it from the freeway. It's virtually built to be instagrammed, as energetic colored forms that stand totemic, in dialogue with more traditional sculpture forms. I was surrounded by folks taking selfies and doing photoshoots, with the obelisks serving as backdrop. I wonder if the paint gets touched-up as it chips.
I am exhilarated by Heizer's challenge of how to interact with his piece. I spent my time at Double Negative trying to sleep and then make coffee despite the howling winds; essentially, figuring out how to co-exist with the environmental conditions, and I can intellectualize this into some kind of joy. At Seven Magic Mountains I took a selfie, walked around for a few minutes, and got back on the freeway. I wonder how it would have been different if I had stayed a while, sitting with the piece longer.
I hold enough romanticism for the 60s/70s land art movement that I feel favoritism to Double Negative, and that Rondinone's piece and its cultural context are garish in comparison to Heizer's understated expression. But I also think it is insane to say that anything is showy relative to the audacity of scale that Heizer has brought to his work, and I perhaps didn't approach Seven Magic Mountains with a very open mind. Telling coworkers that I was visiting Double Negative exposed the weight of explaining just what the fuck it is and why I would care: Heizer's piece mostly exists an intellectual experiment for those in the know. In contrast, Rondinone's is broadly enjoyable: when I show pictures of the piece, it is immediately clear "what it is" and how to interact with it; it's candy colorations need no overthinking to be fun.
Quoting Jordan Carver's essay on Land Art vs. Google Maps:
The status of the image as integral to land art, earthworks, and other works of art not easily accessible for average viewers was not unrecognized before [Rosalind Krauss wrote her essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field]. In 1971, when Gregoire Müller asked Smithson about the importance of photography for works made in the land, he responded, “I think we are actually talking about multiple ways of locating a thing, and one way to locate a thing is to circumscribe it with a photograph. If you are flying over a piece, you can see its whole configuration in a sense contracted down to a photographic scale.”
Seven Magic Mountain's discoverability and legibility work to unite the piece and its photograph, which simplifies some of its relationship with its audience. It told me of its existence while I was going 80mph on my way to a bachelor party in 2017. For Double Negative, I needed to know of its existence to interpret it as art. Photographs of the work are the only thing that actually got me to make the dead-end journey to visit the site of Double Negative; the photograph preceded my reading it as an art object. Seven Magic Mountains was along for the ride, no explanation needed.
Globalization, the internet, and subsidized air fares have shrunk, dramatically, the distance between being aware of something and being able to touch it and see it in-the-flesh. Heizer's piece is dependent on the existence of this distance to preserve its mythos. (This hilarious story, which is where I learned about Double Negative for the first time, plays with exactly the distance and information dynamic: what if there was a second Double Negative—a double double negative—that visitors would see first as they drive down the dirt road in search of the "real" Double Negative?) Heizer's piece still hides its intent, pushing its discourse into furtive art-world corners. In contrast, Seven Magic Mountains has embraced the dissolution of that distance and opens itself up to anyone who happens to be driving between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Sunburnt,
Lukas
p.s. some photos of each site doing what they do best:
