The most comprehensive account available of Michael Heizer's art by a
writer and curator who has critical experience with the artist and his
work. Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible,
American artists.
As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement,
his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has
an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental
art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his
notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical
understanding.
Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments spans the breadth of
Heizer's career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and
biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of
this titan of American art. Author William L. Fox, founding director of
the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, has
alternately been a sponsor, advocate, and critic of Heizer's work for
decades.
Fox's understanding of the artist's history and connection to landscape,
his time spent with Heizer at the remote ranch where Heizer is finishing
his magnum opus - the mile-long sculpture City - and his access to some
of Heizer's key associates give him a unique position from which to
discuss the artist's work. Fox has also made numerous site visits to
Heizer's work - including early pieces in the Nevada desert now largely
lost to the elements - to correct the often inconsistent accounts of
their locations. Last, Fox imparts a crucial new understanding of
Heizer's work by elaborating on the artist's bond with his father, the
famed archaeologist and cultural ecologist Robert Heizer, who enlisted
his son on important digs in Mexico and Peru, providing the young man
with an appreciation of site, landscape, and geology that would
thoroughly inform his work.
Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments is a long overdue addition
to the critical and biographical literature of this major figure in
American art.
