City, one of the largest pieces of art in the world, is a mile-and-a-half long, half-mile-wide installation in rural Nevada where the Mojave Desert meets the Great Basin—the ancestral home of the Southern Paiutes and Western Shoshone. The concrete and rock sculpture, which took artist Michael Heizer more than 50 years to construct, is viewed with awe, but also criticism: like other famous pieces of land art, it’s a massive and permanent installation on unceded land. Savanna Strott joins a group of six visitors as they explore City, and in this piece examines the connections between land art and destruction and colonialism, as well as how Indigenous people connect to the land—not by altering it, but by creating a relationship with it.
But then Douglas remembered how beautiful the land was before Heizer made his mark. She compared the artwork to someone stabbing the earth and leaving a scar.
Like Double Negative, many pieces of land art have started to fade as the land recovers. Rift One, one of Heizer’s nine depressions, is no longer visible. His Circular Surface Planar Displacement Drawing (four circles made from motorcycle tire tracks in Jean Dry Lake) has also vanished.
But City is different. City is meant to last forever. An empire of concrete, City is guarded and maintained and will be indefinitely.
To Douglas, who has not yet seen City, its intended permanence is a message of conquest: Heizer took the land, and it will be his forever. As with other land-art pieces, it’s tainted with destruction, patriarchy, Manifest Destiny and colonialism.
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