Earlier this week I visited The City with a group of friends. It’s an interesting place, and I’m glad I took the time to experience it, as it provided a unique context to reflect on a set of more abstract ideas.
The claim to fame of the city is that it is the largest art installation on earth – a mile by 1.5 miles of terrain sculpted over something like 50 years into an aesthetically pleasing ‘city’ – a series of gravel mounds and hollows each curbed and delineated by gravel roads. There are a couple of distinct sculptures within the space – brutalist/minimalist concrete structures, a series of triangles on one end of the city and a deconstructed, cantilevered cube on the other.
The city is as much the experience as it is the physical art itself – each day one group of 6 people is allowed to visit by the foundation set up to administrate the exhibit. The visit typically involves a 2.5hr pilgrimage from the antithetical los Vegas up to the city, itself near Area 51 in the high Nevada desert. The city as a place is meant to be timeless – which is effected with a permanent crew to rebuild after storms lead to erosion, and to sweep the paths each day to erase the footprints from previous visitors.
- There were a few primary ideas I took away from the piece while walking through it for the 3 allotted hours. I’m sure much of this is a reflection of the head space I was in, and aren’t intentional on the part of Heizer as an artist.
- Insignificance – The scale of the piece, while vast, remains dwarfed by the surrounding Nevada mountains and what nature has created
- Illusory – The artifacts which appear as coherent monuments from afar break apart into a much more fragile and hard to interpret components as one gets closer to inspect them.
- Permanence – Despite all efforts, any attempt at permanence is doomed to fail, but that can’t and shouldn’t discourage the attempt to fight against entropy. I think there’s an argument for a preference for growth/evolution over permanence, but I think that’s beyond the experience I took away from this piece.
- The essence of urban life – what is the emergent behavior between the individual participants and the overall experience of a city?
The city, along with its other restrictive policies requires visitors to agree not to take photos. There are enough photos online to get a reasonable approximation of the experience despite this. It perhaps indicates this policy has been effective in limiting the use of the city as a canvas for selfies / other subjects, and maintaining its position as a sole protagonist.
