Complex City

 

A "scoring" of Michael Heizer's "City" complex in Nevada. (Music For Places II)

From a lecture by the art historian Kirk Varnedoe:

"Part of my art is based on an awareness that we live in a nuclear era," Heizer says in an interview in 1984. "We're probably living at the end of civilization." His project in the Nevada desert, a great monumental series of abstract forms, equates the erosive force of centuries— the blunting of ruins and grand residues of past societies—with the explosive force of the present. He makes clear that Complex One is situated close to a nuclear blast site, and that its angled front wall is designed to serve as a blast shield, deflecting the power of a nuclear bomb." Heizer's elemental forms collapse time into a view colored by a millennial, almost apocalyptic sense of the present. 

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