Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Michael Heizer
American; 20th-century
Ottawa, IL: Buffalo Rock State Park
52%
Effigy Tumuli. 1983-1985
As with much of the sixties crowd, Heizer's work in general is essentially Duchampian: an earthwork is a sort of readymade, or rather, in an earthwork "nature" is a readymade element to which the "form" of the artistic object is affixed as a sort of guidance system for, or governor of, your experience. To experience an earthwork is to have an experience of nature's unformed sublimity that's constantly interrupted by the art context. Earthworks therefore thrive on refinement and reduction of structure, as with Heizer's famous Double Negative. A couple slits in a cliff was all that artwork needed to overhaul the experience of nature and pervert it into (clarify it as?) the experience of art. Meandering through the mounds that make up Effigy Tumuli, one gets the sense that such a perversion/clarification is taking place. One does not get the sense, however, that it takes place as a result of the appropriated ancient American forms (snake, bug, bird, adapted from the Mississippian moundbuilders; not legible as such from the ground). Rather, the art-context effect seems a result of the basic fact that Effigy Tumuli is a work of conceptual art. Why, then, does Effigy Tumuli require the involved representational structure at all? It is not a question which the work answers. (2025)