Michael Heizer

"As long as you're going to make a sculpture,
why not make one that competes with a 747, or
the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge."
Michael Heizer is considered to be amongst the great figures in the earth/land art movement. Spanning generations his most recognized work was created on such a grand scale that, though it is meant to be experienced first hand, it is best viewed from satellite photographs. Double Negative is a set of two unfinished matched trenches in Mormon Mesa that Heizer literally blasted out of the earth in 1969-70. The two trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide and their creation displaced 240,000 tons of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone.

The son of an anthropologist and grandson of a geologist his interest lies in the earth itself as well as in the question of what is art if it cannot fit into a gallery. His smaller works include making monumental copies of stone age tools or engraving a pattern of randomly dropped matches into a gallery sidewalk (which he later replicated in the desert at a grand scale). For the the last 36 years he has been working on a monumental project called The City. In rural Nevada this project extends over a mile long and a thousand feet wide and is estimated to have cost more than 25million dollars by the time it is finished which Heizer estimates will be sometime this year.