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Heizer, Michael
(b Berkeley, CA, 4 Nov 1944). American sculptor, painter and printmaker. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1963 to 1964 and moved to New York in 1966. His early imagery showed an awareness of Minimalist ideals. In 1967, however, he temporarily renounced painting and pursued what became a lasting interest in LAND ART. His ‘excavations’ in the desert of the American Southwest were prefigured by childhood travels to Pre-Columbian and Egyptian archaeological sites with his father, anthropologist Robert Heizer. The earthworks of the late 1960s and early 1970s consisted of moving vast, yet precise quantities of soil in regions of virtual inaccessibility, a strategy he shared with other artists such as Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson and James Turrell. Double Negative (1969–70; Los Angeles, CA, Mus. Contemp. A.) exemplifies his concern for juxtaposing the monumental with the ephemeral. The work displaced c. 250,000 tonnes of desert rock, while cutting a horizontal shaft across the lip of an eroding precipice, thus poising the artist’s heroic gesture against the imminent forces of nature. Works produced for museum and gallery exhibitions, for example Windows/Matchdrop (1969; Düsseldorf, Städt. Ksthalle), where a sidewalk is incised according to the dictate of several fallen matchsticks, demonstrate also his debt to earlier modernist questionings of the creative context and authority of the artist. Heizer incorporated the role of chance in his work’s design.
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