notes > on-michael-heizers-city

On Michael Heizer's City

I asked Cruso how many stones had gone into the walls. A hundred thousand or more, he replied. A mighty labour, I remarked. But privately I thought: Is bare earth, baked by the sun and walled about, to be preferred to pebbles and bushes and swarms of birds? … "And what will you be planting, when you plant?" I asked. "The planting is not for us," said he. "We have nothing to plant – that is our misfortune."¹

In May 2025, I visited City, the monumental earthwork in the Nevada desert built by land artist Michael Heizer over the course of fifty years and, reportedly, at ruinous cost to Heizer's personal life and physical health.

Merely to get there was a sizable undertaking. First, you had to secure one of only a tiny number of reservations offered each year. Only six people are taken to see City at a time, and visits are offered just three days a week, seven months a year. The 2025 season sold out in minutes. Despite being "one of the most important works of art to have been made in the past century" (Glenn Lowry, quoted in The New Yorker), no more than few thousand people have ever seen it.

If you are among the lucky few to secure a spot, then the day of your visit you drive a hundred miles into the sagebrush flats north of Las Vegas, to a tiny ranching hamlet called Alamo. At the office of the Triple Aught Foundation, which administers the artwork, you meet your driver and the other five guests. You are taken another hour further into the wilderness, forsaking paved roads entirely, across one mountain range and then another. At last, in the center of a barren depression improbably named Garden Valley, next to a grove of trees that marks the Heizer ranch, you arrive at City.

Massive earthen mounds conceal City, much of which is sunken below ground level, from view until you enter on foot. You are given three hours to explore the enormous complex, alone and with no more guidance than Heizer's prescription of "Use your imagination."

City is regularly described as "monumental"; this is true in any reasonable sense of the word, though if you are hoping to be awed by sheer immensity you are probably better off visiting the Pyramids. The sculptures inside City are large, and would appear even more so were they not embedded in the vastness of the Nevada desert, but size alone is not the point, and most of City is occupied not by concrete monoliths but by carefully shaped mounds and depressions of earth.

Photography is strictly forbidden. We were given the choice to surrender our phones or else consent to have them searched at the end. Recall the onerously scarce reservations and you might suspect Heizer of megalomania. For my own part, I am glad that I could experience City in near-solitude and unmediated by a phone screen or camera. However impressed you might be from photographs, just know that pictures do it no justice.

While I wandered around City I thought of Bruno Munari, who wrote that "as long as art stands aside from the problems of life it will only interest a very few people."² I don't know what City has to say about the problems of life. But is it really art if you can put it into words? Or is it only art if it changes your life, what decisions you make, what you find important?

On Michael Heizer's City

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