IMG MGMT: Land Art and the Nuclear Landscape

Weapons Depot, Tonopah Valley, Nevada
Michael Heizer et les risques du sublime technologique, by Serge Paul, 2012

Michael Heizer, City: Complex One
Photograph by Tom Vinetz

Sedan Crater, Nevada Test Site
Government photograph (AEC­68­8375), c1962

James Turrell, Roden Crater
Roden Crater/Meteor Crater 07.07.11: 08 Roden Crater Looking North, Near Grand Falls, Little Colorado River, AZ, 2011
Photograph by Michael Light

In 1969, when a 23-year-old Michael Heizer drove his bulldozer into a patch of desiccated Nevada dirt to begin creating his seminal work Double Negative, he was out to do more than just buck the East Coast art establishment; he was out to make a sculpture about oblivion. Following the lead of his fellow Land Artist Robert Smithson, Heizer wanted to create a ‘non-site’ (Smithson’s term), which to him meant cutting through the crust of the high Nevada desert and removing over 250 tons of earth across a ravine, creating the optical illusion of a connected trench. His stated goal was a physical work made of absence–­­ something which could only be experienced in person.

The resulting Land Artwork Double Negative was an act of rebellion, but also of ecological violence: a lone cowboy­-hatted man making an arbitrary mark on the surface of the earth using the biggest tools as his disposal. (The overwhelming majority of the first generation of American Land Artists were men). This was at the height of the Vietnam War, deep into the Cold War, when Western civilization felt the immanent threat of Soviet invasion and global nuclear apocalypse. Artists were reacting in extreme ways, rejecting gallery­-oriented formalism and spawning radical movements like Fluxus, Conceptualism and Land Art. Perhaps, with our superpowers dead­set on atomic Armageddon and seemingly nothing an individual could hope to do about it, Heizer and his contemporaries were simply channeling latent feelings of political impotence into the most direct, most physical gestures available. Or perhaps they were just angry. As Heizer put it, there were ‘no aesthetics involved.’

Prospective tour of Nevada Test Site and Michael Heizer’s works
Google earth

Nevada Test Site, Yucca Flat Government photograph, c 1980s

Nevada Test Site, Yucca Flat Government photograph, c 1980s

Nevada Test Site, overlaid with a diagram showing location of each nuclear test Eric LoPresti, 2016. Sources: Google Earth, USGS Open File Report 00­176

LoPresti, Nevada Test Site diagram

Significantly, Heizer situated Double Negative a mere 70 miles east of Nevada Test Site, a vast salt flat where the U.S. tested its nuclear weapons during the Cold War. NTS loomed large in public consciousness during the 1950s and 60s, when weekly atomic tests made front page news in the New York Times and in Life magazine. From 1952 to 1993, the U.S. detonated over a thousand nuclear bombs in Nevada, leaving the vast salt flat pockmarked with huge circular depressions. This activity spawned a dark joke: “How did America win the Cold War? Simple: we bombed the living crap out ourselves.”

Most of the tests at NTS were underground. Subterranean detonations don’t create the picturesque mushroom clouds of cinematic fetish; instead, they happen deep in the earth, where they vaporize spheres of rock 500-­1000 feet in diameter. Subsequently, the earth above the sphere collapses, creating a crisp circular subsidence crater on the surface. To many, NTS looks like the surface of the moon, but to me, as an artist, it looks like a surreal, oversized game board arranged in a minimalist grid.

Cover of the “Atom” government newsletter, November 1969
Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Diagram of underground nuclear test
From Edward Teller, The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives, 1968

Cross section of portion of Nevada Test Site (Large circles show extent of caverns created by underground tests.) Conceptualization of the Predevelopment Groundwater Flow System and Transient Water­Level Responses in Yucca Flat, Nevada National Security Site, Nevada
By Joseph M. Fenelon, Donald S. Sweetkind, Peggy E. Elliott, and Randell J. Laczniak

Video of underground nuclear test
Government video, date unknown

US nuclear engineers deliberately situated NTS as far from east­-coast population centers as possible. Like the first generation of Land Artists, they intended the remote location to discourage casual viewership. As a result, our adversaries the Soviets observed the development of this terrifying landscape in the same way that most art lovers eventually came to experience Land Art – remotely, via high­ altitude aerial photography.

In fact, nearly every seminal piece of Land Art was created in the desert southwest, often in close proximity to a military base. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is near Hill Air Force base in Utah, James Turrell’s Roden Crater is near Camp Navajo in Arizona, and Walter de Maria’s “Lightning Fields” is only two hours drive from Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. Land Art developed amidst the militarized, nuclear west.

“Trinity,” the first atomic explosion, near Alamogordo New Mexico, 1945 Photograph from National Archives at College Park

Above­ground test at Nevada Test Site (“Upshot­Knothole­Grable”, 1953) Photograph from National Archives at College Park (SE0012003)

Jean Tinguely. Study for an End of the World No. 2, Nevada, 1962 

Tinguely. Study for an End of the World No. 2

Walter De Maria, Lightning Field, 1977 Photograph: Walter De Maria

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels Photograph by Elizabeth Ginsberg, 1976 Holt Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York

I’ve been making paintings of NTS for a decade, because as a landscape, it is absolutely without parallel. One thousand craters – it’s a lot to take in. Historians explain this overabundant earth­moving as the result of US-­USSR political brinksmanship, or of the momentum of the military­-industrial complex, or perhaps of a quintessentially American need to innovate bomb design. None of these explanations quite capture the scale of financial and creative investment our society made into nuclear weapons, or the sheer magnitude of the shattered desert landscape. As the Western technological epicenter of the Cold War, NTS represents the most extreme confluence of conflict, environment, and technology on the planet.

Instrumentation tower and data collection trucks at Nevada Test Site
Government photo obtained via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), c 1980s

Nevada Test Site, “Muskateer­Gascon”
Government photo obtained via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), c 1980s

“Muskateer ­Gascon” detail

Michael Heizer, City
Photoshopped spread from Michael Heizer by Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, 1997

Full­-scale nuclear testing ceased at NTS in 1993, and in the decades since, the landscape has largely fallen out of public memory. In an age awash in images of terror, pictures of underground nuclear tests are absent. This is partly because there are no photographs of the actual explosions ­­ the tests were performed in solid rock far beneath the desert floor, making photography impossible. Strangely, this means the most powerful, most consequential weapons in human history, around which global politics has revolved for nearly 70 years, are completely missing from contemporary visual culture.

Nevada Test Site, “Eel,”
Photograph from National Archives at College Park, c 1962

Nevada Test Site, unlabeled nuclear test, possibly part of “Project Chariot” Photograph from National Archives at College Park, c 1960s

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969­1970
Spread from Michael Heizer by Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, 1997

Sequence showing the creation of Double Negative
Spread from Michael Heizer by Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, 1997

Heizer took over a year to create Double Negative, completing it in 1970. During this time US nuclear engineers detonated over 80 devices between 10 kilotons and 1200 kilotons each, for a total explosive yield of around ~50,000 kilotons (Hiroshima was, by comparison, 15 kilotons). Heizer has since devoted himself to creating City, his magnum opus, at another site adjacent NTS.

“The H-­bomb, that’s the ultimate sculpture,” says Heizer. “The world is going to be pounded into the Stone Age, and what kind of art will be made after that?”

I can’t agree. A nuclear weapon is not a sculpture, and NTS is not a piece of Land Art. It is, however, a mind­-bendingly huge expression of cultural power which profoundly affected a generation of America’s most radical artists. To me, NTS says “We are here. We control this landscape – physically and absolutely. And if necessary we’re willing to raze it to the ground.”

Portrait of Michael Heizer
Isaac Brekken for The New York Times 

Portrait of James Turrell
Photo by Florian Holzher, 2014

William Laurence (left) and J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity Site, September 1945 Source: Google LIFE images

US Nuclear tests in 1969 and 1970, the years when Michael Heizer made “Double Negative”

(Hiroshima=15KT)

Tagged as: City, Double Negative, H-Bomb, land art, Michael Heizer, nancy holt, Nevada Test Site, NTS, Roden Crater, Sedan Crater