Earth Art Cowboys: Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and the Construction of A Western Identity

• In Event: Canons, Collecting, and Object Homes in American Art

Abstract

The narratives of macho earth artists tearing into the American desert with their bulldozers in the 1960s and 70s are well known in mainstream art history. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty covers textbooks and Michael Heizer still appears in the media on topics including his struggle to complete City, a massive earthwork in the Nevada desert. Scholars have been quick to note that Heizer was one of the few earth-art associated artists born in the American West and they have emphasized his lineage as the son of a Great Basin archaeologist and the grandson of a mining engineer. Earth art’s canonical status means that these artistic engineering projects are rarely reconsidered as foreign or intrusive to their setting, a criticism that could easily be levied. I argue that the conflation of the American West with large-scale destructive earthworks is made possible by both an artistic and critical appropriation of common tropes of Western identity. Heizer is still referred to as a “lonely cowboy” by the New York Times, and Smithson’s antipathy for contemporary environmental causes and interest in extractive industry helps to align him with a certain view of the West as resource colony. Evident in the critical emphasis on Heizer’s father, is the fact that Native histories were also appropriated by and for earth artists. Smithson frequently called on Native narratives and monuments to bolster the claim for his works to their site, for example the belief that a whirlpool swirled in the Great Salt Lake, which now houses Spiral Jetty. This paper will reexamine conflations of the idea of the West and earth art in order to understand how such presentations have staked a claim for a certain brand of art as “at home” in a heavily coded geographic space, allowing us to unsettle assumptions about canonical earth art and the West as a region.

Author

• Michaela Rife, University of Toronto (Canada)