Educational Media Reviews Online

In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) unveiled Levitated Mass, a new work by sculptor Michael Heizer which consists of a 340-ton, two-story-tall boulder mounted above a concrete trench deep enough to allow visitors to walk under the rock. Director Doug Pray’s film, also called Levitated Mass, documents the enormous undertaking that was required to bring Heizer’s vision to life.

Conceived in 1968 and first attempted in 1969 (but abandoned when the original boulder broke the crane that was supposed to move it), Heizer’s sculpture was more than 40 years in the making. Levitated Mass picks the story up in its final chapters. In 2005 a quarry supervisor Heizer had been working with for many years called him to let him know they had found a rock which would be perfect for his project. Heizer, in turn, called LACMA’s Director Michael Govan, who proceeded to line up more than $10 million in private funding. A few years later the boulder was ready to be moved. This, as the saying goes, was much easier said than done.

Although the quarry where Heizer’s rock was found is only about 50 miles from LACMA’s campus, its huge size (it was too big to pass under some bridges, and too heavy to pass over many others) necessitated a more circuitous 100 mile-long route that passed through 22 cities and 4 counties, each of which required reams of permits and other paperwork. Because of the boulder’s weight, a trailer the length of a football field with 206 wheels had to be custom built to transport it which could only travel at night and at a maximum speed of less than ten miles per hour. As a result, the trip took eleven days to complete.

Levitated Mass does a great job of underscoring the astonishing number of engineers, government officials, and other people who were involved in this project and the incredible amount of work they put into it through time-lapse photography, montage sequences, and a variety of other techniques. Descriptions of Heizer’s other works and a history of “land art,” the movement he’s most often associated with, are skillfully interwoven throughout.

Interviews with Govan and other art experts convincingly argue for the significance of Heizer’s sculpture as America’s contribution to a very old tradition of monumental art which declined in prominence during the age of museums, but remains important. The film’s most interesting feature, though, are the comments made about the rock by the residents of the communities it passed through en route to LACMA, which run the spectrum from amazement at what human beings are capable of, to disgust that so much money was spent moving a giant rock from one place to another when it could have been invested in struggling communities instead , to wild conspiracy theories about what was really under that tarp (the boulder was covered prior to being loaded onto the trailer).

Taken as a whole, they amount to a sort of template for evaluating art works of this type. Monumental art is successful only to the extent that it evokes awe in the viewer at the power and mastery over nature that it represents. In the case of Levitated Mass, the question is whether or not the finished work conjures up the remarkable feat of engineering which was required to achieve it. By capturing the reactions people had to the apparatus which had to be assembled and deployed to bring Heizer’s boulder to its resting place, Pray’s film provides a measuring stick for the kinds of conversations viewers have about the finished work.

More concretely, Levitated Mass is a fine introduction to an artist who, as one talking head notes, was “as famous as an artist could be” in the late 1960s. It is an essential resource for anyone studying Michael Heizer or land art, and a valuable addition to any collection of films about contemporary art, especially those serving artists, students, critics, or anyone else grappling with the question of what art should be and who it’s for.