Driving to Double Negative (1969)

Rough scribblings on Heizer's land art and the surrounding terrain

1. The Mesa

Double Negative is a 1969 sculpture by American artist Michael Heizer, located about two hours northeast of Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert. Settled on the east edge of the Mormon Mesa by the Moapa Valley, Double Negative consists of two excavation sites — each roughly 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep — facing each other across a large, 1500 foot wide erosional gap. It is not a ‘sculpture’ that occupies space; space, at least partly, occupies it.

There are two types of absence in Double Negative: excavated space and natural space. The two trenches open out into the open space of the cliffside, the rim of the mesa curving inward and creating an amphitheater of sorts. In some sense, the sculpture continues across this space, creating a continuous trench.

The space in between opens up the sculpture to the surrounding landscape. Heizer inverts of the image of the sculpture as consisting of matter ‘pulled’ from the earth. It does not have the form of material that is carved from or produced (forged, crafted, shaped) into something, but neither is it a simple negation of the dominant sculpture’s phallic protrusion. In other words, it is not just a lack; the title of the work does not lay bare a logic of the negative and the positive, nor does it provide a formula: that from the double negation of some proposition P, one can not infer P.

Double Negative is, to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari, a minor artwork. It destabilizes its major form from within. It operates as a virus within a code, and it satisfies neither pole.¹ Its produced absence opens up to a natural void, disidentifying the horizons of the sculpture and the distinction between man-made and ecological. This is not a rejection or simple erasure of borders, but rather a gentle deterritorialization: it is an open, undefined, unparameterized artwork that still satisfies the conditions of an intentionally precise, delicate, man-made excavation with that formalist play on ‘the sculpture.’² That said, it is less about ‘trying out’ sculpture-as-absence than it is about not even seeing a distinction between presence and absence, man-made and ecological. In fact, to write about “presence and absence” and “man-made and ecological” in any semblance of yin-and-yang opposites would be incorrect. Instead, Heizer pushes forth that the man-made is the ecological; it is the same, but not unified.

2. The Drive

The scale is impressive. Double Negative is not for human consumption or consideration. It is something more like a self-revealing, self-reflecting meditation regretfully (but necessarily) operating within the logics of artist and artwork. There is no other way these minor ideas of the ecological and could be revealed than through man-made creation; all art is always, already authored. What enables this artwork to be interpreted is the fixture of the author; otherwise, it wouldn’t exist in the same sense. (Rather playfully, Heizer confronts this in making the two excavation sites obviously aligned and distinctly carved, though erosion is — perhaps intentionally? — taking its toll on the piece).

It is, for one, completely unmarked. There is no indication of human activity other than the rough gravel road passing by the sculpture. Secondly, it is very difficult to get to. Arriving at Double Negative requires a steep drive up the mesa on a dirt road, then a couple miles of incredibly bumpy, rocky terrain. It is difficult, perhaps purposefully difficult, to get to, and is more concerned with a dialogue with the surrounding desert landscape than it is about being seen or experienced. It is simply and purely there.

But it won’t be there forever: inevitably, the mesa rim will recede past the sculpture’s absence, and Heizer’s produced space will fade into the entropic space surrounding it. The space in between the two excavation sites will soon eat the excavation, and the sculpture will become pure absence. Will it still exist? What state will it be in (will it be recognizable or known — will it still be ‘art’)? How are we — the observer — able to impose a teleology upon this space? How are we able to think of a ‘future’ of this sculpture — based on assumption — and how does that reorient us towards Double Negative right now? In some ways, Double Negative escapes the temporal horizons we could even fathom. The future image of absence is a radically different mode of being, actualized from the internal DNA of the sculpture’s modality. Perhaps these are not the right questions to ask, but I nevertheless sense that something very spooky is happening here.

The whole drive there, I was worried that the terrain would pop a tire or bottom out the car. The climb up the mesa was steeper than I typically would’ve felt comfortable handling. The unmarked dirt roads webbing out into different directions made me paranoid that I was going to get lost. Paths are created and reinforced on the surface of the Mormon Mesa; lines of least resistance curve around specific jagged rocks and caked mudbeds. They are writing and responding to the terrain in a flux without channels, valleys, apparatuses. No signs of life other than sparse, dry shrubbery and the occasional cairn.

Leaving Las Vegas, it gets barren quickly. Rows of solar farms, barren mountains, and the occasional town resembling Palm Springs. A steady descent up the mesa offered a grand vista of the Moapa Valley region: a wide, long band of verdant green held against stark dryness. The desert is intensely hostile. It is a smooth surface responding to and refolding whichever intensities strike it. The Mojave hits well over one-hundred ten Fahrenheit during the day and retains none of that heat when the sun climbs down. It is bone-dry but prone to flash flooding. It is still and eternal but rapidly responsive to the micro-impulses of the day. It is unmoving and unchanging, but always in motion: rocks dried out over millions of years remain still, but wind pours over them nonetheless. It has no striation or superior environmental logic. It does not trap heat like humidity does. It is just land.

The Mormon Mesa is completely silent and eternally still. There is only the sound of the wind, and when the air stands still, it’s more quiet than anything you’ve ever encountered. It’s incredibly violent. There is a violence in the terrain and brutal flatness as much as there is in the jagged peaks or the dangerous heat. The desert is pure zero. The desert is uncategorizable in a logic of production or consumption, or even in a recombinatory, multilinear synthesis. It is the foundational kernel where process reaches its inevitable codomain, 0 — meaningless, unassimilable, but deeply internal and constitutive of the mapping’s backbone. Without 0, there would be no mapping. It is fundamental yet dismantling. It is radically exterior and interior, like the war machine operating on the edge of the State, activating its while opening unsealable fissures.

3. The Response

A mile before Double Negative on the lip of the mesa rests a collection of random signs, cinderblocks, flags, rocks, and barrels. A couple read “NO TRESPASSING” and “BEWARE OF DOG,” but in an ironic reversal, others tell that this is a geocache. The phrase “POLISH NEGATIVE” is repeated across a handful of signs. Some say “Est. 2002,” others “No Earth Destruction,” and “God’s ‘No Dents’ Mesa-Spa-Gym.” Across the scattered language, one quickly pieces together that this ‘monument’ is a response to Double Negative, proclaiming that the mesa as it stands — naturally and without intervention — is already “God’s Master Piece [=No Earth Destruction,=].”

Is Double Negative an attempt on Heizer’s part to try and control the land, romanticizing the ‘state of nature’ and unassimilability of the absence constituting the sculpture? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps it just is. Is Heizer’s artwork a true confrontation with his ethical situatedness, or is it a flippant and careless acceptance of the structural impossibility of any other mode of expression? Does the piece, then, have a radiating ‘subtext’ of the human? From all angles, it does. In the most obvious sense, it is man-made, and the possibility of talking about it right now in such a manner — in the validity of a critical reading — means that it is an artwork which was produced by a human. I would not be able to write about it right now in this way if it was ‘just’ the coincidental formation of two trenches. It is always and already brought to interpretation. The human-existential element is what grants this work the significance of it being revealed in a certain way in the first place. Would, then, the ethical limit of this sculpture’s form be something like if it were completely secret, as if Michael Heizer had simply created it in the desert and not announced its existence or creation at all? Why must it be brought into discourse?

“Polish Negative” brings up an expected, reductionist, though important counterpoint to Heizer’s work. It’s common across much ‘abstract’ contemporary art: what’s the point? In a rebuttal, “Polish Negative”’s painted words cradle a perfected categorical image of nature needing, for a higher moral reason, to be ‘untouched’ in the same ecotouristic genre of rhetoric that codes nature as ‘green,’ ‘pure,’ ‘naturally-sustainable’ (as in, ‘productive-if-left-alone’), and ‘virginal.’ The obvious formal irony of this monument aside (the trespassing signs satirically designating a territory which is meant to be broken by human interaction — these are signs meant to be looked at, flags meant to wave, geocaches meant to be located), it intervenes with nature by assigning a God or a subjectum — an ordering principle — upon the earth’s surface. It is a fundamentally aimless monument, but one which complicates Heizer’s sculpture. Just as Double Negative ‘eats’ or ‘contains’ the absence around it, it also absorbs all critiques into its structure, silently responding to them in a cold, bleak simplicity.

4. The Valley of Fire

It’s over one hundred-fifteen out and we’re standing in a corridor of tall, red sandstone formations resembling small towers. It’s ancient, weird, and mystic. Impressions into the rock surface appeared as windows; rocks appear mini-villages, valleys byways. The thick layer of sand coating the trail floor gave the sense that these rocks suddenly emerged from the loose granular material that would eventually constitute their form. Petroglyphs stretch across the fading tar-black skins of some red rocks. Dozens of cramped symbols face the afternoon sun; and, suddenly — dry winds blow through narrow valleys, producing a low rumbling, just as it ever has. This was the only sound. The people who came into these same valleys some thousands of years ago are long gone, but proof of their existence shall remain in this remote corner for thousands longer.

Just as there isn’t even a possible conception of infinity in the desert, there isn’t even a conception of time or scale. The desert is always being sculpted, but not towards anything — not towards a future, nor towards an infinity.³ There is not even a virtual or an actual here. Any axis of time dissolves. There isn’t even duration; there isn’t even a present. Eternity implies the existence of an eye to see it. Nothing can resolve into a singular moment. An approach to the desert which stands comfortably and preliminarily apophatic: I’m not sure what the desert is just yet, but I feel that there is something beyond sense and analysis.

We leave the Valley of Fire and drive through the “Lake Mead National Recreation Area”: a massive man-made lake surrounded by rocky, barren, empty ground — bright and sun-bleached — and, in the distance, the mountains of black, tan, and bare white. It’s creepy and deeply horrifying: a lake too-blue that isn’t supposed to be there. A massive valley filled with trillions of gallons of water. Brutal, lifeless landscapes. I’m very scared; it’s scary out here.

1. In some ways, it is a refusal, but perhaps not even a refusal: see Gilles Deleuze’s “Bartleby; or, the Formula.” Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is not a harsh rejection of the structurally-positioned commands he receives from his boss, but neither is it an absent, empty response. It uses the structure of polite compliance but refuses to actualize anything. It breaks the ascribed function of communication and tears apart a logic from within.

2. Heizer is still the singular artist of this piece, and takes claim for it; the ‘whole’ of the work is attempting to command and control the desert space in producing trenches, turning absence into sculpture, but the individual ‘parts’ — the internal operations, its minor attributes — end up superseding the whole. In other words, the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts

3. “It is unmoving and unchanging, but always in motion…”