The art of installation

Installation Art: The Work of Michael Heizer

The American artist and sculptor Michael Heizer (1944- ) is the son of an anthropologist who specialized in the Native American tribes of the West. Heizer's early exposure to native art and wide open spaces are evident in almost all of his creations. Today, Heizer is primarily noted for the strength and scope of his land art projects. Heizer's work deemphasizes the divide between art and decoration, nature and design. "With colleague Walter de Maria, Heizer went west in 1967, and created a new genre of 'land art' or 'earth art,' which used the earth as its medium. Far from the cramped studios of New York, and outside the confines of the museum's white walls, his works reached unprecedented size.

However, Heizer has not confined his output to such massive creations. He is also a notable conceiver of installation art. Installation art is a form of location-specific, 3D, sculpted composition that arises from an interior, rather than an exterior space. It is designed to transform people's perceptions of interior space, much as land art challenges notions of people's exterior space. Installation art is distinct from land art in that it is created within human-constructed interiors. It is often smaller and more tightly-controlled than land art that appears to arise spontaneously from the natural world. However, installation art conveys the same sense of 'found' art as land art to the viewer, even though it is not constructed to appear as if it springs from nature.

Installation art often looks superficially decorative. Yet it conveys a deeper meaning about humanity's relationship to interior spaces, although it can be decorative, even beautiful. But this is not its primary intention. Even Heizer's installed art, within the confines of a structure, has a kind of serendipitous quality that mimics his land art, although it has a more modernist and artificial color scheme, in contrast to the sepia hues of his native-influenced land art. Heizer's installation art is marked by spaces, caverns, and rifts in the landscape, even though these spaces are more geometrically-formulated than his land art.

One example of Heizer's greatest pieces of installation art is North, East, South, West. In this work, a medium-sized opaque black hole lies in the center of a white tile floor. The lonely and symmetrical blackness is stark. At first it looks ordinary, merely decorative. But the shining blackness is harsh against the blinding white of the floor, and seems even more poignant against the gleeful yellow of the brick walls around it. Although the geometry of the work is arresting given the contrast of colors, the work does not call attention to itself as art. But upon being prompted to gaze at it, the startling black-hole like quality of the circle in the midst of a riot of color, light and openness, causes the viewer to reflect upon the work's larger meaning. The hole conveys a greater sense of absence than the entire empty room. Paradoxically, the room feels more 'full' given the presence of a hole as its central focus, although the viewer is prompted to reflect upon absence at the sight of the hole. A single bit of absence and darkness is more attention-grabbing than light.