Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘Levitated Mass’

“Levitated Mass” is a documentary about the conceptualization, actualization and meaning of the Michael Heizer art piece known as Levitated Mass, which is really just a 340-ton boulder suspended over a carved out walkway in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is a pretty great movie that raises all sorts of questions such as “what does this mean?” and  “what is art?” and “how the hell do you move a 340-ton boulder anyway?” 

So according to this film and the people interviewed therein (many of whom are friends, professional acquaintances and patrons of Michael Heizer), Mr. Heizer is the originator and thereby the master of negative structures and negative sculptures. To put it in the most simplistic, caveman-like terms (because that’s kinda how I operate when it comes to abstract art, let’s just call it like it is), imagine someone digging out a big hole in the ground, and then putting either a giant rock or a slab of something inside the giant hole in the ground. Boom. Art (insert never ending and often banal “what is art” debate here). Now when art dummies like me see a giant rock in a hole in the ground, we declare unto the world, “Behold! A giant rock! In a hole!”

But to Mr. Heizer, this is about so many things. It started in the late 60’s as his attempt to break art out of art galleries and off of canvases (himself starting as a large scale painter of giant geometric forms), trying to bring art back out into the world. Additionally, he’s one of these guys who really wants to challenge what people consider to be art, which started him on digging into the earth and coming up with his initial ideas about using negative space, and which lead to his idea of finding a giant boulder and somehow finding a way to make it appear as if it is levitating.

In addition to these ideas, he also wanted to bring back the concept of large scale art, epic pieces of work, monuments meant to stand the test of time for as long as possible. The Egyptian pyramids and Easter Island heads and Stonehenge are both frequently referenced as inspirations, as there is much bemoaning and gnashing of teeth throughout this movie about the lack of large scale art of this kind, and they kind of have a point. There’s the Washington Monument, and a bunch of statues in Washington D.C., but that’s it. For some odd reason, not one person mentions Mount Rushmore, which is an odd omission considering there really isn’t much else.

So Mr. Heizer was all like “I wanna bring sexy back to giant conceptual art” and he set about changing landscapes in the desert and digging out negative spaces the size of the Empire State Building laid on its side and did all sorts of things for decades, some of it going over well, some of it not, most of it still in existence wherever he created them, as they were meant to be in the first place. And when he was finally able to secure a gigantic rock from a quarry, he was able to set about making his vision a reality.

The thing is, due to illness and the physical demands of being away from home, he did a large majority of his work through hours and hours and hours of phone conferences with all the key people involved in getting this 340-ton boulder from the quarry to the museum, which just happened to be a 100+ mile journey. And while Mr. Heizer was off in the desert orchestrating the madness from behind the scenes, the movie gets focused on the people they do have access to, which are all the people tasked with coming together to make this (ultimately $10 million) vision an actual thing that can be viewed and appreciated and derided and pondered for years to come.

And holy cow did it take A LOT of people doing A LOT of work to simply MOVE this boulder, let alone all the stuff it took to put it in place as an actual art installation at the museum. That comes way later. First they gotta get that rock there! And of course this is a very large part of this movie, especially when they do manage to get the thing rolling through 20-something towns over the course of several nights, and people started coming out in droves to just SEE this thing slowly go by, and it totally became an event unto itself, the moving of a piece of the art became art, as people stood off to the side and took pictures and viewed it and appreciated it and derided it and pondered it as it went past.

This whole section is fascinating because of the amount of work that went into moving this immovable mass such a far distance, coupled with the artistic side effect of the transportation of said mass giving the whole thing even more meaning and gravitas. This is not something Mr. Heizer intended, as he saw the moving of the rock as simply that, the transporting of one element of the overall piece from one location to another, analogous to that of buying paint at the store and bringing it home to use. But of course, people buy paint and art supplies and drive them home every single day. How often has a 340-ton boulder been transported in such a manner?

When the boulder does arrive at the museum, Mr. Heizer finally arrives and for the rest of the movie he is all over this thing, doing as much physical work as possible himself, overseeing every detail, and it is during these times and between the work that we get to hear Mr. Heizer’s actual words and thoughts and ideas on what he is doing, as up until this point in the movie he had only been represented in some archival footage, with the rest of the information provided by pretty much everyone else EXCEPT Mr. Heizer. And of course this adds to the mystique of the artist, adding to the legend of the man and his work, a legend which he fully intends to get outlived by the longevity of the actual pieces of art themselves.

“Levitated Mass” is pretty great in how it documents and chronicles much of the work that went into making this happen, while also putting it all into historical and artistic context, making it all pretty accessible to everyone who may see this, whether they have an art degree hanging on their wall at home or a velvet painting of a tiger under a black light. By the time this movie is over, this 340-ton, millions of years old piece of granite is loaded with significance. It is more than just a rock. It is art. It is a monument to the achievements that can happen when people work together with a singular focus, and it becomes easy for even an art philistine like myself to appreciate.