Going Big  David Salomon
Going Big: Michael Heizer,
Bulldozers, and Suburbia
David Salomon
I don’t work with scale . . . I work with size.
Michael Kimmelman (1999)
Heizer is . . . just a jerk in the desert with a bulldozer.
Matt Jenkins
Introduction
Like the modest suburban houses surrounding
it in Houston, a pristine green lawn separates the
Menil Collection’s modernist building from the
street. Unlike its neighbords’ yards, however,
there are a number of depressions dug into it.
These are sculptures Michael Heizer originally
made in the Nevada Desert in 1968 and which
were recreated in the Menil’s grass in 1987 and
2008. What are these three pieces—Isolated Mass/
Circumflex, Rift, and Dissipate—doing on this
manicured lawn? Or, to quickly change the scale
of our inquiry, what explains the relationship
between Land Art and suburbia? In a word, it was
“bulldozers.” While it is true that bulldozers were
not used to create these pieces, the bulldozer (and
other earth moving technologies) establishes a lit-
eral and a conceptual connection between Hei-
zer’s work and suburban subdivisions. In doing so
they help to reveal how Land, Minimal, and Con-
ceptual art were in no small measure responses to
the suburbanized and technologized post-WWII
American landscape—a landscape literally shaped
by bulldozers (Ammon; Salomon, “Highway”;
“Fluorescent”).
David Salomon is an assistant professor in the art history department at Ithaca College, where he is the Coordinator of the Architec-
tural Studies Program. He is the coauthor of The Architecture of Patterns (2010). His current research on art, technology and suburban
infrastructure has been published in the Journal of Architecture, Places and The Journal of Landscape Architecture.
The Journal of American Culture, 40:3
© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
249
The figure of the bulldozer provides a surpris-
ingly efficient and productive way to examine the
relationship between art, architecture, and land-
scape architecture in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
It is productive because it provides a historically
specific mechanism that allows one to examine the
overlap between these disparate cultural cate-
gories. More specifically, looking at Heizer’s work
via the lens of suburban subdivisions grounds it in
a history outside of art practice and discourse.
Likewise, looking at subdivisions through the lens
of Heizer’s art reveals the degree to which the aes-
thetic of suburbia is dependent on the suppression
of specific sensibilities and scales. The connection
is surprising because art is not typically thought of
as being a priority in suburbia. However, the com-
mon use of the bulldozer, and other everyday
technologies—including automobiles, televisions,
and fluorescent lights—in both realms reveals their
shared interest and dependence on these devices
(Salomon, “Fluorescent”). In doing so it allows art
and everyday environments to be understood as
existing on a continuum rather than being diamet-
rically opposed.
Building on Bulldozers
Heizer’s work (and Land Art and Conceptual
Art in general) has often been described as a cri-
tique of the physical, economic and social limits
250 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 40, Number 3  September 2017
of galleries and museums (Buchloh 107). As Phi-
lipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon put it, Land Art
defined itself as an antiestablishment movement
against precisely such an art system, resistant to con-
ventional beliefs regarding what counts as art, how it
can be made, and where one might find it.
(Kaiser and Kwon 17–18)
Heizer’s work is also said to echo the ancient
Mesoamerican places that he visited as a child
with his archeologist father. It is also said to be
a response the vastness of the American West.
Finally, his work is said to contrast the different
temporalities, or speeds, of modern and ancient
life (Heizer and Brown 8–11, 33; Kimmelman,
“A Sculptor’s”; “Art’s Last”; McGill; “Discus-
sions with . . .” 248; Lee). One can add to this
list that his work was also filtered through the
lens of suburban landscapes and infrastructures
(Reynolds).
Neither Heizer nor his peers—a group that
includes Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Dan
Flavin, and Dan Graham—were apologists for
suburbia. They did, however, draw from its
forms, spaces, and technologies; not to dismiss or
destroy them, but to see what else one could
know about and do with this new environment,
and the methods and machines used to make it.
Heizer suggests his relationship between bulldoz-
ers, Land Art and suburban infrastructure when,
in an 1984 interview, he noted that he used these
machines in ways that are
. . . dissimilar to the industrial techniques for which
they were intended . . . by that I mean [using] the same
tools that are used to build airplanes and automobiles,
the same materials used to build houses and highways,
in ways not originally intended by the technology.
(Heizer and Brown 42)
Significantly, all of these examples, “automo-
biles . . . houses and highways,” are icons of sub-
urbia. In the 1950s and 1960s, the bulldozer was
also an icon, first of economic progress and then
of environmental doom. A bulldozer is a tractor
with a blade attached to the front of it. The first
modern ones were built in the 1920s. The term
bulldozer, however, is older than the bladed trac-
tor. Ralph Harrington writes,
The term itself was already in use to denote a type of
powerful horizontal press used for shaping and bend-
ing metal, [it was also a term used to describe] racist
thugs. . . who stalked the politics of the nineteenth-
century American South.
(Harrington)
No matter the context a bulldozer is an aggres-
sive, strong, and violent thing which uses these
qualities to get what it wants; this is true for a per-
son or a piece of heavy machinery. A complete
account of the earthmoving devices that trans-
formed America’s rural and urban landscapes
after World War II would include scrapers, exca-
vators, graders, front loaders, and dump trucks.
However, it was the bulldozer that received most
of the praise and the blame for this transformation
(Ammon; Rome).
The need for the bulldozer was created by the
creation of massive infrastructural projects: roads,
canals, and dams especially. The major technical
developments in its history include the replace-
ment of the tractor’s wheels with a continuous
tread or track. The result was the so-called craw-
ler tractor. The height and angle of the blade were
first controlled by wires and motors, and later by
a hydraulic system. The major figures and compa-
nies involved were Benjamin Holt, R.G. Le Tour-
neau, Caterpillar, Alan Bradley, John Deere, and
so on. (Haycraft; Harrington).
Bulldozers were in wide use by 1930. They
were given much credit for helping the Allies win
World War II. They were especially praised for
their ability to quickly clear and cut the land to
make roads, encampments and airfields in the
South Pacific. After the war, bulldozer use grew
exponentially. Its brutal efficiency enabled it to
quickly erase and transform natural and urban
eco-systems alike. It did this quickly but not
cheaply (“Earth, The Basic Issues”). It only did
one thing—move things out of the way—and it
did it very well. The bulldozer’s three main the-
aters of operation were highway construction,
urban renewal projects, and suburban tract devel-
opments (Ammon).
Initially, bulldozers’ value for the suburban
developer was the ease with which they could
turn agricultural fields or lightly forested areas
into cleared and flat building sites. The template
 Going Big  David Salomon
for suburban subdivisions had been established by
the FHA in the 1930s. When developers in the late
1940s and early 1950s, such as William Levitt and
Henry Kaiser, started their home building enter-
prises they quickly bulldozed away potato and
pea fields and replaced them with fields of single-
family homes (Girling and Helphand; Easterling
129–60, 175–95; Hayden 128–51; Weiss; Eichler).
However, in major metropolitan areas, and espe-
cially in the hilly Los Angeles and San Francisco
regions, cheap and easily bulldozed farmland was
in short supply. This meant builders had to find
sites out in the countryside or up in the hills
(Ammon). It was the latter where the bulldozer
proved to be especially valuable, as it could oper-
ate on land with up to an 85% slope (Lynch).
Bulldozers’ strength and flexibility enabled them
to crawl up and around hillsides to create build-
able land where there seemingly was not any. The
techniques of flattening mountain-tops, cutting
and filling slopes, and terracing hillsides were
among their most common tasks (“Look How
You Can Cut Land”; “Look How You Can Now
Build” Lynch).
Articles in professional design publications (for
architects, engineers and landscape architects)
unapologetically promoted the bulldozer as the
go-to device for turning impossible obstacles into
usable infrastructural and economic opportuni-
ties. Publications provided technical advice for
how to use the machines to efficiently and eco-
nomically produce building sites, and displayed
the aesthetic innovations made possible by them
(Kelly 50; Jaffe 97; “Bulldozer Architecture” 15;
“Earthmoving” 124–84; “A New Approach to
Land Shaping” 97).
However, the faith in this technology, and its
indifference if not hostility toward existing envi-
ronmental conditions would soon be challenged.
By the mid-1960s the backlash against a
machine that literally pushed things around had
begun. The bulldozer became both the object
and the metaphor for everything wrong about
suburban subdivisions and urban renewal efforts
(Rome). Peter Blake’s “God’s Own Junkyard”
is paradigmatic in this regard. His book-long
photo-essay is a series of contrasting pictures
251
showing untouched landscapes against ones that
are littered with commercial signage and/or
refuge, or ones that have been manipulated
beyond recognition (Blake). The implicit con-
clusion of every page was that the landscape
was being nonchalantly, yet systematically pol-
luted. It was precisely at this moment that
artists began using earthmoving machines to
make art. These artists were certainly aware of
the bulldozer’s negative associations and effects.
Why choose to use such a violent tool? Why
start using them at the exact moment when the
criticism against them was mounting? Why not
denounce their destructive ways, instead of
deploying them?
Heizer’s stated intention to find alternative
uses for these machines is a clear sign that his was
a direct response to the normative uses and effects
of bulldozers and the like. Unlike Blake’s and
others’ laments about the exploited and ugly land-
scape of roadside America, Heizer and his peers
were less interested in what already existed than
they were in asking what one could make using
the same tools. This meant not shying away from
their power. Rather, one had to harness it for
other, equally big, equally bold projects, projects
like a sculpture the size of a city.
An Empty City
Michael Heizer’s massive sculpture City was
begun in 1972. It is located 150 miles north of Las
Vegas in Garden Valley, Nevada. It is approxi-
mately 1-¼ long by ¼-mile wide, covering over
two hundred acres of desert land.1 It still is not
finished. Its precedents are many and varied. They
include Teotihuacan, the ball court at Chichen
Itza, airplane runways, military bunkers, and
modernist architecture (Kimmelman, “Sculp-
tor’s”; “Art’s Last”). These are just its architec-
tural influences. There are biographical and
historical ones as well.
Heizer grew up among rocks and ruins. He is
the son of an archeologist–anthropologist and the
grandson of a geologist and mining engineer. His
252 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 40, Number 3  September 2017
family has been in Nevada for over 130 years. He
has spent the last fifty of them digging, blasting and
moving dirt around its arid valleys. His work com-
bines the dueling historical narratives of technologi-
cal progress and environmental neglect—two
conditions that animated American art, and the dis-
course and building of suburbia, in the 1960s and
1970s.
If the sources of his work are complex and var-
ied, the tools he uses to make it are less so. His
Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) were made with
a pick and shovel. For his canonical Double Nega-
tive (located eighty miles north of Las Vegas)
Heizer used dynamite to loosen the earth and a
bulldozer to move it. This created two linear
depressions, plus two roughly triangular piles of
tailings. Both the work’s geometry and construc-
tion methods echo how road builders working
across the country overcome various obstacles to
create a highway system with minimal grade or
route changes (Lewis; Gutfreund; Swift).
At City, which now sits within the 704,000
acre Basin and Range National Monument estab-
lished by President Obama in 2015, Heizer has
Figure 1. Michael Heizer, City, 1972–present, Garden Valley, Nevada. ©Google Earth Pro, Sept. 2016.
relied less on explosives and more on an array of
earthmoving equipment—bulldozers, scrapers,
graders, excavators, and dump trucks—to carve,
grade, and smooth the earth into a variety of
shapes and surfaces (Kimmelman, “Sculptor’s”;
“Art’s Last”; Vankin).2 If at Double Negative he
used the techniques of highway engineers, at
City he used those of the hillside homebuilder
(National Association of Home Builders).
City is certainly sized at the ceremonial, infras-
tructural or urban level (Figure 1). However, it
does not function as such. It is a city with no liv-
ing inhabitants, buildings, rituals or functions; a
city that simultaneously projects a prehistoric and
a postapocalyptic sensibility. Its emptiness makes
it feel bigger than it actually is. As a whole City
has a long, low profile, one that is almost imper-
ceptible at ground level and invisible from the
entry to the site. It is more of a canyon or valley
than it is a mountain. As described by Heizer and
the few people who have visited it, it is less a thing
to look at than an environment to be immersed in
(Kimmelman, “Art’s Last”; “Michael”). When
one is “in” City the desert literally and even the
 Going Big  David Salomon
surrounding mountains disappear. However, it by
no means blends into its surroundings. Its curved
shapes, linear paths and smooth surfaces are dis-
tinctly other from the rough dessert floor and
jagged nearby mountains. As Heizer says, it is
“art, not landscape,” the latter term referring to
the picturesque tradition of making man-made
environments look “natural.”
Some of the first elements—Heizer calls them
complexes—constructed at City are dramatically
angled, tall, and severe objects. Even these carry
suburban overtones. City I is a large pile of earth
pile, framed with two massive concrete walls and
fronted by two dramatically cantilevered frames.
While recalling military bunkers and temples, it
also mimics the typical roadside scene of a massive
building set back from the street, with dramatic
signs announcing its presence. In the finished ver-
sion of City I the widening of the “road” surface
suggests a parking lot in front of a big-box store.
From above City seems to be similarly linear.
Zooming in, however, one sees that its edges are
defined by curves and that it is composed of a ser-
ies of some symmetrical and some irregularly
shaped mounds and depressions. Each surface—
which first appears to be soft but which are in fact
made from hard desert materials—is outlined with
a crisp concrete curb. Combined with the change
in texture, they suggest a division between flat,
smooth circulation paths, or streets, and sloped,
textured building zones.
The most recently published photographs of
City show a remarkably primped place. It no
longer has the air of a ruin in waiting that pre-
2005 photos show. In this it is not unlike the
perfectly groomed stepped-terraced landscapes
set to receive suburban roads and houses—an
environment also associated with isolation, and
also dependent on the same heavy machinery to
make it possible. (Kimmelman, “Michael”)
Despite the brute force and inelegance of the
machines used to create them, both Heizer’s and
the suburban site work promoted in the design
press in the 1950s and 1960s have a remarkably
similar scale and sensibility: a meticulous and
expansive emptiness. Among their important dif-
ferences is that Heizer’s site is remote and
253
useless while its suburban counterparts are not.
And, while Heizer’s City is meant to remain in
this barren state, in suburban developments such
emptiness is only a temporary step in an ongoing
(economic) process.
Arrested Developments
In other words, City is Art with a capital A,
and suburban subdivisions are capitalism with a
capital C. For Heizer, Art is understood as a set
of cultural artifacts and practices that proposes
how things (objects, cultures, societies, etc.) could
be different from how they currently are. In this
sense art is never (just) a critique of the present
but it is always a proposition for the future; it is
virtual in that it expresses what does not yet exist,
but could.
Could one say the same thing about the con-
struction sites in Nevada abandoned in 2008 and
photographed from the air by Michael Light a few
years later (Figure 2)? They make one wonder if
instead of being future sites for stand-alone
houses they are not already works of art (Light,
“Lake Las Vegas”; Kilston). Half a decade old
when he captured them, Light gives them an aura
of intentionality. If these sites were indeed meant
to be works of art, or parks, or to be used for agri-
cultural endeavors, or if they had been created by
hand, would these earth works be recognized as
Heizer’s work is, that is, as accurate manifesta-
tions of a historical moment? One could make the
argument that both the incomplete developments
are and Light’s photographs of them are just that.
As with Heizer’s work in the desert, Light’s pic-
tures reveal that sometimes pushing earth around
with bulldozers produce sublime forms and reveal
deeper cultural meanings. In his documentation of
Las Vegas, as in his other work on the sometimes
dense and sometimes empty landscapes of the
American West, Light’s crisp images serve as stark
reminders of the often unintentional and short
term beauty produced by otherwise arrogant,
wasteful and violent practices (Auping, Light, 100
Suns; Bingham).
254 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 40, Number 3  September 2017
Figure 2. Michael Light, Future Homesites of “The Falls” at Lake Las Vegas, Henderson, Nevada; 2011.
Ó 2011 Michael Light. Courtesy of the artist.
Of course, the plan is to finish the development
of these sites. If and when that happens a different
sensibility will emerge. It will change from an
empty to an episodic landscape, one filled with rel-
atively small, sometimes identical, sometimes
unique objects that, like all previous suburbs, will
produce a more fragmented, irregular impression.
If the standard suburban sensibility is individual-
ized and isolated, the photos by Light remind us
that this literally rests on the massive and con-
nected infrastructures made by possible by power-
ful devices like bulldozers. What is lost when these
sculpted sites are built upon and landscaped is the
tension between their continuous and discrete
properties—the color and texture of the earth pro-
viding the former, the geometry of the machine
the latter. As Light’s work deftly captures, when
they are “finished” (with houses, or malls or casi-
nos), everything gets small, and the vastness and
intensity that was there at the start is lost.
The bulldozer is good at creating continuous
effects and at erasing differences. These are the
same qualities found in monumental architecture.
They are also present in road construction and in
suburban housing developments. Only in the last
have they been covered up. If normative suburban
design seeks to hide this outsized, even violent
sensibility, one alternative is to expose it, to inten-
tionally let its aggressive nature come through.
This is what Heizer does at his City; it is why he
uses bulldozers and why City has suburbia as its
referent.
LA Interlude
It is worth noting that there had been attempts
by landscape architects to create more artistic,
more formally unified hillside subdivisions. Gar-
ret Eckbo’s plans for Wonderland Park and Crest-
wood Hills in Los Angeles used a variety of
techniques to augment rather than hide the earth-
moving moves required to build houses on these
two hilly Los Angeles sites (Trieb and Imbert). At
the 835-acre Crestwood Hills (1948) development
Eckbo used a somewhat less intrusive site
strategy—although there was still enough earth
 Going Big  David Salomon
moved to create roads along two ridge lines to
form stepped-terraced sites in the lower areas.
Houses sat lightly or were perched above the
ground and minimal earth was moved to receive
them. Eckbo’s unexecuted scheme for plantings
called for the consistent use of trees at different
levels of the site to produce a clear articulation of
the different zones, and different topographies,
within the development. His stance was that tak-
ing such a “formal’ approach was not counter to
the “natural” or found condition. Rather, Eckbo
saw the job of design “to improve the relationship
between people and the landscape around them,”
not mask it. However, the client disagreed, reject-
ing his purposefully “unnatural” plans as too geo-
metric and “exotic.” In other words, there was
too much art, not enough landscape.
If implemented, Eckbo’s scheme would have
created an artificial consistency across the neigh-
borhood; such a vision was implemented at the
smaller Wonderland development (Figure 3). It is
located on a less dramatically sloped site and the
plots were created in the soon to be standard
stepped-terraced solution. Here, the identification
Figure 3. Garrett Eckbo, Wonderland Park, Los Angeles, CA, c. 1950. Courtesy: University of California
Regents/UC Berkley Environmental Design Archives.
255
of different topographic conditions with specific
plantings recommended at Crestwood was carried
out and there is a tension between the mid-
century modern architecture, Eckbo’s abstract
planting scheme, and the manipulated topogra-
phy. Each has its own identity, each is ultimately
artificial, yet the overall effect is consistent.
In emphasizing topological zones rather than
individual houses or trees Eckbo’s design avoids
the typical fragmented sensibility of suburbia.
Heizer’s City is similarly differentiated. Colors,
textures materials, geometries, and forms are
repeated, over a large area, but are varied enough
to avoid becoming monotonous. If Heizer uses
rocks and dirt to achieve his constancy, Eckbo
used trees and bushes. Each created an environ-
ment in which the expression of the collective is
privileged over the individual element, yet those
elements are not subsumed by the whole. Such
effects had to be composed, or made up. In other
words, they are as artificial, or social, as they are
natural.
As a landscape architect Eckbo was obligated
to provide practical solutions, as an artist Heizer
256 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 40, Number 3  September 2017
is not. However, Eckbo’s stance (and work), as
well as Light’s photographs, attests to the fact that
one does not have to choose between efficient and
aesthetically indifferent infrastructures and use-
less art works. Rather, one can find ways of link-
ing the two together.
The Work of Art in the Age of
the Bulldozer
While Heizer’s and Light’s work can be con-
sidered critiques of suburbia, it would be more
accurate to call them provocations. How can one
produce a suburban landscape in which the whole
is foregrounded rather than the individual ele-
ments? What other environments and atmo-
spheres can be produced by our powerful
earthmoving machines?
While City cannot be taken in all at once and
has to be experienced over time, one cannot
escape its continuities. One might say that Hei-
zer’s is a City in waiting. It offers, in perpetuity,
an image of the earth-work that literally lies
beneath the surface of suburbia. Even though
individual parts (slopes, streets, pads, etc.) are
identifiable, when combined they produce an
articulated whole; one where it is hard to tell
where one part ends and the whole emerges. It is
a reminder of the man-made sensibility that is
covered up when suburbs are built-out and is
revealed when ancient sites are left to decay.
Heizer’s position is neither technophobic nor
technophilic. His work clearly embraces the
aggressive and dramatic effects made possible by
bulldozers, and recognizes that they demand the
making of other big, dramatic things. Such an
embrace is not a cynical or na€ıve stance. Rather,
it is an aesthetic one, one that simultaneously
deals with sensations, perceptions, and emotions
rather than parceling them out to specialized
disciplines.
Why did artists turn to the bulldozer? It was
because, as Walter Benjamin argued in the 1930s
and Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, they recog-
nized that to change everyday conditions requires
one to engages and uses the very techniques and
tools being used by those whose actions and
effects you disagree with, not by surrendering
these powerful devices to them. Ignoring or sup-
pressing such things will not make them go away.
Returning to older, less invasive strategies for
making or building (or growing) art, architecture
or landscapes will not make them go away. It is
best to address them head on and use them for
alternative ends—not because these alternatives
are better, but because they expose the fact that
other possibilities are indeed out there and the
future is always up for grabs.
When seen in the context of Eckbo’s and
Light’s work, Heizer’s City serves as a reminder
of what is present and invisible in suburbia; of
the massive physical, political and economic
infrastructures that it rests upon. However, while
tucking such reminders away in remote desert
locations has the advantage of it being preserved
(now in perpetuity as part of a literal National
Monument), relegating such effects to such
places undermines its influence. If the bulldozer
can be used to make a different kind of art, then
surely it can be used to make create a different
kind of suburbia; one that might embrace the
dramatic, ancient, violent and empty vastness of
the west.
Conclusion
Such thoughts bring one back to the Menil’s
lawn. Heizer’s interest in size, emptiness, and
deep time makes his markings at the Menil
unsettling. The pieces have not been scaled down
to fit onto this lawn; they are the same size as
the originals. In the Nevada desert they were
placed miles apart from one another. Here, they
are separated by mere inches. And yet, in this
new context they appear tiny, whereas in the
dessert (or in pictures of them in the desert) they
seemed neither small nor big. Like the desert
itself, they appear beyond measure, beyond
scale.
 Going Big  David Salomon
One wonders what kind of art work one
would make with a bulldozer on the Menil’s
lawn today and what infrastructures or continu-
ities might they uncover. Like Heizer’s depres-
sions in the Nevada desert, would they be
allowed to erode or would they be pristinely
preserved? Either way, it seems we could use
some new big ideas (or new ideas about bigness)
for how to merge architecture with landscape, in
suburbia and elsewhere. In other words, we
could use a few more artists deploying their
specific form of knowledge to identify a new
technology or repurpose an existing one to
reconnect these two fields.
Notes
1. For comparison, the two projects it is often associated with,
Central Park and the National Mall in Washington are 843 and 310
acres, respectively.
2. The Basin Range Monument was created, in part, to prevent
any energy or railroad lines—particularly ones that would carry
nuclear waste to the proposed and long delayed Yucca Mountain
Repository, from running close to City.
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