Over the course of three days in 1971, Michael Heizer used two Caterpillar tractors to pull a thirty-ton granite block back and forth across the front lawn of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The stone tore into the well-maintained grass, submerging the monolithic object into a pit while also amassing an immense pile of dirt— and a good deal of scorn among the museum’s board of trustees. They ordered that the sculpture, which was commissioned to accompany a solo exhibition of the artist’s work, be dismantled, and the lawn, quickly returned to its pristine state. The granite was eventually blown to pieces.
Fourteen years later, in 1985, Heizer mounted an exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum with an installation inspired by this early exemplar of Land art. Dragged Mass, a new print that he completed with Durham Press in 2018, is the most recent iteration of this storied, career-spanning work.
The sizeable intaglio print incorporates etching, aquatint, and drypoint, and draws its imagery from Heizer’s initial sketch for the sculpture and a photograph of the block of granite, which was painstakingly transported from a quarry in Vermont to Detroit. The print, too, in line with so much of the artist’s work, was shaped by a tremendous amount of effort and force. Heizer made several marks on the copper plates by using tractors and other machinery at his ranch in the Nevada desert. This technique—essentially drypoint on an industrial scale— echoes the movement of earth undertaken in Detroit over forty years ago. Drypoint, akin digging a hole, is an act of displacement. There is the gouge in the copper but also the raised burr; the pit in the ground but also the pile of dirt.
A continued rumination on the vast subjects of movement, excavation, and accumulation that have occupied Heizer for decades, Dragged Mass documents and extends the resonance of a short-lived, pioneering work, which was, like so many other monumental endeavors, leveled by people and time.
Dragged Mass and other prints by Heizer are available directly through Durham Press. For more information, please contact us at sales@durhampress.com