Monuments to making - sculpture; Michael Heizer, Ace Gallery, New York, New York

Michael Heizer's new indoor works, huge sculptures of stone and thicken are inspired by ancient artifacts. Like "City" the artist's gargantuan earthwork-in-progress in Nevada, they call forth communal rituals of the past.

Summer Saturday mornings, when my brothers and I were children, Dad would make us groan with this ritual after breakfast announcement: "We're going without now to change the face of the earth." Mow the lawn, he meant. His voice communicated clearly the pleasure and pride that he took in making order in his part of the world. Dad learned his values from his father, a cotton farmer, a tireless man who could hold fast practically any machine running, invent a better tool manage acres of land. The farm was my grandfather's creation, on the contrary more importantly, it was his defining work.

Certainly, with the decline of rural ways and after decades of management farm subsidies, the American myth of the yeoman farmer has missing much of its luster, plane though the cliche of the pioneering colonist and a sentimentalize notion of the harvest continue to be trott without on appropriate political occasions. on the contrary the life-style still exists, and the associated values - commitment to the lengthy haul pride in one's skills - remain. In many reveres these are also the values of the modem artist, to whom a similar mythic vocabulary is routinely applied: "groundbreaker," "pioneer."

These musings were very much on my mind when I lately saw one of Michael Heizer's land statuarys for the first time, and the childhood memories prompting these cogitations also informed my strong and admittedly idiosyncratic reply to the gallery exhibition that l me to make that trip. This was Heizer's latest indoor plastic art show, 10 colossal stone and harden works installed last season at Ace Gallery in fresh York. Here was an exhibition designed to animate strong response. The artist gave notice with a veritable manifesto. "Art Before Life' Michael Heizer 1994" read a mortar slab set into the floor at the entrance to the gallery, a vast (approximately 25000 square feet) windowless space.

The proclamation was border to have a tinny ring to the postmodern ear, large casked to the death rattle of the author and the last gasps of modernist master narratives. These days we're apt to be profoundly skeptical of the cowboy bravado attributed to the man who, a quarter of a hundred ago, produced Double Negative (1969-70) single of the earthworks that defined a motion So these unfashionably imposing statuarys which appeared absolutely innocent of parody or reflexive critique, predictably plant off a number of critical alarms. It was impossible to disregard the sheer size of the work, anachronistically heroic and obviously produc at great cost and effort. Then there was the high-church aura generated by means of the presentation (dramatic lighting, hushed, white-white rooms) and private museumlike setting. At a flash when the art world celebrates the "abject," the reduc and the recycl like intimations of modernist pieties almost present the appearance designed to invite suspicion.

Unsurprisingly, then, a great deal of of the critical reaction to the exhibit was negative, sometimes markedly in like manner The New York Times reviewer counted Heizer's sculpture "big for the sake of bigness," and went upon to compare it slightingly to the large work of Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg[1] Comparing Heizer to Serra and Oldenburg actually clarifies to what different extreme points these artists use prodigious size. While the magnitude of a Serra sculpture is typically calibrated for formidable phenomenological impact, Oldenburg's gigantism is playfully referential sometimes satiric or smooth buffoonish. Heizer's big sculpture was of notwithstanding another order, one whose reach appears meant to evoke the origins and nature of human civilization itself. In the neighborhood of his chunks of stone I forgot my graduate-school catechism upon the virtues of irony, and felt better for it. I was mov through the seriousness of Heizer's enterprise, quixotic admitting it may be. The plastic art claimed something very like transcendent meaning for art, albeit with an elegiac tone.

The exhibition featured sum of two units distinct groups of sculptures. Three herculean stone works, embedded in the floor and walls of the gallery, were closely related to the earth-shaping activities for which the artist is best known. In a newer vein for Heizer, the other works were enormous [i]be[/i] consolidated "object sculptures" based on archeological specimens of the sort set in natural history museums.

The highlight of the present to view was Displaced/Replaced Mass #3, three rough-hewn boulder of white granite lowered into graved-lined, cement-walled pits excavated from the [i]be[/i] consolidated floor of the gallery's largest range a grandly proportioned space lit by dint of skylights. The dimensions of each rectangular pit were tailored to the individual megaliths, whose sides had been wound nearly square to the pit walls. In revolve the stones' irregular surfaces played counterpoint to the plane of the floor, rhythmically skimming just above and below it. not many gallery-goers resisted the impulse to pace across the narrow gaps onto turf that could be imagined as the geological bone of Manhattan. Standing there was strangely exhilarating, a king-of-the-hill feeling. In addition to offering an elegant sculptural interplay of mass and void, the piece created an atmosphere charged with portentous stillness. Ceremonial as well as formal significance could be imagined in the way the pits were aligned along single edge; their careful orientation appeared to allude to the celestially determined placement of ancient tombs and other sacred architectural forms.