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Fortunately, a German tourist came by; she was apparently so dazzled by the desert landscape that it didn’t occur to her that I could have been a psycho killer (I am not). It amazed her that she could drive almost four hours, a trip that in her home country could take her through a parade of history and cultures, and see nothing but the occasional gas station. I did point out that the occasional world-changing event did occur in what looked like dry nothingness, such as all the atomic bombs we set off just east of the interstate, and the mountain we’re hollowing out to stick a bunch of nuclear waste in.
Perhaps it’s more meaningful if you’ve spent a lot of time in the west. Heizer’s father was a prominent anthropologist, and his grandfather a geologist, so he spent his childhood immersed in harsh landscapes and ancient cultures. City is directly influenced by Native American mound building, but its sharp, clinical lines and hard angles refer to a newer tradition of epic building, the Nevada of the nuclear age, from the bomb tests of the 40s and 50s to the Yucca Mountain waste repository of today. It’s a region of epic beauty and world-historical terror, and Heizer seems to have conceived a work that pulls all of that together.
