November 20, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “Made You Look,” in this week’s issue, writes about two immersive experiences he had recently: a viewing of Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth,” at the Sphere, in Las Vegas; and a visit to Michael Heizer’s land sculpture “City” in the Nevada desert. Of his Sphere experience, he writes, 

Everything about this place dulls your palate for the natural. You walk under an emoji the size of the Death Star, you wait in lines for holograms, you sit in a state-of-the-art haptic chair, you stare at a screen almost as big as the one that brought you the emoji, and you’re supposed to believe that what’s up there is real ?

Not a great recommendation. His description of “City” is more beguiling:

This is, simultaneously, the quietest place I’ve ever been and one of the loudest—every breath and pebble-crunching step is deafening, in the same way as someone wrestling with a sweet wrapper at the movies. The slanted sides of the trenches suggest ancient ruins, but also the I-15. It’s not always obvious where the art ends and the desert begins. Toward either side of “City,” however, you’ll find big, straight-edged structures: to the west, a flock of concrete fins; to the east, a trapezoidal slab with concrete beams poking out. These objects look plainly more man-made than natural—“man-made” being the strange, polished stuff that refuses to admit that it’s natural, too.

Reading Arn’s piece, I recalled another account of a “City” visit – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016). Goodyear wrote,

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?