Levitated Mass Review

About a month after moving to Los Angeles, a friend and I ventured to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for an afternoon of moseying.  With only a couple hours to take in the sights, I barely saw anything, but at the end of our venture, he took me out to see the massive installation on the museum's front lawn.  It's Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass, and words don't quite do it justice.  A massive boulder sits atop parallel walls, while a passageway underneath allows visitors to stand directly below the huge rock.  Lots of people take forced perspective pictures making themselves out to possess superhuman strength, while others admire from a distance, feeling it too eerie to pass beneath the piece's focal point.  It's a sight to behold, and one of the museum's crown jewels.

Having seen the work in person, I was anxious to see Doug Pray's documentary, also titled Levitated Mass, about the monumental effort it took to make Heizer's decades-in-the-making piece come to fruition.  I was also skeptical, wondering how a feature-length documentary could focus on a single work and keep my attention.  I feared for naught.

Pray's documentary, wisely, isn't solely a look at how Levitated Mass came into being.  Instead, he widens the scope of his film, taking a brief survey of Heizer's bizarre, inspiring career and exploring the way art both unifies and divides us.  Levitated Mass proves not just an insightful art doc, but also a lovely peek into public consciousness about art.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, and many eyes, with many points of view, take in the rock as it makes its way to Los Angeles.  And the people with those eyes also have mouths, and use them to share wildly different opinions about Heizer's odd marriage of modern and primordial influences.

The sheer logistics of the project are staggering, and enough to warrant a cinematic record of Levitated Mass's creation.  Even for Heizer, whose career is marked by numerous ambitious projects, including "negative sculptures" that exist underground and a city project in the Nevada desert, Levitated Mass is a massive undertaking.  Once a big enough rock is found in the Riverside, California quarry, Heizer decides to bring his idea, originally conceived in the 1960s, to life.  To make the move from Riverside to Los Angeles - not too terrible a drive for a normal wheeled vehicle - a behemoth multi-faceted monstrosity must be built, with multiple trucks connected and various pivot points to navigate turns.  Each city and town along the way must approve, too, as power lines and stoplights have to be moved out of the way, and highways prove unnavigable because of overpasses and an inability to bear the boulder's weight.  It's a miracle that everyone who needs to sign off does, but it takes a bunch of villages to raise a monolithic art piece, apparently.

The details of the project, and Heizer's other projects, provide plenty of intellectual stimulation.  Viewers craving something to chew on will find plenty as they consider Heizer's work, which defies not only easy explanation, but easy description.  He's a mad scientist, an engineer, a visionary, and more; alongside his devoted wife, he makes seemingly impossible structures materialize.

But Levitated Mass gets its heart from the canny, candid musings of the people along the way.  With plenty of national media coverage, and intense local interest, the boulder's journey becomes a hullabaloo, with people lining the streets, snapping photos, and even staging festivals along the winding, surface street-intensive route.  There are plenty of people, young and old alike, who express simple awe, but there are more personal, revealing reactions, too.  An unexpected stop has the rock parked for a day in front of a church with a Spanish name translating to "Rock of Salvation," which stirs up impassioned faith in religious passers-by looking for a sign from God.  Impoverished onlookers decry the project from a financial standpoint; the ten million dollars spent on Levitated Mass could've been used to help create jobs and rejuvenate the economy, rather than movie a rock across state.

These differing reactions reveal the power of art to reveal something not merely about the artist, but within the viewer.  When beholding a creative piece, we bring our own baggage, see ourselves reflected in it, or excluded from it.  As the boulder moves from town to town, the people are forced to confront the art in progress, and thus find themselves reflecting on what it means, and what they mean.  Hearing the awe, frustration, and confusion proves funny, poignant, and powerful.  It also suggests that, however objectively fascinating a particular piece of art might be (if one wants to argue such can be true), it becomes infinitely more valuable when it is being seen, celebrated, and criticized.  Then it becomes more than a sculpture on a pedestal or a painting on the wall.  It becomes woven into the fabric of humanity, a vital (if fleeting) blip of shared experience.