Artists on Artists Spotlight: An-My Lê on Michael Heizer

By Patricia M. Hernández
Assistant Curator, Dia Art Foundation

In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series. Established in 2001, these lectures highlight the work of contemporary artists from the perspective of their colleagues and peers. Artists are invited to give informal lectures, talks, or other presentations focused on a single artist represented in Dia’s permanent collection, exhibitions, or programming. Developed in the spirit of Dia’s mission, the series is motivated both by an in-depth focus on individual artists and a drive to facilitate new ideas and discourse across disciplines and generations. Dia has recorded all public programs for the last twenty years and the full archive is available in the Watch & Listen section on our website.

In her 2008 Artists on Artists lecture, photographer An-My Lê approaches Michael Heizer’s practice through the lens of photography and war. Lê’s own work focuses on landscapes transformed by the consequences and representations of war, and her lecture addresses the ways in which the social and political upheaval of the 1960s influenced the Land art movement.

Born in Saigon in 1960, Lê fled Vietnam as a teenager with her family in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. She begins her lecture by outlining how the war in Vietnam and the protests in the United States shaped a new American identity and, subsequently, influenced responses by artists that addressed the political moment, forging new modes of making.

She then turns her focus to the parallels between the changes in Vietnam’s landscape that were wrought by the war and the alterations in the earth engendered by Heizer’s land works. Bunkers, blast sites, trenches: Lê highlights how these war structures and scenes emerge as military metaphors in Heizer’s structures, built into the land in the Nevada desert. The U.S. military reshaped Vietnam’s topography through bombing campaigns at an unprecedented scale, as well as the application of herbicides to defoliate the countryside. Wartime documentation often depicts men marching through the craters left by bombs. Lê addresses how this consequent negative space resembles Heizer’s Double Negative (1969). For this work, Heizer displaced 240,000 tons of desert sand from two gash-like ditches, rendering them voids that will remain visible interventions in the land. In this lecture, she also speaks about the monolithic geometric forms of City (1972– ), which alludes to an abandoned military bunker.

As Lê draws out the mythos of Heizer in her lecture, she seeks a more nuanced perspective on how power is enacted in his work. Although Heizer abstains from referencing war directly through his practice, Lê compares the ways in which his work aggressively alters the landscape to how the tools used to fight the Vietnam War changed that region forever. His earthworks, she notes, echo the gravity of war: “[Heizer’s] work is about acts of defiance. It’s a reaction against government control. The idea of a fascistic overtone of a government or a structure is something that he reacts against.” However, she wonders whether exerting power over the landscape in this way may suggest an identification with the oppressor, a concern she also shares in her work as a photographer and a survivor of the Vietnam War.

As Lê concludes, “The idea of landscape is an incredibly powerful and enduring subject that artists have constantly re-explored and reinvented, because the land is a site for dialogue between the individual, the power structure, and something that’s much greater than us—something perhaps spiritual.”

Lê’s photographic work on landscape and war is currently the subject of her first survey exhibition in a United States museum, An-My Lê: Contested Territory, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. To see more and to take a virtual tour of the exhibition, visit the Carnegie Museum of Art website.

An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. She lives and works in New York City.