Every morning, I look for two things on my drive down 6th. The first is a girl curled on her apartment building’s alley stoop, smoking a morning cigarette and swiping on her phone. She never looks up. The second is Levitated Mass (2012) by Michael Heizer. Over the past year, the two have become my good luck charms. The girl, however, is a bad charm. She doesn’t want a cigarette at the same time every day, so I’ll go weeks without seeing her and start to feel very unlucky. So there’s the boulder: ever reliable, an unmoving witness. It has watched the campus around LACMA dismantle and rebuild as the Academy Museum and the Geffen Galleries, while Wilshire Boulevard
continues its endless procession. The city remakes and it watches.
Originally staged outside Deitch’s SoHo gallery from 2005 to 2008, the Art Parade imagines the parade as an artistic medium, raunchy and rooted in the culture of the city. Revived by LACMA and Deitch to celebrate the opening of the David Geffen Galleries, the June 20th parade featured 146 human-powered projects, more than 1,600 participants , and over 60,000 spectators. I built a ten-foot cardboard replica of Levitated Mass as float number 144.
Levitated Mass is a 22-foot, 340-ton boulder from a Riverside quarry. When it broke free during a 2007 detonation, land artist Michael Heizer recognized it as a megalith. For LACMA Director Michael Govan, transporting it to Los Angeles echoed the ancient practice of moving megaliths to mark the “center,” the perfect groundbreaker for his vision of Miracle Mile as the city’s cultural center. So the rock traveled 105 miles to Los Angeles atop a football-field-sized truck with 206 wheels, passing through 22 cities over 11 nights. Crowds in each city lined the streets after dark to watch what was called “a pain in the neck,” “not art,” “phenomenal,” a “waste,” and “the coolest.” When it arrived on Wilshire Boulevard, hundreds of Angelenos greeted it with blaring horns and cheers, like a parade.
Heizer buys acres of land to use as raw material, creates abstract ‘cities’ in the Nevada desert, puts craters in the floors and boulders in the walls of white cube galleries in New York. Geology takes forever. He makes geological miracles happen in the span of a few years. Levitated Mass condenses thousands of years into a minutes-long encounter.
Levitated Mass depends on participation. The trench beneath the boulder asks us to walk through, recalibrate, look up, come back, until we are standing under all 340 tons. The artwork only reaches its impossible truth when a person walks beneath it. I think about Levitated Mass every day and find it impossible to finish thinking about. More than anything I’ve been stuck on the parade it created at its own arrival. Parading it down Wilshire again felt like another way of entering the work.
To build mine, I threw rock parties. My friends came over on weeknights and we beat up cardboard, made our hands raw from ripping endless strips of Gorilla Tape (the World’s Strongest Tape), drank beer, grilled hot dogs, and inhaled spray paint. We actually never got too much done at any one rock party. The rock was the excuse to hang out. The cardboard boulder grew slowly, unevenly, around whatever else happened those nights.
On June 20th, it was almost 80 degrees in LA’s direct, summer afternoon sunlight. The staging area was asphalt, and all 1,600+of us sort of melted onto it as we waited. Costumes, banners, materials, snacks, limbs, liquids spilled into the dark concrete, slowly obscuring it until one by one, we lined up and made the loop down Wilshire Blvd.
About that one-mile loop, I remember it was loud. Underneath the new Geffen Galleries, sound is trapped and echoed. It was cheering, jeering, a marching band, music blasting from all directions. A few onlookers looked us dead in the eye to say, “That stupid rock!” or “God, it’s so ugly!” It all just washed over us. We played The Clash’s Combat Rock through a tiny speaker nobody could hear but us, spinning the rock and bouncing it off its wooden platform, yelling “ROCK ONNN!” It all creaked like hell and barely made it to the end of the parade.
As 144 of 146 projects, the crowd dissolved in our wake. It was weird, but with the parade lines undrawn, we could easily take our rock to see its namesake. We blundered our way through the 60,000 people who were on LACMA’s campus that day, yelling “WE’RE GIVING IT BACK!” I looked back once and saw Michael Govan filming us and smiling. I looked back again and a group of almost 100 people were following us.
The truth is Levitated Mass creates a parade wherever it comes and goes. As we descended the trench to take our mini mass directly underneath its mother, people lined either side, followed behind, recording and chanting “ROCK, ROCK, ROCK, ROCK!” We lifted it high above our heads to kiss the peak with the boulder’s base. What to do with a 10 ft cardboard rock when the parade is over? Destroy it in front of its namesake with a team of around ten small children who watched me take the first punch and had to get involved. Then ditch the scraps in the dumpster. It felt like the only possible ending.
Levitated Mass was the best excuse. To invent rock parties, to build something ridiculous, to spend a month listening to Combat Rock. But it’s also what the sculpture has always been to Los Angeles: an excuse to stop traffic, argue, cheer, follow strangers, chant, and play. Geology measures time in millennia. Art measures time in encounters. Los Angeles measures time in traffic. Levitated Mass exists in all three.
The next Monday, I drove to work. The girl wasn’t there, but thank god Levitated Mass was.
