Effigy Tumuli

Michael Heizer (b. 1944 Berkeley, CA; lives and works in New York, NY, and Garden Valley, NV) is among the best-known artists associated with Land art, a movement that originated in the late 1960s characterized by large sculptures called “earthworks” largely made from materials found in the remote landscapes where they are sited. While scholars of Land art often fleetingly mention the influence of Native visual cultures on earthwork artists, the dominant historical narrative of the movement suggests that it grew out of Minimalism and that by creating site-specific artworks outdoors beyond the confines of galleries and museums—supposedly making them resistant to commodification—Land art was a critical response to the object and market-driven art world of the 1960s and seventies. I use Heizer’s 1985 earthwork Effigy Tumuli as a case study to complicate this reading by elucidating the artists’ undertheorized interest in and use of Native art and land-based practices. In doing so, I connect his work and the broader Land art movement to the American cultural tradition of Indian play as theorized by Philip J. Deloria. I suggest that Heizer’s motivation for “playing Indian” follows a dialectical pair of desires to create distinctly American art while also implicitly criticizing American imperialism

Adornment · Dialectic · Minimalism (technical communication) · Narrative · Object (grammar) · Reading (process) · Sculpture · Visual art of the United States · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora