“Water Strider” by Michael Heizer

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During the 1960s and early 1970s, the art world was strongly impacted by the concepts of postmodernism, in which the meanings of all things were called into question. The concepts of postmodernism were founded on the ideas of deconstruction, through which it was discovered that even our most fundamental signs and symbols are capable of representing and communicating different meanings to different people depending on cultural and other understandings and experience. However, at the same time it was discovered that human beings are moved by many of the same emotions and basic motivations – the desire for love and understanding, the need for companionship, sadness, hate and despair are several examples.

Out of these ideas grew the concept of earthwork art, heavily influenced by the ancient past, strongly associated with the divorce between the academic art of the gallery and the natural art of the time and often deeply involved in understanding and exposing the intimate relationship between humankind and the environment. Although “principles espoused by the earliest practitioners of Earthworks art had less to do with the impact of humanity on the environment than with a rebellion against the gallery system” (Siegal, 2004), a close investigation of Michael Heizer’s “Water Strider” reveals that the environment and its connection with the past and importance to the future played a significant role in the artist’s development of this project. The purpose of the present discussion is to discover how this particular artwork functions in relation to these concepts of the formless as they emerged out of postmodernism.

“Water Strider” comprises one fifth of a larger work entitled Effigy Tumuli constructed on a bluff overlooking the Illinois River in a region known as Buffalo Rock State Park near Ottawa, Illinois. Completed in 1985, the work includes five different mounds constructed to represent five different forms of life that are indigenous to the region’s current environment. These are abstracted representations of creatures such as the insect known as a water strider, a catfish, a frog, a turtle and a snake. Each one is constructed to be an abstract representation in the style of the ancient Indians who once inhabited the region. Some, such as the figure of the turtle, is constructed using pre-existing geographical formations as a part of the construction.

In this case, the turtle’s shell incorporates a hill that was already established on site. “Buffalo Rock was once the site of a mine, and as part of its conversion into a state park, the Ottawa Silica Company Foundation commissioned Heizer in 1983 to complete the large-scale tumuli at Buffalo Rock” (Tarasin, 2007). Its name is a literal description of what it is. Effigy is defined by the Random House Dictionary (2009) as “a representation or image, esp. sculptured, as on a monument” while the American Heritage Dictionary (2003) defines tumulus (the singular form of tumuli) as “an ancient grave mound.” Each structure is massive in keeping with the artist’s other works that have involved entire terrains. “Frog” is 340 feet long, “Turtle” is 650 feet long, “Catfish” is 770 feet long and “Snake” is 2,070 feet long (Tarasin, 2007).

“Water Strider” is itself 685 feet long. Intended as an earth reclamation project to turn strip mined land back into a healthy natural environment, the structure is both artwork and environmental project and remains open to the public for the duration of its existence as it is too large to be moved or confined. Laying flat across the ground, the earthwork seen from the air depicts the stylized image of a common water insect seemingly heading in a generally southwest direction toward the river, approaching it from an oblique angle (Tarasen, 2007). The body is a long, medium sized mound that tapers from its widest point approximately where the back legs connect near the center of the figure to a rounded point in the back and a rounded square for the head.

The figure also includes eight very narrow but longer and somewhat shorter mounds radiating from this central shape to represent the bent legs and long antennae of the insect. The figure is so large that one can only truly discern its representation when it is viewed from a helicopter. Satellite images enable one to pick out the shape, but generally only if one already has the knowledge of its location and general appearance (“7 km”, 1998). From the ground, the “Water Strider” has a white dirt trail that leads directly up to the mound where visitors are encouraged to experience the work from the perspective of an insect. This begins to illustrate how the artwork relates to the concepts of postmodernism and the formless.

Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that realism in art is a form of conformism, and that the task of contemporary artists is to produce “incommunicable statements” which cannot be fitted into the easy flow of information within computerized society. In his “Appendix Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?,” published at the end of The Postmodern Condition, he wrote that the “only definition” of realism is that “it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that art.” It is associated in this account with those who “pursue successful careers in mass conformism by communicating by means of the ‘correct rules,’ the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it” (Lyotard, p. 75). This uncritical use of established methods of representation is contrasted with ‘avant-garde’ art, which, he argues, uses experimental innovations in technique and structure to attempt “to make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible” (Lyotard, p. 78). This line of thinking contributes to an understanding of the concept of the formless.

The formless is, in essence, a term interchangeable with the concept of the sublime. This division between a form of artistic practice that replicates existing conventions for describing ‘reality’, and one which challenges these conventions to “allude to something which does not allow itself to be made present” (Lyotard, p. 80) is, Lyotard insisted, central to a definition of postmodernism itself. Lyotard argued that a “postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. The rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for” (Lyotard, p. 81). This is an idealistic conception of artistic production. It implies that avant-garde can produce an ‘innocent’ text, detached, by the conscious effort of the individual artist, from the categories established by preceding works. Realism, Lyotard insisted, simply replicates these established rules.

Kant’s theory of the sublime, on the other hand, states that “the aesthetic of the sublime is where modern art (including literature) finds its impetus, and where the logic of the avant-garde finds its axioms” (Kant, p. 10). For Kant, the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of both pleasure and pain, the pleasure one feels at the pain inherent in the conflict between the subject’s capacity to conceive something and to represent it. For example, we have the idea of the totality of what is, but we can make no representation of it. Modern art devotes itself “to presenting the existence of something unpresentable”; “it will make one see only by prohibiting one from seeing” (Kant, p. 11). Systems of reasoning used to justify such art remain inexplicable without the incommensurability between reality and concept,” an incommensurability that they cannot but disguise (Kant, p. 12).

In contrast, the avant-gardes continually expose the artifacts of presentation that allow thought to be enslaved by the gaze and diverted from the unpresentable” (Kant, p. 12). The presence of this sublime element, then, inspires the imagination in a specific direction based on which elements remain visible or understandable. Its significance is in the way in which it brings attention to the uncertainty of meaning inherent in the work, such that no resolution makes itself apparent. “It expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world” (Lyotard, p. 78). In keeping with these ideas, “Water Strider” is a pure expression of the postmodern ideas of the formless as its very nature refuses to conform to standard or ‘official’ rules of art and its presentation serves to complicate vision in order to force more esoteric considerations.

The structure of the “Water Strider” is both temporary and permanent. It is temporary in that it is made of earth which is subject to numerous forces including erosion, floods, human activity and a number of other events. However, it is permanent in that it cannot be moved from its present location, its structure is relatively stable and erosive effects are likely to take centuries. It is also both recognizable and unrecognizable. If one is flying in the air over the region and happens to look down, one will be able to see the giant water bug sprawled across the ground, making it an easily recognizable structure. However, if one is on the ground, approaching the structure on foot, it resembles nothing any more distinctive than a series of hills in a somewhat unusual juxtaposition making it unrecognizable. This element of the structure brings to mind the mysterious mound-like structures of the ancient Indians who used to live in this region of the United States and used these mounds as sacred burial places for their ancestors.

The image of the “Water Strider” is also both understandable and puzzling. When seen in its entirety, it is clearly a bug and, if water remains on the ground and one is familiar with the common forms of life in this region, the type of bug is known. However, what isn’t known is the meaning of the work, why a water strider should be used as imagery in such a large-scale work. Understanding that the work is part of a reclamation project helps to bring attention to the surrounding environment, which was certainly one of Heizer’s intentions in creating the image, bringing attention to the importance of even so small and seemingly insignificant creature upas this.

This also begins to heighten the work’s connections with the sublime elements of the Native American traditions upon which the work is founded. “Although the original Earthworks pieces were created as a means for artists to escape the stultifying and self-referential gallery system and expand their media to include the land itself, it is difficult to ignore seeming similarities between the works produced by this movement and prior works by prehistoric peoples and more recent large-scale sculptors” (Seigal, 2004). In creating the “Water Strider” in this way, Heizer was making a clear connection to the ancient ways of life not only in structure and image style, but also in spirit as he emphasizes the importance of every living thing to the balance of the environment.

Examining this work in such detail and in combination with the artistic theories of the time has provided a much deeper appreciation for the artwork. When first looking at the “Water Strider”, one might automatically assume it represents a significant waste of time, energy and earth. However, understanding that this work functions to reclaim unusable property into something that contributes to the welfare and enjoyment of the nearby community begins to open the mind to its possibilities. Considering the figure and its different appearances depending upon how one approaches it – whether from the air or the ground – this earthwork encourages connections between the individual and the greater human experience. It does this in a number of ways, again and again illustrating the concepts of postmodernism and the formless.

The contradictions and paradoxes it introduces into one’s thoughts as the image is undecipherable and decipherable, present and past, meaningless and meaningful can do little but address the formless. Experiencing the artwork forces connections with all of life in emphasizing our own smallness crawling around on the body of the bug and realizing how much of the structure is indecipherable from our ‘natural’ position. We are also forced to acknowledge the importance of our smallness as we prove capable of making such drastic changes to our environment. At the same time, we must acknowledge the importance of creatures as small as bugs or disavow our own significance. Finally, the earthwork forces a strong inner connection with the past in its similarity to the Indian burial mounds of native humans and to the future as we realize the way in which these mounds persist today for modern man to experience the ancient ways.

Works Cited

“7 km W of Ottawa, Illinois, United States.” Terra Server USA. Washington D.C.: U.S. Geology Survey, 1998. Web.

“Effigy.” Random House Dictionary. New York: Random House, 2009.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. New York: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Siegal, Joshua. “Earthworks Art.” Visual Images. (2004). Web.

Tarasen, Nick. “Effigy Tumuli.” Double Negative. (2007). Web.

“Tumulus.” American Heritage Dictionary. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.

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“Water Strider” by Michael Heizer

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