CAC's Weekend Art Thread: A Giant Rock is Headed for Los Angeles

Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for all you haters in the sticks), it isn't SMOD.

No, the giant rock coming is part of an incredible addition to LACMA (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Levitated Mass:

Michael Heizer and his $120,000 subject of an unwritten work by Edgar Allen Poe

The official story is this will be the latest addition of work to LACMA.

Truth be told, this is going to be our new mayor. No, make that overlord. We need something all-powerful and crushing to overtake all the egos in city hall.

He Who Will Reign Over All, being transported by his servants

From the LACMA website:

Levitated Mass is an artwork by Michael Heizer comprised of a 456-foot-long concrete-lined slot constructed on
LACMA’s campus, upon and at the center of which is placed a 340-ton granite megalith. As visitors walk along the
slot, it gradually descends to fifteen feet deep, running underneath the megalith before ascending back up.

Site-specific art with minimalist roots is generally frowned upon by those not in love with modern art, and that is a shame. There is something that good minimalism, particularly that in the "earth art" vein, can accomplish- a unification and assertion of natural forces. Not a one-ness with nature, but a humbling sense of the massiveness of it. But also an abstraction of the real into the theoretical. I will be the first in line to experience this work when it opens, scheduled for the late spring-early summer.

I am not going into detail about the work yet, since obviously I have not seen it. Rest assured I will comment once I have, barring a massive earthquake striking the Southland at the very unfortunate moment of me walking under it.

The process of moving such a massive rock has become its own event in SoCal:

View more videos at: http://nbclosangeles.com.

LACMA has a route tracker in case you wish to meet our modern megalith, here.

Hauling the 340 ton beast required the creation of a massive, 3-lane-wide rig, was was itself an engineering and logisitical wonder, as you can see:

In case any of you were wondering, the $10 million project was funded with private donors. Your taxes didn't go to this. Those went to Piss Christ. So in case you were getting mad at yet another government boondoggle, I can save you the aneurysm. There are those (some Occupy types being the loudest) who are infuriated money was spent on a "huge rock" instead of the homeless.

Let me answer the minor outbursts from lefties that this money could have "gone to help the unemployed." The money from donors could have been spent on a hundred thousand different things. It is in their right (I know that must boil your blood) to choose what they want their money to go towards. These donors decided it would do a lot of good in this way. Again, that free choice of theirs to do with their spare income what they wish is a thorn in many a liberal's side. If up to many of these do-gooder dolts, the $10 million would have gone to a great "community-building" organization, like ACORN.

People were put to work digging up the damned mass of earth, building the site at LACMA, designing the transport rigging, and dragging the beast across the Southland. More people were employed through this privately-funded project than in the dozens of "shovel ready" stimulus projects that litter Southern California. They are free to whine about it being "a vanity project by a slave to the elites" (pulled from a comment so incredibly stupid I won't quote in its entirety here for fear its density may actually kill you), but it accomplished a lot more good indirectly than your daring 8 seconds of keyboard-assaulting fury.

Switching away from the curious lefty outrage and Levitating Mass, an observation and a remembrance. Art gets a lot of shit from the right. Culture in general does. The passing of Breitbart energized me on my argument that we need to become the culture. Breitbart realized you don't win by simply fighting the media. You become the media (to steal a line ironically from Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra). You don't like current culture? Infiltrate it. If your kids or family members are passionate about art, music, film, etc, don't discourage them, embrace it. The more conservative minded people we have to re-engage the arts, the less "leftist" the arts will be.

Conservatives decided, stupidly, to all but abandon the arts (and the overall culture they increasingly whined was lurching to the left) over the last few decades. Just cede the entertainment part of our media to the left. Some openly said that was stupid, and made it a call to arms for the conservative-minded creative types to step up to the plate. Andrew Breitbart was the most prominent of these, directly and indirectly. I never knew him personally, and I will never get the opportunity to thank him for it. But I will paint, shoot, and proudly share my work and my conservative beliefs without any shame.

Everyone who can, must.

I will be doing the Art Threads after a very long hiatus every Sunday. If you are a creative type, feel free to submit your work to theoneandonlyfinn (at) gmail.com. If you happen to be in a creative event (gallery show, performance, etc), feel free to also submit a link and I will post it in upcoming threads.

posted by CAC at 06:32 PM

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