In a year when one of the strongest big-screen films — director Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, about 19th-century British painter J.M.W. Turner — was an artist biopic of the most artful order, the idea of spending hours in the dark with artist backstories may be less off-putting than usual. With UCSB Arts & Lectures’ fascinating new series of documentaries Art on Film, starting Thursday, April 21, at Campbell Hall and running for four more Thursday nights through May 12, art makes its way to the screen in humbler and also truer fashion (read: documentary fashion) and addresses its general field of interest from multiple angles.
The film sequence kicks off with Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer’s Monolithic Sculpture (April 21), directed by Doug Pray, which follows the remarkable trajectory and logistical entanglements of manifesting “land artist” Michael Heizer’s epic work of the same name at LACMA in 2012. The installation involved transporting a 340-ton boulder — a very special, mystically imbued boulder — from a Riverside County rock quarry to LACMA for one of his primal/modernist epiphanies, to the tune of $10 million.
Heizer has been focusing on land and environmental issues in his sculptures since the late ’60s, when he first attempted to create an earlier version of his 2012 piece. The film deals with the life and unique ideas of this gallery-eschewing “outsider” artist (who lives in a remote spot in Nevada and has been creating a massive land sculpture “City” for years, along with landmark works such as “Double Negative”). But the film mostly chronicles the strange creation of his LACMA work, a process that included a long account of the slow transport of “the rock” across four counties in SoCal, to the amazement, skepticism, jeers, and cheers of the public. In that way, the creation of Levitated Mass took on an uncommon public art aspect, the kinetic prelude to its ultimate sedentary state on the LACMA property, at which point the pithy Heizer said it fulfills his vision that “static art is its own language. Everything that’s said is said by it.”