Dig Into Munich Depression. The Ins And Outs And Ups And Downs of Digging a Gigantic Hole on The Outskirts of Munich.
It is one of the great 20th century works of art you’ve never seen, and it was developed and constructed—dug, really, over the course of about a week—in a plot outside of the city center that was slated for residential construction during Germany’s postwar development boom. Heizer is considered a master of the American West, the closest figure the art world has to a radical libertarian who thinks in gestures the size of highways and in weight that requires forklifts.
Munich Depression, however, is a work produced in Europe (and it would be a mistake not to consider the symbolism behind an American digging a ditch in a West German capital less than two decades after the bombed-out city was released from U.S. occupation). With the vital help of his friend and enduring supporter, the great gallerist, collector, and curator Heiner Friedrich, Heizer excavated a hole in the ground measuring 100 feet in diameter and 16 feet deep. Visitors could descend into the hole and stare up—which is where the real magic began. The soft edges created a floating 360-degree horizon line that played optical tricks with the viewer’s sense of scale, space, orientation, and the relationship of land, sky, and self. It was, from reports, religious in its psychogeology. Munich Depression only lasted about a month, but Heizer took photographs from inside the hole and, upon return to New York, co-designed his own projector, where he utilized the Munich photos for a piece called Actual Size: Munich Rotary. The black-and-white photographs beamed from six glass slides through six projectors create an exact life-size reproduction of the depression and its horizon line. It is this 1970 projection work that is being displayed this spring at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
This past February, Heizer, who lives in both Garden Valley, Nevada, and Manhattan, sat down with his old friend and collaborator Friedrich (whose numerous achievements include cofounding the Dia Art Foundation in 1974) to discuss the ins and outs and ups and downs of digging a gigantic hole on the outskirts of Munich and how they were flying on belief, adrenaline, and instinct at a time when there wasn’t much support for works that might have seemed to an outsider like construction for construction’s sake. Please read the whole story in interviewmagazine.com.