page_title: Levitated Mass
section_title: Concept and construction
hierarchical_section_title: Levitated Mass / Concept and construction
caption_attribution_description: English: The $10 million rock on display in the back yard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
context_page_description: Levitated Mass is a 2012 large-scale public art sculpture by Michael Heizer at Resnick North Lawn at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The installation consists of a 340-ton boulder sculpture placed above a 456-foot viewing pathway to accommodate 360-degree viewing. The nature, expense and scale of the installation attracted discussion within the public art world, and its notable 106-mile transit from the Jurupa Valley Quarry in Riverside County was widely covered by the media.
  The piece is open to the public during museum hours and does not require museum admission. According to Google Maps, the Levitated Mass sculpture is located less than a 3-minute walk north of Urban Light, the most visited public art sculpture in Southern California.
context_section_description: The work is composed of a 21.5-foot (6.55 m) tall boulder mounted on the walls of a 456-foot (138.98 m) long concrete trench, surrounded by 2.5 acres of compressed decomposed granite.  The boulder is bolted to two shelves affixed to the inner walls of the trench, which descends from ground level to 15 feet (4.5 m) below the stone at its center, allowing visitors to stand directly below the megalith.
  Initial plans for the work described the boulder as being affixed to the trench walls themselves, giving the boulder the appearance of 'floating' when viewed from within the trench via optical illusion, hence the work's title.  Support shelves were subsequently required, which arguably compromised the floating effect.  A 1982 Heizer work in Manhattan, also called Levitated Mass, consists of a much smaller, carved rock set on hidden supports, and does preserve this 'floating' effect.
  Heizer rarely explains or comments on his work and has never offered a public explanation of Levitated Mass's meaning or significance.  He has however described the piece as being 'static art' and emphasized the importance of the boulder's size and of the work's longevity, saying that the work is meant to last 3,500 years.  LACMA has published a preliminary sketch of the work by Heizer that contains a handwritten notation saying that the work "destroys 'gestalt' concepts".
caption: The Rock installation in LACMA's backyard
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