This time, though, Sparhawk, Parker, and bassist Steve Garrington knew they wanted to go further with Burton and his palette of sounds, to see what someone who is, as Sparhawk puts it, “a hip-hop guy” could truly do to their music. Burton recorded Low’s last album, 2015’s Ones and Sixes, at April Base, adding might to many of its beats and squelch and frisson beneath many of its melodies. Burton, the quietly energetic and adventurous producer who has made records with James Blake, Sylvan Esso, and The Tallest Man on Earth in recent years while working as one of the go-to figures at Bon Iver’s home studio, April Base. To make Double Negative, Low reenlisted B.J. Instead, in faithfully defiant fashion, Low will release its most brazen, abrasive (and, paradoxically, most empowering) album ever: Double Negative, an unflinching eleven-song quest through snarling static and shattering beats that somehow culminates in the brightest pop song of Low’s career. But Low will not commemorate its first quarter-century with mawkish nostalgia or safe runs through songbook favorites. Since 1993, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker-the married couple whose heaven-and-earth harmonies have always held the band’s center-have pioneered a subgenre, shrugged off its strictures, recorded a Christmas classic, become a magnetic onstage force, and emerged as one of music’s most steadfast and vital vehicles for pulling light from our darkest emotional recesses.

The work is currently owned by MoCA and is accessible by four-wheel drive vehicle or motorcycle.In 2018, Low will turn twenty-five. In 2021, plans for a solar development project near Double Negative were rejected due to resident protests against the project's impact on the artwork. A good aerial photograph appears in the catalogue, but Heizer reportedly worried that documentation in a museum gallery would misrepresent a sculpture that he felt could be known only through physical experience. For the large-scale, historical survey of land art “Ends of the Earth” at MoCA in 2012, Heizer did not want any representation of Double Negative to be included in the exhibition. įor the solo exhibition 'In Context: Michael Heizer, Geometric Extraction', MoCA was able to include a photographic panorama of Heizer’s work.

Recently however he has expressed a contrasting wish to restore the piece, perhaps in opposition to Robert Smithson's support for the principle of entropy. Among the terms of the agreement with the museum is the fact that, according to the artist's wishes, MoCA will undertake no conservation of the piece as Heizer indicated that nature should eventually reclaim the land through weather and erosion. Dwan then donated Double Negative to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA) in 1984, with Heizer’s blessing, to coincide with “In Context: Michael Heizer, Geometric Extraction”. In 1971 Heizer prevented the Dwan Gallery from selling the work. In 1969 the art dealer Virginia Dwan funded the purchase of the 60-acre site for Double Negative and in turn, the artist transferred the property deeds to Dwan. The work essentially consists of what is not there, what has been displaced.ĭouble Negative can be reached by following Mormon Mesa Road north-eastward from Overton to the top of the mesa, continuing across it for 2.7 miles, turning left at the opposite edge onto a smaller path that extends along the rim of the mesa, and then following the path north for 1.3 miles. The 'negative' in the title thus refers in part to both the natural and man-made negative space that constitutes the work. Two trenches straddle either side of a natural canyon (into which the excavated material was dumped). The work consists of a long trench in the earth, 30 feet (9 m) wide, 50 feet (15 m) deep, and 1500 feet (457 m) long, created by the displacement of 244,000 tons of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone.

Double negative