As you may have surmised from past blog posts or any of the news items already written about Levitated Mass, installing Michael Heizer’s latest artwork is not quite the same as purchasing a painting, shipping it to the museum, and hanging it on the wall. In fact it feels a lot closer to making a building, what with all the construction workers employed both onsite at LACMA, digging the 456-foot-long slot in the earth north of the Resnick Pavilion, and the team from Emmert International building the transporter for the 340-ton megalith currently resting in a Riverside quarry. Just to give you an idea of how complex the project is and how many people are involved in making it happen, check out this video documenting recent progress at the quarry site.

The transportation of the megalith, made possible by Hanjin Shipping Co., Ltd., will happen almost entirely in the small hours of the night over many days. The boulder is scheduled to start moving… well, soon. Once it begins, we’ll be tracking it on the Levitated Mass webpage as well as offering daily updates on Twitter so stay tuned for news of its movement.

Scott Tennent