A massive public sculpture worth $10 million

Just 60 miles from the ubiquitous Stone Valley Quarry, workers are scurrying around a mammoth 21-foot-high, 340-ton solid granite boulder; marked by an expanse of dust, roaring bulldozers, boulders and cut granite hillsides - to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Museum Mile. If everything works well, this bewildering boulder is slated to hover over a cut in the earth on the museum’s grounds, and be open for public viewing, by the end of next month.

California-based sculptor Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass is in keeping with his reputation of huge outdoor installations, with extensive usage of earth and rock. More than a brash occupation of outdoor space, what makes it really ambitious is the whole logistics of moving Heizer’s rock, dynamited out of a hillside. It’s a trip that takes the boulder right through the heart of a highly congested urban center:, through 120 miles of journey - nine nights at six miles per hour – cutting across highways, overpasses, bridges and sharp turns.

The exercise, almost five years in the planning (with sketches of it done way back in the late 1960s), is nothing short of a massive military movement. Emmert International, known to move very large objects, is overseeing the relocation of a gigantic rock as the artist wants.

The rock raised off the ground by hydraulic lifts is put in a cradle; steel trusses built around it, all part of a modular tractor having 22 axles, each carrying brakes and 196 wheels. Along with the rock, it will weigh almost 1,210,900 pounds. The rig, about 295 ft long x 27 ft wide, requires a team of 12 people, to run it.

Teams will be deployed for lifting telephone and power lines, swinging traffic lights to the side and laying down plates on suspect patches of bridges or roads. Once the ‘rock‘ arrives at the museum, its new address, disassembling the transporter as well as sliding the boulder to center it over a 456-foot-long slot already slashed into the ground, will take place. The whole project will cost close to $10 million.