Heizer (born 1944) is a self-styled cowboy with family roots in California and Nevada. Living in New York in the mid-60s, he fell into a loose association with a group of artists who married the formal qualities of mid-century modernism with the pop ecology of the 1960s, in which sculptural materials like marble and plaster were replaced with dirt, common rocks and other ground-harvested objects. Heizer and his colleagues—many of whom moved west to locate large, untouched environments—became increasingly ambitious in the size and scope of their undertakings.

Heizer is best known for his 1969 work Double Negative, a 1,500-foot trench cut into the opposing walls of a canyon on Nevada’s Mormon Mesa, the creation of form through the movement of over 200,000 tons of earth. Along with Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty (1970), Double Negative epitomizes 100 years of modernist thought: the infatuation with progress, confidence in the endless possibility of machines and the veneration of form through its simplification. These sculptures are also massive (and literally dirty) disruptions of their natural settings.

The artist—who in interviews sounds slightly unhinged (or, at least, beleaguered) by his 40-year stay in the desert—keeps the property closed to visitors pending City’s completion. (On a website about the artist, http://doublenegative.tarasen.net, Nick Tarasen provides City’s Google Map coordinates: +38° 1’ 48.00”, -115°, 26’ 10.00”. The satellite view is a 2009 USDA photograph.) At ground level, City is almost entirely below grade, skirted and traversed by a network of berms. In the beginning, the artist, using borrowed machinery, did a lot of the labor himself, but in 1997 (yes, 25 years later) the Dia Foundation—a New York-based organization with a 30-year commitment to Heizer’s brand of audacious, large-scale work—stepped in. With Dia and the support of a handful of family foundations, Heizer was able to hire a full-time construction and excavation crew. Besides shaping the perimeters and hull of the artwork, Heizer and his crew have constructed enormous abstract sculptures (gorgeous, out-and-out expressions of Euclidean fundamentals) and heavy, sloped structures that look like Philip K. Dick’s take on pre-Columbian architecture.

In appearance and effect, the sculpture is a concrete Chichen Itza for the 21st century. Heizer is not trying to directly evoke the civic or religious functions of early Meso- and South American civilizations, although he could do so with competence: His father was an anthropologist and the young Heizer would occasionally join him on his travels. The artist is instead dealing in awe—in formalism and sheer magnitude. He is also dealing in a patently mid-20th century American perspective of awe. In art terms, this is the perspective of the Abstract Expressionists who pushed the size of painted canvases to the absolute capacity of gallery and museum spaces. In general terms, this is the love of the boat-sized car, the McMansion and the 100-foot flagpole. For awhile there, bigger was better.

In recent years, Heizer has joined local ranchers, Nevada politicians and national environmentalists who are contesting the federal government’s plan to store the sum of the nation’s nuclear waste in a facility (now partially completed) in the belly of Yucca Mountain. If all goes as planned—the Obama administration has, for now, tabled the project—low-grade nuclear waste, as well as the potent weapons grade stuff distilled from it, will be transported by rail from over 100 locations throughout the United States to a drop-off point in Caliente, NV. From there the waste will be carried by rail through Nevada ranch land to the repository, where it will sit for thousands of years until the radioactive materials have fully degraded. Situated on a large parcel of private land, City is not quite within shouting distance of the proposed Yucca Mountain facility (and incidentally, the Nevada Test Site and Area 51) but close enough to be troubled by it: The proposed Caliente rail line cuts through the desert within the sightlines of City.

Both City and the repository have been decades in the making, and in very different ways, Heizer’s masterpiece and the detritus of nuclear technologies are stubbornly built to last. Whereas City embodies a sort of visual fulfillment of the modernist impulse—it is a fantastic, outsized expression of pure, egotistical form—the dormant Yucca Mountain facility is a necessary, fated manifestation of the modernist veneration of machines and industry. (A safe storage solution for the United States’ nuclear waste is undeniably needed. The more remote the location, the better.)

City is a reminder that art-making can be bad for the environment: Many art materials are toxic; gas-guzzling machines build and transport work and a lot of installations are temporary, un-recyclable and slated to be thrown away. Either by dint of a green agenda or simply by being a porous member of an increasingly environmentally minded society, the new generation of artists tackling issues of the earth are making smaller, concept-driven and sometimes deliberately helpful gestures. And earthworks, like City, although they sound the part, are not conservationist gestures. Participants in the business of art, while duly awed, are increasingly less comfortable with Heizer’s brand of grandiose, macho production.

BIO Abigail Guay is the exhibitions director at Open Satellite, a contemporary art space in Bellevue, WA.