After a more than six-month delay, the giant boulder that will be the centerpiece of a likely very permanent art installation at LACMA began its journey to the museum Tuesday night.
The 21-foot high, 340-ton boulder that has spent the past 20,000 or so years anonymously at a quarry in Riverside County will now be part of the art world, the feature of “Levitated Mass.” The specially-designed 299-foot long, 27-foot wide truck that is carrying the rock will take nine days to make its delivery, at speeds nearing a blazing 5 mph.
Once it gets here, it will be placed in the middle of a concrete trench which will allow people to walk underneath the behemoth:
The rock was supposed to be in place last August, but there was a problem with a bridge — it seems the truck would have crushed it, so a new route was required. Finally all of the red tape has been cleared and the odyssey has begun.
It has been reported that the project costs in the “single digit millions, more than five and less than 10,” and paid for mostly by private donations. That’s good; in these difficult financial times, it would be tough to explain to people that their tax money is going towards dumping a rock at a museum.
They ripped up a perfectly good lawn that had only been in place for a few months to construct this thing that on the surface appears to be a vanity project by the artist. But I’ll bet we’ll all be happy with the results — how often to you get to walk around and beneath such an imposing object?