LEVITATED MASS (Doug Pray) Rating: NNNN
Some documentaries are about politics. Some are about people. Doug Pray’s very enjoyable Levitated Mass is about a really big rock.
Specifically, Pray is out to document artist Michael Heizer’s project to bring a very large boulder to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the summer of 2012.
Pray – whose last doc was the insightful 2009 advertising study Art & Copy – tracks the journey from beginning to end, starting with the detonation at a California quarry that split the 308-tonne slab from a rock shelf and charting the long, complex process of transporting said rock (slowly, carefully and over several nights) to its current home as an exhibit at LACMA.
Through it all, a sense of bemusement and goodwill surrounds the project, with Pray suggesting none too subtly that the human ingenuity required to make the thing happen is at least as artful as the thing itself. It’s kind of delightful, really.
