Is This The Heaviest Object Ever Transported In Modern Times?

Is Los Angeles soon to enter the Guinness Book of Records for the ‘largest boulder ever transported in modern times’?

Earlier this year, a 340-ton, 21.5-foot-high granite boulder from Jurupa Valley was strapped on a 176-wheel transporter truck that traveled at 10mph, and transported over 85-miles in 11 nights, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

The monolith traveled at nights on closed roads over 5 counties and 22 cities, and was led by a police escort—for the monumental sculpture ‘Levitated Mass’ by artist Michael Heizer, which only recently opened to public.

The art piece features a 456-foot-long, 15-foot-deep concrete trough (on LACMA’s campus) running beneath the granite boulder, which allows visitors to walk underneath it.

Heizer originally conceived the work in 1969, but discovered an appropriate boulder only decades later in Riverside County, California.

“This is a historic occasion, one many years in the making,” Michael Govan, CEO of LACMA and Wallis Annenberg Director, told ArtsBeatLA. “Thousands of families witnessed the transport of the 340-ton megalith to LACMA this spring, and now Michael Heizer has realized his artwork on the museum’s campus, where it will stand for generations to come.”

The 340-ton rock is one of the heaviest objects to be moved since ancient times.

Govan told Los Angeles Times, “It’s much contested, the movement of monoliths in ancient times. The estimated weights of certain objects are speculation. But it is pretty clear that this is one of the largest monoliths that’s ever been moved.”

Levitated Mass speaks to the expanse of art history, from ancient traditions of creating artworks from megalithic stone, to modern forms of abstract geometries and cutting-edge feats of engineering.

Would you feel safe walking underneath the giant rock?

[via David K Israel and LACMA, images via Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times]