Robert Smithson’s time machine
For me, at the moment, one of the great disappointments of Google Earth is its unreadiness to focus on Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on the briny shore of Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. Not only would it be a pile of fun zipping around over it like a bird, you could keep an eye on how it’s doing from time to time. As you can see below, the satellite was obviously having a fuzzy day.
This is easily the most famous of the many earth-moving efforts of Smithson (1938-1973), who came out of industry-minded Passaic, New Jersey, and obviously wanted to sculpt a better world. He fashioned “Spiral Jetty” over the course of six days in April 1970 out of basalt rocks and earth, a counterclockwise coiled dragon 1,500 feet long and 15 wide.
From that coil reel off galaxies of symbolic meanings. For a fine if borderline flowery analysis, see Angelika Pagel’s essay for the National Parks Service.
One admirer called the work “the quintessential heroic gesture in the landscape”. Others applaud what Pagel characterises as “the ultimate revolt against the stifling confines of the gallery and the crude commercialisation of the art world”.
Smithson and his truckers finished their job and saw that it was good. Then the water in the lake returned to its normal level and submerged the sculpture for three decades. Then in 1999 the jetty reappeared above the surface, the formerly black rock all pink with salt encrustation, but before anyone could say “global warming”, heavy snowfalls raised the lake level again in 2005 and partially sunk it once more.
Another piece by Smithson: “Glue Pour”, set up in Vancouver in 1969, photographed by George Steinmetz. Not nearly so interesting, is it?
When the jetty rose from the brine in ‘99, an artist from Salt Lake City, David Baddley, ritually threw some of its stones into the lake in an “assisted-entropy” performance. Entropy — the inevitable disintegration of all matter — fascinated Smithson. People love to visit great ruins, he said, unable to resist the “urge toward … civilised refuse”.
The colour of the water — that of pale blood, a gift of the bacteria and algae, but sporadically yielding to turquoise, copper, pale green and cobalt blue — appealed to Smithson, as did the lake’s links to a primordial sea. It’s a shape-shifting leftover of ancient Lake Bonneville, which was the size of Lake Michigan. Legend connects it to the Pacific Ocean by an underground river — the “Rio Buenaventura” — which caused treacherous whirlpools to form in the lake’s centre.
As well, the artist appreciated the junk that man left behind after hammering a continental railroad together nearby and thus foreseeing Golden Spike National Historic Site. And when he flew over his work-in-progress in a helicopter, Smithson evoked Poussin, declaring “et in Utah ego”. Death in Utopia.
Three years later Smithson came down hard, dying in a plane crash in Texas while surveying yet another earthwork.
Many people do come to see the sculpture, even though it’s wave-washed and well off the beaten path (”One must earn this experience,” it’s said). Their trampling and, more to the point, exposure to the elements have long been a source of worry for the owner, the Dia Foundation. Some want to build it up stronger and even add some more basalt to restore the original colour, but although Smithson wanted his works preserved as much as possible, I think nature’s way is best.
Tyler Green wrote of visiting the great fractal for ArtsJournal.com:
BLOCKQUOTE
I walked out onto the jetty, following its spiral curve to the center. Most art isn’t made to be touched, let alone walked on. The jetty is. Like virtually no other artwork, “Spiral Jetty” transforms art viewing into a five-sense experience. I smelled brine, I heard chirps and voices carried over the flat by the light breeze; I tasted the lake on my lips, I felt the crusty salt crystals that cover the black basalt of the jetty, and my eyes happily ignored the topographic drama around me so they could fix on the jetty.
And Pagel mentions Craig Owens, a “cultural critic and theorist”, suggesting that the sculpture today only really exists in an “intelligible” state is in the film that Smithson made about it and the myriad photographs, maps, diagrams and drawings documenting it. So that now the viewer’s point of view is no longer a matter of where the jetty is, but the media that have captured it, thus adding to the artwork’s vortex of meanings, and offering yet another option for exploring ideas of time, space and change.
So I guess I can’t feel too bad about not having a clear view of “Spiral Jetty” on Google Earth.
You can join in this particular artistic process by visiting Smithson’s own, rather tight-fisted website or the equally frugal “home” site, but the other online sources mentioned above are far better, as is the article at Sculpture.org.
Lovely consortium of images and commentary, as usual. Where did you get those shots of the jetty? Are they Google Earth on a less-fuzzy day? I’m struck by the irony that we see a perspective of Smithson’s artwork that he never did, like Mozart’s last 3 symphonies which were never performed in his lifetime.
We visited the Jetty during the drought in 2001. It was quite the pilgrimage I must say, but worth the long drive and feelings of “are we utterly lost?!!” every half hour or so. Even amid the garbage, abandoned trailers and mine tailings, the scene was surprisingly beautiful. The rocks were covered in salt crystals; the pink water was utterly surreal. My husband put on his fishing waders and walked the whole spiral. I sat back with the kids and played in the briney shallows.
And since then the waters have risen and reclaimed the whole thing…. Nature’s entropy at work.
Thankyou, Julie. It’s absolutely terrific having a first-person account of the site here on the blog, and I really envy you being able to see the jetty.
I really should have credited the photos properly, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten now where they came from, but it didn’t take me too long to find them on the Web. Seems to me someone in the Google Earth Community may have posted the aerial photos in the forum (no, they’re not GE images). It is indeed an amazing, thought-provoking work.