By Angelika Pagel
|
I would like to preface my essay with a cliche and a confession. The cliche of the Spiral Jetty evokes the conventional, though not necessarily inappropriate categorizations applied to the piece and the artist in art history survey texts. The Spiral Jetty, built in 1970, has been canonized as the "icon of land art" (Werkner 1992, 86), the earthwork par excellence, "the quintessential heroic gesture in the landscape" (Hobbs 1981, 192). It is commonly interpreted as a primal symbol of life and death and understood to represent the ultimate revolt against the stifling confines of the gallery and the crude commercialization of the art world. Moreover, the Spiral Jetty as an art object has assumed mythic dimensions (Hobbs 1983, 106) since it was covered by the Great Salt Lake, thus unwittingly improving on the legendary events that, as we will see, partly inspired its conception. Robert Smithson for his part, has been transfigured into a hero, due to his premature and tragic death only three years after completing the Spiral Jetty. As to the confession - I also had Smithson and his Spiral Jetty thus conveniently filed away in my own art historical repertoire - until, for this essay, I traced the expansive interpretive dimensions of the Spiral Jetty and went on my own exhilarating pilgrimage to the site. I further confess to the sheer delight I experienced with Smithson's film of the Spiral Jetty and with the artist's stimulating writings, brimful of provocative cultural theories and decidedly personal artistic principles. I recognized my own guilt in readily categorizing and simplifying artists and their work and, lest art historical lightning strike me, I hope to redeem myself by sharing with you some of my findings. I have divided this essay into three parts: samples of lyrical quotes by Smithson about the Spiral Jetty, followed by a brief litany of "cold facts" and finally a summary of the most important ideas associated with this earthwork. In the first set of quotes, the emphasis is on the dialectic of tranquility and turbulence, synthesized in the Spiral Jetty.
In the second set of citations, the Spiral Jetty and Great Salt Lake emerge as symbols of the origin of life, of life as it expands and contracts, of growth and decay. The Spiral Jetty also emerges as a link to prehistory and the Great Salt Lake as a metaphor for the primordial ooze.
The final selection of quotes locates Smithson and us in one of the artist's favorite sites: above the Spiral Jetty. Suspended there in a helicopter, Smithson contemplates one of his favorite obsessions - entropy.
In this excerpt, Smithson also introduces an ambiguous reference to the famous 17th-century painting Et in Arcadia Ego (And I too, am in Arcadia) by Nicolas Poussin which reminds us that death (in form of a tombstone) is present even in the most idyllic-utopian landscapes. By adapting Poussin's title to read Et in Utah Ego, does Smithson perhaps intimate, tongue-in-cheek, that Utah, at this moment, is the perfect nirvana to him, a sort of Smithsonian "this-is-the-place"? Or does he, like Poussin and his protagonists, point a finger at entropy, that state of disintegration and decay towards which, ultimately, all matter strives, with death being only its beginning? Smithson's position in a helicopter is also noteworthy and rather ironic. Not only did the artist point out the etymological root of "helicopter" in the Greek word for spiral (Holt 1979, 113), activate his "immobile cyclone" through the spiraling motion of a helicopter, the waves produced by its choppers and their reflection on the water while filming The Spiral Jetty, and propose a work of "aerial art" visible only from above for a Texas airport, but he also died while surveying another earthwork from a plane, falling - as Lucy Lippard put it - from the air to the earth, "like some twentieth-century Icarus" (Lippard 1981,40). Robert Smithson was born in New Jersey in 1938 and died at the age of 35 in Texas. He was well-read from the classics to the beatniks. He was interested in science fiction, especially that by J.G. Ballard whose stories focus on "entropy, environment and altered states of consciousness" (Tsai 1988, 73). He witnessed a rain dance at the Hopi village of Oraibi and hiked through Canyon de Chelly. He was attracted to "both prehistoric and postindustrial ruins" (Owens 1992, 48) and fascinated by galaxies, crystalline structures, earth sciences, dinosaurs, geology and maps. His favorite museum was the Museum of Natural History in New York. The Spiral Jetty is located off Rozel Point, west of the Golden Spike Monument. It was begun in April 1970. For its construction, two dump trucks, one tractor and one large front loader moved 6650 tons of rock and earth to create a coil 1500' long and 15' wide. $9000 were provided by the Virginia Dawn Gallery of New York to pay for part of the construction and a 20-year lease for originally $100, later $160 annually was secured from the Utah Land Board (Hobbs 1981, 191). So much for "cold facts". What determined the choice for this specific location? In his Spiral Jetty essay, Smithson emphasized the decisive role played by the red color of the lake at Rozel Point and its association with blood. For Smithson "our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas" (Holt 1979, 113). The Great Salt Lake of course is the remnant of such an ancient body of water, Lake Bonneville, and thus fulfills Smithson's preference for landscapes "that suggest prehistory" (Holt 1979, 187). Furthermore, Rozel Point is not first and foremost known for its irresistible beauty (if it is known at all), thus satisfying another of Smithson's site requirements, namely "to find a site ... free of scenic meaning" (Holt 1979, 186). Smithson disliked the idea of the carefully designed and patterned European garden and even went so far as to suggest that "art degenerates as it approaches the condition of gardening". He preferred the notion of "sites of time" to what he called "gardens of history" which to him implied a sense of the "pastoral", of the manicured artifice or artificial casualness associated with 17th- and 18th-century continental landscaping (Holt 1979, 85-86). Art historian Gary Shapiro defines "sites of time" as "those locations that manifest the forces of growth, change, decay, spoliation, mixture and drift", in other words, locations that affirm process over outcome (Shapiro 1995, 120). The character of the extended area chosen for the realization of the Spiral Jetty, constitutes a perfect "site of time": Rozel Point with its industrial debris from abandoned oil rigs; the Great Salt Lake, both alive and dead, with its primitive organisms, its viscosity of primordial ooze and its ever changing salt crystals, and even nearby Golden Spike Monument with its overgrown railroad embankments, track beds and defunct industrial earthworks such as the fills and cuts Hobbs 1981, 193). As a "site of time", the Spiral Jetty and its surroundings also illustrate the for Smithson crucial notions of "entropy" and "fringes". Entropy - the inevitable disintegration of all matter, of the universe; the law of devolution; the certain tendency of everything to fall apart. Entropy, so Smithson, implies a "built-in obsolescence" (Holt 1979, 154). Ruins could be considered the trademark of entropy. Smithson remarked on our fascination with visiting great ruins, our "urge toward ... civilized refuse" (Holt 1979, 154, 187). As just described, everything about the extended site of the Spiral Jetty is indeed the result of entropy. The Spiral Jetty itself, as if in a grand gesture of deference towards its creator, complied with its "built-in obsolescence" and disappeared under the rising lake waters. When it partially re-emerged in the early 1990s, Salt Lake City artist David Baddley seized the opportunity to engage in what I like to call an "assisted-entropy" performance when he helped the Spiral Jetty to resume its entropic course by throwing stones from the eroding earthwork into the Great Salt Lake. Being deeply fond of the Spiral Jetty, he wanted to pay homage to its legacy by, as David puts it, "actualizing" Smithson's idea of entropy which is allegorized by the Spiral Jetty. It is appropriate at this point to mention Smithson's attitude towards technology which of course was a necessary aspect of building the Spiral Jetty. Smithson felt that the dualism of man-versus-nature was an invention of the Romantic era, that landscapes destroyed by industrialized civilization were "modern monuments" equal to those of ancient cultures (Werkner 1992, 77) and that the products of technology should be considered extensions of nature rather than of humans because, after all, "even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw matter of the earth" (Holt 1979, 82). As if to prove his point, Smithson compared the trucks used in constructing the Spiral Jetty to clumsy dinosaurs (Holt 1979, 114 and The Spiral Jetty film), thus equating present and prehistory, technology and nature. For Smithson, low-tech equipment - what he called "dumb tools" - such as the dump trucks used in building the Spiral Jetty, made construction look like destruction (Holt 1979, 83), a fortunate synchronism because it emphasized, once again, the "built-in obsolescence" of the Spiral Jetty, manifest even as it was being built. Eventually, everything - humanity, technology and nature - will be swept up by entropy. Fringes, peripheries, circumferences were of interest to Robert Smithson in a literal and allegorical sense. In his Spiral Jetty essay, Smithson meticulously describes the wasteland surrounding Rozel Point and in his film, footage of driving the dusty road toward the site is given substantial attention. Peripheries presuppose a center and for Smithson the relationship between a center and its boundaries was a metaphor for the "dialectic between the inner and the outer" (Holt 1979, 156, 155). The nature of a spiral, however, is that is has neither center nor fringes or at least that neither center nor fringes are distinctly separate. It is as if center and fringes are involved in a dialectic without synthesis. The hypothetical center and fringes of a spiral are in a constant state of simultaneous energy and entropy, of concurrent becoming and devolving. The Spiral Jetty was meant to be experienced by walking it. As we follow the coil of the spiral toward the apparent center, we are being decentered coincidentally, since the spiral folds back on itself as it grows. When we arrive at the "center", we realize that we are merely at the end of the coil and we have no choice, just like Smithson in his film of the Spiral Jetty, but to turn back. Unwinding our course, we will get out of the spiral without ever having reached its peripheries. When we finally stand again on the spiral's panhandle, we realize that the spiral's circumference is nothing other than the sum total of its coiling action, that center and fringes are but a continuous passage through time and space. Time is the agent of entropy and the enemy of formalism. The formalist approach, which still dominated art criticism in the 1960s, declared "pure art" to be self-referential (that is, referring to nothing but its own shapes and materials), universal and timeless (Tsai 1988, 73), thus emphasizing an artwork's formal qualities over its content and context. The Spiral Jetty was and is a reaction against this authoritarian and limiting definition of art because it celebrates symbology rather than self-reference, site specificity rather than universality and impermanence rather than timelessness; hence it is not "pure art" in the formalist sense. Like David Baddley, Mark Tansey was intrigued by this icon of earthworks when he painted Purity Test in 1982. Since this is not the place to explore the thicket of postmodernist discourse hidden in this painting, suffice it to say that Tansey's work, like Baddley's, is also an homage, but of a different kind. Purity Test is an homage to intentionally impure art - its own postmodernist impurity and the Spiral Jetty's pre-postmodernist impurity. Purity Test also raises the question whether there even is a "pure art" that exists in a vacuum, detached from allegory, extraneous meanings, social circumstances and contextual realities. Can any art truthfully claim to be informed by nothing other than its own materials, colors and forms? Tansey collapses time in this painting when he confronts 19th-century "Remingtonized" Utes with a 20th-century art work that claims roots in prehistory. In so doing, Tansey may even be paying homage to Smithson's declaration that the present "must go into places where remote futures meet remote pasts" (Holt 1979, 91). Regarding the Spiral Jetty's intended impermanence, its "built-in obsolescence", I feel compelled to bring up two qualifying footnotes. Footnote number one would cite a secondary source making the allegation that in fact Smithson was unwilling to let weathering and the rising waters take over but instead intended to raise the Spiral Jetty by fifteen feet (Hobbs 1918, 196-197). David Baddley embraces this apparent contradiction graciously by explaining that for him it only "humanizes" Smithson and the Spiral Jetty. Just like David admits that his ego played a role in his performance piece, so Smithson should be allowed that moment when he wants to defy entropy. Footnote number two would credit several authors who have remarked on the ultimate irony in the fact that this work of impermanence is now so permanently fixed in photography, film and print. Cultural critic and theorist Craig Owens even suggests that the only "real" place where the Spiral Jetty exists and from where it is fully "intelligible", is "in the film which Smithson made, the narrative he published, the photographs which accompany that narrative, and the various maps, diagrams, drawings ... he made about it", summarily called "texts" in postmodemist jargon. Therefore, Owens hypothesizes, the viewer's "point-of-view" of the Spiral Jetty "is no longer the function of a physical position, but of the mode ... of confrontation" (that is, photographic, cinematic, textual) and concludes that Smithson was one of the first truly postmodemist artists by transforming "the visual field into a textual one" (Owens 1992, 47). As interesting as these theoretical ponderings might be, I wonder whether Craig Owens actually went out to Rozel Point on the long gravel road, past curiously staring cattle, to marvel at the red color of the lake, the mysterious coils shimmering just below the surface. I wonder whether he absorbed the peculiar atmosphere of wasteland mixed with stunning scenery, and then returned home with tar between his toes and under his shoes, salt stains on his clothes, salt crystals forming on legs, hands and arms that explored the muck, smelling of oil and brine shrimp. The extent of the Spiral Jetty's multiple meanings would be a formalist's nightmare. There is first of all the gamut of traditional significations for the spiral shape, derived from authoritative sources on signs and symbols in Smithson's library. The spiral as a symbol of growth and decay, expansion and contraction - therefore a symbol of the origins of life, of evolution and entropy; the spiral as a symbol of cosmic forces in nature, a symbol of infinity, rebirth, the sun, the moon and, from a slightly less popular angle, the spiral as a variation on the metaphor of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere (Shapiro 1995, 219). The spiral represents an urge towards the center and simultaneously away from it; it is associated with water and with the primeval serpent, slithering through the primal ooze. Lucy Lippard in Overlay, her seminal book on contemporary art and the the art of prehistory, even suggests that walking the Spiral Jetty is like the reiteration of primitive initiation rites (Lippard 1983, 225). In any case, Smithson's spiral refers to everything but itself. Secondly, the artist felt the spiral to be an appropriate choice of shape because, loosely interpreted, the growth of crystals, such as the salt crystals which would eventually encrust the Spiral Jetty, proceeds in the manner of a spiral (Holt 1979, 112). The Spiral Jetty could therefore be considered a macrocosmic rendering of the microcosmic, spiral-like molecular structure of a crystal. Thirdly, Smithson's spiral jetty carries on a tacit dialogue with the standard jetty, a leftover from the aborted off shore oil drilling efforts, which is located just west of Smithson's piece. Last but not least, the Spiral Jetty pays homage to a time-honored local myth Smithson chanced upon. According to this legend, which was partly informed by the mixture of fact and fiction in pre-exploration accounts of the North American West and by the lively imagination of Spanish artographers, the Great Salt Lake used to be connected to the Pacific Ocean by an underground river - sometimes called Rio Buenaventura - which caused treacherous whirlpools to form in the lake's center (Morgan 1995, 17, 63). Legends, it has been implied by one art historian, are a way of coming to terms with the passage of time, which is, as I have suggested, the agent of entropy. Hence, by extension legends are safeguards against entropy itself, which is the legacy of time. Mythology and symbology, time and entropy, dialectics of center and edges, sites of time versus inert scenery, the importance of walking the spiral, references to prehistory, science and technology - the Spiral Jetty sucks us into its vortex of meanings, only to spit us out again, wondering where we have been - like the mind-bending spiraling ocean of Stanislaw Lem's sci-fi cult classic Solaris, translated into English in the year of the Spiral Jetty and perhaps part of Smithson's personal and extensive library. Obviously, there are more perspectives of meaning to explore, more grounds to unearth but in keeping with the spiral's symbolism of infinity and enigma, I will abstain from further ruminations and forego any one particular conclusion.
Baddley, David, telephone conversation with the author, 7 March 1996. Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York: Abbeville, 1984. Braun, Barbara. Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Societies of Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Hobbs, Robert. Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. ________ . Robert Smithson: Retrospective. Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1983. Holt, Nancy ed. The Writings of Robert Smithson. New York: New York University Press, 1979. Krauss, Rosalind. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977. Leider, Philip. "How I Spent my Summer Vacation or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah" in Artforum, September 1970. Lippard, Lucy. Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Morgan, Dale L. The Great Salt Lake. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995. Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Robert Smithson: El Paisaje Entropico - Una retrospective 1960-1973. Exhibition catalog. Valencia, Espana: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, 1993. Shapiro, Gary. Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Sobieszek, Robert A. Robert Smithson: Photoworks. Los Angeles and Albuquerque: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Tiberghien, Gilles A. Land Art. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. Tsai, Eugenie. Robert Smithson: Unearthed - Drawings, Collages, Writings. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ________. "The Sci-Fi Connection: The IG, J.G.'Ballard and Robert Smithson" in Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988. Werkner, Patrick. Land Art USA: Von den Upsprungen zit den Grossraumprojeckten in der Wuste. Munchen: Prestel Verlag, 1992. |