Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.

30Jan08

Spiral Jetty. Photo via mbuitron at flickr

The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970.

Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, it forms a 450 m long and 4 m wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. (Wikipedia on Spiral Jetty, Utah.)

It is considered to be the central work of American sculptor Robert Smithson,

Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of the then-fashionable minimalism. He soon became affiliated with the Primary Structures movement and artists such as Nancy Holt (whom he married), Robert Morris, and Sol Lewitt. As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying mathematical impersonality to art. He outlined this view in essays and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum.

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey. He was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock. In a later essay, he described such places as the equivalent to the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in a series of ‘non-sites’ in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass. In 1969, he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts gained from his readings of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and George Kubler.

(Wikipedia on Robert Smithson)

Approach to the Spiral Jetty. Photo via toolshed4 on flickr

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred.

Dialectics have nothing to do with such things. I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are – nature as both sunny and stormy. Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th-century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us. Many parks and gardens are re-creations of the lost paradise or Eden, and not the dialectical sites of the present. Parks and gardens are pictorial in their origin – landscapes created with natural materials rather than paint. The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Apart from the ideal gardens of the past, and their modern counterparts – national and large urban parks, there are the more infernal regions – slag heaps, strip mines, and polluted rivers. Because of the great tendency toward idealism, both pure and abstract, society is confused as to what to do with such places. Nobody wants to go on a vacation to a garbage dump. Our land ethic, especially in that never-never land called the “art world” has become clouded with abstractions and concepts.

Robert Smithson in Art Forum, 1972

Spiral Jetty from the air. Photo via mbuitron on flickr

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it.

Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

Friedrich Engels in “The Dialectics of Nature”, 1883

Ground View of Spiral Jetty. Photo via on mbuitron on flickr.

Smithson proposes that the artist should start to map the “bleached and fractured” space of entropy which surrounds him. To deal with the real conditions of art production, but through “low levels of consciousness”, an “oceanic”, Neil Young aesthetic. This is something that has still hardly been started, and most artists who are influenced by minimal or concept art are doing the opposite, domesticating the signs of radicality within ruling class interiors. Yet perhaps we can also blame Smithson for this.

Merlin Carpenter in Spex, 1997

Spiral Jetty. Photo via CRYoung on flickr.