Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty 0520245547, 9780520245549

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Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty

With texts by George Baker Lynne Cooke

Bob Phillips »

Catherine Phillips

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Ann Reynolds-s

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kjte Shaw

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Robert Smithson Diana Thater

‘and an interview with Robert Smithson by Kenneth Baker

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Published by University of California Press in cooperation with Dia Art Foundation, New York Unversity of Califomia Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Lt London, England {© 2005 by Dia Art Foundation, New York Cataloguing inPubication Data ison fle with the Library of Congress. ISBN 0:520-24554-7 (Hardcover only) Al artworks by Robert Smithson © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York “The Spiral Jetty” by Robert Smithson was orginally published in Arts of the Enironment, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: Brazier, 1972). Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, wth Barbara Schréder and Bettina Funcke Research assistance by Karin Jaschke Prootreacing by Richard Galin and Libby Hruska Designed by Katy Homans Printed and bound in italy by Cont Tipocolor Arti Grafiche Al cgnts reserved. No part ofthis publication may be repreduced in any frm or by any ‘electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior waiten permission from the publisher and author. This publication was made possible through generous support from Philip E. Aarons ‘and Shelley Fox Aarons MD. Front and back covers: fl stils from Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson Endpapers: Mark Ruwedel “ile page: Gianfranco Gorgon! Manufactured in aly 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 woe7es4a2a ‘allable through the University of California Press worapress ed

The Spiral Jetty Robert Smithson 7 Spiral Jetty A Visual Diary, 1970-2005, 14

Contents

“a position of elsewhere” Lynne Cooke 53 At the Jetty Ann Reynolds 3 The Cinema Model George Baker 79 ‘Smithson, Writer Lytle Shaw 115 Talking with Robert Smithson Kenneth Baker 147 ‘A Man Becomes Unstuck in Time in the Film That Became a Classic! Diana Thater 165 Building the Jetty Bob Phillips 185 Catherine Phillips 199 Selected Bibliography 202 Afterword Michael Govan, Director, Dia Art Foundation 206

Robert Smithson

The Spiral Jetty (1972) Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through. 0. K. Chesterton

My concern with salt lakes began with my work in 1968 on the Mono Lake Site-Nonsite in California.* Later | read a book called Vanishing Trails of Atacama by William Rudolph which described salt lakes (salars) in Bolivia in all stages of desiccation, and filled with micro bacteria that give the water surface a red color. The pink flamingos that live around the salars match the color of the water. In The Useless Land, John ‘Aarons and Claudio Vita-Finzi describe Laguna Colorada: “The basalt (at the shores) is black, the volcanos purple, and their exposed interiors yellow and red, The beach is grey and the lake pink, topped with the icing of iceberglike masses of salts.”? Because of the remoteness of Bolivia and because Mono Lake lacked a reddish color, | decided to investigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah. From New York City | called the Utah Park Development and spoke to Ted Tuttle, who told me that water in the Great Salt Lake north of the Lucin Cutoff, which cuts the lake in two, was the color of tomato ‘soup. That was enough of a reason to go out there and have @ look. Tuttle told my wife, Nancy Holt, and myself of some people who knew the lake. First we visited Bill Holt who lived in Syracuse. He was instrumental in building a causeway that connected Syracuse with Antelope Island in the southern part of the Great Salt Lake, Although that site was interesting, the water lacked the red coloration I was looking for, so we ‘continued our search. Next we went to see John Silver on Silver Sands Beach near Magna. His sons showed Us the only boat that sailed the lake. Due to the high salt content of the water it was impractical for ordinary boats to use the lake, and no large boats at all could go beyond the Lucin Cutoff on which the transcontirental railroad crossed the lake. At that point I was still not sure what shape my work of art would take. | thought of making an island with the help of boats and barges, but in the end | would let the site determine What | would build. We visited Charles Stoddard, who supposedly had the only barge on the north side of the cutoff. Stoddard, a weltdriler, was one of the last homesteaders in Utah. His attempt to develop Carrington Island in 1932 ended in failure because he couldn't find fresh water. “I've had the lake,” he said. Yet, while the was living on the island with his family he made many valuable observations of the lake. He was kind ‘enough to take us to Little Valley on the east side of the Lucin Cutoff to look for his barge—it had sunk. The abandoned man-made harbors of Little Valley gave me my first view of the wine-red water, but there were too many “Keep Out” signs around to make that a practical site for anything, and we were told to “stay away” by two angry ranchers. After fixing a gashed gas tank, we returned to Charles Stoddard’s house north of ‘Syracuse on the edge of some salt marshes. He showed us photographs he had taken of “icebergs,”* and Kit Carson's cross carved on a rock on Fremont Island. We then decided to leave and go to Rozel Point. ‘Spiral Jetty, 1970 Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon!

Driving west on Highway 83 late in the afternoon, we passed through Corinne, then went on to Promontory. Just beyond the Golden Spike Monument, which commemorates the meeting of the rails of the first transcontinental railroad, we went down a dirt road in a wide valley. As we traveled, the valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscapes we had seen. The roads on the map became a net of dashes, while in the far distance the Salt Lake existed as an interrupted silver band. Hills took on the ‘appearance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. We followed roads that glided away into dead ends. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stony matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediments were countless bits of wreckage. Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devor industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud. ‘Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on pitings could have been the habitation of “the missing link.” A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes. ‘About one mile north of the oil seeps | selected my site. Irregular beds of limestone dip gently eastward, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance. It is one of few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jigsaw puzzle that composes the salt flats. As | looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cycione while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the maintand oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still. The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a bolling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prom ence, Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none. After securing a twenty year lease on the meandering zone,* and finding a contractor in Ogden, | began building the jetty in April, 1970. Bob Philips, the foreman, sent two dump trucks, a tractor, and a large front loader out to the site. The tail of the spiral began as a diagonal line of stakes that extended into the meandering zone. A string was then extended from a central stake in order to get the coils of the spiral. From the end of the diagonal to the center of the spiral, three curves coiled to the left. Basalt and earth were

scooped up from the beach at the beginning of the jetty by the front loader, then deposited in the trucks, whereupon the trucks backed up to the outline of stakes and dumped the material. On the edge of the water, at the beginning of the tail, the wheels of the trucks sank into a quagmire of sticky gumbo mud. A whole afternoon was spent filing in this spot. Once the trucks passed that problem, there was always the chance that the salt crust resting on the mud flats would break through. The Spiral Jetty was staked out in such @

way as to avoid the soft muds that broke up through the salt crust, nevertheless there were some mud fissures that could not be avoided. One could only hope that tension would hold the entire jetty together, and it did. A cameraman was sent by the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles to film the process. The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. On eye level, the tail leads one into an undifferentiated state of matter. One’s downward gaze pitches from side to side, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the inner and outer edges, while the entire mass echoes the irregular horizons. And each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice. Growth in a crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw. The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiraling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times. This description echoes and reflects Brancusi’s sketch of James Joyce as a “spiral ear” because it suggests both a visual and an aural scale, in other words it indicates a sense of scale that resonates in the eye and the ear at the same time. Here is a reinforcement and prolongation of spirals that reverberates up ‘and down space and time. So it is that one ceases to consider art in terms of an “object.” The fluctuating res‘onances reject “objective criticism,” because that would stifle the generative power of both visual and auditory scale. Not to say that one resorts to “subjective concepts,” but rather that one apprehends what is around ‘one’s eyes and ears, no matter how unstable or fugitive. One seizes the spiral, and the spiral becomes a seizure. ‘After a point, measurable steps ("Scale skal n, It. or L; It. Scala; L scala usually scalae pl. |. a. orig nally a ladder; a flight of stairs; hence, b. a means of ascent”®) descend from logic to the “surd state.” The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event. The “curved” reality of sense perception operates in and out of the “straight” abstractions of the mind. The flowing mass of rock and earth of the Spiral Jetty could be trapped by a grid of segments, but the segments would exist only in the mind or on paper. Of course, it is also possible to translate the mental spiral into a three-dimensional succession of measured lengths that would involve areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses, and strains; but in the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality. Ambiguities are admitted rather than rejected, contradictions are increased rather than decreased—the alogos undermines the logos. Purity is put in jeopardy. | took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt. “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown, We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in con structing the creature that made the footprint. And lo it is our own."® For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) | would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly ‘overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps. Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes of Rozel Point | closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. | opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents, no they were veins and arteries

sucking up the obscure sediments. My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere; | thought of Jackson Pollock's Eyes in the Heat (1946; Peggy Guggenheim Collection). Swirling within the incandescence of solar energy were sprays of blood. My movie would end in sunstroke. Perception was heaving, the stomach turning, | was on a geologic fault that groaned within me. Between heat lightning and heat exhaustion the spiral curled into vaporization. | had the red heaves, while the sun vomited its corpuscular radi ions. Rays of glare hit my

eyes with the frequency of a Geiger counter. Surely, the storm clouds massing would turn into a rain of blood. Once, when | was flying over the lake, its surface seemed to hold all the properties of an unbroken field of raw meat with gristle (foam); no doubt it was due to some freak wind action. Eyesight is often slaughtered by the other senses, and when that happens it becomes necessary to seek out dispassionate abstractions. The dizzying spiral yearns for the assurance of geometry. One wants to retreat into the cool rooms of reason. But no, there was Van Gogh with his easel on some sun-baked lagoon painting ferns of the Carboniferous Period. Then the mirage faded into the burning atmosphere.

From the center of the North—Mud, salt North by East—Mud, salt Northeast by North—Mud, salt Northeast by East—Mud, salt East by North—Mud, salt East—Mud, salt East by South—Mud, salt Southeast by East—Mud, salt Southeast by South—Mud, salt ‘South by East—Mud, salt ‘South—Mud, salt South by West—Mud, salt ‘Southwest by South—Mud, salt Southwest by West—Mud, salt West by South—Mud, salt West—Mud, salt West by North—Mud, salt Northwest by West—Mud, salt Northwest by North—Mud, salt

Spiral Jetty. crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks, crystals, rocks,

water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water water

North by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

The helicopter maneuvered the sun's reflection through the Spiral Jetty until it reached the center. The water functioned as a vast thermal mirror. From that position the flar reflection suggested the

ion source of a cyclotron that extended into a spiral of collapsed matter. All sense of energy acceleration expired into a rippling stillness of reflected heat. A withering light swallowed the rocky particles of the spiral, as the helicopter gained altitude. All existence seemed tentative and stagnant. The sound of the helicopter motor became a primal groan echoing into tenuous aerial views. Was | but a shadow in a plastic bubble hov‘ering in a place outside mind and body? Et in Utah ego. | was slipping out of myself again, dissolving into

@ unicellular beginning, trying to locate the nucleus at the end of the spiral. All that blood stirring makes ‘one aware of protoplasmic solutions, the essential matter between the formed and the unformed, masses of cells consisting largely of water, proteins, lipoids, carbohydrates, and inorganic salts. Each drop that splashed onto the Spiral Jetty coagulated into a crystal. Undulating waters spread millions upon millions of crystals over the basalt. The preceding paragraphs refer to a “scale of centers” that could be disentangled as follows: (2) ion source in cyclotron (0) a nucleus (c) distocation point (a) a wooden stake in the mud (€) axis of helicopter propeller (f) James Joyce's ear channel (@) the Sun (h) a hole in the film reel.

Spinning off of this uncertain scale of centers would be an equally uncertain “scale of edges: (@) particles (b) protoplasmic solutions (©) dizziness (@) ripples (€) flashes of light (f) sections

(@ foot steps

(h) pink water.

The equation of my language remains unstable, a shifting set of coordinates, an arrangement of variables spilling into surds. My equation is as clear as mud—a muddy spiral. Back in New York, the urban desert, | contacted Bob Fiore and Barbara Jarvis and asked them to help me put my movie together. The movie began as a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving. And the movie editor, bending over such a chaos of “takes” resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Film strips hung from the cutter's rack, bits and pieces of Utah, outtakes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of footage. Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs. Fiore pulled lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a Neanderthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth. Outside his 13th Street loft window one expected to see Pleistocene faunas, glacial uplifts, living fossils, and other prehistoric wonders. Like two cavemen we plotted how to get to the Spiral Jetty from New York City. A geopolitics of primordial return ensued. How to get across the geography of Gondwanaland, the Austral Sea, and Atlantis, became a problem. Consciousness of the distant past absorbed the time that went into the making of the movie. | needed @ map that would show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world | existed in.

| found an oval map of such a double world. The continents of the Jurassic Period merged with continents of today. A microlense fitted to the end of a camera mounted on a heavy tripod would trace the course of “absent images” in the blank spaces of the map. The camera panned from right to left. One is liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hypothetical monsters that lurk between the map's latitudes; they are designated on the map as black circles (marine reptiles) and squares (land reptiles). In the pan shot one doesn’t see the flesh-eaters walking through what today is called Indochina. There is no indication of Pterodactyis flying over Bombay. And where are the corals and sponges covering southern Germany? In the emptiness one sees no Stegosaurus. In the middle of the pan we see Europe completely under water, but not a trace of the Brontosaurus. What line or color hides the Globigerina Ooze? |don't know. As the pan ends near Utah, on the edge of Atlantis, a cut takes place, and we find ourselves looking at a rectangular grid known as Location NK 12-7 on the border of a map drawn by the U.S. Geological Survey showing the northern part of the Great Salt Lake without any reference to the Jurassic Period.

the earth’s history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing. . .”

I wanted Nancy to shoot “the earth’s history” in one minute for the third section of the movie. | wanted to treat the above quote as a “fact.” We drove out to the Great Notch Quarry in New Jersey, where | found a quarry facing about twenty feet high. | climbed to the top and threw handfuls of ripped-up pages from books and magazines over the edge, while Nancy filmed it. Some ripped pages from an Old Atlas blew across a dried out, cracked mud puddle.

According to all we know from fossil anatomy that beast was comparatively harmless. Its only weapons were its teeth and claws. I don't know what those obscene looking paunches mean—they don’t show in any fossil remains yet found.

Nor do I know whether red is their

natural color, or whether it is due to faster decay owing to all the oil having dripped down

off them. So much for its supposed identity.®

The movie recapitulates the scale of the Spiral Jetty. Disparate elements assume a coherence. Unlikely places and things were stuck between sections of film that show a stretch of dirt road rushing to and from the actual site in Utah. A road that goes forward and backward between things and places that are elsewhere. You might even say that the road is nowhere in particular. The disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture. Nevertheless, all the improbabilties would accommodate themselves to my cinematic universe. Adrift amid scraps of film, one is unable to infuse into them any meaning, they seem worr-out, ossified views, degraded and pointless, yet they are powerful enough to hurl one into a lucid vertigo. The road takes one from a telescopic shot of the sun to a quarry in Great Notch New Jersey, to a map showing the “deformed shorelines of ancient Lake Bonneville,” to The Lost World, and to the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. The hall was filmed through a red filter. The camera focuses on a Ornithominus Altus embedded in plaster behind a glass case. A pan across the room picked up a crimsom chiaroscuro tone. There are times when the great outdoors shrinks phenomenologically to the scale of a prison, and times when the Indoors expands to the scale of the universe. So it is with the sequence from the Hall of Late Dinosaurs. An interior immensity spreads throughout the hall, transforming the lightbulbs into dying suns. The red filter dissolves the floor, ceiling, and walls into halations of infinite redness. Boundless desolation emerged from the cine-

matic emulsions, red clouds, burned from the intangible light beyond the windows, visibility deepened into ruby dispersions, The bones, the glass cases, the armatures brought forth a blood-drenched atmosphere. Blindly the camera stalked through the sullen light. Glassy reflections flashed into dissolutions like powdered blood. Under a burning window the skull of a Tyrannosaurus was mounted in a glass case with a mirror under the skull. In this limitless scale one’s mind imagines things that are not there. The blood‘Soaked dropping of a sick Duck: illed Dinosaur, for instance. Rotting monster flesh covered with millions, of red spiders. Delusion follows delusion. The ghostly cameraman slides over the glassed.in compounds. These fragments of a timeless geology laugh without mirth at the time-filled hopes of ecology. From the soundtrack the echoing metronome vanishes into the wilderness of bones and glass. Tracking around a glass containing a “dinosaur mummy,” the words of The Unnamable are heard. The camera shifts to ‘a specimen squeezed flat by the weight of sediments, then the film cuts to the road in Utah. Notes 4. Dialectic of Site and Nonsite site onsite 4. Open Limits Closed Limits 2.8 Seties of Points An Array of Matter 3, Outer Coordinates Inner Coordinates 4, Subtraction Aiton 5. Indeterminate _eterminate Certainty Uncertainty 6, Scattered Contained Information Information 7. Reflection Miroe 8. Eage Center 9. Some Place No Place (physica) (abstract) 10. Many ne Range of Convergence The range of convergence between Site and Nonsite consists of a course of hazards, @ double path made up of signs, photographs, and ‘maps that belong to both sides of the dialectic at once. Both sides are present and absent at the same time. The and or ground from the Site is placed inthe art (Nonsite) rather than the art placed on the ground. The Nonsite isa container within another container—the room. The pot or yard outside Is yet another container. Twosimensional and three cimensional things trade places with each other in ‘the range of convergence. Large scale becomes small. Small scale becomes large. A point on @ map expands tothe size of @ land mass. Aland mass contacts into a point. Is the Site a reflection of the Nonsit (itor, oF i tthe other way round? The rules of this network Of signs are discovered as you go along uncertain tails both mental and physical. No fish or reptile les init (Mono Lake), yt it swarms with millons of worms which develop into flles. These rest onthe surface ‘and cover everything onthe immediate shore. The number and quantity of those worms and flies is absolutely incredible. They dit up in heaps along the shore.” W.H. Brewer, The Whitney Survey, 1863, 2. London, 1960, p. 129. 3. “In spite of the concentrated saline quality ofthe water, ic is often formed on pars of the Lake. Of course, the lake brine does not freeze; I is for too salty for that. What actually happens is that during relatively calm weather, fresh water from the various streams flowIng into the lake “foats’ ontop ofthe salt wate, the two failing to mix. Near mouths of rivers and creeks this “oating’ condition exists at al times during calm weather. During the winter this fresh water often freezes before it mixes with the brine. Hence, an ice sheet several Inches thick has been known to exten from Weber Riverto Fremont Island, making it possible for coyotes to cross to the istand and ‘molest sheep pastured there. At times this ice breaks loose and floats about the lake inthe form of “cebergs."" (David E. Miler, Great Salt Lake Past and Present, Pamphlet of the Utah History Atlas, Sat Lake Cty, 1949.) 4 Township8 North of Range 7 West of the Salt Lake Base and Meridian: Unsurveyed land on the bed of the Great Salt Lake, i sur ‘eyes, would be described as folows: Beginning at a point Soutn 3000 feet and West 600 feet trom te Northeast Corner of Section 8, Township 8 Nortn, Range 7 West; thence South 45* West 651 feet; thence North 60" West 651 feet; thence North 45° East 651 feet; thence Southeastery along the meander line 675 feet tothe point of beginning. Containing 10.00 acres, more or less. (Special Use ‘Lease Agreement No. 222; witness: Mr. Mark Crystal) ‘5, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (College Edition, World Publishing Co,, 1959, U.S. 6. A. S. Eddington, quoted on p. 232 in Number, the Language of Science, Tobias Dantzig. Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, 7. Thomas H. Clark, Colin W. Stearn, Geological Evolution of Nortn America, New York, Ronald Press Co., n.d, p. 5. £8, John Taine, The Greatest Adventur, Three Science Fictian Novels, New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1963, p. 239,

Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon!

Summer 1970 Photos: Olantraneo Gorgon! a”

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une 1993 Photo: Mark Ruwode! overeat: Photo: Mark Ruwodet 2

Photo: George Steinmetz a

January 2008 Photo: Thomas Crow

Photo: Matt Coolidge

Photo: Mark Rawedat

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January 2005 Photo: Mark Ruwedel a

‘August 2003 Photos: Martin Hogue

‘August 2003 Photos: Martin Hogue

January 2004 Photos: Thomas Crow ”

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DWAN 29 WEST 57 STREET NEW YORK OPENING OCTOBER 31 TO NOVEMBER 25, A 16MM, 35 MINUTE, COLOR AND SOUND FILM ON THE SPIRAL JETTY WILL BE SHOWN DAILY AT 2:00 IN THE GALLERY FOR DURATION OF EXHIBITION

a position of elsewhere” Lynne Cooke All things sank to the same level, a surface resembling a blind mirror that no longer reflects, that casts nothing back. —Martin Heldoggor

Poster for Dwan Gallery exhibition, 1970

Excepting possibly Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson may be the most influential artist of the past forty years. This achieve‘ment is all the more remarkable in that Smithson's mature career spanned less than a decade, ending in 1973 with his untimely death at the age of thirty-five. The principal vehicles, through which he realized his far-reaching ideas involved language, which he deemed a material; a miscellany of sites, beyond the precincts of the museum and gallery, that included abandoned industrial and natural wastelands; and Nonsites, idiosyncratic reformulations of optical mechanisms and protocols that fracture, dislocate, and displace conventional visual modalities to create structural equivalents for sculpture. His profound impact derives less from formal and conceptual innovations in individual pieces, however, than from his inventive and restless explorations of multiple avenues, genres, and media, Conjoining art making, curating, and critical writing, his practice offers a model that has proven exemplary for later generations. Nevertheless, the Spiral Jetty, the iconic earthwork ‘Smithson created at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake in Utah in April 1970, is widely regarded as his signature statement. ‘Measuring some fifteen hundred feet in length and fifteen feet wide, and composed from 6,650 tons of basalt rocks and earth, the Jetty was built over a period of about three weeks. Ravishing photographs, in color and black-and-white, by Gianfranco Gorgoni, whom Smithson invited to the site, were soon widely disseminated, and several of these have assumed iconic status ‘through repeated reproduction in the art press, general media, and exhibitions. Since between 1971 and early 2002 the Jetty ‘was mostly invisible—submerged under the lake's viscous red water—it became known primarily through secondary means, that is, through those ubiquitous photographs, as well as, ‘Smithson’s own film and essay, rather than through direct experience, Albeit dependent primarily on reproductive media, its growing prestige over the past three decades has skewed debate about the identity and role played by each of the other two eponymous components in Smithson’s oeuvre, the film and essay; rather than being recognized as works in their own right, they have been relegated to the status of supplements or proxies. The donation of Smithson’s celebrated sculpture to Dia Art Foundation in 1999, together with a prolonged drought that has severely reduced water levels in the Great Salt Lake, has greatly increased its visibility—titerally and metaphorically—and further eclipsed its companions." ‘Smithson began the thirty-two-minute film in New York in the summer of 1970. The 16mm footage he had commissioned of the earthwork both while under construction and after completion was gradually interwoven with new segments filmed back Bast, in his so-called urban desert: the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and a quarry in New Jersey. [As he juxtaposed and intercut these disparate elements, he

adjusted his storyboard retrospectively rather than rigorously adhering to any predetermined plan. Benefiting for the first, time from the experience of working with a professional filmmaker, Bob Fiore, he composed an audio track that comprised voice-over quotations from a wide range of sources, including Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, a medical textbook, geology manuals, and ambient sound.* On October 31, 1970, the film debuted as the centerpiece of his show at Dwan Gallery in New York, where it was screened daily for the next four weeks, and then, shortly after, at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and ‘Vancouver. Widely shown in museums and film festivals over the next few years, it was hailed by a number of critics as ‘Smithson’s finest work.* After his death, it was made available on video to educational institutions, where generations of students have usually seen it in degraded form, often on pirated copies. Recently, with the resurgence of film and video-based artwork by younger artists, it has attracted attention as a “sleeper,” a remarkably prescient piece. And, benefiting from new technologies, including DVD transfer and better sound systems, art institutions have at last begun to screen it in accordance with the artist's intentions—that is, in a dedicated dark space at designated times. Such renewed access is producing new audiences and finally fostering scholarly attention.® Several months after completing the film, Smithson, in response to an invitation to contribute to an anthology titled Arts in the Environment, wrote a text on the Jetty.® Weaving a quasi-documentary, quasi-poetic evocation of the process of realizing the earthwork with an excursus on the cinematic, this essay adumbrates a pedigree for the project by referring to such art historical precursors as Jackson Pollock, Van Gogh, and Brancusi. Nine black-and-white images illustrated the article, After the appearance in 1979 of a posthumous collection of his published and unpublished texts and interviews, critical examination converged on the role language played in ‘Smithson’s practice, a focus that has largely determined theoretical readings of his oeuvre for the past two decades and provided the basis for the sustained relevance of “The Spiral Jetty” essay for many subsequent writers.” If both the film and essay adumbrate the nexus of ideas that inspired the sculpture, each was nonetheless—and this is crucial to the identity and character of each—filtered through the specific requirements and possibilities offered by its own medium. Together with the sculpture, the interwoven works constitute a unique reformulation of Smithson's abiding preoccupation with the Site-Nonsite dialectic. Since several related projects had not been realized by the time of his death in July 1973, the Spiral Jetty ensemble remains the most resolved and radical articulation of that governing paradigm in his vision. Even so, it has rarely been studied as a cohesive, interdependent entity.

By Smithson’s own account, his work did not mature until the mid-sixties.* Although a highly ambitious young artist during the fifties, he was essentially an autodidact—his school, the vanguard fringes of the New York art scene. In those formative years, he concentrated on drawing, which allowed him to quickly absorb a heterogeneous mélange of ideas, styles, and art forms. Given the intimacy, speed, and expressiveness particular to the medium, the hundreds of sketches still extant from that crucial gestation period offer a clear record of the evolution of his interests, from religious iconography and eschatological themes to a provocative fusion of erotic and populist imagery and beyond. Possessed of a voracious, demotic, visual appetite and a legendary stamina as a cinephile, Smithson also avidly pursued movies of all types—from sci-fi to B-grade to the more experimental—a pursuit that few among his peers could rival.” From this roiling matrix he fashioned a vision by the mid-sixtios that, in contradistinetion to the tendencies of most contemporaries, privileged time as much as it engaged space. ‘Time past, in the guise of geology, paleontology, crystallography, and entropy, increasingly dominated his thought; more oblique was his engagement with time future, filtered as it often was through the dystopian speculations of such mentors as Ballard, Burroughs, Borges, and Beckett. In 1964 Smithson devised a singular work from flashing neon, The Eliminator, which he hoped would be selected for “The Responsive Fye,” an upcoming blockbuster exhibition conceived by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Given its abrasive, glitzy flickering, this comer piece proved far more aggressive than much of the Op art then challenging contemporary taste, which ultimately dominated MoMA’s show. For ‘Smithson, however, The Eliminator's brash visual charge was Joes important than the brief interaticos between flashes. Those moments, he thought, bleached out awareness and obliterated ‘memory: time was deployed here not merely to undermine optical equanimity but to eviscerate thought.° Since, for Smithson, “timelessness is formed in the lapsed moments of perception,” ‘The Eliminator prefigured reflections frozen by the camera’s unflinching Iens in many subsequent works."* In addition, it, heralded the spatial aporias of the Mirror Displacements and ‘more radical temporal disjunctures first assayed in photographic and photo-text works. Through a play of reflections en abyme across the three angled mirrors, space too was similarly dissolved—or eliminated. Its legacy culminates in the Spiral Jetty film, when spatiotemporal reworkings are at their most sophisticated Undaunted by his failure to be included in MoMA’s pivotal show, Smithson soon gravitated toward the Minimalists, particularly Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt, who were simultaneously gaining critical recognition. Again, his engagement with a new set of ideas proved singular, verging

on idiosyneratic. The ostensibly abstract configurations employed in the group of works he presented in his first significant solo show at the newly opened New York Dwan Gallery in December 1966 expose his fledgling preoccupation with crystalline structures, as well as the evolution of his attempts to disrupt the phenomenological basis of a Minimalist aesthetic. And, as with The Eliminator, he employed mirrored surfaces to dislocate conventional optical modalities: Four Sided Vortex (1964) traps vision in a vertiginous, kaleidoscopic free fall; like an untitled blue and yellow wall piece from the next year makes impossible a cohesive view, as it splinters the spectators gaze, immersing her in the surrounding milieu that, in turn is also spatially destabilized. On a drawing for a related wall sculpture, Smithson wrote, “Double vanishing point—exists a8 a solid and reversal of traditional illusionistie perspective— infinity without space." In the series of closely related works that followed, such as The Cryosphere (1966), modularity, seri ality, and permutation—all staples of a Minimalist vocabulary— are again calibrated primarily according to crystallographic models rather than to geometric determinants. This six-part piece, each hexagonal unit of which comprises a cool green steel with twelve mirrored faces, was selected for “Primary Structures,” an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in the summer of 1966, Inclusion in this landmark exhi

bition, which counterpointed newly emergent Minimalist work with sculpture by Anthony Caro and his British cohorts, con summated Smithson’s public debut in the ambit of the American vanguard, confirming a position he had simultaneously been staking through essays, personal associations, and his own curatorial endeavors."? Fundamental to Smithson's prominence were his manifold gifts as a conversationalist (a devoted habitué of Max's Kansas Gity and a gregarious host, he became a seminal conduit for art-world visitors to Manhattan from Europe and elsewhere in North America) and his remarkably broad intellectual interests evidenced in the contents of his library and the heteroglot range of references in his writings and interviews." Equally important was the support he received from Virginia Dwan, in whom he found the ideal patron and dealer."° In addition to promising him a solo show in 1966 she had encouraged him earlier that same year to co-curate the opening show for the New York branch of her gallery, located on West Fiftyseventh Street in Manhattan, Titled “10,” this exhibition brought together a group of canonical works by key Minimal ists with additional contributions from a number of figures more marginal to the movement, notably Ad Reinhardt and ‘Agnes Martin. Tellingly, it positioned Smithson, a relative neophyte, at the core of a powerful coterie of more established and

The Eliminator, 1964 ‘Smithson in his studio with Foursided

somewhat older artists. Less than a year later, in the summer of 1967, his preoccupation with language (particularly with the relation between the discursive and the visual and with the theoretical framing and reception of his work) contributed to curatorial collaboration with Sol LeWitt: “Language to Be Looked At and/or Things to Be Read” opened at Dwan in the summer of 1967. The inclusion of certain historical precedents, by Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, and Emilio Marinetti, among others, contextualized Smithson's and LeWitt's works, ‘as well as those of their peers, such as Andre, Walter De Maria, (On Kawara, Robert Morris, and Reinhardt. By the summer of 1967, when Artforum dedicated a special issue to sculpture, critical debate increasingly focused on a range of hybrid modalities that evolved as this art form ‘was pushed to the limits of its founding logic. The issue contained—alongside Michael Fried's vehement rebuttal to what he deemed the theatricality at the heart of a Minimalist aesthetic— the third in Morris's four-part series “Notes on Sculpture,” LeWitt's “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” and Smithson's “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site.” This landmark issue not only made indisputable the fact that radical ‘work of all guises had migrated from the arena of painting into what later came to be designated as “the expanded field” of sculpture, but it confirmed that the debate was largely generated and defined by artists, not just by means of their art objects but through their roles as critics and curators."® Actively pursuing all three positions, Smithson artfully situated himself at the very heart of this, the vanguard epicenter. A modest photo collage made that same year, New York, New Jersey, incorporates a section of map detailing the stateline between New York and ‘New Jersey. A pair of black-and-white photographs of a two‘Smithson installing The Cryosphere (1966) inthe exhibition “Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum, New York, Api 26, 1966 Photo: Fred W. MeDarrah

lane freeway is pasted into the central portion of the gridded Paper. Shot from below the highway in one and from the median strip separating the traffic flow in the other, these generic views propose vectors without object or goal. Fusing diagrammatic and cartographic representations of space and counterpointing two-dimensional grids and orthogonal perspectives, this disarmingly simple work transforms into Smithson’s idiom ‘Tony Smith's legendary account of his drive along an unfinished turnpike late one night in the early 1950s: It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights... . The road and much of the land ‘scape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first | didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views | had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. | thought to myself, it ought to be clear that's the end of art. . . . There is no way that you can frame it, you just have to experience it.1” A wry homage, Smithson's collage coolly diatills Smith's overheated vision, which soon became emblematic of the search for a new art, one that literally and metaphorically existed outside given boundaries, traditional paradigms, museal conventions, critical protocols, and formal definitions. Set in the very landscape—desolate, marginal, man-made wastelands— that a decade later so attracted Smithson, this epiphanic journey: offered him a paradigm from which a new art could be generated, “Later,” Smith continues, “I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe—abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me.”* Charting a limbo or liminal zone, Smithson images an unidentifiable place, one that is, spatially and temporally in between the precisely mapped, the cartographically demarcated. This laconic photo collage can therefore also be read as a sly challenge to Fried, who had singled out Smith’s narrative as exemplifying everything that warranted his opprobrium. In October 1968, Smithson single-handedly curated “Barthworks” for Dwan, An assemblage of works by Morris, De Maria, Michael Heizer, LeWitt, Andre, Dennis Oppenheim, Claes Oldenburg, and several others, including himself, it presciently codified a seminal new direction." Alongside several of his own recent essays, notably “Towards the Development

of an Air Terminal Site,” “The Monuments of Passaic,” and “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” all published in Artforum, and his unrealized project for the Dallas-Fort Worth airport (for which he had commissioned works from Andre, LeWitt, and Morris), this landmark show confirmed Smithson's status as the chief polemicist of the latest movement.*? “Barth Art,” a large-scale exhibition organized by guest curator Willoughby Sharp for the Andrew Dickson White Museum. of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, upstate New York, in February 1969, transformed this burgeoning foray into an international movement quizzically acclaimed by both the mass ‘media and the more specialized art press, thanks to a strategically managed press campaign.” Its groundbreaking curatorial model also proved extraordinarily fertile in subsequent years; for, rather than either selecting: preexisting works or commis-

sioning new ones, Sharp invited artists first to visit the venue to conceive a project and then to return to execute their ideas directly on-site and in relation to the specifics of that site.” Smithson's elaborate and ambitious project for the Cornell show involved a number of Nonsite sculptures—Mirror Displacements—which he created in one of the galleries of the museum, each comprising mirrors and rock salt amassed from the nearby Cayuga Salt Mine. He also made a Subsite‘Sub-Nonsite piece that related a work installed “underground, that is, in a stone closet in the museum's basement, with a Subsite aboveground at the Cayuga Salt Works’ quarry. Connecting the Subsite to the gallery was a third element, a Mirror ‘Trail, which mapped the placement of eight mirrors along a path that Smithson had laid out to link the art in the institution in Ithaca with the outdoor locations beyond the city.

[Now York, New Jersey, 1967

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Proposal for White Museum, Cornell, Based in Myers Salt Mine, 1968

Modest photographs of the mirrors in situ accompanied this map. On his initial visit to Cornell to reconnoiter the site in late 1968, Smithson had proposed placing in piles of salt crystals photographs taken in the mine shaft of photographs of that same site. However, when he returned just prior to the opening of the show to realize that proposal, he jettisoned his plans in favor of the use of mirrors as his primary material, On one wall of the gallery, he exhibited the Ithaca Mirror Trail piece together with small photographs of mirrors in the mine shaft. On the floor, Smithson installed a group of sculptures variously composed from mirrors and salt crystals. In this bold rethinking of his initial proposal, photography was relegated from the status of crucial indexical witness to that of documentary supplement, while mirror reflection now assumed a vital place. Henceforth, when he employed photography in his art, Smithson would question the image's capacity to convey anything beyond a sense of temporal absence or loss: it had become, in short, equivalent to the mirror reflection, a lacuna in perception’s modalities, His Cornell project expanded upon an earlier series of Site-Nonsite works that had also been designated for presentation in institutional settings, that is, in galleries and museums. First begun in 1967, these works inaugurated an extraordinarily fertile period in his oeuvre, one that radically theorized a gallery-based practice. Coupling material deposits with temporal counterparts, Smithson constructed metal bins to contain

‘hace Mirror Trail, Whaca, New York, 1968

rocks sourced from the very site that he plucked instants, moments frozen in photographs. Combining references to a lands cape location elsewhere, by way of various documentary

modes (notably photography, cartography, and diagrams) together with rock and mineral samples presented in metal storage bins, the Nonsites introduced a new form: structural equivalents for sculpture. The first of these Nonsites, A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, Now Jersey (1967-68), contains a note that states that the art st is prepared to lead tours to the geographical source. By subsequently dispensing with the possibility of any actuali ed linkage, Smithson emphasized the notion of absence,

which was becoming central to his aesthetic, Spatial absence, in turn, opened the way to a temporal aporia. At Cornell, the Mirror Trail prioritized a hypothetical journey, temporal passage over the voided or irreal concrete sites, favoring motion in spac time over a fixed or static mode of address. In parallel fashion, the Mirror Displacements destabilized the relation, between physical matter and the actual architectural environment, disrupting stable or fixed coordinates. In their suspension or removal of time, as in their dislocation of space, the Cayuga Nonsites can trace their heritage not only from the pivotal 1964-65 group of works made with neon and colored plastic but also from the aptly titled The Eliminator If, with hindsight, Smithson’s original proposal for the show at Cornell seems tentative, and if, in its final form, his juxtaposition of Subsites, Nonsites, photographs, and in situ

works seems unduly complex, this exhibition nonetheless provided a crucial experience in that it allowed him to tease out critical issues regarding the question of site, In the statement “A Thing Is a Hole in a Thing It Is Not,” published some months earlier, in the April 1968 issue of Landscape Architeoture, Smithson had written, “Site Selection Study’ in terms of art is just beginning. The investigation of a specific site is a matter of extracting concepts out of existing sense-data through direct perceptions. Perception is prior to conception,

when it comes to site selection or definition. One does not impose, but rather exposes the site—be it interior or exterion.”** Given the context in which this brief article was to be pub:

lished—a journal devoted to landscape architecture—his concluding sentence is deliberately polemical: “The unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists.” He was equally clear about the appropriate methodology: “What is needed is an esthetic method that brings together anthropology and lin-

‘guistics in terms of ‘building. Encouraged by Heizer, with whom he had developed a close friendship in late 1967, Smithson now began working in more remote desert locations rather than the dystopian urban wastelands he had formerly preferred.*° Together with his wife, artist Nancy Holt, and Heizer, he traveled to isolated Mono Lake in the Californian high desert in summer 1968; there Smithson collected raw material for a Nonsite and embarked upon his first film work Although it was unfinished at the time of his

‘A Nonsite, Pie Barrons, Now Jorsay, 1967-68

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death, the preliminary soundtrack of readings he had selected ‘was recorded with Heizer shortly after they returned, indicating the growing significance he accorded sound. Referencing geological, geographical, and zoological data, this voloeover was to have been leavened with music, notably Michel Legrand’s theme from Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels. Following precepts outlined by French novelist and scriptwriter Alain RobbeGrillet, who greatly interested him, Smithson began transposing the static written Nonsite—for example, the text-image piece published in December 1967 as “The Monuments of Passaic” in Artforum—into its cinematic equivalent. ‘This formative experience was soon followed by another trip of even greater import: a two-week sojourn in April 1969 that he instigated with Dwan and Holt to various Mayan sites in the Yucatan. Adopting, in a self-mocking spirit, the venturesome itinerary of the pioneering nineteenth-century explorer John Lloyd Stephens, Smithson explored ancient sites and a culture that was already deeply meaningful to him through copious if nonsystematic reading. It is significant that the two ‘key works that resulted were a text-and-photo piece, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” published in Artforum in September 1969, and a Nonsite lecture, “Hotel Palenque, delivered two years later.” Drawing on Stephens's stirring account of the various environs in which the unknown marvels “meldents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan,” 1960, published in Artforum, September 1969

INCIDENTS OF MIRROR-TRAVEL IN THE YUCATAN

of a lost civilization were first uncovered, Smithson placed his group of twelve mirrors in similar locations.** The resulting series of photographs, created around a vacuum or void made by the mirrors’ reflections, may be read as ironic corollaries to the illustrations produced by Stephens's colleague, Frederick Catherwood, of monuments entangled in jungle vines or wrapped in writhing foliage. Smithson's text describes each “incident,” plus a number of related works whose subjects were lost—hypothetical continents, sometimes considered precursors to the lost Mayan civilization, such as Lemuria and Atlantis.** In a rhetorical flourish, he ends his richly layered essay with a provocative challenge, addressed to himselfas much as to his readers: “It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found... . Yucatan is elsewhere." No reference is directly made in this work to those cultural landmarks (then becoming tourist destinations) that ‘Smithson and his friends visited, though they permeate his work in different ways. Interweaving seemingly casual evocations of this deep past and its ancient myths and gods, he created a meandering monologue that fuses current experiences and ephemeral art activities with literary and fine-art, allusions. Via this exploratory format, he conjured a series of Nonsites through the interplay of visual and verbal representations—diaristic narrative, anecdote, and snapshot.

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Framed by the public vehicle through which it was channeled—the pages of an art magazine—this seminal work stretched the definition of Nonsite, replacing material samples, like those found in A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, with conceptions that were either immaterial or too remote or too short-lived to be directly experienced by an audience. Here, as in most of his essays, Smithson synthesized into a distinctive idiosyncratic idiom voices borrowed from science fiction, travel writing, and science manuals. Since he treated magazines and related publications as equally valid alternatives to the more conventional (anthropological) sites of gallery and museum, the linguistic increasingly became, for him, a building material. Doubtless impressed and challenged by Heizer’s Double ‘Negative, constructed during the winter of 1969-70 with funds from Dwan, Smithson's ambitions took a new turn as the decade opened. Permanence now replaced temporality—or, better, a protracted entropic disintegration replaced evident ephemerality—as the desideratum for his site-based projects. ‘Thus, in late 1969, he attempted to use Miami Islet, a rock outcropping west of Vancouver, to make a long-term installation from shards of glass"! Prevented from completing the project owing to a public outory that claimed it was ecologically unsound, he traveled several weeks later to Kent State Univer sity in Ohio, where he created Partially Buried Woodshed. An improvised response to a site he happened upon when his proJected “mud pour” proved impossible due to freezing weather conditions, this project enabled him to realize a desire, perhaps fostered by his recent experiences in the Yucatén, to bury a building, Significantly, he would donate his artwork to the university only on the condition that it be maintained—that is, that it be left untouched and subject to organic dissolution. Anticipating a more monumental earthwork, Smithson began scouting in February for land at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, land that he proposed to lease on a long-term basis. Whereas previous large-scale, sited works, including Asphalt Rundown (1969), in Rome, and Partially Buried Woodshed echoed or engaged such dramatic telluric activity as voleanic eruption, avalanches, and landslides, Spiral Jetty was conceived according to a quite-different paradigm. Certain properties of salt, such as its helical crystalline structure and its role as a preservative, helped to determine Smithson’s choice of the site at Rozel Point. Engaging a professional contractor working to exacting standards, he planned the work to endure. Temporal change based on the lake's cycle of water levels would determine the growth and erosion of layers of salt encrustation on the rocks, as well as its unpredictable and indeterminable appearance and disappearance. In contrast to that volatile activity, the mass of rock and earth that constituted the sculpture was constructed to remain intact. As entropy, a dynamic of slow geological change, replaced fleeting existence, which had

typified his early approach to land-based projects, the artist found potent symbols of man’s hubris, of abandoned hopes and mired illusions in a nearby derelict oil jetty and rigs. Although the thinking of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss still figures large in another text written at this time, Smithson conceded that for the Jetty his chief building block had morphed from the anthropological into the entropological; as ‘opposed to a historical framework, a nonteleological approach, based on a geological time scale that implies eons not millennia, had become his yardstick.” In its first incarnation the Jetty took the form of an are ending in a small blob; within a couple of weeks it was modified into its final state: a spiral. This loaded motif was multiply determined—even overdetermined—referring as it did to the site and to certain abiding notions in Smithson's imaginary. As evidenced in a notebook containing an extraordinarily heterogeneous set of quotations that crossed cultural and scientific fields, this motif reinforced his desire to expose, rather than impose upon, the site.” In “The Spiral Jetty” essay, he cited the gyrating rotary effect he glimpsed immediately on arriving at the location, local myths of a vortex that connects the lake to the center of the Earth, and images found in petroglyphs and other Neolithic drawings discovered near the site. But he could have equally referenced precedents in his own practice, such as Gyrostasis (1968), a key sculpture shown at Dwan in 1968." Circumstances dictated that no other earth art project that Smithson undertook would acquire this renown or acclaim.

‘The site of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), built near Emmen, Holland, the following summer for the Sonsbeek outdoor sculpture exhibition, has none of the extraordinary dystopian beauty, none of the desolate wilderness features that are hallmarks of the Jetty’s context, Nor is that sculpture counterpointed by physical reminders of a checkered human history, as is the Jetty by the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site and abandoned mining equipment.”* The last of his monumental earthworks, Amarillo Ramp was realized only after the artist's death on July 20, 1973. Located on the private property of rancher Stanley Marsh, it is today somewhat deteriorated ‘and not easily accessed: it is also without the benefit of the artist's exposition—in either textual or filmic works. Yet it is not by default alone that the Jetty remains Smithson’s most renowned artwork. Midway through his essay on the Jetty, he muses on images of dissolution and origination: “was I but a shadow in a plastic bubble hovering in a place outside mind and body,” he speculates. Flirting with the possibility of a return to a unicellular beginning, he then answers his own query: “Ht in Utah go.” This arresting, italicized statement seems to allude directly to art historian Erwin Panofsky’s celebrated deconstruction of the classical trope Bt in Arcadia Bgo.*° In that essay, a copy of which Smithson owned, Panofsky elucidates two distinct meanings for the phrase. One, the more familiar, is elegiac, an allusion to an idyllic era, which, though now passed, is still remembered, still treasured in memory. Closer to a memento mori, his second

‘Amarillo Ramp, Tecovas Lake, Amarilo, Texas, 1973 Photo: Mark Ruwodel, May 3996

interpretation conveys the reminder that death is present even in Arcadia, even in the most idyllic of worlds. Within the discursive context Smithson was constructing around his earthwork, both of these meanings may have been implied, since both are possible. In retrospect, the moment of the Jettys completion must have seemed golden; it must have been tinged with nostalgia. The year that began in February 1970 with his first site visits to Utah through November when the film debuted in New York had been particularly intense and fertile for Smithson. Today, with the hindsight of thirty-five years, a parsing of the text that reads that year as a luminous moment seems even more apposite. For, few other individual works in his oeuvre seem to have so galvanized and stretched Smithson as the Jetty project did; in no other finished works does he seem to have been so invested. With his astute sense of the importance of informed critical response, he worked zealously to shape the reception of these pieces—the sculpture and the film. He made various return visits to the earthwork with friends, artists, critics, and curators."' Preferring photographs by a professional photographer over his own, he deployed images not only for press but also as his contributions to several important exhibitions. Thus, in the summer of 1970, he showed 4 group of eight photographs of the Jetty in “Information,” the wide-ranging, ultra-contemporary show that Kynaston McShine organized for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And, later that winter, several of Gorgoni’s photographs of the Jetty were featured as Smithson’s contribution to the 1970 Whitney Annual Sculpture show.** Editioned for sale as an artwork, the film was screened in a variety of contexts, ranging from film festivals to contemporary art exhibitions, beginning with

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“Blements of Art: Barth, Air, Fire, and Water,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1971." In her tribute to her close friend in Studio International in October 1978, critic and curator Lucy Lippard recalled that ‘Smithson was often “gloomy, maybe sometimes bitter, about the prospects of changing anything.” Deeply skeptical about the utopian ameliorist platforms of the rapidly burgeoning environmental movement, he had been not only locked in protracted negotiations with mining and other corporations whose despoiled sites he sought to recycle, but he also soon discovered that his complexly nuanced, ironic vision had set him apart from much current practice. “As long as art is thought of as creation, it will be the same old story,” he wrote in a passage that Lippard quoted to end her homage. “Here we go again, creating objects, creating systems, building a better tomorrow. 1 posit there is no tomorrow, nothing but a gap. a yawning gap. That seems sort of tragic,” he conceded, then quickly qualified his conclusion by adding, “but what immediately relieves itis irony, which gives you a sonse of humor. It is that cosmic sense of humor that makes it all tolerable.™® ‘Titled “The Spiral Jetty,” Smithson’s essay seems to have been written in 1971 for the anthology, published in 1972, edited by Gyorgy Kepes that variously focuses on the aspiring environmental movement." Read in its original context, the artist's contribution stands apart not least for its form—an art‘work in the guise of writing—but also for its tone; wry, self mocking, deeply skeptical yet wistfully optimistic, it concludes with a reference to the road, to that place in-between, a liminal zone, a spatiotemporal lapsus, a gap. ‘Smithson ended his text on the road in Utah—but not his film, Footage of both the road ahead and also the road behind appears in five different places in the movie, Nowhere is it represented as a connective between locations; there is no point of departure and no terminus. Divested of both, the traveler is always in transit. By contrast, in the film, the precise geography of Rozel Point is painstakingly given via surveyor’s charts and cartographic systems, which provide coordinates and detailed measurements. Maps of hypothetical places, detailing mythical continents, accompany actual ones. If, at moments, the narrator in the voice-over is fulsomely specific in detailing the location, at other times he suggests that it eludes definition. “The Lost World,” Smithson’s voice intones after musing’ on a pile of books whose subjects—astronomy, geology, paleontology, anthropology, and science fiction—are all relevant to his, study. All but one of the books in this stack is reflected in the mirror on which it is piled. Shorn of its own reflection—hence of a certain evidence of substantiality—The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle takes on a semblance of irreality. as it acts out the very absence of instantiation that Smithson simultaneously constructs cinematically for his subject. By means of a

dialectical exegesis, ricocheting between past and present, actual and mythical, real and illusory, he intercuts a deep past (epitomized in the film by shots of dinosaur fossils in the natural history museum in Manhattan) and the immediate present (the remote shores on Rozel Point from where he runs out to. the end of the Jetty and back), ‘Tracking the film's genesis and construction from a “series of disconnections,” Smithson’s text highlights its “impossible vectors,” the fact that it travels to places “nowhere in particua ending in “a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on

‘some spiral reels.” A series of dialectical movements sutures the radically disparate, brokering a state of “cosmic rupture” into ‘a cinematic universe,” another type of limbo. With a quote from Beckett's The Unnamable, he conjures himself sui generis, speaking from a position he claims has no genesis, no origin, no past, and no future: “going nowhere,” he is suspended in the eternal present. ‘The film, unlike the essay, ends with the narrator reading a list of symptoms associated with sunstroke, a condition ‘evoked filmically by the vertiginous spiraling camera movements, as well as by the dazzling image of the sun reflected in the glassy water of the lake—ensnaring the sun in its coils, the Jetty seems to have captured its own souree of light, hence life. ‘Recovery may be slow." Smithson's voice warns, “for a long period subsequently there may be loss of memory and inability to concentrate.” The soundtrack stops here but the film continues for what seems a long minute. The final shot shows Fiore’s studio, where the film that we are now watching is wound onto the editing machine's reels; a large photo print of the sculpture hangs on the wall, The protracted silence is broken only by the

sound of the real projector (near the viewer in the gallery) through which the film continues to spool: the innuendoes implicit in Smithson’s final comments start to reverberate eerily, a dark warning. For his solo show at Dwan beginning October 31, 1970, ‘Smithson arranged to screen his film daily at designated times. ‘The poster for the exhibition illustrated a storyboard for the film, which, by dint of much erasure, redrawing, and annotating, mirrors the sequences in the movie, Since he planned to sell the film as an editioned work, he was reluctant simply to rent it out to museums or to film programs. Although he speculated at length on such unlikely venues for its screening as the Staten Island Ferry, he also dreamed of a more permanent destination, an underground cinema to be located near Rozel Point. Recognizing that the sculpture would not always be visible, since it would be submerged under the red waters for unpredictable durations, he hoped to site the film nearby. ‘There, he imagined, it would play in a cavern to visitors who, after descending a spiral staircase, would perch on rocks for the thirty-some minutes of its duration. In essence, this proposal reiterates his governing precept that space and time are accessed only when the spectator is removed from the normal conditions of time-space. Like the buried building, the mine shaft, and even the quarry, the underground cavern, evoke his proposal for a “museum of the void,” limned in another sketch. “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not,” the statement that he attributed to Carl Andre, defines an absence as the form of a desired place, a place of memory and history, a repository for relics salvaged from the past. It had become a mantra for Smithson, ‘Smithson's studio, Now York City, 1970 Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon!

‘Spal Jetty, 1970, fm stl

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Smithson’s growing commitment to film was further adumbrated in a companion essay to “The Spiral Jetty.” Film historian Annette Michelson commissioned “A Cinematic Atopia” for an issue of Artforum on alternative cinema.*” Taken together, these two texts attest to the degree that, for him, this medium was absorbing writing: He privileged its soundtrack as the governing structural device and the cut as the principal vehicle for sequencing visual metaphors.* Normally deemed the youngest of the arts, cinema is, for him, the most ancient: “Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude, One is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras,” he asserted.** If his notion of cinema housed in an underground venue alludes to Plato's cave as the primary site of spectatorship, it also recalls his accounts of Mayan temples, whose cavernous depths held sacred relies, including obsidian mirrors and wall paintings.® Thus, rather than breaking totally new ground, the pair of essays summariizes an evolution in Smithson’s thought that had already been assayed in both realized and unrealized artworks Smithson was not alone in his pursuit of alternatives to documentary photography as the means to connect his off-site projects with the art institution. Highly conversant with cameras since his youth when assisting his father on archaeological digs, Heizer had begun experimenting with photographic processes after realizing his first large-scale earth sculpture, Munich Depression, in 1969. In addition to producing “actualsize” photographs—that is, images based on a one-to-one ratio with their subjects—he explored the possibilities offered by specialized equipment that the military used for environmentally scaled projections." Smithson, by contrast, capitalized on his relative lack of technical knowledge and experience, favoring the Instamatic, the tourist's tool, for his early text-based Michael Heizer, Munich Depression, 1969

works—“The Monuments of Passaic,” his first foray with it, brilliantly exploited such associations. Yet, like many of his peers, notably his close friends Richard Serra and Joan Jonas, he then started to experiment with film and video, as these ‘media became increasingly available in the late sixties. Mono Lake, his first serious venture in that direction, memorably exploited the potential of the soundtrack as a structural and compositional device. Its unedited footage features not just the site but the road leading to it and his companions driving and listening to the radio, while he, cigarette dangling from his fingers, studied various maps, These motifs return in slightly different form in the Jetty film, While such footage could serve as 1 prologue to a documentary or a road movie, Smithson’s use sharply veered from conventions associated with either genre. Unlike most of his peers, he approached film in the most ambitious way, referencing major works in cinematic history. Relying more on, say, Sergei Eisenstein than Daiga Vertov, he also directly referenced Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). Above all, he drew heavily on notions of temporality, as explored by Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, a favorite film.%* ‘Smithson subsequently worked on storyboards for a number of other films, for which he shot a certain amount of footage over the next few years. None, however, reached completion. Certain constants informing these unfinished projects hhad been tested in earlier and concurrent texts. They include use of metaphor that depends for its vividness and power on the conjoining of unlikely elements effected through the cut; a constantly shifting perspective that is somehow divorced from the predictable and fixed position of an authorial overview; and a temporal dislocation that interlays past and present, future ‘and past in unfathomable trails. Although the three parts of the Spiral Jetty ensemble reinforce and elucidate each other, there are certain crucial differences among them. Less equivalents than interrelated variants on a set of ideas, each of the three works titled Spiral Jetty cite legacies particular only to the forms in which it is ‘embodied. The sculpture relies on dramatic shifts in scale that ‘can only be apprehended on-site from a personally choreographed movement in time and space. In both film and text, Smithson clearly refrains from trying to conjure vicariously this kind of apprehension: nowhere does he attempt to describe in words the impressions gathered by walking along the sculpture, nor does he resort to a handheld video camera to approximate the spectator’s moment-by-moment passage through the site. The decaying man-made jetty that visitors must pass en route to the site creates a sense of anticipation, and once it is no longer within eyeshot the artist's jetty comes into view, in poignant contrast. Viewers cannot help comparing one with the other, so close are they, yet the film never reveals the presence

of the derelict structure. The text, on the other hand, freights this conjunction in loaded terms: “A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes,” In contrast to this self-evident record of failure, the essay offers a different—a modernist—history, mentioning Pollock, Van Gogh, and Brancusi, among others. But it makes

Utah's architectural department in January 1972, his last formulation of the Nonsite. The opposite pertains in the institution, where History prevails over Time. Not surprisingly given this conviction, Smithson soon began to construct alternative lineages, outside the modernist heritage, for his off-site and reclamation projects. More pertinent comparisons would be to such proto-earthworks as the Panama Canal and Frederick

neither science fiction nor mainstream Hollywood, neither Stanley Kubrick nor Hitchcock. Cinema, in this construction belongs to the Neanderthal, the successor to the dinosaurs whose remains are revealed in the lurid, reddened recesses of the deserted Hall of Late Dinosaurs, When Virginia Dwan closed her gallery in mid-1971,

scapes that enthralled Tony Smith.%* Published in the February 1973 issue, Smithson’ last contribution to Artforum resulted from a commission from his close friend John Coplans to write on the work of Olmsted: the oceasion was an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art devoted to the pioneering landscape architect's work, a subject of great interest to editor and artist alike.®° Typically, Smithson used the occasion to draw comparisons with his own projects, Central Park's Vista Rock Tunnel, the narrow arched entrance to the Rambles, even

no reference to the cinematic history

that informs the film,

‘Smithson joined the John Weber Gallery, founded by her former

assistant, However, he did not immediately pursue the option of a solo show, for his focus had moved elsewhere: to potential cinematic ventures and to land-based projects, many of which involved reclaiming former industrial sites. This redirection must have contributed to his decision to withdraw from participation in Documenta 5 in 1972. Once he would have been eager to ocoupy a prominent position in such a significant event, but now his shifting interests, coupled with what he considered ‘an oppressive curatorial agenda, resulted in his writing a brief statoment critiquing the project, which was published in the catalogue. A polemical position piece as distinct from the innovative form he evolved in the text-image Nonsite essays, this text was reprinted shortly thereafter in Artforum.®* For Smithson, Time and History change places in cinema as they do in such remote “elsewheres” as Utah and the Yueatén: there Time encompasses History, as he proposed in the droll slide lecture “Hotel Palenque,” delivered to the University of

View of Central Park, Looking Northwest ‘from Park Avenue and 94th-98th Street, 1088 Photo: Peter Baab

Law Olmsted's Central Park—or to the abandoned artifical

land-

the cave at the end of the stream called the echo the quarries, mine shafts, rotaries, underground caverns, and dimly lit hall ‘ned entrances to Mayan temples that had permeated

his journeys, actual and imaginary, of the past decade. These “gaps,” these things that are holes in things they are not, are passageways akin to Alice's Looking Glass or the Bellman's blank map. in that they are thresholds to an elsewhere, to places like the Yucatéin and Utah, where “the sites are receding into the Nonsites and the Nonsites are receding back into the sites." As custodian of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty since 1999, Dia Art Foundation is daily involved in issues relating to its identity and maintenance. This book reflects that responsibility in its composition and focus. Beginning with Smithson’s own text ‘crystals on Spiral Jetty ‘Photo: Robert Smithson, e. 2973

NORTH

quaror

anu0Kor

onra rour

WEST

samuan

‘toner some

Larrrupe

Ocean chart

‘Botiman's Map, in Lewis Carrots The Munting ofthe Snark, 1876. Reproduced in Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language tn the Vicinity of Art,” published $968,

it also contains a photographic diary of the earthwork at various moments during its thirty-five-year existence, tracing its history in pictures as the changing lake level, climate, and weather alter its appearance but not its composition. For more than three decades, the sculpture has remained resiliently in place, virtually without alteration apart from the growth and erosion of layers of salt crystals, The account by contractor Bob Phillips, who oversaw and engineered the construction of the piece, contributes little-known information about the daunting task that Smithson faced in trying to convince the skeptical professionals on whom he had to depend to realize his project: to build the improbable according to his dictates. On a recent visit to the site, horticulturalist Catherine Phillips spied a ubiquitous mystery plant, which proved on. later inspection to have a reproductive system configured in a spiral—striking evidence of the uncanny herald of this overdetermined motif at Rozel Point. ‘When reconsidering this now-famous landmark from the perspective of 2005, recognition of the importance of the artist’s ideas has led to the inclusion of a hitherto unpublished interview that art critic Kenneth Baker conducted in 1971 and Smithson then edited for publication. Capitalizing on new research and critical interpretation by a generation of scholars who were only infants at the time that the Jetty was created, we have commissioned individual essays on each of the three components—sculpture, film, and essay—in order to explore its significance from the standpoint of art historians, who not, only matured long after the artist's death but who here address ‘each component in relation to the medium in which it was realized. Ann Reynolds reflects on her first visit to the sculpture at Rozel Point several months after the publication of her seminal book on Smithson’s work and archive. She recognizes that for anyone today, herself included, this work is always already known, that it is inextricably part of what the artist himself called “the reel world.” Poet and literary historian Lytle Shaw forensically examines the essay in ways that both develop, and turn, the history of text-based analysis in which Smithson’s work was first theorized, The unprecedented interest, today, from younger artists, themselves directly and indirectly indebted to a film long known but seldom properly screened, is reflected in the contribution by Diana Thater, one of the pioneers of her generation in rethinking the role and installation of film-based sculpture, Originally delivered as a lecture with sound and video comparisons in Dia's Artists on Artists series, her text attests to the extraordinarily prescient character and ongoing relevance of this film, arguably the least known of the trio of eponymous works. It complements scholar George Baker's exacting analysis of this still-underappreciated work, suggesting how fertile the ground remains for further study, how much terrain is left to mine.

Notes. 4. For a discussion of photography’ role in the reception of Land art, including Robert ‘Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, see Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, "Marked Sites: Land Art ‘and Photography 1969-1970" (master's thesis, Courtauld institute of At, June 2004}, particulary pp. 29-42. 2. Much recent press has focused on the question of the restoration and conservation of the Spiral Jety. See, for example, Melissa Sanford, “Salt ofthe Earth Sculpture, [New York Times, January 13, 2004, and Lori Buttars, “Up from the Desths,” Art News 101, no. 14 (December 2002), p. 37. Within recent years, an unprecedented number of visitors have been going tothe sit, aided by new signage from the Utah Depart. ‘ment of Natural Resources, which has made travel over the fiteen anda-hatmile dit road from the Golden Spike National Historic Ste far easier 3. Bob Fore encouraged and helped to construct the soundtrack fr Spiral Jet. soure ing such audio material as the helicopter in fight. According to Fite, the sound often ‘dentitied asa “respirator” was actualy generated by a component ina contemporary artwork made by a fiend of his. (Fore, conversation withthe author, December 2004.) 4. Inthe New York Times, Peter Senjeldahl claimed, “Probably his finest and most revealing work is a 35 minute, 16mm flm partly documenting the construction of the Jetty and partly setting forth... his obsessive fascination with time, pace, geology, ‘and. . "entropy." (Seheldahl, “He Made Fantasies as Real as Mountains,” New York Times, August 12, 1973, p, 127,) See also Kenneth Baker “Of course—but .. .” Christian Science Monitor (February 23, 1971): and Joseph Masheck, “New Yor Robert Smithson.” Artforum9, no, 5 Uanuary 2974), p. 73. 5. The ealiest detailed study of te flim, by ElizabethC, Chids, appeared ten years after ithad been completed. See Chis, “Robert Smithson and Flim: The Spiral Jetty Reconsidered,” Arts Magazine 86, no. 2 (October 1981), pp. 68-81. See also Eva ‘Schmit, “Et in Utah ego: Robert Smithson's “Enlropalogi’ Cinema,” in Rabert ‘Smithson: Zeichnungen aus dem Nachiass—Orawings trom the Estate (Munster: Westflisches Landesmuseum fir Kunst und Kulturgeschicht, in association with Vestsjaliand, Kunstmuseum, Soro, Denmark, 1989), pp. 42-65. 6, See the reprintof Smithson’s “The Spiral Jet” inthis book, pp. 7-23. it was cxiginaly published in Arts of the Environment. ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: Brazier, 41972), and most recenty reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 143-53, 7. Smithson’s wings were originally collected by Nancy Holt in 1979 for The Wetngs (of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), which was designed by Sol LeWit, This pubicaton prompted Craig Owens's seminal essays “Earthwords,” published that same year, and “The Allegorcal Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmod: ‘ermism.” published the next year. Owens's essays launched and framed the continuing ‘tical ang theoretical examinations of Smithson's wring, (See Owens, “Eathwords,” (October, no. 10 (Fall 1979}, pp. 121-30: and “The Allegeical Impulse: Toward& Theory of Postmodernism,” October, no. 12 [Spring 1980}, pp. 67-86.) For a recent discussion of Owens's impact, see Pamela Lee, “The Cowboy inthe Library: The New Robert Smithson,” Bookforum 12, no. 4 {December 2004-lanuary 2005), pp. 6- 12: and Lyle Shaw's essay, “Smithson, Writer,” in this book, pp. 125-27. 18 See Smithson, interview for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, by Paul Cummings (1972), n Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 270-200. In tis interview, Smithson Wacks the evolution of his work ‘9. Smitnson's library contained a vast selection of books, magazines, and pamphlets devoted to fm. Lori Cavagnaro’s recent compilation of bibliographic references forthe contents of his library was published in Ann Reynolds's Rabert Smithson: Learning ‘rom New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). pp. 297-345; Valentin Tatranshy's 1973 compilation was published in Robert Smithson (Los Angeles: ‘Museum of Contemporary Ar, in association with the University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004), pp. 249-63, 10, Smithson deserved it as follows: “The Eliminator overloads the eye whenever the ‘ed neon flashes on, and in So doing diminishes the viewer's memory dependencies ‘or traces. Memory vanishes while looking at Te Eliminator... The Eliminator orders negative time as it avoids historical space.” (Smithson, “The Eliminator” [1964 in Robert Smithson: The Collected Whitngs. p. 327.) 111. Smithson, “Incidents of Mircor-Tavel inthe Yucatan” (2969), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Woitings, p. 221 12 Smithson, handwritten notes trom the drawing Three Works in Metal and Plastic (2964). tlystrated in Ann Reynolds, Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, p. 67 413. Championed by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fied and led by Anthony Caro {this group of British sculptors soon lot critical ground inthe United States to the Minimaligts, many of whom also became occasional writes and curators, 114 See the compilations of Smithson’ Hbrary by Cavagnaro, in Reynolds, pp. 297— 345: and Tatranshy, in Robert Smitnson, pp. 249-63

415. Smithson’s holdings inthe Archives of American Art contains numerous postcards from Virginia Dwan to the artist, including two in which she urges him to organize his exhibition of earthworks soon, as the phenomenon was not yet recognized. See the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 0.0. 16. For example, Robert Morris curated the important show “Nine” atthe Castel Gallery's warehouse in 1969, in which process-based works by Americans such as Richacd Serra were brought together with works by Gilberto Zoro and Giovanni Anselmo. The term “expanded field” was coined by Rosalind Kreuss in 1979 in her highly influential exegesis “Sculpture in the Expanded Field." (See Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Fiel,” October, no. 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 31-44, 417. Tory Smith, “Talking with Tony Smith” interview by Samuel Wagstaff, J. in Minimal [Arts A Crtical Anthology, e8. Gregory Battcock (1968; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 386. The interview was reprinted here alongside Michael Fiea's “Art and Objecthood.” it was orginally published in Artforum5, no. 4 (Decer ber 1966), pp. 18-39, 18. bid 19, See reviews of the exhibition, in “Earthmovers,” Time 92, no, 15 (October 11, 11968), p, 84; and “Moving Mother Earth,” New York Times, October 6, 2968, p. 280, 20, Almost all of these phototext-based Nonsites were first presented through the Influential vehicle of Aetforum.

‘A2smin. 6mm COLOR |ANO SOUND FIL ON THE STARTING OCTOBER 1 ‘THRU NOVEMBER 25,1970 [ATOWANNEW YORK. sna VANCOUVER 0

24. Te press had afield day both celebrating and lampooning “Earth Art.” See for example, “What on Earth!” Life, April 24, 1969, pp. 81-82, and Roy Bongart, “I's Called Earth Act—And Boulderdash,” New York Times Magazine, February 2, 1970, Pp. 26, 1221, Bruce Jay Friedman's article “Dirty Pctures: Dig? (Yes, cig” was @ ligt later mass-media profile ofthe movement. (See Friedman, “Dirty Pictures: Dig? [Nes, cig” Esquire 75, no. 5 (Moy 1973), pp. 142Ff) 22, See Thomas W. Leavit's foreword and Willoughby Sharp's “Notes Toward an Understanding of Earth Ar,” in Earth Art (ithaca, N.Y. Andrew Dickson White Museum of Ar, Comeli University, 1969), np. 23. Smithson, “A Thing Is a Hole ina Thing It's No.” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 96. Originally published in Landscape Architecture 88, no. 3 (Apt 1968, p, 208 24, i, 25, Smithson had considered a numberof other sites forthe Spiral Jety, including {Bolivian salars and Mono Lake in California. While working on the Jetty, he visited ‘Moab, Utah, searching for appropriate places to site other works inthe area. See Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty," n this book, p. 7. 26. In 1968, Smithson, Hot, and Michae! Heizer shot both super film and instamatic Slides: readings fo the soundtrack were recorded soon after In 2004, Hott transferred this material to video, eating it and expanding the soundtrack, to create Mono Lake (1968/2004),

27. See Smithson, “Incidents of MirarTravel in the Yucatan,” pp. 119-33. This essay was originally published in Artforum8, no. 2 (September 1969), pp. 28-33, See also John L. Stephens, incidents of Travelin Yucatan (1843: New York: Dover Publications, 1963) 28. As described inthe preface to the 1963 edition, Stephens and his companion Catherwood chronicled their visits to “foryfour ruined ets where “or a bret space the stiness that reigned... was broken, and they were again left. . to utter estruction” (Stephens, p.v 29. Smithson's The Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria, Sanibel Island, Frida (1969) and Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) (1969) are two examples in a group of works that reference mythic land masses. Since the nineteenth century, claims have been made that remnants of the lost chlizatons of Lemuria and Atlantis survived ‘and migrated to the Yucatan, (See L. Sprague De Camp, Lost Continents: The Atiantis Theme in History. Science, and Literature [New York: Dover, 1970), a copy of which was in Smithson’s rary 30. Smithson, “incidentsof MirorTravel in the Yueatan,”p. 133. {31 Grant Arnold describes in detail Smithson's proposal for Miami Islet, including the circumstances leading up to the project’s cancellation. See Grant Arno, “Robert ‘Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation,” in Robert Smithson Jin Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation (Vancouver: Vancouver rt Gallery, 2003), pp. 10-30. 32. For an account of the Kent State project, see Richard Martin, “Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed,” Arts Magazine 59, no. 1 (September 1984), pp. 104-08: ‘and Dorothy Shinn, Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (Kent, Oho: Kent State University School of rt Gallery, 1990) 33, See Bob Philips's illuminating recollections in “Building the Jet,” inthis book, pp. 185-97. Note that inthe soundtrack ofthe fl, Smithson describes the work as composed from four materials: mud, sal crystals, rocks, water 34, “Claude Levi Strauss has suggested we develop a new discipline called “Entrono! ogy. The artist and the ertc should develop something simi.” (Smithson, “Ar. Through the Camera's Eye" (c. 1972), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 9.375) 35. See Bob Philips, inthis book, pp. 185-87. See also Smithson, “Talking with Robert Smithson,” interview by Kenneth Baker, inthis book, p. 148, 36, See the pages from this notebook, in this book, pp. 128-45. Robert Smithson ‘nd Noney Holt Papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian institution, !mcrotim real 3834, Thomas Crow also discusses the relevance ofthis notebook in ‘Cosmic Exle: Prophetic Turns in the ile and At of Robert Smithson.” in Robert ‘Smithson. po. 33-56, 37, “When | made (Gyrostasis}| was thinking of mapning procedures that refer tothe planet Earth. One could consider it as a crystalzed fragment of a gyroscopic rotation. oF 8 an abstract three dimensional map that points to the SPIRAL JETTY, 1970 in the Great Salt Lake, Utah.” (Smithson, “Gyrostasis" (1970), in Robert Smitnson: The Collected Wotings, p. 136.) 38, The Sonsbeek Festival mostly commissioned works for a parkland setting in Areim, Holland. Located just outside the town of Emmen, rather than inthe park Broken Cirle/Spral Hil is, however, nt isolated but relatively accessible, See Jennifer L Roberts's discussion af Smithson’s confrontation eth time, history, anc historiographic models, especialy her chapter “Spiral Jety/Golden Spike,” pp. 114-39, In Miror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Pres, 2004), where she concludes, “Smithson knits all three monuments (Golden Spike, oll field, and the Jetty ise together in a large historical eld. This, he hopes, wil ce clude the possiblity ofthe excision and replacement of any one of them into some ‘other ‘trivial history” (Roberts, p. 128), 39. See John Coplans, “Robert Smithson: The Amailo Ramp,” in Robert Hobbs. ‘Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Rhaea, N.Y. Cornel Unversity Press, 1981), pp. 47-55, 40. See Erwin Panofshy, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y. 19855), 'pp. 295-320. This book was in Smithson's personal library 44, Smithson's day books from the late shies onward show that he had regular meet Ings with such erties as David Bourdon and later John Coplans, among others. These ocuments are curently hel in the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, 190541987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reels 3832-3837. 442, See the checklists for “Information,” organized by Kynaston MeShine, a the “Museum of Modern Art. New York July 2-September 20, 1970). and forthe Whitney Museum Sculpture Annual (December 12, 1970-February 7, 1972) 43, See Kennotn Baker's review of the show “Elements of Art: Earth, Ai Fire, and Water." in Artforum9, no. 7 (March 1972), pp. 72-74,

44, Lucy ippare, “Two,” Studio International 186, no, 959 (October 1973), p. 162. 45. bid 446, Among the other contributors to this anthology, only Leo Marx evidenced acritical attitude toware the burgeoning environmental and reclamation movements. See Marx American Institutions and the Ecological Ideal,” pp. 78-97, and “Environmental Potentials: Visionary and Real.” pp. 98-107, in Arts of the Environment. 47. See Smithson, “A Cinematic topia” (1971), in Robert Smithson: The Collected UWntings, pp. 138-42. Originally published in Artforum 10, no. 4 (September 1972), pp. 83-55, 48, For a relevant discussion of the novelists attraction to cinema, see Alain Robbe Ghiet, “Time and Description in Fiction Today (1963), in Fora New Novel: Essayson Fiction, trons. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press. 1965), pp. 143-56. Smithson ha this book in his Worry 49, Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty." in this book, p. 11. '50. See Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Trave in the Yucatan,” pp. 119-33, 51, Heizer exhibited these projections in the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition In 1971. See Sam Wagstat, “Michael Heizer's Use of Photography.” in Michael Helzer: Sculpture n Reverse, pp. 72-75. '52, Robbe Grits and Alain Resnals’s Last Year at Marlendad must have been beloved by Smithson for its beguiling and complex temporal enigmas. Robbe Gilet described his collaboration with Resnas: “I saw Resnais’ work as an attempt to construct a purely mental space and time ... without wocrying too much about the traditional relations of cause and effect, or about an absolute time sequence in the narrative. And this mental time, with ts peculanties, ts gaps, is obsessions its obscure areas, 's the one that interests us” (Alain Robbe Gillet, introduction to Last Year at Marien ‘bod, rans. Richard Howard [New York: Grove Press, 1962], pp. 8-9). Smithson had this bookin is ibrar, 153, Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” Artforum 11, no. 2 (October 1972),p. 22. When reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Whiting, pp. 154-56, this polemic was accompanied by two ilustrations. The fst, Wandering Canal with Mounds (197), ‘may have been a proposal Smithson sketched forthe forthcoming exhibition before he grew dislusioned wit ts agenda, The second was his 1967 New York, New Jersey ‘hot collage. '84. Fora discussion of Smithson’s Movie Treatment for Panama Passage (1970). see Joseph Masheck, “The Panama Canal and Some Other Works of Work," Artforum9, 'o. 9 (May 1974), pp. 38-44: and my own essay, “Hearsay.” in Francis Als: The ‘Modern Procession (New York: Pubic Art Fund, 2004), pp. 113-14, 155, See Elizabeth Bariow, Frederick Low Olmsted's New York (New York: Praeger Publishers, in association withthe Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972). ‘56. Smithson, interview by Patricia Norvell, June 20, 1969, in Recoraing Conceptual Art: ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 134.

(On location for Tacta Dean's audlowork Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty, 1987

n

At the Jetty Ann Reynolds In 1988, I described Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty this way: ut there, exquisitely extending from Rozel Point and then turning. in on itself to a place that is both an ending and a beginning, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty needs to refer to nothing outside itself; site and nonsite collapse into the vertiginous patterning of “a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.” And even the artist is startled to discover that this footprint “is our own.” Yet, because of its location and physical fragility, few of us have actually experienced it in this way. Instead we see it neatly framed as a striking still photographic image that is endlessly reproduced as. the preferred symbol, elegant and concise, for “earth art,” with its visual self-sufficiency still assumed to be intact.

‘Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon!, 1970

At the time, a visit to the Spiral Jetty did not seem necessary. T assumed that getting to what appeared to be a remote portion of the northern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake, where the Jetty is located, would be logistically complicated, protracted, and expensive, Also, because of changes in the lake's water level, the Jetty’s fifteen-hundred-foot-long coil of black basalt rocks and gravel had been mostly submerged for over two decades; there was little evidence to suggest that a prolonged emergence ‘was imminent or even inevitable. But what was most crucial to my decision not to travel to the Jetty was the fact that there were plenty of existing descriptions of the Jetty to work with: photographie, cinematic, and hand-drawn images, as well as written acoounts by the artist and by others who had visited the Jetty soon after its completion in 1970, Although I acknowl‘edged that these descriptions were partial and distanced from their referent—‘their singular referential logic is renounced for the distanced experience of the reproductive provess”*—I still felt they provided visual and conceptual proxies, images and ideas, that seemed sufficient or that at least had to be sufficient, because they could not be readily compared to the Jetty on-site. ‘They were descriptions without a clearly visible or easily located physical referent. Perhaps they did not really need one. ‘Then, after almost thirty years of only sporadic and brief periods of exposure, the Spiral Jetty reemerged. An everincreasing number of individuals have since traveled to the Jetty, proving that it is not in fact so remote, and once there many of these visitors have produced new images, new descriptions of an unexpectedly white spiral encrusted and partially filled in with salt crystals. Because of the Jetty’s accessibility and these fresh desoriptions, no one can have the luxury of thinking that the earlier, presubmergence descriptions are sufficient, or possibly ever were. I also had to abandon my belief that the Jetty needed to refer to nothing outside itself, that Site and Nonsite collapsed into a singular, albeit vertiginous pattern. As I stood on the Jetty last September for the very first time, I was deeply aware of the fact that neither my on-site experience nor the descriptions that I was familiar with, both old and new, were self-sufficient or even clearly distinct. Al these things were hopelessly entangled, and this entanglement produced a form of vertigo that was at least dualistic: mental ‘and physical, spatial and temporal. Smithson wrote about a similar experience of crossing & bridge over New Jersey's Passaic River in his 1967 essay “The Monuments of Passaic’: “When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that, was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank."? The experience he describes was shaped by previous ones—Smithson was born in the city of Passaic and grew up elsewhere in New Jersey—and by the fact that Smithson usually

viewed this bridge from the window of a moving vehicle, not up close and on foot. Instead of viewing the blur of fleeting framed images of the landscape that he normally saw from a car or bus, he finds himself inside and among these images. But because his visual experience does not match his expectations, all he can grasp are the descriptive conventions that remain, Initially, when walking out along the Spiral Jetty, I too felt as if I were moving across the surface of a giant photograph or within a spectacularly beautiful and bizarre movie, part National Geographic, part science fiction. The landscape seemed so vast and foreign; the Jetty seemed so modest and familiar, in comparison, yet also so unreal and so white, blindingly s0 at moments, like a snowfield on a brilliant, yet oddly warm day. Due to changes made by the crystallization of the lake's salt water, the Jetty has a new and unfamiliar appearance. But these changes were only unexpected in relation to the descriptions that I already knew. All these old, familiar descriptions were two-dimensional or linear—contained—and featured a black spiral. Here I was inadvertently trying to turn the site into something similar. These descriptions had become the real against which I was measuring another type of uncontained reality: “The true fiction eradicates the false reality."* At first glimpse from the road in, the Spiral Jetty appears 0 small, so elusive that one realizes why this vista is absent from Smithson’s 1970 film Spiral Jetty, which cuts from a view of traveling on the road leading up to the Jetty to a full aerial view of the work itself, But soon this realization was superseded by another: the film provides one form of description. The site offers another. Dealing on-site with the Spiral Jetty requires an awareness of the significant difference between a preexistent description of something—whether textual, photographic, or cinematic—and the need to develop a narrative of one’s own experience of it. On-site, it can never remain just an inert prop. One is forced to invent a story of one’s encounter, to create a fictional space for this experience to inhabit, and a way of speaking and operating in relationship to it. On-site integration of the fragmentary mental images one possesses from reading or looking at descriptions, which bear some relation to cinematic stills, is not the same thing as creating a sufficient or fixed image of the “real thing.” The film experience eventually does fall away only to be replaced by a more site-specific dynamic, yet one that is similarly structured. The Jetty is always an amazing, ever-changing image framed by the surrounding landscape and a platform from which to view this landscape. ‘One can actually find the familiar views at the site, even some of the aerial ones from the photographs and the film, but they change constantly throughout the day because of changes in the quality of the light, air temperature, and wind. For example, the incredibly peculiar white mounds of salt foam rolling across and piling up on the pink surface of the lake suggest a ”

moving, at times menacing, version of the Jetty’s similar, yet static white mounds. The intense color contrasts of the sky, water, and various rock formations make it difficult at times to know where to look and what one is looking at. One's shifting orientation in relation to the landscape as one circles around the Jetty’s spiral creates a visceral, as well as visual, awareness of the site's cartographic terms. One actually embodies the circularity of the horizon line and the tightening of its abstract counterpart on a globe as it draws toward the Earth's two poles while the salt orystals on the material Jetty crunch underfoot. ‘Then there is the presence of the adjacent oil jetty extending straight and much farther out into the lake. Built and rebuilt, it has been used and abandoned in a never-ending cycle over the past thirty-plus years. By contrast, the Spiral Jetty appears to be a prehistoric or even natural formation that has become increasingly at home in its surrounding site. At the site, one comes into contact with visitors who have no previous knowledge of the Spiral Jetty, but even most of them begin to draw analogies to other places, images, and things they have seen. Or they don't perceive the Jetty as an entity separate from the landscape at all. It functions solely as a platform for collecting salt crystals from deeper portions of the lake. Even this is a type of description, however utilitarian, What might the Spiral Jetty’s reemergence reveal about, the role that description has played and will undoubtedly continue to play in the writing of the sculpture’s history, and, by extension, in the writing of the history of post-midsixties art in general, since this history must address a significant number of artworks whose referents tend to be scarce, physically unstable, no longer extant, or even nonexistent, and are almost. exclusively known through photographic images, descriptive texts, reenactments, or refabrications? At the risk of stating the obvious, description is always more than a secondary accounting. It circumscribes what it describes, contains it. And there is no such thing as a description, no matter how simply stated, that is uninflected with analysis, opinion, or desire. As I have already suggested, descriptions can even take the place of what they describe and appear to render their referents unnecessary unless, or at least until, that referent returns. Another important thing to consider about description is that it is historically inflected. In one of the most famous descriptions of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust's protagonist recalls sipping a spoonful of tea with a softened bit of a madeleine, an act that unleashes memories of his childhood. ‘This account could not have been written without a particular, early twentieth-century appreciation of the psychological significance of childhood experience and a particular sense of how the mind works. But this account can and has been endlessly rewritten, and each new version describes changes in the mode and aims of description itself, For example, Walter Benjamin bends

Proust's images to the objectives of Surrealist experience in his 1929 essay “The Image of Proust”: “He lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesickness for the world distorted in the state of resemblance, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through. To this world belongs what happens to Proust, and the deliberate and fastidious way in which it appears. It is never isolated, rhetorical, or visionary; carefully heralded and securely supported, it bears a fragile, precious reality: the image.” Benjamin's discussion of Proust’ “image” has everything to do with photography and its phantom, yet physically fixed, images that are also able to produce a reality of a different or unexpected order: surreal images. A number of key Surrealist objects exist solely as photographic images: Brassai's sculptures involontaires, physical accidents that he discovered in the pockets of pants and overcoats, or Man Ray's automatic object, found in the crease of a man’s hat. Another Frenchman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was equally interested in objects that exist only as descriptions. In a 1963 essay entitled “Time and Description in Fiction Today,” RobbeGrillet identified what he believed to be a crucial, contemporary, shift in the role of literary description: “Description once served to situate the chief contours of a setting, then to cast light on some of its particularly revealing elements; (now] it no longer mentions anything except insignificant objects, or objects which it is concerned to make so. It once claimed to reproduce a pre existing reality; it now asserts its creative function. Finally, it once made us see things, now it seems to destroy them, as if its intention to discuss them aimed only at blurring their contours, at making them incomprehensible, at causing them to disappear altogether."* In his novel The Erasers, Robbe-Grillet, or rather his character Wallas, searches for the perfect eraser. At numerous points in the novel, Wallas describes this object to various stationery-store shopkeepers: “a soft, crumbly gum eraser that friction does not twist but reduces to dust; an eraser that cuts easily and whose cut surface is shiny and smooth, like mother oftpearl .. . a yellowish cube, about an inch or two long, with, the corners slightly rounded—maybe by use.”” Wallas never finds this eraser, but each time he describes it, he feels obliged to buy an eraser that he will not use “since it is not, apparently, the one he is looking for and since he does not need any other despite certain resemblances—than that one." The eraser is a phantom, an imaginary object, yet it is more real than the generic erasers that Wallas purchases but never desoribes. Description creates a reality in which “real” physical objects, although not quite eclipsed, are granted significance through the fact that they disappoint. Robbe-Grillet’s use of description draws an important distinction between things imagined and things in the world that the imagination departs from, Such descriptions render a dif

ferent version of the real—one constituted by the imagination through descriptions and then tested against the outside world, which then rings false or unfamiliar. I call attention to RobbeGrillet’s discussion of the historical shift in the manner and function of description because of the significance of his writings for artists working in the 1960s in New York (including and especially Robert Smithson), because of the incredible subtlety of what he has to say about description, and finally because using @ literary model foregrounds the way description can shape or create a reality and not just reiterate one assumed to be external and a priori to it. This is precisely the way in which many descriptions of the Spiral Jetty have functioned, particularly the ones created or dictated by Smithson. They are also realities, which, once at home in the imagination, are hard to shake and can overwhelm, even if temporarily, one’s sense of things in the world, render them unfamiliar, disappointing, or make them ring false. ‘The final sequence in Smithson’s 1970 film about the Spiral Jetty produces one such situation. This sequence, unlike the rest of the film, is not dominated by some sort of rhythmic sound—a respirator, a clock, or a Geiger counter—or by the alternating sounds of a truck driving down an unpaved road, of rocks tumbling out of a truck bed into the Great Salt Lake, or of lake water lapping against the shore. In the final sequence, only muted sounds from outside the artist's studio can be heard, as the camera slowly zooms in on a photographic image of the Spiral Jetty, which is tacked above an editing table and framed both right and left by editing equipment. By this, point in the film, one’s inner ear has been conditioned by the constant repetition of rhythmically inflected sound, but if the viewing space is relatively quiet one might hear the clicking sound of the film projector as it unravels its loops of film, frame by frame, in front of its illuminated lens. The memory of now-absent recorded sound collides with its " Wve" presence in the room, and the parallel memory of footage of the Spiral Jetty in the process of being constructed and experienced onsite converges with its “still” presence over the editing table ‘These confrontations produce a palpable awareness of the contradictions and necessary relationship between a description becoming a real presence and the real fading into a twodimensional desoription.° ‘Smithson's hypothetical continents provide the closest, analogy to how he might have intended for the Spiral Jetty to function and to how it might continue to function as a description, despite the fact that it has, temporarily, returned as a physical object in the world. Smithson made Earth maps of four ‘hypothetical continents: Atlantis, Gondwanaland, Cathaysia, and Lemuria, He used outlines of these continents, which he traced out of a variety of books, to reconstruct them on a drastically reduced scale from materials found at a number of

6

different sites. For example, he made a map of Lemuria, an island once thought to have existed off the northeastern coast of Africa and adjacent to Madagascar, out of shells on the beach at Sanibel Island, Florida. Through this process, Smithson physically reconstituted this and the other three continents, which had previously existed only as ideas, images, and historical possibilities. But, since he then abandoned them to the elements almost immediately after completing and photographing them, they could only be experienced through photographic images and working drawings. His efforts reiterate their existence and their inevitable disappearance into description. ‘The Spiral Jetty may have reemerged and its physical remoteness may have been overcome, but an experiential remoteness, created in part by the Spiral Jetty film and other still images but also by historical distance, remains. The Jetty’s presence yet absence, its tendency to slip underwater and to rise above the lake level to dry up almost completely, has become a monument to instability, a state both man-made and geological. But, ultimately, the Jetty gets you there to this place, imagined or real, and the rest is your story. All histories necessarily consist of images, dates, names, and places, but they are also descriptions, stories to be told, and stories of the Jetty will continue to be told and enacted long after its image has ceased to take physical form. Atlantis, Cathaysia, Lemuria, and Gondwanaland are the subjects of such stories. Places, objects, real and imagined. The Spiral Jetty is on its way. Notes 1. Ann Reynolds. “Reproducing Nature: The Museum of Natural History as Nonsite,” ‘October 45 (Summer 1988), p. 109. The quotation is by A. S. Eddington, os quoted in Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty.” reprnted in this book, pp. 7-13. Originally published in Arts of the Environment, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: Brazier, 1972), pp. 222-32, this text was later reprinted in The Whitings of Robert Smithson, ed, Naney Hott (New York: New York University Press, 1970). pp. 109-16, and in Robert ‘Smithson: The Colected Writings, ed. Jack Fla (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 143-53. 2, Reynolds, p. 109, ‘3, Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum7, no. 4 (December 41967), p. 49. (Reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Calected Writings,9. 70.) 4. When discussing his fourth Mirror Displacement, Smithson relates to the reader \what Chalchinuiticue, the Surd of the Sea, said to him atthe site: “The true fetion ceradicates the fase rely.” (Smithson, “Incidents of MirorTravel inthe Yucatan,” Artforum8, no, 1 [September 1968], p. 30: reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 123.) 5. Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust" (1829), In lluminations, ed. Hannah ‘endt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 206. 6. Alain Robbe rile, “Time and Description in ition Today” (2963). in For @ New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1966) p.147, 7. Robbe-Giilet, The Erasers, ans, Richara Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1964}, p.126, 8. tid, p. 127, 8. Foran elaboration of this point, see my Robert Smithson: Learning fram New Jersey ‘and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2006), pp. 221-32, ‘Photo: Catherine Philips, 2008 6

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The Cinema Model George Baker Make a painting or sculpture as one winds up a reel of moving picture film. With each turn, on a large reel (several meters in diam eter if necessary), a new “shot” continuing the preceding turn and tying it into the next one—This kind of continuity may have nothing in common with moving picture film or even resemble it.

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Everything is two things that converge. This range of convergence is really the great area of speculation. Robert Smithson, comments at the Earth Art Symposium, 1969

retrospective in Los Angeles came at the exhibition's putative ‘end’: the visitor was greeted with a small sign announcing that Spiral Jetty, “a film about the making of Robert Smithson's epic earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, Utah," was available for viewing on the museum's lower level. One puzzled over this direction, wondering if the sign’s statement was perhaps a product of the earnest labor of the museum's education depart ment or a flat-footed, ironie feint on the part of the curatorial team. For the fact that Smithson’s flim amounts to anything but a simple documentation of the making of his earthwork: was the scandal of this sign. Smithson, of course, had his own name for the type of practice to which his film—with its maps, diagrams, texts, and aerial views—instead belongs: the con: struction that the artist called a Nonsite, And that Smithson's film proposes a radical transformation and intensification of the logic of the Nonsite, one that potentially reorders the direo. tion and meaning of Smithson's entire artistic practice, only completes the scandal of this sign. Much more promising was the placement of Smithson’s film at the end point of the exhibition—following certain of his drawings that he called “movie treatments,” an arrangement of stills from the Spiral Jetty film itself, and a group of deeply pellicular” sculptures such as Glass Strata (1969) or Mirrors and Shelly Sand (1969-70).’ From this position, the viewer could begin to imagine the reordering of Smithson's project that his engagement with film involves. It is this reordering that I want to explore in this essay, that is, the potential development by Smithson of what we could call @ “cinema model" for the work

of art, This would be a model that goes beyond the claims that ‘mirror Stratum, 1967

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have been made for Smithson’s postmodernity and his role in the elaboration of other extrinsic models—namely, those of language, photography, or allegory—dedicated to disrupting the purity of modernist visual art.” Smithson’s “cinema model” would also far exceed the marginalized position thus far extended to the exploration of film by artists during the emergence of Postminimal and Conceptual art, just as this model would have almost nothing to do with traditional understandings of what is still unfortunately called the “artist's film.” It may indeed have little to do with the making of objects that we normally call films. Within the context of the recent retrospective, the imagining of such a cinema model was also further aided by the seeming accident of Smithson's film being screened, not only in a terminal or extrinsic position vis-a-vis the exhibition, but in the museum's basement. It is, of course, a cliché of museum architecture that permanent screening rooms, indeed whole cinema departments, are relegated to the underground levels of the structure. But Smithson had always wondered about the proper viewing conditions for his Spiral Jetty film. “I am also interested in projection sites,” he once stated. “Where and how movies are ‘Plan tor Musoum Concerning Spirat Jetty near Golden Spike Monument, aera ‘Tlan wear

tor Museu ! Thee on patatgely RS BolhOr Spike Meer ument

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shown strikes me as important. Actually, I would like to show my film Spiral Jetty on the Staten Island Ferry. The ferryboat could sail out to the middle of the harbor, then sail back to the port in a spiraling voyage while the film was showing.”? This was an option not readily available to a museum situated in Los. Angeles, But Smithson had also envisioned the construction of a special museum dedicated to the Spiral Jetty, one to be built near the Golden Spike National Historic Site in Utah and thus close both to the Great Salt Lake and to the site of his earthwork, where his film would be screened in a literal underground cinema bored into the bowels of the earth, to which the viewer would have to descend via a spiral staircase. A pointless, circling voyage on the water; a spiraling descent into the earth: Smithson’s projection sites imagine a striking pair of analogies for the experience of both his spiral sculpture and his film, an assertion of physical continuity or reverberation—or perhaps what the artist would call a “range of convergence”—between the work of art and its viewer. That such continuity or convergence flies in the face of the experiences of displacement or dislocation that Smithson’s work famously put on offer seems deliberate, That one projection site was on the water and the other beneath the earth also hardly amounts to a coincidence, for these were the two materials— earth and water—constantly juxtaposed in Smithson’s sculpture and his film. Indeed, in Smithson’s film, earth and water themselves function as analogues for the solidity of sculpture and the flow of film, respectively. And it is with this realization that Smithson’s two imagined projection sites begin to differ in important ways. Projected in motion on the water, Smithson's film would have been immersed into the flowing, transitive condition characteristic, we might say, of its own material, of the medium of film itself, But deposited beneath the earth, ‘Smithson’ film was instead to be viewed entombed in the material most characteristic of the artist's sculpture. Indeed, as imagined in its underground museum near the Spiral Jetty, ‘Smithson’s film would hardly have come to coincide with the sculpture that it so closely mapped—this was not to be, in other words, a situation reminiscent of the story of Jorge Luis, Borges's Chinese map, which came to cover in a one-to-one scale the area of its depiction (a favorite example of Smithson's). Instead, Smithson’s underground museum assured that whatever continuities might exist between the Spiral Jetty sculpture and its film, the two works were always to be noncoincident with one another, no matter how closely they might approximate the other's conditions: the film was to be buried in the Underground Projection Room (Wah Museum Plan), 973 (Wiah Museum Plan), 1974

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ground, beneath the earth (the material of the sculpture), while the sculpture would soon disappear beneath the water (with its connections for Smithson to the flow of film), The two Spiral Jetty works, the sculpture and the film—they share the same title, along with Smithson’s written essay published in 1972— were to be radically unavailable to each other, in the most physical and palpable of ways. It must be admitted that this “unavailability” or noncoincidence, however, is of a rather strange sort. It is achieved, in ‘Smithson’s imagining, only by the film and sculpture sharing the very same “fate”: utter immersion in their conceptual opposite, To be buried in the earth, to sink beneath the water: these morbid or even catastrophic physical enactments of the condition of immersion make literal this latter state, characteristic of the (usually metaphoric) absorptive environment commonly attributed to the cinema, Such continuity-through-separation reveals a simple logic: Smithson’s Spiral Jetty film was presented as a complex analogy for and a continuance of the sculpture itself—indeed no simple document of the latter’s making. More importantly, the Spiral Jetty film acts not only as an analogy for Smithson's sculpture; it comes into play more generally as a mode—perhaps the mode—for creating the condition of the analogical or the continuous.‘ That this relational vocation for cinema in Smithson’s project would posit its powers of continuity only in the face of radical discontinuity—that its continuity would indeed be based on rigorously establishing such discontinuity—this is the first lesson of Smithson’s cinema model. ‘Asphalt Rundown, Rome, 1969

From the very first frames of Smithson'’s film, we sense the work of connection and analogy that the Spiral Jetty sets out to achieve, As the film opens, we find ourselves staring, perhaps through a telescopic lens, directly at the sun. (The film will end, more or less, with another concerted gaze into the sun, reflected in the water around and within the sculpture in the Great Salt Lake, setting up a circularity that structures the film throughout.) Our view is accompanied by the labored mechanical wheezing of what sounds like a hospital respirator. This immediate disjunction between image and sound, however, does not hold. For as the respirator accomplishes its aural work of expansion and contraction, the camera irises in on the sun in perfect congruence with the soundtrack, producing a vertiginous connection between what we hear and how we see. ‘The respirator’s noise of expansion and contraction simultaneously becomes an auditory emblem, then, of something. like a visual shift in scale, as the film proceeds from a long shot to a closeup view of the sun's surface. This surface seethes with a progression of solar flares, which now themselves billow out and recoil back to the sun in time with the respirator's steady rhythm of in and out. By this point, the connection between the partial image of the sun and the sound of the mechanical breathing has become so extreme as to force us to imagine the sun as the breathing’s source, as if the sun had become an ani‘mate being suspended in a sort of limbo, a space between life and death, with all the horror-movie connotations that this undead state might carry. It is at this moment that we hear ‘Smithson begin the voice-over by merely naming the site and title of his sculpture: “The Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Box Elder County, Utah.” Once again, any literal disjunction between what we see and what we hear immediately dissolves in the face of the spiraling solar flares that seem now to prefigure or rhyme with the growth and shape of Smithson’s sculpture, as if it too had come to life. Nothing in the subsequent unfolding of Smithson’s film contradicts the immense web of connectedness that Spiral Jetty’s opening scene initiates. From the image of the sun, we progress to an image filmed from a vehicle speeding along a dirt road whose slight curve reaches out toward the horizon while echoing the form of the preceding solar flares. Repeated several times—both from the front of the vehicle, with the road being devoured before us, and from the rear, with the road spat out into a dust-laden cloud—this episode, and each subsequent ‘one in the film, seems to articulate a specific power or characteristic of Smithson’s cinematic apparatus. If the opening episode was concerned with the scale shifts that cinema can enact and with the transformative powers of the closeup shot, the road episode returns to the sheer kinesis of physical movement characteristic of cinematic illusion, a subject dear to early

avant-garde films and close to something like the famous roller-

coaster scene in René Clair and Francis Picabia's Entr'acte (1924). That this cinematic illusion of motion can be produced both forward and in reverse is crucial to this set of scenes, just as it was explored in fact in a film like Entr'aote.® From the road episode, we jump to Smithson's footage of an “entropic” experiment of dumping pages ripped from books and atlases, into a ravine—a striking prefiguration of the construction methods of the “dumped” earth of the Spiral Jetty itself, as well as of contemporaneous works, such as Asphalt Rundown (1969), “The Barth's history,” Smithson's voice-over tells us, as the pages fall like dead leaves, “seems at times like a story recorded in a book, each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages, and some of the pieces of each page are missing.” While this destroyed, unbound book is of course “ike” Smithson's film—with its fragmented episodes that hardly proceed to construct a coherent narrative or “story”—Smithson concentrates on the pages’ wafting onto the parched ground of the ravine, cracked into ragged fragments like the falling pages themselves. This produces another striking visual correspondence between the pages and the earth (precisely the analogy made in Smithson's voice-over), but Smithson seems more interested in the strictly cinematic logic of this entropic sedimentation, as these objects falling onto and covering over their visual twins enact the process of something like that, of cinematic progression, where frame follows frame in an endless succession that is also an endless burial of image falling upon image Cinema, in other words, proceeds by way of “dumping,” from which process Smithson's Spiral Jetty sculpture will also ultimately emerge. Hardly content to leave his web of analogies here, Smithson then progresses through a series of scale shifts, filming the torn pages in long, medium, and then closeup shots. In the last of these closeups, the camera pans the pages ‘as one might read them, from left to right, traveling through them, indeed, like a progression of individual film frames drawn through a projector. The insistent ticking of the soundtrack throughout this entire episode underlines the inexorable progression characteristic of what by now seems a cinematic drive, however unbound the filmed fragments here are from any notion of a reconstituted chronological order. In a later episode, Smithson will again present the viewer with books piled one atop the other in an analogy to sedimentary strata (one of the books is titled Seclimentation) or to the logic of cin‘ema and its deposited film frames once more. Now, however, Smithson presents the book not as unbound but as nothing but a series of bindings, yet the “whole” object that the bindings constitute splits in two in an analogy to cinema's procedures of doubling, as Smithson films the pile of books upon a mirrored ground. Smithson’s voice-over sums up our disorientation—in the face of torn fragments that will not add up to a coherent

whole and find their doubles outside themselves, or whole objects that exceed their literal boundaries in a play of refleotions—by simply reading aloud the title of the book on the top of the pile: “The Lost World.” Divided ultimately into a tripartite structure, the film maps correspondences and analogies in every episode of its first section that themselves correspond to the logie of cinema. ‘Smithson's panning of the torn atlas pages and his transforming of them into film frames returns in perhaps the key episode of the film’s opening section, the footage of dinosaur fossils from the American Museum of Natural History. Filming the space with a red filter, Smithson transforms the Hall of Late Dinosaurs first into a kind of photographic darkroom, the place from whence the cinematic image emerges—and this is a color that will be taken over in the film's subsequent sections by the red water of the Great Salt Lake. (Salt, of course, the object of the darkroom’s manipulations, lies at the basis of the photographic and cinematic image.) Here again Smithson's camera begins to pan from left to right, in a movement as inexorable as the forward zoom of Michael Snow's film Wavelength (1967) (which this episode seems explicitly to cite). Circulating instead in a continuous spiral movement, the camera concatenates, first, the room's windows like film frames into motion and then the individual vertebrae and bones of the dinosaur fossils themselves. All the while, the soundtrack unleashes a noise like footsteps reverberating in an empty space, a string of blurred echoes whose resoundings produce the aural correspondence for the visual reverberation we witness on the screen.* Dissolved as coherent objects by such echoes as much as by the red halation of intense light, the fossils become strangely immobile and rigid avatars—undead, in-between things—for the structure and movement of cinema (‘Going ‘Movie Treatment: Hall of Late Dinosaurs, 1970

Evolution of Amphibia, 1962

nowhere,” Smithson's voice-over intones, reciting a passage from ‘Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, “coming from nowhere”) ‘And yet if the torn atlas pages and forlorn fossils “are” film frames, or can be converted as two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional models “into” film, they both point to what the first section of Smithson's film seems concerned to map: the site of his spiral sculpture, The Spiral Jetty film, in other words, is a Nonsite, But it is a Nonsite that no longer stands as a structural equivalent for “sculpture,” as Smithson’s classic Nonsites had, but maps a site that itself now contains a sculpture.” Or perhaps this description is not entirely accurate, For, of course, the film maps this site and this sculpture in ‘terms that constantly return to the production of corresponences between the soulpture and the film, as if the film was still a “structural equivalent” for sculpture, just as the earlier ‘Nonsites had been. And yet the film's ultimate concatenation of all of the Spiral Jetty’s details into equivalents as well for the idea of the cinematio—this leaves us with a pressing series of questions, We must answer, first, why and how Smithson would shift the soulptural model of the Nonsite s0 radically toward the construction of cinema, even if he now produces a film that focuses on and extends a sculpture. We should wonder, too, about the convertibility more generally of the medium of sculpture into the medium of film. And we need to develop language for those operations that gave Smithson such sudden access to the intense web of analogies and connections that his film produced. These are the open questions as the first section of Smithson’s film comes to a close, as the artist now pans, not torn pages or rigid fossils, but maps of his sculpture’s site, ina series of shots that link disparate maps and distant times and places, only to dissolve from such representations to the actual wators of the Great Salt Lake. It is the first scene transition of its kind in Smithson’s film, less a cut than a cinematic technique of superimposition and metaphoric connection, We thus arrive, at the opening of the film's second section, at the site itself, but the site is given to us only as a play of redtinged ripples and eddies that emerge from (and merge with) the film's earlier maps and diagrams, in an image whose form and color echoes the cracked ground and torn pages and red light that Smithson has already transmuted into so many figures of the cinematic. Here is my essay’s polemical part. It would perhaps be easy to search for the source of the Spiral Jetty film's method of “correspondence” and analogy in the mythic visions of Smithson's early “religious” art. It was Walter Benjamin, after all, who made explicit such a connection between mythic experience and the modernist notion of correspondance: “The important thing, Benjamin wrote, about Charles Baudelaire, “is that the corre-

spondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements... . The correspondances are the data of remembrance not historical data, but data of prehistory. And yet this reflex action of many recent revisionist accounts of Smithson’s work—stemming from the major shift initiated

a decade ago by Eugenie Tsai's recuperation of the early paintings and writings—not only trivializes the formal break that Smithson makes from his early lyrical and expressionist concerns to his mature work in favor of a supposed continuity of “theme,” it also altogether misoonstrues the import of

Smithson’s later model of relationality. For there is another source for such operations in Smithson’s project, a formal logic in his work itself obscured by the recent rush to embrace his early religious themes and iconography. ‘This formal development does stem back to the years of Smithson’s earliest work, showing the “break” between his early and mature modes to have indeed been more gradual and aborious than previously assumed. However, the critical task lies not in extending the values and ideas of Smiths ‘Smithson in hi studio with works from his ‘exhibition “Assomblages” at Richard Casteane Gallery, New York, October 1962 Photo: Fred W. MeDarrah

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early work in a developmental teleology that comes to determine his later cares but to sketch a genealogy showing the radicality of Smithson’s later work already to be writhing, in fact, within and beneath his earlier project, breaking up its problematic forms and themes from the rt. The crucial turn seems to be located around the unfortunately lost works of Smithson’s second 1962 show at the Richard Castellane Gallery in New York, an exhibition whose objects leaned less

upon religious themes than the scientific motifs of biology and natural history, and whose oreations were referred to at the time as “Assemblages.” or “Bio-loons, Specimens, Chemicals, Diagrams.”® The last of these terms—the diagram—is key for my purposes here, and we get a good sense of its emergence

in Smithsor work in a surviving photograph of Smithson in his studio in 1962, standing next to a diagrammatic represen tation, apparently copied from a biology textbook illustration, of a snake's head. Lam of course not ignorant of the potential religious and biblical overtones of such an image of a snake. But what seems crucial in formal terms here lies in Smithson’s

sudden adoption of a diagram as the totalizing schema for his own pictorial language. This move toward the adoption of a readymade schema with its language of appropriation was of course a well-established strategy within avant-garde antiaesthetics from the Dada epoch to its Pop resuscitation. Working for the moment through the strategies of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns (the “device”), and early Pop, Smithson shares here with artists like Andy Warhol the readymade pictorial schema's thematization of its own form as such in the literal appropriated diagram (witness key Warhol paintings of the early 1960s, such as his Dance Diagrams or Where Is Your Rupture? [1961)), Immediately, however, Smithson moved beyond such precedents, departing it seems from any simple understanding of readymade form, industrial or functional depiction, and the diagrammatic-as-theme. Already in some of the collages of this moment, such as the work St. John in the Desert (circa 1961-63), or in what seems to be one of the few paintings from the 1962 series that has survived, an image entitled Selfless Portrait (1962), we sense the emergence of an exploration on Smithson's part of the diagram as an operation, one that serves less to automate the formal production of a painting than to interconnect disparate objects, representations, and languages. In St. John [Andy Warhol, Where le Your Rupture?, 1963

in the Desert, Smithson hardly denigrates his appropriated scientific diagrams, mostly of electrical cireuits and currents, in proper allegorical fashion. Instead, he seems to replace the traditional allegorical model of religious painting—the unequal comparison of degraded material language to transcendent supraphysical referent—with a proliferation of an almost infinite multitude of contiguous images of literal connection, operating with a quite-different set of languages that the diagrams explicitly describe in their own captions as those of “equiva lence,” “oscillation, “continuity,” and “integrated networks.” In Selfiess Portrait, we begin to witness the power of this language of connection in action, as Smithson’s schematic Ie" literally loses its boundaries and becomes opened, diagrammatically, onto a kind of inventory of the disconnected, in which both images of physical touching—a person brushing a bust, perhaps two round touching organisms, their echo in a figure eight or rotated infinity sign—and textual elements such as purely connective prepositions and conjunctions—“from,” “for .d,” “of”—now figure prominently." It is the art historian and theorist David Joselit to whom we owe the most advanced account of this diagrammatic strategy in twentieth-century art. In an essay entitled “Dada’s Diagrams,” Joselit bucks previous accounts of the centrality

of the readymade or of allegorical strategies of appropriation and montage in Dada, placing the diagram alongside the readymade and montage as a third, overlooked element—with its own logic and ends—in the Dada arsenal." For Joselit, the diagram finds its primary exploration in the Large Glass project and related works by Marcel Duchamp and in the unfortunately named “mechanomorphic” or machine drawings of Francis Picabia and those Dadaists influenced by him. As opposed to Cubist semiosis, whose effect Joselit calls “implosive” as “objects collapse under their own mounting semiotic obscurity.” the Dada diagram is “expansive,” a matter of “vectors and relations” that do not return to a post-Cubist mimetic or representational image, even of the machine, but instead present a mode of linkage characteristic of such technology."® “The diagram, Joselit writes, “reconnects the disconnected fragments of representation invented by cubism." This reconnection hardly

amounts to a “return to coherence,” but instead exists as a further liberation of the transformational energies of Cubist semiosis, producing what amounts to “a free play of polymorphous linkages,” a boundless “connectivity between discrete elements.” And unlike the readymade and montage, the diagram becomes “abstract” not by directly assaulting the “objeo-

tivity” of commodities but by emphasizing a “pure relationality between things,” producing “an interstitial space—a space of the cut like the joins between pictures in a montage or the infrathin boundary between a readymade and its recodings,” seeking to “visualize Dada’s physical and conceptual principle of commodity fission.""* Crucially, Joselit sees the emergence of the Dada diagram as a strategy that would hybridize and reconnect text and image only in the face of an epochal split between textual and visual regimes within modernity exemplified, in his account, by the

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped ‘Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large (las), 1918-23

Francis Pleabla, Machines Turn

disjunction between the book and the cinema. It is this relation to cinema in Joselit’s historical narrative that returns us to Smithson." With a new understanding of the overlooked importanceof the diagram to avant-garde strategies at our disposal, it should now become easier to understand why such long-accepted avant-garde paradigms as collage, the readymade, and photomontage were never especially compelling for Smithson. Indeed, in Smithson's early attempts at collage, which seem closer in form to the collage models of Rauschenberg: or perhaps of Kurt Schwitter

an to any properly Cubist models,

the inherently disjunctive language of collage seems from the beginning to be threaded counterintuitively through a dia grammatic field of analogies and pure relationality. It’s King Kong (circa 1961-63) or the similar work Untitled (Venus with Reptiles) (1963) present something like a “jigsaw” model of collage, where disjunctive pieces are only placed on the same ground inasmuch as they might “fit” together in a panoplyof planar rhymes a proliferation with its own connestions to the formal operation of a work like St. John in the Desert. Indeed the objects represented within the fragments themselves present a similar, but now representational, correspondence of forms. Kong—an image, not coincidently, of course taken from the cinema—is echoed by the forms of the surrounding sky scrapers and statues, connected to them visually instead of woven with them into a diegetic narrative, just as Smithson’s Venus corresponds in her fetishized shape to the otherwise disjunctive lizards and tails heaped everywhere around her a lascivious rhyme of phallic body and phallic tails.

It is also not a coincidence that when Smithson does turn to more explicit Dada models of image appropriation and montage in transitional works such as Untitled (Hexagonal Center) (1963) or Untitled (The Time Travelers) (1964), he is attracted now to the erotic, Dada’s own primary avatar of the diagrammatic machine's principle of connection (just as Georges Bataille, in another context, embraced the erotic as a form of intense “communication”). In this light, Smithson’s evident interest at this moment in both homosexual desire and hermaphroditic bodies (witness Untitled (Second Stage Injector}. 1963) serves as another emblem of an abstract concern with conneetion and linkage, principles that are made transparent and transparently mechanical in his most explicit Dada cita tion, Honeymoon Machine (1964). That a diagram of some sort lies at the heart of Untitled (Hexagonal Center)—one indeed that will be taken up in Smithson's later work leading to the Spiral Jetty'"—and that yet another movie lies at the heart of Untitled (The Time Travelers) forces us to realize that when ‘Smithson does work through the twentieth-century models of collage or the Dada models of the readymade and montage, such working-through only occurs via the formal imperatives and relationality of a mode of representation that has already

Honeymoon Machine, 1964

become implicitly diagrammatic. Smithson’s collages and montages, however awkward, are already on the way to becoming diagrams—which perhaps explains their awkwardness—and they operate visually along the line of the diagram's map of relations, vectors, and polymorphous connections. We are now in a position to understand the “break in Smithson’s work from 1964 into 1965—the onset of his ‘mature” Minimal sculpture and “crystalline” works—as a development that is in point of fact an intensification of a diagrammatic logic. Perhaps Smithson found a range of convergence between the diagram as a mode and the linkages he was in the process of making between the antianthropomorphic, antihumanist ideas that he began to plumb from the natural sciences and the forms of early Minimalism. We can, at any rate, sense the vocation of the diagram in newly physical terms in his “crystalline” and mirrored sculptures of the moment. ‘The Untitled works of 1964-65, for example, begin to map a spatial disorientation that is based upon producing a new set of spatial relations, connecting floor to ceiling or ceiling to PPointioss Vanishing Point, 1967

floor, reversing their polarities, pushing the center of a viewer's space to the extremities and inviting the peripheral to a new place in the center of a given work. Such connections are perhaps still latently diagrammatic—however radically we must begin to rethink the Minimalist oxymoron of a phenomenological sculpture with newly diagrammatic purpose'*—and yet these works mark a significant development taken up in ‘Smithson’s subsequent project, inasmuch as they evoke literal diagrammatic structures, such as the orthogonals of traditional single-point perspective. For single-point perspective entails, of course, a type of “connective” grid or diagram, but one of a restricted and restrictive kind; the singularity of its vectorization will be completely overturned in Smithson’s work. A sign of the multiplicity of vectors and linkages in ‘Smithson’s subsequent work arrives with the sculptures of 1966 such as Alogon or Plunge, which begin to play not with Minimalist seriality and repetition but with structures of progression that offer potentially infinite variations in physical scale, Inasmuch as progression itself implies relations of con-

nection and concatenation, scale shifts—which become so important to the later Spiral Jetty project and film—are also implicit in the diagram's formal imperatives, which entail a mode of representation wherein no two things can be thought to exist in actuality in the same place, space, scale, or plane: ‘True diagrams always involve a range of shifting scales, with‘out physical anchor or realizable key. And, after a period in 1967 of making objects out of literal maps and appropriated printed diagrams (Entropie Pole, Untitled [Map on Mirror— Passaic, New Jersey}), Smithson emerges in 1968 with a whole series of sculptures that emanate now directly from the conneetive tissue of diagrammatic representation and spaces, a series involved in the solidifying of the perspective grid, the conditions of pictorial illusionism, or a more generalized cartographic field. Sculptures such as Pointless Vanishing Point and Leaning Strata are interstitial objects that testify to the interstitial vocation of the diagram; they are objects, paradoxically, devoted to undermining any belief in an independent object or self-sufficient entity, vectors without object or goal (quite literally “pointless”)." These are works that lead, later in 1968, directly to the inescapable eruption of diagrammatic form in Smithson’s invention that year of the Nonsite.*® ‘The concern with perspective diagrams and orthogonals carries over into sculptural and photographie forms of the Nonsites, which often solidify this “conn tive” grid, as well ‘This solidification of the immaterial grid or intersti

serves however fully to undo its singular veetor, and the visual and pictorial field it once supported, fulfilling the pun of Smithson’s “nonsights” as a form of antivision. The Nonsites instead introduce an entirely other field of diagrammatic, as opposed to perceptual, connections—moving structurally beyond the phenomenological field of Minimal a in a definitive way, just as they open onto a new understanding of the continuity crucial to the assault on contained objects characteristic of all forms of Postminimalism.*! “By drawing a diagram,” Smithson wrote in “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites” in 1968, “a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a ‘logical two dimensional picture.’ A ‘logical pictus differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor—A is Z."** This * logical pic-

ture,” it bears saying, would not only come to map the later Spiral Jetty through a cinematic field of such “analogies”; it lies at the source of the diagrammatic form of the spiral in Smithson’s art. The spiral, that is, would be something like a self-reflexive sign, or diagram, of the diagrammatic drive itself, an image of sheer vectorization and enfolded reverberation." And thus it makes perfect sense to witness its birth in any number of spiral forms sprouting like weeds atop a literal collection of diagrams, representing a typology of airport layouts in Smithson’s 1966 sketch Texas Airport. Here, on a preexisting field of diagrams, Smithson sketched a series of “echoes

Texas Aiport, 1968

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of these diagrams, in the echo that is itself the spiral form, echoes that defunctionalize the diagrams at their basis, leading their purposeful vectors astray into a vectorization made now for its own sake—a diagrammatic drive let loose from its previ ous restrictive confines, a matter of expansive ripples like the aftermath of a series of pebbles dropped into a body of water. Or, as in the slightly later but related sketch atop a diagram, A Web of White Gravel Paths Surrounding Water Storage Tanks (1967), we witness a vectorization that produces a defunctionalizing image of connection for its own sake (the obstruction of the “web,” of course, a kind of gothie joke for an airport site). And, in the same year that Smithson produced the Spiral Jetty, he would now make it explicit that he saw his previous sculptures as not only made from diagrams thematically, but operating as diagrams formally, in a text he wrote in 1970 about the earlier “solidified diagram" Gyrostasis (1968). This was a standing spiral that had itself descended from the cartographic diagram of Untitled (Hexagonal Center) and from a previous triangulated spiral from the artist's air-terminal project, which he called an Aerial Map: “When I made the soulpture,” Smithson wrote, “I was thinking of mapping procedures that refer to the planet Barth, One could consider it... as an abstract three dimensional map that points to the SPIRAL Gyrostasis, 1968

JETTY, 1970 in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. GYROSTASIS is relational, and should not be considered as an isolated object." We witness with this a diagrammatic veotor leading now through the full range of Smithson’s artistic work, a matter of diagrams connecting themselves endlessly to other diagrams, in a pure field of continuity. It produces an effect within Smithson’s work something like that of another map that he produced in that same year of 1970: the drawing A Surd View for an Afternoon, a “map that now makes fully diagrammatic the entirety of Smithson’s recent project, linking up a whole series of drawings of his individual works, a diagram of other diagrams connected by the vector of a spiral. In such a fully diagrammatic vision—or “surd view"—of the work of art, A is now Z, as Smithson put it, in an unleashing and self-reflexive imaging of the diagram's sheer powers of connection and linkage.** As ‘Smithson concluded of this intensified field of connection in his “Provisional Theory of Non-Sites": “A logical intuition can develop in an entirely ‘new sense of metaphor’ free of natural or realistic expressive content, Between the actual site... and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that ‘travel’ in this space is a vast metaphor."**

‘The pathways of my argument now become clear. It is the “vast metaphor" of the diagram that Smithson finally realizes, first in the diagrammatic spiral form of his earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, and then in the cinematic expansion of its principles in the Spiral Jetty film. The “cinema model” thatI have been tracking here emerges as an outgrowth and recoding of the diagrammatic mode established in the artist's earlier work, as by 1970 cinema comes in every way for Smithson to take up the structural operation of the diagram, pushing its powers further, transcending its “morphology,” we could say, for a formal process now able to be realized cinematically. For cinema, as put in place in Spiral Jetty, can be seen, like the diagram, to exist as a force of sheer vectorization. It makes palpable, via montage, the techniques of linkage and connection that remain only potential images of such in conventional diagrammatic forms, Its linkages, furthermore, operate upon and across a basis of inescapable interstices, the “outside” of the individual cinematic still image that Gilles Deleuze, at the same moment that he was thinking through his theory of the diagram in A Thousand Plateaus, would consider the very basis of cinema as a concept, or more properly, a model: cinema would be that medium, like the diagram, whose purpose was to produce relations across discontinuity, a medium made possible by the condition of the interstice.*” And last, the “vast metaphor” of the diagram finds its enactment in cinema's potential dedication to an abstract transitivity, its foundation of a fully transformational, metaphoric field,

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‘A Surd Viow for an Afternoon, 1970

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‘The second secti n of Smithson’s film inserts the viewer into this metaphoric field by an immediate and rigid suppression of the medium shot. The entire section alternates between long shots—of Smithson, the work, and the landscape—and extreme closeups or partial views. Thus, in this section of the {film ostensibly devoted to filming the construction process of the sculpture, we move between seeing an overview, a ghostly stick figure seen from afar staking out the diagrammatic curve of the spiral sculpture with a string, and closeups, first of Smithson’s green rubber boots plunging like the legs of some massive water creature into the lake and then partial views of the bulldozer and dump truck that Smithson employed in the making of the sculpture, Like Smithson’s boots, which seem transmuted into something entirely other, the partial images of the construction equipment analogize these machines with a whole menagerie of grumbling prehistoric dinosaurs or movie monsters, living counterparts to the fossils in the earlier redfiltered scene in the American Museum of Natural History. ‘This becomes an analogy that Smithson sustains by cutting irrationally from the machines to a still illustration of three ‘Stegosauruses and then later another still image of a lizard; it becomes an analogy sustained by the alternation between distant and closeup views. Such alternation determines the rhythmic unfolding of the second section of the Spiral Jetty. For each episode of the dinosaur machines, pushing and lifting and spewing out the earth that would make up Smithson’s sculpture, exists against, ‘an extreme closeup of the red-tinged water of the Great Salt Lake, flowing in quiet ripples whose movement never ceases. Interspersed and paired in this way, the images of the water and the earthmoving machines seem themselves overtaken by the power of cinematic analogy, presenting a twinning of water and earth that analogizes one to film and the other to sculpture respectively, only to undo their separation and assert, ultimately, their potential continuity. Smithson explored precisely this analogy later in his essay “The Spiral Jetty,” when he described his choice for the sculpture’s site in terms that evoke the concept of a “cinema-ized site,” which he had established long before in his work, a physical site taken over by the conditions of the cinematic.** “As I looked at the site,” Smithson wrote, “it REVERBERATED out to the horizons only to suggest AN IMMOBILE CYCLONE while FLICKERING LIGHT made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the FLUTTERING STILLNESS, into A SPINNING SENSATION WITHOUT MOVEMENT. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness, From that GYRATING SPACE emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty.” Having presented the site in terms of the “flickering light” ‘Spal Jetty, 1970, film still

and the “fluttering,” “spinning,” and “gyration” of cinema—but algo the “stillness” and “immobility” of sculpture—Smithson concludes with a set of terms that tie the earth and water of his site together with the sculptural and cinematic mediums of the Spiral Jetty: fo ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality

of that evidence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still.” ‘The connection Smithson constructs here between earth and water, and thus between sculpture and cinema, takes the form, in this last line, of a chiasmus. Smithson had many figures for this type of connection through inversion in his project, the most important of which was the term enantiomorphism, borrowed from the natural sciences and the language of crystallography—the pairing of two objects in mirrored reflection, with their polarities reversed (our left and right hands are enantiomorphs). Smithson’s Spiral Jetty earthwork imagines this chiasmus in the literal entwining of water and earth, producing in effect not one but two spiral forms, in enantiomorphic relation to each other. But, as the water serves as a mirror reflection of the Jetty's earth, so too does Smithson’s analogous film, producing another chiastic connection more radical than the literal entwining of earth and water in the sculpture. In the metaphoric transformations and linkages enacted by the film, the dinosaur machines produce the sculpture through. a series of actions—lifting, pushing, dumping—that, in the grips of Smithson’s analogies, become so many analogies of other, more directly biological processes, such as oral ingestion and anal excretion. Smithson often seems at pains to stress these further analogies, as in the scenes of the sculpture’s construction we proceed through the section's method of closeup, fragmented, and partial views toward ever-increasing proximity to the machines. In one memorable sequence, the camera progressively inserts us through ever-closer shots “into” the gaping “orifice” of a rock-filled dump truck, whose contents spill as if directly onto us by this sequence's end. If, later in this section, such closeups of falling or dumped rocks will call up once more the falling of film frames through a projector—just as a later closeup of the spinning treads of the bulldozer visually echoes the spinning film reel itself—here the dumping becomes truly excretory, and that in an all-encompassing way, as the black earth and stones fill the entirety of the screen. With such oral and anal metaphors, Smithson coneretizes an infamous dictum. of the Dadaist Man Ray’ -—who was thinking, at least in part, of Brancusi—to the effect that all modern sculpture “has the same anal source.® For the field of modernist sculpture, as critics from Rosalind Krauss to Mignon Nixon have shown, was the field of the part object. Sculpture itself, then—at least at

tho moment it was pushed to the limits of its founding logio— had involved a transformational field of anarchic equivalencies. And thus we could say that in Spiral Jetty, cinema absorbs this equivalency principle, substituting its partial images for sculpture'’s partial objects, becoming thereby a formal tool of analogy and continuity. Cinema achieves this, however, only to the extent that it takes up that which defines the sculptural at its limits, remaking this limit condition in its own terms Spiral Jetty imagines this linkage, between sculpture and cine‘ma, as a relationship of chiasmus, a connection through erossing, inversion, reflection. This is a relationship that echoes a statement that Smithson was fond of citing, and that he attributed to Carl Andre: “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.”*" ‘Smithson's cinema model explores the truth that one can only be open to radical continuity through a profound recognition of discontinuity—the operation of connection and linkage only conceivable in the face of the force of in-completion and prior disconnection. In the second section of the Spiral Jetty film, the sculpture can only be perceived as incomplete or unfinished, facilitating thereby the cinematic play with analogy and metaphoric linkage. However, the third and final section of Smithson’s film presents the sculpture, in some sense, “complete”—although the sculpture’s openness to growth and temporal transformation does not cease to this day, a sign of the sculpture’s incorporation of a logic we could inversely eall cinematic. But the conclusion of the Spiral Jetty hardly becomes a simple document of the finished sculpture; taking his camera into a helicopter and presenting the viewer with aerial images like those that had so marked his prior Nonsites, Smithson elaborates a climax to his film that is instead “about” the diagrammatic process of vectorization, and thus that does not allow his film, in reality, to conclude at all. For vectors are not final in this way, not finished: the vector exists simply as a force of linkage, a “line of flight” as Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say, and Smithson's film builds then to such an exploration of what we could call the diagram’s mode of functioning, rather than its mere physical appearance. ‘Smithson achieves this enactment of the vector through yet another, overarching analogy or performed continuity, as he places his camera in motion in a manner analogous to the form of the Spiral Jetty itself. This concern with reverberating camera movements—allowing cinematic insoription to be determined reciprocally by the form of the object to be recorded— stretches through all of Smithson’s engagements with film, such as the six-minute work titled Swamp (1971), which he made with Nancy Holt. Swamp is a film, in the artist's words, “about deliberate obstructions or calculated aimlessness,”

wherein we hear Smithson convey, almost sadistically, a set of seemingly senseless directions to Holt as she looks steadfastly through her camera while attempting to make her blinded way through the reeds and bog of a ewamp in New Jersey. ‘Smithson’s directions, however, were recorded separately from the film footage, and thus his “voice-over” and commands remain suggestively out of synch with the “progress” we witness Holt's camera in the process of making a vector, we might say, everywhere given over to misdirection and potential wandering astray. And such concerns would recur, as well, in ‘Smithson's final projects in the wake of the Spiral Jetty, such as his double earthwork Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), where he concluded that the work shouldn't build toward a “show” or an exhibition of its form but should become “a way of generating continual movement"—to which purpose he planned another film. As opposed to the grounded obstructions of ‘Swamp, the film for Broken Circle/Spiral Hill took (like the Spiral Jetty film) to the air. But its vectors would be just as obstructed, just as “aimless.” Smithson imagined at least three different camera movements that his film could produce: descending and ascending helicopter shot that would push the sculpture in and out of the condition of visibility; a shot that simply traced an echo of the perimeters of the two earthworks in a pointless voyage that Smithson described as a “figure 8 Aerial camera movement”; and, finally, a set of vertiginous shots performed by a stunt plane engaged in a “cloverleaf” maneuver of four ascending and descending loops—like the roundness of his sculpture or a “loop” of film—over the static earthwork. In the Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s airborne camera similarly begins by attempting to follow the curving line of the Jetty— filming from only a fow foot off the ground, in anothor partial view—tracing a dizzying pathway that produces a sensation of pure directional movement but leads ultimately “nowhere,” arriving after some moments at the absent center of the spiral. At this point, the helicopter carrying the camera ascends into the sky, but now in a manner that sets the entire apparatus spinning, first in one direction and then the other, placing the gradually appearing sculpture into motion like an echo of the spinning disks of Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926). During this drunken reeling, Smithson’s voice-over works through the infamous dirge that repeats the materials of his earthwork—

“mud, salt crystals, rocks, water”—for each and every point of the compass. Smithson’s helicopter changes the direction of its spinning precisely at the halfway point of the artist's exhau: tive list of the points on the compass, but otherwise the episode and voice-over produce a sense of directionless directionality, a serial cataloguing of directions, a vectorization for its own sake.

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After an inserted series of closeup shots of rocks covered in salt crystals that progressively descend in scale to an almost microscopic state—and where the expanding and contracting respirator noise that opened the film returns for the first time—Smithson repeats the entire endeavor of following the spiral’s spinning vector. This amounts to perhaps the most memorable episode in Smithson's film, his evident parody of Alfred Hitchoock’s crop-duster scene in North by Northwest (1959), as Smithson’s helicopter-borne camera now chases the artist along the full length of the precarious spiral." “For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames),” he artist wrote, “I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get

the scale in terms of erratic steps." Indeed, Smithson’s steps during this entirely pointless pursuit are erratic, as the artist consistently changes his speed, going faster and then slower, lurching and then skipping, seeming at times scared or nonchalant, almost falling once or twice, But he meant his words

‘erratic steps” to tie together two of the crucial experiences of

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his spiral: its directionless vector and its opening onto an infinite series of irrational linkages through the logic of shifts in scale, a relational connection of the radically disparate. For “erratic steps” replaced the “measurable steps” that the artist explained lie at the basis of the confused notion linking the irrational experience of scale to the rational and knowable quantity of size.°* “For me,” Smithson testified, “scale operates by uncertainty.” And he continued: After a point, measurable steps (“Scale skal n. It. or L; It Scala; L scala usually scalae pl., |. a. originally a ladder; a flight of stairs; hence, b. a means of ascent”) descend from logic to the “surd state.” The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity sud denly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event, The “curved” reality of sense perception operates in and out of the “straight” abstractions of the mind. The flowing mass of rock and earth of the Spiral Jetty could be trapped by a grid of segments, but the segments would exist only in ‘the mind or on paper. Of course, it is also possible to translate the mental spiral into a three-dimensional succession of measured lengths that would involve areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses, and strains; but in the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality. Ambiguities are admitted rather than rejected, contradictions are increased rather than decreased—the alogos undermines the Jogos. Purity is put in jeopardy. | took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt.°7 While the diagram seems to be referenced negatively in thia passage, placed in opposition to a bodily or phenomenological experience of “sense perception,” this is not in fact the case Rather, the passage, and indeed this entire episode of Smithson’s film, juxtaposes the phenomenological and the diagrammatic, showing each to be prone to an operation in excess of their conventional limits, layering the one (Smithson’s body) atop the other (the Jetty’s spiral diagram, or vector). It is instead the logical shadow of the diagrammatic drive that I have been tracking—its tamed, instrumentalized version—that Smithson denigrates here. For scale shifts are implicit within the kind of “surd” diagram or cinematic model in which he was interested, as the conclusion of his film definitively leads the viewer into “uncertainty” just as Smithson “takes his chances” running the spiral.®* “The movie,” as Smithson put it, “recapitulates the scale of the Spiral Jetty. Disparate elements assume a coherence.” This coherence is neither that of logic nor rationality but that of the irrational linkage of a fully diagrammatic set of continuities, made as if randomly or at least autonomously, made, that is, for

their own sake—for the sake of the operation of linkage itself, autonomy twisted into an impossible experience of the lack of separation between all things. Smithson traced these irrational linkages in his own essay—at one point self-reflexively diagramming “The Spiral Jetty” essay's “logic"—in what he called his writing’s “scale of centers.” This diagram of scale shifts ‘was akin to a musical “scale,” consisting of eight “notes” in the form of a progressive list: {a) ion source in cyclotron (b) a nucteus (0) dislocation point (d) a wooden stake in the mud {@) axis of helicopter propelier (f) James Joyce's ear channet! (g) the Sun ()) a hole in the film reel. Move

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(2) particles (0) protoplasmic solutions, (c) dizziness (2) ripples. (€) flashes of light (f) sections (@) foot steps () pink water.®? One might make much of the fact that each of these diagrammatic tracings ends with a figure of cinema, the “hole” in the film reel and the salted water that Smithson’s “system” had analogized throughout with the medium of film, But the

‘Movie Treatment: Spiral Jott, 1970

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And if this verbal diagram was not enough, Smithson added an “equally uncertain soale of edges,” as he put it, “spinning off” from the first set of unmotivated connections, one scale relating to the other like a major to a minor key:

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“logic” of such connections was obviously beyond logic. It pointed instead to the polymorphous linkage of the semiotic mode of the diagram, a mode taken over by the cinema model. “The equation of my language remains unstable,” Smithson concluded after establishing these lists, “a shifting set of coordinates, an arrangement of variables spilling into surds. My equation is as clear as mud—a muddy spiral.™® ‘That mud, or a “muddy spiral,” could figure forth both the autonomous vectoring of Smithson’s film, as well as the general conditions of a diagrammatic language, seems counterintuitive, to say the least. But mud, of course, is a material whose very existence is diagrammatic in the way that Smithson had come to understand such operations. For mud is a material in limbo, ‘we might say, a substance made up only of the combination of otherwise separate substances, an interstitial hybrid holding both earth and water in murky suspension. Inasmuch as earth and water came to function as Smithson’s analogies for sculpture and film, mud comes as well to exist as Smithson’s very image of his Spiral Jetty project, and indeed as a concrete, if entropic, metaphor for his model of cinema. Mud had been the literal condition out of which Swamp emerged, the material underlying its ultimate, if “aimless,” vectored form. And it is in fact immediately after mentioning the “muddy spiral” of his logic of connection in “The Spiral Jetty” essay that Smithson turns to a long description of his Spiral Jetty film's construction. This is a film, in Smithson’s self-understanding, that began as a “set of disconnections.”*" But as Smithson catalogues the “coherence” that his movie maps, the analogies and linkages that it constructs, the impossible vectors that it travels, between places “nowhere in particular"—“a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels™*—we sense the ‘operation of the cinema model once again, a diagrammatic mode of connection across (but also undoing) the condition of the radically disparate. “The disjunction operating between reality and film,” Smithson ultimately explained, “drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture. Nevertheless, all the improbabilities would accommodate themselves to my cinematic universe. Cosmic “rupture” cedes its place to a “cinematic universe” of accommodation, which in the face of the Spiral Jetty we can imagine as a parallel universe dedicated to the condition of the parallel, with all rupture and separation literally dissolving into an intense “communication” of forms.“* We could end here, Smithson did not. Smithson, upon the completion of his film Spiral Jetty, was in no way finished with the film, Like his earthwork, which would go on to have a life beyond the moment of Smithson’s labor upon the piece, the Spiral Jetty film would hardly be allowed to rest, a finished

“document” of a finished sculpture. Smithson’s “cinema model”

would not allow such stasis, being instead, as the artist had put it, a way of “generating continual movement.” And so, in a conclusion of sorts, I would like to turn to Smithson's most important statement about the cinema, the essay “A Cinematic Atopia,” written in 1971 for Annette Michelson’s special issue of Artforum dedicated to film. Although this has not been recognized at all, Smithson’s essay presents the literal continuation of the Spiral Jetty film, and the full realization of the latter's movement toward a “cinema model.” ‘That illegibility should be the fate of Smithson’s essay is surprising, as its title literally takes off from the Spiral Jetty film’s existence as a Nonsite for the artist’s sculpture: “A Cinematic Atopia” points us toward the condition of a “cinematic nonplace” or, perhaps better, a “cinematic nonsite.” Right from the opening lines of the text, the artist presents a

concern with cinema and place or space. “Going to the cinema results in an immobilization of the body,” the essay begins. “Not much gets in the way of one's perception.” While this is the experience that Smithson literally contradicts at the moment of his writing this essay in his own film Swamp, such “liberated” perception brings Smithson to @ conclusion about cinema: “One thing all films have in common is the power to take perception elsewhere.” Then working his way through a catalogue of the various types of films engaged in this “elsewhere"— from abstract films to “Hollywood garbage,” from Westerns to Japanese cinema (“too exhausting”), from the sensationalism of Hitchoook to the “pale abstraction controlled by computers" of the so-called Expanded Cinema—Smithson locates his own contribution to cinema “on the fringes of this expanse.” The spatial term here, once more, is key. For “after the structural film,” Smithson explains, “there is the sprawl of entropy. The monad of cinematic Limits spills out into a state of stupefaction. We are faced with inventories of limbo.”® Limbo now comes to define the “cinematic atopia” named in Smithson's title, and it will be the spaceless space his essay seeks, impossibly, to locate. It is in fact the case that the inter‘mediary state of “limbo” had been a concern of Smithson’s since the moment of his earliest work. If limbo surfaces in his so-called religious paintings (see Christ in Limbo (1961), it returns as a defining feature of the interstitial vocation of the diagram, emerging then in many ways in the construction of the Nonsites. We witness this in something like its pure state in a work like the Mono Lake Nonsite (Cinders Near Black Point) (1968), a map or diagram that has become nothing but ‘a useless border, a vast field of the interstice, whose blankness indicates the spaceless space of limbo, a zone that lies beyond the bordered and the contained—beyond the border and the “A cinematic Atopla 1973, published In Artforum, Soptomber 2971

CINEMATIC ATOPIA ROBERT SMITHSON

Going to the cinema results in an immobilization of the body. Not much gets in the way of fone's perception. All one can do is look and listen, One forgets where one is sitting. The luminous screen spreads a murky light throughout the darkness, Making a film is one thing Viewing a film another. Impassive, mute, still the viewer sits. The outside world fades as the eyes probe the screen, Does it matter what film one is watching? Perhaps. One thing all films have in common is the power to take perception elsewhere. As | write this, I'm trying to revember a film | liked, or even one | didn’t like My memory becomes a wilderness of elsewheres How, in such a condition, can | write about jim | don't know. 1 could know. But | would rather not know. Instead, 1 will allow the elsewheres to reconstruct themselves as a tangled mass. Somewhere at the bottom of my memory are the sunken remains of all the films | have ver seen, good and bad they swarm together forming cinematic mirages, stagnant pools of images that cancel each other out. A notion of w abstractness of films crosses my mind, only ‘0 be swallowed up in a morass of Hollywood garbage. A pure film of lights and darks slips into a dim landscape of countless westerns. Some sagebrush here, a little cactus there, trails and hoofdexts going nowhere. The thought of a fim with a “story” makes me listless. How many stories have 1’ seen on the screen? All those characters” carrying out dumb tasks. Actors doing3 permanent exciting things. It’s enough to put one into coma let us assume 1 have a few favorites. tkiru? 360 called Living, To Live, Doomed. No, that won't do, Iapanese films are too exhausting aken as a lump, they remind me of a record 18 by Captain Beet Heart called fapan ina Dshpan. There's always Satyajit Ray for a heavy dose of tedium, if you're into tedium, Actually, end to prefer lurid sensationalism. that | mus urn to some English director, AlfredFor Hitchck ‘will do. You know, the shot in Psycho where Janet Leigh’s eye emerges from the bath-

tub drain after she's been stabbed. Then there's always the Expanded Cinema, as developed by Gene Youngblood, complete with an introduction by "Bucky" Fuller, Rats for Breakfast could be a hypothetical film directed by the great utopian himself. 11's mot hard to consider cinema expanding into a deafening pale abstraction contiolled by computers. At the ringes of this ex panse one might discover the deteriorated images, of Hollis Frampton’s Maxwell's Demon? Alte the "structural film” there is the sprawl of entropy. The monad of cinematic limits spills ut into a state of stupefaction. We are faced with inventories of limbo. Hf 1 could only map this limbo with dissolves, ‘you might have some notion as to where it is But that is impossible. It could be described as cinematic borderland, a landscape of rejected film clips. To be sure it is a neglected place, if we can even call it a “place.” If there was ever 2 film festival in limbo it would be called “Ob livion.” The awkwardness of amateur snapshots brings this place somewhat into focus. The depraved animation that George Landow employed in one of his films somewhat locates the region A kind of aphasia orders this teetering realm. Not one order but many orders clash with one another, as do “facts” in an obsolete encyclopedia Ii we put together a film encyclopedia in lim: bo, it would be quite groundless. Categories would destroy themselves, no law or plan would There would hold itself together for very long. Table of Conbe no table or contents for the tents, The index would slither away into somakemuch a cinematic slime. For example, | could of the film based (or debased) on the A section index in Film Culture Reader. EachHerereierence is a list take. would consist of a 30-second order: Abstract Ex of the takes in alphabetical Grigory, pressionism, Agee James, Alexandrov MichelAllen Lewis, Anger Kenneth, Antonioni Artaud angelo, Aristarco Guido, Amheim Rudolf, A Antonin, Astruc Alexandre. Only isthethe letter cohergives this index its order. Where ence? The logic threatens to wander out of control. in this Cinematic atopia orders and groupings

have a way of proliferating outside their original structure or meaning, There is nothing more ten: tative than an established order. What we take to be the most concrete or solid often turns into a concatenation of the unexpected. Any order can be reordered. What seems to be without order, often turns out to be highly ordered. By isolating the most unstable thing, we can arrive at some kind of coherence, at least for awhile The simple rectangleof the movie scree the flux, no. matter how many different orders one: presents. But no sooner have we fixed the order in our mind than it dissolves into limbo. Tangled jungles, blind paths, secret passages. lost cities invade our perception. The sites in films are not to be located or trusted. All is out of proportion, Scale inflates or detlates into uneasy dimensions. We wander between the towering and the bottomless. We are lost between the abyss within us and the boundless horizons outside us. Any film. wraps us in uncertainty, The longer we look through a camera or watch a projected image the remoter the world becomes, yet we begin to understand that remoteness. more. Limits trap the illimitable, until the spring we discovered turns into a tlood. "A camera filmin, inself ina mirror would be the ultimate movie,” says Jean= Luc Godard. The ultimate film goer would be a captive of sloth, Sitting constantly in a movie house, among the flickering shadows, his perception would take on a kind of sluggishness, He would be the hermit dwelling among the elsewheres, foregoing the salvation of reality. Films would follow films, Until the action of each one would drown in a vast reservoir of pure perception. He would not be able to distinguish between good or bad films, all would be swallowed up into an endless blur. He would not be watching films, but rather experiencing blurs of many shades. Between blurs he might even fall asleep, but that wouldn't matter. Sound tracks would hum through the torpor. Words would drop through this languor like so many lead weights. This dozing consciousness would bring about a tepid abstraction. It would increase the gravity of perception. Like a tortoise crawling over a desert, his eyes would crawl across the screen. All films would be

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white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly “underground” cinema. This would mean Visiting many caves and mines. Once when | was in Vancouver, | visited Britannia Copper Mines with a cameraman intending to make a film, but the project dissolved. The tunnels in the mine were grim and wet. | remember a horizontal tunnel that bored into the side of a mountain. When one was at the end of the tunnel inside the mine, and looked back at the en-

THE SPIRAL

trance, only a pinpoint of light was visible. One shot | had in mind was to move slowly from the interior of the tunnel towards the entrance and end outside. In the Cayuga Rock Salt Mine under Lake Cayuga in New York State | did manage to get some still shots of mirrors stuck in salt piles, but no film. Yet another ill-fated project involved the American Cement Mines in California — I wanted to film the demolition of a disused cavern, Nothing was done. =

container—in the grips of the diagram’s enactment of the between.** And a work like New York, New Jersey (1967) presents a self-reflexive image of the diagrammatic interstice, its field of pure relationality, appropriating a map that depicts the space or border between New Jersey and New York. It is, however, precisely the border or the limit that disappears in this collage, given over to another blank field, a nonplace only partially filled in by two further interstices represented by the two photographs that Smithson inserts into this blankness—placing the diagram, or interstice, en abyme—images of the open air between two elevated highways or the dirt border between two roads. Here, the interstice becomes an impossible vista, with each photograph’s image of limbo receding toward the horizon in mirror reversal of the other. But if “limbo” was a defining condition of Smithson’s embrace of the diagram, we should return to his taking up of this logic in “A Cinematic Atopia,” the artist's evident assertion that the limbo of diagrammatic linkage finds its ultimate realization in cinematic form. For what, we might ask, are the “inventories of limbo” that he there names? What would it mean to “inventory” limbo, to attempt—I would guess—to submit its interstitial nonform to the operations of archive, and category, and system? By 1971, such were the operations of the dominant forms of so-called Conceptual art, especially in its photographic variants—even if these were inventories gone awry (as in the work of Sol LeWitt) or whose function appeared obtuse (as in the work of Smithson’s new friends, the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher).“” When he wrote “A Cinematic Atopia,” Smithson was evidently thinking of the strategies of Conceptual art as much as its linked endeavors in the domain of Structural film, including as an illustration to the essay one of his works produced from within the very center of the Conceptual art context (produced in fact for an exhibition organized by Lucy Lippard)—the photowork 400 Seattle Horizons (1969), a gridded typology of amateur snapshots made on ‘Smithson’s behalf by Lippard and others.*® Another series of “impossible vistas,” the gridded form of the work and its accumulation of photographs had occurred before in Smithson’s Nonsites, in specific works such as Nonsite “Line of Wreckage,” Bayonne, New Jersey (1968) or in the various Nonsites produced in relation to the industrial area of Oberhausen that Smithson created during a trip with the Bechers to sites in Germany. And yet here, in “A Cinematic Atopia,” the grids of Conceptual art's archives were extended to a “limbo” that may be a condition of the diagram, but that had emerged in Smithson’s argument in relation to a breaching of the contained structure of film: “The monad of cinematic limits spills out into a state of stupefaction. ‘We are faced with inventories of limbo.” It becomes immediately clear, as one reads Smithson's words, that this breakdown of “cinematic limits” refers to his

Spiral Jetty film. As an extension of the diagram, the film produced an endless succession of linkages and analogies, vectors and continuities, which Smithson now attempts to map in “A Cinematic Atopia.” His parodic attempt to “map” this inbetweenness—to produce once more a diagram of his film's operation as a diagram—leads us direotly, in the artist's subsequent words, into the field of the cinematic interstice: “If Tcould only map this limbo with dissolves,” Smithson continued, “you might have some notion as to where it is. But that is impossible. It could be described as a cinematic borderland, ‘a landscape of rejected film clips. To be sure it is a neglected place, if we can even call it a ‘place.""” Smithson, of course, makes no mention of the Spiral Jetty film in these passages. But, instead of the impossible “dissolves” that he imagines capable of mapping the cinematic atopia that he seeks, the artist gives us another grid, another field of accumulated images, reproducing some thirty-six film stills from Spiral Jetty—tike a “landscape of rejected film clips"—in a two-page spread at the conclusion of his essay. And here the interstitial field of the grid comes to overlay the cinematic device of the dissolve, the linkage between scenes, bodying forth precisely the “cinematic borderland” or “inventory of limbo” that “A Cinematic Atopia” proposes. In 1970, simultaneous with Smithson's project, Roland Barthes too had located what he called the authentically “filmic” in the experience unleashed by the quotational device of the film still. “The filmic,” Barthes wrote, “quite paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the projected film, the film ‘in movement,’ ‘au naturel,’ but only, as yet, in that major artifact which is the still.”®° For the filmio, according to Barthes, is precisely “what, in the film, cannot be described, it is the representation that cannot be represented.” It was the film still that unloashed this “beyond” of film form, a beyond that came to define the cinematic itself but only by “structur{ing] the film differently,” working against its rigid and forward diegesis, producing the possibility of a “counter-narrative,” as a kind of “permutational unfolding.” Exereted or dropped out of the forward flow of the film, the still could produce a burgeoning forth of associations and connections operating at what Barthes saw as an “obtuse” angle to the direction of the cinematic narrative. “Disseminated, reversible, trapped in its own temporality,” such counternarrative “can establish (if followed) only an altogether different ‘script’ from the one of shots, sequences, and syntagms (whether technical or narrative): an unheard-of script, counter. logical and yet ‘true. Imagine, Barthes proposed, relative to the Bisenstein movies of his analysis, following “not Euphrosyne’s machinations or even the character (as a diegetic entity or as a symbolic figure), not even, further, the countenance of the Wicked Mother,” but only a set of connections released by the still, namely, “within this countenance, that grimace, that black veil,

the heavy, ugly dullness of that skin.” The result: “You will have another film.” The frozen field of the film still, an “immobilization of what is supposed to be the cinema's sacred essence,” namely, “the movement of images,” allows for the “inarticulate” in film to be released. It thus puts the film into relation with a set of texts and directions (vectors, we might say) within itself that it previously could not imagine: “The still, then, is the fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment; film and still meet in a palimpsest relation, without

our being able to say that one is above the other or that one is extracted from the othen”®! Their discontinuity would exist impossibly together. Such is Barthes's theory of the still. And what of Smithson’s theory of the still? For that is what “A Cinematic Atopia” constructs, in its exploration of Spiral Jetty as a field of frozen stills, or in its concern with immobilization throughout—from the first line, “Going to the ‘cinema results in an immobilization of the body,” to the essay's final images of “ultimate film-going,” involving a viewer that would be “a captive of sloth,” his eyes like tortoise crawling over a desert,” witnessing an entropic equalization of all films into “a vast mud field of images forever motionless.”** Indeed, almost all of Smithson’s words in this essay oan be read as an oblique desoription of the included grid of film stills, no matter that the artist nowhere mentions Spiral Jetty or its archival reconstruction, existing like “another film,” in the words of Barthes, on the pages of Artforum. At first, after locating mbo” in the cinematic interstice that could perhaps be ‘mapped with dissolves,” Smithson seems to indicate that no order whatsoever organizes the inventory of his stills. “If there was ever a film festival in limbo it would be called ‘Oblivion,”

Smithson avers, continuing, “A kind of aphasia orders this, teetering realm. Not one order but many orders clash with one another, as do ‘facts’ in an obsolete eneyclopedia.”®? It, would seem that Smithson was describing the anomic ordering principles of the archive as a form, its potentially absurd nonorder, or lack of identifiable order, as this had been put in place in s0 many postwar and neo-avant-garde aesthetics leading up to the forms of Conceptual art. And, indeed, Smithson proceeds to provide us with a concrete example of what has been called Conceptual art’s “anomie archives,” in his subsequent example of, not an “obsolete encyclopedia” (too Surrealist perhaps), but a cinematic archive, “a film encyclopedia in limbo.” As opposed to establishing a coherent order, Smithson asserts, “it would be quite groundless. Categories would destroy themselves, no law or plan would hold itself together for very long. There would be no table or contents for the Table of Contents, The index: ‘would slither away into so much cinematic slime.""* And thus follows Smithson’s somewhat hilarious example of such an anomie archive, a film “based (or debased)” on thirty-second takes referencing each of the entries under the letter A in the

index of that bible of the cinephile that is the Film Culture Reader: Abstract Expressionism, James Agee, Kenneth Anger, Michelangelo Antonioni, Rudolf Arnheim, Antonin Artaud. ‘And yet that this anomie “film eneyclopedia” will not ultimately correspond with our experience of the grid of stills from the Spiral Jetty arrives in the next proposal of Smithson's essay. “In this cinematic atopia,” he instead proposes, “orders and groupings” are not merely canceled out, but “have a way of proliferating outside their original structure or meaning.” We should begin to look at the sequencing of the stills in ‘Smithson’s typology. “There is nothing more tentative than an established order,” Smithson observes. “What we take to be the most conerete or solid often turns into a concatentation

of the unexpected. Any order can be reordered."™” It is clear enough by now that Smithson really is describing the reordering offered up by the sequence of extracted stills from his film, One of the mysteries of Smithson’s reception, however, surfaces in the multiple forms in which this typology of film stills has been handed down: Neither the reprint of Smithson’s collected writings nor the actual collage object often exhibited, a tripartite selection of stills from the film, corresponds exactly to the arrangement as it originally appeared in the pages of Artforum. While the principle of perpetual reorganization, the reshuffling of the extracted stills, seems to be the operation Smithson embraced—and literally describes at this moment in his essay— it is nonetheless revealing to return to the original presentation of the typology, the first “remaking” of Smithson's film (itself a remaking of the artist's sculpture), ‘There, the typology “ends” with an image of incompletion, a still of the torn book and atlas pages from the first part of ‘Smithson’s film. As these fragmented pages were let loose from their bindings and set “free” only to fall into a correspondence with the cracked earth, as much as with the logic of deposition of the cinematic image, so Smithson now releases the individual frames from Spiral Jetty, ripping them as fragments from the diegetic order of his film. Unlike the similar grid of photographs that Smithson had published to accompany his previous essay in Artforum on his Mirror Displacement project in the Yucatan, which were presented in an approximation of the chronological order of their creation, here, as Ann Reynolds notes, “ e provides no such order for the film stills.” Reynolds concludes, “Their placement bears no relationship to the sequence in which they

‘were shot or to the sequence in which they are viewed in the completed film." But rather than producing the effect of a lack of order, Smithson's “freeing” of the film frame offers instead the proliferating field of orders that his “Cinematic Atopia” essay describes, its “concatenation of the unexpected.” For the “inventory of limbo” that Smithson had been proposing is coneretized here by the individual images that had themselves functioned to create analogies or diagrammatic

linkages in his original film. To inventory these analogies and linkages as such—a much more difficult task than creating the inventory of a set of self-contained objects—leads directly into the zone of the interstice, the limbo now taken over by the grid itself as it both separates and relinks all of the disparate images extracted from Smithson’s film. And these individual frames, themselves fragments ofa former diagram, begin like weeds to sprout a series of new links to the images against which they now abut, in a reordered field of potentially more intense connections and analogies. We sense this connective drive in that last row of images in the typology that the still of the torn pages had concluded. For these pages and their diagrams and maps are wedded to a sequence that includes a still of an actual map, as well as two of the crucial “long shots” that had separated the closeup views in the second section of the film, long shots that functioned as something like a cinematic equivalent, in Smithson's system, of the “overview” presented by the form of the diagram or map itself. So all four images in this last row are something like equivalents or analogies for each other, and this occurs throughout the typology, in greater or lesser degrees of obviousness, ‘The last row on the first page of the grid, for example, presents the still of the three Stegosauruses. Here it is surrounded by and connected to the partial images of the machines that in the film's second section functioned as analogies for these creatures. Other connections suggest themselves, One row— the second on the first page—presents a kind of reiteration of the types of movement in Smithson’s film, collecting images taken from disparate sections of the film concerned with “dumping,” “ariving, ” “ripping,” and the “spiraling” of the camera respectively. Another—the first row on the second page—begins with an image of ripples, which is then taken up in the subsequent stills by the contour lines of maps and the ripped path made by the earthmovers on top of Smithson's Jetty. The “dinosaur mummy” at the start of the next row connects to the “preserved" forms of rocks encrusted by salt deposits, then to a tumbleweed similarly entombed, or to the Jetty once more, but now presented flipped as though it were the tail of some long-extinct creature. One row—the third on the first page— presents a marked rhythm of alternation, from center to edge and back again, flipping from an overview map of the Great Salt Lake site, lying in the middle of the larger prehistoric lake from which it descended, to the outskirts of Smithson's vectored spiral, to Smithson standing at the spiral’s absent center, to an aerial image of its edge once more. Below this row, we find a sequence of images of “superimposition”—of the Great Salt Lake on a map overlaid by this map's grid, of the sun reflected in and over the water around the Jetty, or of the continents of the ‘Jurassic period “coexisting” with the land masses of our present moment. Closeup shots of rocks and of water now sit together,

along with the parallel or rhymed vectors ofa road reaching Into the distance and a dump truck rearing its load up into the air. The sun from the beginning of the film lies next to the image of the sun from its end, but here the beginning shot significantly comes after that image of the end. ‘And, as this specific reshuffling suggests, such connections hardly need to be confined to the left-tovright sequence representative of the way we read text in the pages of a bound book—or in a magazine like Artforum, For Smithson’s grid “works” not only horizontally from left to right, but vertically or up and

down as well, producing a machine of alternate readings and diagrammatic veotors and connections that could just as easily, for that matter, be imagined proliferating along the diagonals of this grid—witness, in this regard, the diagonal pathway of Smithson’s spiral taken up in a diagonally adjacent image by the machine ripping a path along the Jetty, a path that con-

tinues and completes the vector begun in the first image. And, it goes without saying, these veotors and linkages in Smithson's typology hardly respect the division between the magazine pages but work their way—again like weeds—across that inter-

stice as well, leaping across the physical chasm that it presents, We are in a position finally to understand the sense of Smithson’s words in “A Cinematic Atopia”: “Any order can be reordered.” He continues:

What seems to be without order, often turns out to be highly ordered. By isolating the most unstable thing, we can arrive at some kind of coherence, at least for awhile. The simple rectangle of the movie screen contains the flux, no matter how many different orders one presents. But no sooner have we fixed the order in our mind than it dissolves into limbo.5” Here we sense what Smithson’s “inventory of limbo" truly involves. For an “inventory of limbo” would be a quixotic archive, not of stable objects nor isolated things, but a collection of connections, a typology of linkages, a mapping of the interstice—an archive of the unmappable force that subtends and produces the form of the archive itself. “Limits trap the illimitable,” Smithson concludes, “until the spring we discovered turns into a flood."°* An inventory of limbo would then be something like a (meta?\diagram of the diagrammatic drive, a self-reflexive operation we have seen in action throughout ‘Smithson’s entire project, the (non)logic standing behind and beneath the artist's diagram of a diagram that was, for example, his Surd View. This inventory would be a diagram or a map that, significantly, leads nowhere, except to the “limbo” of the force of connection and linkage produced for their own sake, a “maze and labyrinth”—as one of the selections in Smithson's pile of books would have it—allowing us to get lost beyond all borders in the atopia of the cinema model. In Smithson’s “inventory of limbo,” in this gridded space or field of the interstice,

the border, and the relational, we experience the Spiral Jetty remade into an example of a literal cinema “model,” its destruetured structure clarified in the muddying of this remaking. For the “continual movement” generated by this “vast mud field of images forever motionless” has nothing to do with the diegesis of the original film, but emerges from an imaginaire of conneetedness that would recast cinema indeed as a model—this word ultimately taken in the sense of its meaning that functions less an “ideal” than that force of remaking that is the diagram. In the final moments of the Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s airborne camera attempts to manouver over the earthwork so that the blazing late-day sun is reflected in the waters around and within the Jetty. It is now that we hear Smithson's voice-over imagine experiences of excess and the overflowing of bounds,

in a precise description of “sunstroke,” for example, or in a citation that imagines the sun, not as a singular object, but as a force of multiplicity, existing like “bees in a swarm.” Smithson’s voice intones: Gazing intently at the gigantic sun, we at last deciphered the riddle of its unfamiliar aspect. It was not a single flaming star, but millions upon millions of them, all clustering thickly together, like bees in a swarm. Their packed density made up the deceptive appearance of solid, impenetrable flame. It was in fact a vast spiral nebula of innumerable suns. Such visions of the disintegration of the integrated, of the singular object, into networks of interconnection only echo and in fact redouble the experience we are now given of the sun merging with the “spiral nebula” that is the Jetty. In one of Smithson's many drawn “movie treatments” for the film—

‘Movie Treatment: Spiral Jetty, 1970

307

works on paper that, yet again, diagram the diagrammatic structure of the film, replete with arrows and labels and the gridded structure of the interstice—Smithson points us diagrammatically to the sun. His written deseription diagrams what the film will allow us to see: “Sun passing through Jett

he explains. And then, “sun burns through.”** ‘This image of superimposition might once have served as an example of Smithson's allegorical bent, of his interest in a structure of signification where one text is read through another along the lines of the postmodern experience of the palimpsest. But this image—of “passing through,” of “burning through,” as Smithson puts it—in actuality points us beyond the allegorical devaluation of signifying matter. It points us beyond the misrecognition of matter itself, as something isolated, or devalued, or ruined. It presents, instead, an image, not only of superimposition, but of connection and analogy—of the Jetty as like the sun, and of the sun as a spiraling force like the Jetty—where each object can only be seen in light of the other, each one linked to or physically continuous with the other. And this of course thus becomes an image of the cinema model in operation. It becomes an image of the range of convergence and connection that Smithson always sought, a reflection that is simultaneously a palimpsest but also a blinding “nonsight” that is, in its way, visionary. IfT have been at pains to track Smithson's cinema model here, this is due to the way in which the ramifications of this ‘model have been taken up in contemporary art, and this in all directions. For Smithson's engagement with the cinema. exists not just as a crucial “precursor” to what has been called. a general cinematic turn in contemporary art, as if an earlier moment of artists making films finds itself redeployed in the present, in the same manner as critios recently spoke about a return to Conceptual art in the strategies of a so-called ‘Neooonceptualism, Rather, the cinematic has come today to stand in for, and, in fact, transvalue—it has come, in other words, to realize—an aesthetic drive implicit within early moments of the postmodern, just as cinema for Smithson deepened and realized an implicit dynamic within his own earlier work, We will most likely not find words for this drive within the domain of a methodological turn to the concerns of cinema studies, for the cinema model in the visual arts has been taken up as a force that drives mediums and aesthetics beyond themselves—it has become, we might say, a force of the beyond, of a becoming other that art seems everyday to wish more dramatically to instantiate.*° And it would then be in this light that the cinema model comes to serve as an exemplar, not for contemporary artists who merely “make films,” but as a structural tool that realizes a contemporary concern, for example, with the topological—of translating objects and events into new forms— in that turn to the cinematic as a field of transformation and 308

“remaking” that we witness in the projects of artists like Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. Or, parallel to this, the cinema model emerges as something like a machine of the analogical in the digital era, a vast web of interconnections now experienced as a return of the repressed—of repressed continuities in the epoch of (digital) connection—in the vision of the “films” of an artist as compelling as Tacita Dean, ‘The last image of Smithson's film imagines all of these future vocations of the cinema model. Having positioned the ‘sun into the center of the form of the Jetty, Smithson’s film then abruptly cuts to a final image, another image of the Jetty. Fittingly, this final image is absolutely motionless, being in fact a black-and-white photograph, a motionless conclusion in the form of a still. Now Smithson’s voice-over ceases, and we experience both an end to the film's motion and its discursivity in the radical silence of this last shot. And yet we are presented ‘once more with an image of superimposition and linkage, as ‘Smithson focuses our gaze on a photograph within this photograph, a famous image of the spiral earthwork pinned to a wall in the film editor's studio, the spiral sculpture overlaid by the various spiral reels of the movie apparatuses everywhere in evidence, If such a power of analogy continues to seethe within this final shot, a diagrammatic vector erupts as well, for it is not entirely accurate to describe Smithson's concluding still as absolutely motionless. Instead, in what now amounts to a rather obvious homage to the vector of Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), which itself infamously drove forward toward a conclusion in a photographio still, Smithson's camera begins to “iris in” on the photograph of the Jetty. This movement echoes the opening of Smithson’s film, the irising in on the sun with which the voyage of the Spiral Jetty began. But it also leaves us in silence to contemplate the sheer forward 200m of the cinematic vector, a final movement toward the transformative vocation of the closeup shot that the Spiral Jetty embraced in all its forms. The Spiral Jetty concludes, then, with nothing like a conclusion. It “concludes” with an opening out, a movement toward, an uninterrupted experience of the zoom, the iris, the vector—a shift in scale and a transformation in vision that produces a pure cinematic figure of connection. It is a vision in which we can begin to see a Robert Smithson ‘who would not just be that “phenomenologist” of dislocation and displacement that a generation of art criticism has taken him to be, but the “cartographer” of a new experience of radical linkage that the cinema model can construct.

”~ Spiral Jetty Drawing with Star Diagram,e. 1970

Notes 4.1 take the description “pelicular™ from Jennifer L. Roberts, who uses the term to describe Robert Smithson's sculpture Mirored Zigguat (1966). describes sculptural type in Smithson’s project, however, that extends to many other works. See Roberts, MirorTavels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven Conn. Yale University Press, 2004), p. 44 2. Three crucial essays by Craig Owens deal with Smithson: “Photography en abyme” (1978), “Eerthwords (1979), and the two-part essay “The Allegorcal Impulse: Toward ‘a Theory of Postmodernism" (1980), all collected in Owens, Beyand Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson etal. (Berkeley: Unversity of California Press, 1992). Fm plays en important role in Owens's account of the ale {ovical impulse in postmodernism, yet my account of the importance of cinema for ‘Smithson ultimately citfers radically in emphasis from Owens's essay. 43. Smithson,“ . The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, Is a Cruel Master, interview by Grégoire Miller (1972), in Robert Smitnson: The Collected Wiitings, ed. Jack Flam (Georkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 264. 4. For the one reading of Smithson's fm that Is most attentiveto its analogical structures, soe Elizabeth C. Childs, “Robert Smithson and Fim: The Spiral Jetty Reconsidered.” Arts Magazine 56, no. 2 (October 1983), pp. 68-81. Both Roberts's (see note 3) and Ann Reynolds's recent books on Smithson (Robert Smitnson: Learning from New Jersey and Eisewhere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003) contain important readings of the Spiral Jetty fim upon which | lean here. Other readings ofthe fim include Eva Schmiat, "Et in Utah ego: Robert Smithson's “Entropologc’ Cinema,” in Rabert Smithson: Zeichnungen aus dem NachlaB—Drawings trom the Estate (Munster: Wesfalsches Landesmuseum fir Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, ‘association with Vestsjeliand, Kunstmuseum, Soro, Denmark, 1989); and the as yet unpublished essay by Andrew V. Uroske, “La Jetde ‘en spirale’: Robert Smithson's Stratigraphic Cinema,” forthcoming in the journal Grey Room, no. 19 (Spring 2008). | wish to thank Uroskie for sharing his important Deleuzian reading of Smithson’ fim (one that maps Gilles Deleuze’s detntion of the cinematic -timeimage" onto the oper ation of Smitson’s flim), as | prepared my own. 5. Smithson discusses the reversibility of cinematic progression in the last sentences ‘of the essay “A Tour ofthe Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967), In Robert ‘Smithson: The Collected Wetings,p. 74 6. Smithson identifies the sound as a metronome in his essay “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), in this book, p. 13. Tis essay was orginally published in Arts of the Environment,ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: Brazil, 1972), pp. 143-53, 7. The manner in which Smithson’s Nonstes operate in the absence oftheir “referent” ‘opens onto the explicitly Structualist impetus ofthese objects. They ental a “struc ‘uralistactviy” in the manner that Roland Barthes had famously defined this (in an essay Smithson read and cited in his own writings): “The goal of all structualist acti ty, whether reflexive or poetic, Is to reconstruct an ‘object in such @ way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the unctions) ofthis object. Structure is thereby ‘actualy a simulacrum of the objec, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible or, if one prefers, Unintligile inthe natural object. Structural man takes the real, decomposes it then recomposes i.” (Barthes, “The Strucuraist Activity” (1963), in Critical Essays, rans Richara Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 214-25.) 8, Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 139-41. 9. On these references and this show, see Thomas Crow, “Cosmic Eile: Prophetic Turns in the Life and Art of Robert Smithson,” in Robert Smithson (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, in association wit the Museum of Contemporary At, Los Angeles, 2004), p. 45, 410. Again, Iam not ignorant of the potential eruption of religious concerns in a portrait ‘that call itself “seess.” But rather than calling up a Chistian theme of selfing. Smithson’s concern in the diagrams that replace his religious works name the latter ‘tradition ony it seems, to ionize and replace their conceens—even if by contiguity—in ‘8 manner all the more clear fr the punning references in both image and tte. To be without a self in the itera sense that this diagram imagines can in no way be contained in any reference to an imagination confined to religious or traditional subject, ‘attr, atleast in its normative forms. 114, For the moment, “Dad's Diagrams” unfortunately remains unpublished. It wll appear in 2005 inthe scholarly volume accompanying the major Dada retrospective organized by Leah Dickerman for the National Gallery of Art (The Dada Seminars, e¢. Leah Dickerman and Matthew Witkovsky [Washington, D.C. National Gallery of Art, 2006), and I thank David Joselt fr sharing Its final manuseript form with me. twill be ‘an e809 thet should single-handedly alter the terrain of Dada and avantgarde studies.

12. Ibid, p. 14 13. bid, p. 15. 114, bid. As with his previous work on Marcel Duchamp, Josel’s understanding of the diagram is ultimately Deleuzian. See the section “Abstract Machine and Diagram," in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatter, “S87 .6.-A.0. 70: On Several Regimes of ‘Signs,” la A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tans. Brian Massumi (inneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 140-48. 15, Jose, pp. 18-19. AS an aside, it should be added to Josellt's argument that ‘many Dada photomontages seem implicitly diagrammatic in their functioning. (This is. ‘noted in Joselt’s text vis-8is certain reacymades, for exemple, Duchamp's Unhappy Readymade (1919). Ths diagrammatic version of photomontage is nownere clearer than in perhaps the most important of Berlin Dada photomontages, Hannah HOch’'s Cut withthe Kitchen Knite Dada through the Last Weimar Beerbely Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919-20), which operates in analogy toa ciagram or map of the cultural ‘epoch that it names (or imagines) in its tite. 416. Smithson had his own thoughts on the relation between book and cinema, a we have seen worked out in the Spiral Jetty fim’s frst part. Those scenes involving books bear comparison on every level to Joselit's investigation of Duchamp's own play with the form ofthe baok, on which see the inital pages of ~Dada's Diagrams.” | wl return atthe conclusion of this essay toa linked concer, the stills from his fm that Smithson would place back into print form as an ilustration to his essay “A Cinematic Atopia,” in Annette Michelson’s special Artforum issue on fim. (Smithson, "A Cinematic Atopia,” Artforum 10, no. 4 (September 1974}, pp. 53-55. Reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. pp. 138-42.) 417. On this point, see Crow, po. 54-65 n, 100. 48. In this connection, the notations that Smithson made on Three Works in Metal and Plastic (1964), a sketch for some of these objects, make for riveting reading as they reveal Smithson’s own understanding of the diagrammatic labor of such sculptures: “The entire room that the piece is in, is absorbed by he piece.” “Floris reflected cover celing.” “Wall reflected at very steep angle.” “Double vanishing point—enists as 2 solid reversal of traditional ilusionstic perspectve—infnty without space." “Any object may be placed in here—it reveals al kinds of delicate polyhedra, symmetric net works all held together by fragile ‘angles, joints, corners,” etc." “it has been reported that the Mariner camera showed Mars to have surfaces lke miros.” In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, | have set out ‘to design that ungraspable architecture." “At the present, | am working on a set of 24 blocks or slabs with mirors on them, with these | can make an endless variety of mazes, ty hotels, tiny corridor, ete.” 419, Reynolds's chapter on these objects in Robert Smithson: Leaming from New Jersey and Elsewhere (see pp. 125 and following) presents the most elucidating, ‘account of the itera dlagrammatic basis of these 1968 works, without, however, comprehending the dlagram as a theoretical principle in Smithson's project. Reynolds thas published a recent essay on the “cartographic” dimension of Smithson's practice, hich does come close to articulating the diagrammatic dive whose genealogy| am exploring here. See “Cartographic Images—Cartographic Actions,” in Robert Smithson: [Mpping Dislocations (New York: James Cohan Gallery, 2003), pp. 4-5. 20. To produce a sculpture from @ diagram or from the conditions of pictorial iltusion {sm seems a drect inversion ofthe action Smithson woul later take in producinga (pictorial, ilustionistc) fim from a sculpture, as in the Spiral Jetty. But such inversions both stem from a slogrommatic principle atthe basis of their reciprocal equivalence ‘and topological translatbiliy. 21. Smithson’s definitive statement of this Postminimalist aim appears in his essay A Seaimentation ofthe Mind: Earth Projects,” in a discussion ofthe Nonsite: “Yet, if aris art it must have limits. How can one contain this ‘oceanic’ ste? | nave devel‘oped the Nonsite, which in physical way contains the disruption ofthe site. The ‘container isin @ Sense a fragment itself, something that could be called a three‘dimensional map. Without appeal to ‘gestalts' or ‘antorm,’ it actualy exists as @ fragmentof a greater fragmentation. It's @ tweedimensional perspective that as broken away from the whole, while containing the lack f its own containment. There ‘ate no mysteries in these vestiges, no traces of an end or a beginning... . Separate “things, forms,” “objects, shapes,’ et., with beginnings and endings are mere con venient fetions: there is only an uncertain alsintegrating order that transcends the limIts of rational separations.” (Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects™ [2968}, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 111-12.) 22. Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of NorSites" (£968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 364, 23. in fact, Deleuze and Guattan’s chapter on the diagram in A Thousand Plateaus features a series of diagrams based upon the form of a spirl. See A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 136 and 137.

‘Spiral Jetty, fm stil

24, Smithson, “Gyrostasis” (1970), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 136. 25, Although one cannat make this outwith any certainty, Smithson seems to have crossed out the word “language” and substitutes the term “view” in his diagrams title A Surd View. The “surd” was a favorite concept of Smithson's, one that came to him through his interest in Samuel Beckett (The Unnamable [1959). fers to an irrational aumber in mathematics, orto the rot ofan integer, and to those soundiess sounds in language made by the breath and not the voice (ike fk B 5 ). The ety ‘fy ofthe word links back tothe tile of Smitnson's sculpture Alogon, as the Oxford Eretish Dietionary explains that surd descends from the Latin surcus, meaning “deat™ ‘or “mute,” 8 mistrenslation of the Greek slogos, signifying the irrational and speectless. The retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, uilized A Surd View for an Aternoon as their catalogue's cover image, implicitly ging the diagram a kind of foundational place whase ramifications have indeed determined ‘ny understanding of Smithson's fm and larger artistic Proect. The diagram was made ‘uring Smithson's interview with Dennis Wheeler and is directly discussed during its course, see “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson” (2969-70), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 196-233. 26. Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of NonSites.” p. 364. 27. Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time:mage, vans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). | have explored Deleuze's theorization of the intrstice at some length in “Reanimation ()” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 28-70. 28, Smithson frst broaches this notion of a “einemaized site" in his essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey." See Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, '. TO: “Noonsay sunshine cinemaized the site, turing the bridge and the river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatlc 400 was lke photographing ‘2 photograph. The sun became a monstrous lightbulb that projected a detached series of ‘tis through my Instamatie into my eye. Wnen | walked on the bridge, it was as ‘though | was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and stee!, ‘and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie fin that showed nothing ‘ut a continuous blank." The elnema connection continues a few pages later, when ‘Smithson concludes, "I had been wandering in a moving picture that | couldn't quite Picture” (p. 72). Owens cites this passage in his essay “Photography en abyme” but ‘misses the passage's concer witn both photograpy and cinema, its ultimate creation of separate analogies for both mediums, and its potential prioritization ofthe cinematic Reynolds dlscusses Smithson's notion af a “cinematized site" in Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, pp. 103 and 223, 29. Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in tis book, p. 8. Ihave taken the liberty of capitalz Ing those words and phrases in Smithson’s description that most immediately suggest 30. Man Ray, “Inéit,” in Pere Bourgeade, Bonsor, Man Ray (Pars: Betfond, 1972), . 161. Here Is perhaps the moment to point out the eruption ofthe spiral form in the earlier moments of modemist sculpture. Owing tothe spira's dlagrammatic vocation, it should haraly be a surprise that this eruption takes place within the context ofthe Dada and Constructivist avantgardes, where we could look to Man Ray's “moving” sculpture Lampshade (1919) and Duchamp's optical devices leading up tothe cine matic projet Anemic Cinema (1926) or to Constructivist shibboleths such as Viadimie Talin’s Monument to the Third International (1919) ‘34, Smithson cites this ‘motto” of Andre's fst in the essay “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (1967), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. 0. 58, end ‘then uses It as the tle of @ 1968 essay in Robert Smithson: Me Collected Writings, Pp. 95-96. Andre's proposal fr Smithson'ssirterminal project was to have created @ Sculpture as2 kind of hoe, utizing dynamite to produce craters inthe ground of the site, a “procedure” also explored in Lawrence Weiners early work at more or les this same time, ‘32, Smithson,“ .. The Earth, Subject to Catacysms, Is a Cruel Master, interview by Miler, p. 264, ‘33. On the fgure-ight movement, soe Smithson's drawing attached to Unedited 16mm Tokes, Emmen, Holland (1974). On the other planned shots, see“... The Earth, Subject to Cataciysms, Is @ Cruel Master,” pp. 258-59: “The film remains Unfinished. Ihave in mind several aerial maneuvers. One would be @ descending and ascending helicopter shot. The helicopter would go as high as possible over Broken Circle, then sloniy drop down into the middle, til it was about three feet over the sand bank and the water. The diameter would cut the frame In half the closer the helicopter {got to the Broken Circe, The helicopter would ascend the same way it came down, Yet, another maneuver would involve an airplane. | am thinking of the ‘clover leaf ‘maneuver. It consists of four loops, with Broken Circe atthe bottom ofthese loops.

[Aworkon this scale doesn't end with a “show.” It has a way of generating continual movement.” 34, On the cinematic ramifications of this Alfred Hitchcock parody, See Uroskle, pp. 5 ‘and folowing. 35. Smithson, “The Spiral ety." in this book, p. 9. 36. YwesAain Bois has best clarified the centrality for Minimalism ofthe relationality of scale over the absolute notion of quantifiable size, fllowing Smithson’s lead in tis: 526, for example, “A Picturesque Stoll Around Clara lara" (2983), in Richard Serra, ed, Hal Foster wth Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Roberts has \witlen eloquently about the logic of scale shits a they operate in Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty" essay, pointing out that the original sequencing ofthe essay's illustrations was ‘meant to enact a progression of scale shits traveling from the larger landscape and curving mountain ranges tothe spiral form ofthe microscopic salt crystals deposited ‘on Smithson's earthwork by the Great Salt Lake. See Roberts, pp. 128 and following. 37, Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty," in this book, p. 8. '38, As Smithson put i in footnote to “The Spiral Jet.” “The ules of this network of signs are discovered as you go along uncertain trails both mental and physical” (ibid. . 13). Smithson further unpacked the operation of what he called the Siteonsite cialectc inthe folowing way: “Two-dimensional and three dimensional things trade places with each other inthe range of convergonce. Large scale becomes small ‘Small scale becomes large. A point on @ map expands tothe size ofa land mass. ‘land mass contracts into point” (bid) 39, id. p. 11. 40. tid 41. bid 42, Te last two cations can be found In ibid, pp. 12 and 11, respectively 43, id, . 42. ‘44, The “communication of forms” is @ concept close to the mederist notion of “correspondence” but emerges In this specific sense in the late Surrealist context with Georges Botale’s notions of “communication” and “eretism” or Roger Caillois's crucial essay on natural mimicry; see Callois,“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia™ (2935), trans. John Shepley, October no. 31 (Winter 1984), pp. 17-32. While taken Up in relation to Smithson’s work inthe project of Rosalind E. Krauss and Ywe-Alain Bois that culminated in the exibition and book Formiess: A User's Guide (New York: one Books, 1997), the term itself is developed directly in a number of recent texts by Leo Bersani: see, for example, Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University ress, 1990) and Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University ress, 1995); or Bersani and Ulysse Dutolt, The Forms of Violence: Narative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1985); Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998) More recenty,Kaja Siverman has taken up Bersan's ideas in a text ofthe utmost Importance to my own eitical response to contemporary art, see Siverman, World ‘Spectators (Stanforé: Stanford Unversity Press, 2000). An asyetunpublished essay by Siverman on Gerard Richter ("How to Paint History, Parts | and I") explicit takes up such communication in terms of the rhetericl form of analogy in ways obviously impor tant to me here. See also my own recent essays “Reanimations ()"; “The Antimages of Robert Whitman: The Dante Drawings, 1974-75," in Robert Whitman: Playback (Wew York Dia Art Foundation, 2003); “Fraser's Form,” in Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 0.2003 (Cologne: DuMont, 2003); and “Film Beyond Its Limits,” in Anthony MeCal: ‘Fim installations (Coventry, England: Mead Gallery and University of Warwick, 2004). 45, Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 138-38 46, The film that Smithson would make with Nancy Holt and Michael Heizer about is ‘rip to the Mono Lake site in California concerns ise explicitly with the experience of “borderless” border: while documenting the site, Smithson repeatedly filmed Heizer and Holts walking ofthe shores of this sat lake, a “border” that becomes a onborder in the face ofthe immense quantity of fies that breed in the lake's shallow waters, sending up 8 lving line of "haze" that the artists travel through and displace ‘uring the firs key scenes. 47, An exibition and catalogue have recently been devoted to Smithson’ visits to Germany in the company of Bernd and Hilla Becher. See Feld Trips: Bernd & Hila ‘Becher, Robert Smithson (Porto, Portugal: Fundagao Serralves, 2002). On this aspect (of Smithson’s work, see, 100, Robert A. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo Works (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), 48. The exhibition was Lippara's "557,087" atthe Seattle At Museum in 1969, On the project, see Sobieszek, pp. 25-27. Two lines from Smithson's “A Cinematic

‘Mopla" seem to refer back to 400 Seattle Horizons, further explaining its inclusion withthe essay. “The awkwardness of amateur snapshots brings this place [imbo, the Cinematic topia} somewhat into focus": and “we are lost between the abyss within us ‘and the boundless horizons outside Us," which was used as a caption forthe image ‘of the work in the orignal publication in Artforum. (Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopa,” pp. 139 and 141.) 48, Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopa.”p. 139. 50. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in The Responsibilty of Forms, trans. Renard Howard (Berkeley: Unversity of California Press, 1994), p. 59. 5. Ibid. pp. 57-61, 52. Smithson, “ACinematic Atopia”. pp. 144-42. 53. Ibid, pp. 139-40. In this connection, aphasia, a form of speechlessness, exists ‘as yet another avatar of Smithson’s concern with the suid 54. Ibid., p. 140. See, also, BenjaminH. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richtr’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October, no. 88 (Spring 1998), pp. 117-45, 55. Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia”p. 140. 56. Reynolds,p. 226. She concludes, however: “They provide another order of exper ‘ence that is ‘sisplaced' from the making or the viewing ofthe fllm and tha, sltnough stil ependent on them, is even further removed from either sight or ste. 57. Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia," pp. 140-41. 58. Ibid,p. 141. 59. The “movie treatment” in question is reproduced on page G4 ofthe Museum of Contemporary Art's Robert Smithson. Fora different understanding ofthis “burning Utwough.” see Hal Foster, “Torn Screens,” in Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004) (60. For a more direct engagement with tis “becoming other” see my essay “Film Beyond its Limits."

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‘Smitheon at Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, 1970 Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon!

Smithson, Writer Lytle Shaw In the darkness the white-roofed houses of the mining town gleamed like the funerary temples of a necropolis. Their cornices were ornamented with countless spires and gargoyles, linked together across the roads by the expanding tracery. A frozen wind moved through the deserted streets, waisthigh forests of fossil spurs, the abandoned cars embedded within them like armoured saurians on an ancient ocean floor. 1.0. Batard, the Crystal Wortd Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous, Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud. Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt, air... . A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made ‘systems mired in abandoned hopes. ‘Robert Smitheon, “The Spiral Jetty”

Like geological writing and travel narrative, science fiction is, one of the elemental materials of Robert Smithson’s prose. If all of these materials are transformed and retrofitted, their tonal and epistemological traces are nonetheless fundamental to our experience of Smithson’s heterogeneous writing. The derelict space, for instance, that generates Smithson’s 1970 outdoor sculpture Spiral Jetty owes its special illegibility in large part to recent science fiction’s imagination of environmental ruins, likewise the derelict time evoked by this space. Each set of “abandoned hopes,” each failed attempt to exact a profitable future from the lake, becomes a geological layer. Technological ruins in the landscape thus seem for Smithson to open potholes in the present, projecting us at onve toward wildly unrealized futures and toward radically inaccessible pasts—human aspirations as discrepant deposits.’ Time as universal measure thus gets replaced by time as particular claim. In “The Spiral Jetty” essay (and in other essays, too), Smithson makes a similar claim about size, which he seeks to drive out of existence by endless claims of scale: Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object that appears to be certain. Considering these passages, one could argue for a basic homology in Smithson's thought: temporal claim is to time as scale is to size. In both cases, relative terms destabilize the naturalistic frames that would measure and bind them. And this dual gesture is part of why we remember Smithson now. His model of the temporal claim could be used not only to think culturally and critically about the time (and ultimately the history) of oil wells or suburban developments—but also art historically to disrupt progressive narratives of the avant-garde. His model of scale could similarly be used not merely to activate or defamiliarize objects or surfaces within a gallery space but instead to question the gallery or museum space as the natural frame or container—to put Nonsites into dialogue with Sites and While extrapolating such models of time and space from his writing may be indispensable in navigating Smithson's work, there remains a sense in these passages that some other processes are operating in the prose itself, that its strange tonalities, its generic quotations, its fascination with materiality all function as a complex form of embodiment, of enactment. Smithson was especially adept at proposing the radically unconventional terms of such enactments in the writings of his peers. In his 1968 essay “A Museum of Language in the

Vicinity of Art,” he suggests, for instance, that “Carl Andre's, writings bury the mind under rigorous incantatory arrangements” and crush thoughts “into a rubble of syncopated syllables"; that Donald Judd’s “abyssal” syntax is a “brooding depth of gleaming surfaces—placid but dismal”; and that the “oppressive weight” of Sol LeWitt’s “sepia” handwriting” makes reading it “like getting words caught in your eyes." Beyond the widely acknowledged fact that Smithson was interested in the materiality of language, that he thought of writing as “printed matter," as unruly heaps or piles of substance, how might one understand his own writing’s complex enactments? How, moreover, might such an understanding affect our picture of ‘Smithson as a theorist and art historian? Since Smithson is the artist whose writings and sculptures most forcefully artioulated the terms of so-called site-specific art, what might it mean to take him at his word that “language ‘covers’ rather than ‘discovers’ its sites and situations"? I want to pursue these questions first by looking at the genres and tonalities that make up the “Spiral Jetty” essay as a whole. For the essay not only theorizes industrial debris geologically but is itself a composite critical style, one whose discrete lexical sediments, whose discourses or generic tonalities, rub and abrade each other: Wild terminological inventions for historiographic thought—“Devonian industry,” “Silurian technology”—butt up against bureaucratic details of the proJect’s progression (“From New York City Tcalled the Utah Park Development and spoke to Ted Tuttle”); an ominous sci-fi account of sunstroke (“Rays of glare hit my eyes with the frequency of a Geiger counter. Surely, the storm clouds massing ‘would turn into a rain of blood”) gives way to a more distanced, entropic account of the site's context as an undifferentiated continuum of “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water” repeated twenty

times'; a pseudodocumentary voice-over cosmology (“Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primor-

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dial seas”) claims equal authority with an apocalyptic color theory (from G. K. Chesterton) of red as “the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through” and a geological account of film editing ‘as a process wherein “a paleontologist [sorts] out glimpses of a world not yet together.” Each of these tonal strands is not just thematically but also stylistically distinot—evoking different intertextual and generic worlds. Mikhail Bakhtin contends that a genre at once “lives in the present” and “remembers its past, its beginning,” making it “capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development." By way of this concept of genre, the fundamental problems of Smithson's art—his complex critiques of time and size—are transported into the medium of writing. If, at a thematic level, Smithson's writing in general and the “Spiral Jetty” essay in particular positions temporal claim and scale against time and size (respectively), then at 1 formal level his writing positions a sampler of disparate genre fragments against a stable concept of genre.* Indeed, its whiplash of conflicting tonalities is every bit as significant as the larger themes to which these quotations seem to refer. If ‘Smithson is a writer who, as art historian Stephen Melville suggests, would force on us “a new recognition of the ways in which criticism is tangled up in its objects,” then this is not, just any tangling—but a series of experimental (and experiential) rhetories charged with radically new functions." ‘As temporal and scalar arguments become nonnaturalistic ways of arguing for artworks’ “sites or situations” (both literally and discursively), so generic textual quotations become a fundamental rhetorical method of effecting this function at the level of writing. Smithson was attentive not just to the physicality of language—but also to the institutional and social palpability of discourses; it was this that allowed him to make art by “casting a glance” the way others might cast a bronze.'!

‘As | looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the ‘entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into @ spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibilty of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence (p. 8).!° Consider the reading of these lines offered by Suzaan Boettger, author of the most recent and extensive survey of earthworks:

The vividness of his language conveys the phenomenological immediacy that inspired the spiral form of this earth jetty. Yet it was rather disingenuous of him to slight the importance of preexisting intellectual conditions. Predisposing him to this experi ential discovery was Smithson’s regular work with spirals.*® ‘The question here is not merely that of contradiction between “phenomenological immediacy” and “preexisting intellectual conditions” but also that of how the supposed sitespecific nature of Smithson’s sculpture is explained (formally or otherwise) by his several-page epiphany, interlaced with these ‘Splat Jetty, 197%

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In this way, Smithson confounds a history of site specificity, like that of Miwon Kwon's, that would move “from a physical location—grounded, fixed, actual—to a discursive vector— ungrounded, fluid, and virtual.” At a physical, phenomenological level, his process is often figured as an act of literalizing forces that are already latent to a site—first affects, or subjective states that are somehow manifestly present, later actual objects that would appear as manifostations of those affects, like the Spiral Jetty itself. Though transformed by Smithson's epistemological and stylistic concerns, the basic generic template that allows for this literalization is most frequently science fiction—which seems to assume a privileged position among his quoted genres. The suggestion that inherent affects and objects could be extruded from 2 site implies the traditional idea of genus loci, an accessible place-based essence. Even 0, Smithson’s use of a shifting and theatrical patchwork of quotations to register discursively a site's affects at once courts and destabilizes such a model of site specificity. By aligning insights with their generic frames— that is, by juxtaposing the radically different tonalities and epistemological grounds of the science-fictional panorama of environmental destruction (the geology manual, the omniscient cosmological documentary, the pulp drug novel epiphany, the newly translated postwar Continental philosophic aphorism, and the travel narrative vignette)Smithson signals the contingency that keeps any one of these discourses from being the last word on the site, while successively pronouncing the last word within each one Having fundamentally rearticulated the terms of writing’s necessary involvement in artworks, it is no accident that the status of Smithson's own writing has remained a problem within his intense but somewhat belated reception. The first, response to this problem has been to summarize and contextualize his insights." Now thirty-two years after his death, the terms of Smithson’s vocabulary (Site/Nonsite; entropy; the orystalline; his critique of anthropomorphism, avant-garde temporality, and the monument) have certainly made their way into art-historical discourse, where they operate primarily as a body of Postminimalist tenets. More recently, the coherence of his, thought has been contextualized, in a number of monographs and surveys of earthworks, in relation first to Structuralism and Poststructuralism, then to 1960s art criticism and popular culture, then to the other earthworks artists, and finally to Ameri‘can historiographic and nationalist thought."* But, despite the significant advances in our understanding of Smithson made by these critics, a certain jolt still ocours when critical writing makes contact with a fragment of Smithson’s prose, when it is asked, for instance, to extrapolate a theory of site specificity from a passage such as the following from his essay “The Spiral Jetty”

pat Rom s ten Sike Je [1 ate

widely varying tonalities and intertextual nods. Take, for instance, his nod toward the genre of science fiction, which again is only one of the multiple genres his essay evokes: describing the basalt deposits and dipping limestone beds of that section of the Great Salt Lake's shoreline in a series of would-be violent natural movements frozen in self-canceling phrases—an “immobile cyclone,” a “dormant earthquake,” and “spinning sensation without movement”—Smithson can associate the outdoor site with the kind of radically antinaturalistio affect with which he was identifying in the world of science fiction, In the background we might hear, for instanoe, J. G. Ballard’s “frozen wind [moving] through the deserted streets."!7 ‘As in Ballard’s science fiction, the “shattered appearance” of the Jetty’s landscape is thus based not on the glorious powers of nature (the dynamic sublimity we associate with cyclones and earthquakes), but on a vaguely sinister (and technically impos sible) enigma of natural history. Science-fictional oxymorons allow Smithson to stop nature's clock in the midst of its most dramatic productions. ‘This freezing effect in “The Spiral Jetty” is part of a larger subset of tropes that Smithson borrows and transforms from science fiction, even as he distances himself from concerns other‘wise crucial to the genre—especially character-based narrative (with its frequent investment in psychology)'* and willingness to speculate about futurity."® In “Entropy and the New Monuments,” for instance, when Smithson reverses the temporal charge of the monument from past to future, he seems, initially, to be reinterpreting the monument as a kind of science-fictional, futuristic enterprise—that is, until the new monument's very function turns out to be the clouding of the possibility of futurity itself:

‘Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon, 1970

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monu: ments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages.*°

‘Smithson's own essays announced his interest in science fiction, In considering the importance of this link, oritios have stressed that, like many works of science fiction, Brian Aldiss's novel Earthworks, from which Smithson most likely appropriated the term earthworks in his own writing, is an account of an “eoological apocalypse"—in this case one that also happens to involve soil becoming a precious commodity, which the protagonist transports around the world.*! Other critics have noted thematic connections both generally—that Smithson’s

flippant and perverse” quotations from science fiction introduce “time as eternal recurrence"—and specifically—that ‘Smithson’s essay “The Crystal Land” bears a close similarity to the“ logic of Ballard’s vision” in his novel The Crystal World.* As significant as all these thematic ties to science fiction may be, what gives the above passage from “Entropy and the New Monuments” its characteristic strangeness—and makes it, typical of Smithson's practice of quoting genres—is a series of rhetorical inversions that, within the larger science-fictional project of temporal speculation, allow him to substitute entropic and antinaturalistic terms for a humanist vocabulary of the monument.2* What is “science fictional” about this criticism is that, within a seemingly familiar syntactical pattern, “alien” terms eat away their counterparts from within, allowing commemoration of past to become obliteration of future. Aldiss disPhoto: Mark Ruwedel, 2002

tinguishes science fiction and fiction through a reverse model of this logie: the former is “hubris clobbered by nemesis"; the latter ‘hubris clobbered by mimesis,” so that the very will toward natuuralism becomes the aggressor.”* It is in this context that one should understand Smithson’ substitution of the term obstruction for abstraction in his account of Minimalist sculpture.*® ‘The frozen natural disasters Smithson locates at the Spiral Jetty’s site are not just ambient effects that make his siting compelling but also figure, according to Smithson, the latent (if science-fictional) origin of the form of the Jetty itself. To make his soulpture is therefore at one level to literalize these forces— certainly a more extreme claim for the origin of an artwork than those made by other artists associated with earthworks, be it Michael Heizer's phenomenological assertion of “density, volume, mass, and space” or even Dennis Oppenheim’s more terrain.” Neither of general affirmation of “place, the physi these ists describes his sites through popular and multiple literary genres or as coded with this kind of theatri ‘al meaning. How does shoreline reverberate or gyrate? What about this section of lake could possibly constitute it as a “rotary”? ‘Throughout his essays, Smithson’s prose is doing far more than explaining how he came up with the form of his outdoor sculpture (if it's doing that at all). As Barrett Watten suggests, ‘Smithson’s “flagrant and ironic use of metaphor . . . indicates the impossibility of any real ‘likeness.’

‘To propose that the concept of site specificity in Smithson must be approached rhetorically, through a series of generic quotations like scienee fiction, is not to suggest, however, that ho seeks to persuade his readers of an organic link between a ‘material object and a location. Rather, the asserted link itself is often destabilized. What is instead crucial to the rhetorical Photos: Mark Ruwedel, 2002

aspect of Smithson's project is his use of counterintuitive, often science-fictional terms and phrases to assert shared frames of reference—contexts—in which objects can be conceived in relation to, juxtaposed with, sites. We notice in Smithson's writing not merely a thematic move from the naturalistic to the rhetorical, from time and space to temporal and scalar arguments, but a coincident formal move that precedes and “grounds” these

others, from genre as binding horizon of discursive validity to a sequence of generic quotations as shifting siting mechanisms for arguments. From 1966 with “The Crystal Land” (his third published essay) on through essays such as “The Domain of the Great Bear" (1966) and “The Monuments of Passaic" (1967), Smithson’s writings had evoked, not only the genre of the seience-fictional narrative, but also that of the more mundane scientific manual

(especially the geological manual), the more elevated or theoretical treatise, the field guide, and even the informal or memoirish account of @ field trip that might have led to “breakthroughs in the field. But these early texts were written before he had actually built objects in the field—before he had fully estab-

lished his dynamic between Sites and Nonsites.*° First with Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1969) and then with “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), Smithson brings the discussion, of site specificity to a new level: the understanding of both temporality and scale that had seemed to direct him toward derelict industrial zones and “abandoned futures” could now seem grounded in preexisting sites, where his sculptures could literalize unstable temporal and spatial conditions. And, as this occurs, the status of narration and explanation undergo slight adjustments: the midrange camp that had organized ‘The Crystal Land,” for instance, with its mining of field

reports and suburb names, gives way in “The Spiral Jetty” to a more clear polarization between the bureaucratic and the low-fi sublime, with the former enlisted primarily to deal with the progression of events in the project's timeline, the latter to account for affective states that cause the subject to focus on, and build his work out of, certain events over others. ‘Smithson’s account of the process that leads him to Utah betrays this oscillation. After mentioning other works on salars, “the remoteness of Bolivia,” and that “Mono Lake lacked reddish color,” Smithson links his decision “to investigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah” with his finding out from Ted ‘Tuttle of the Utah Park Development that “the water in the Great Salt Lake north of the Lucin Cutoff, which cuts the lake in two, was the color of tomato soup” (p. 7). ‘The passage moves from basking, scientifically, in the geological world of salars to contemplating a landscape whose aesthetic enigma emerges from the popular-cultural world of “tomato soup.” As the essay progresses, these various enig‘mas will link themselves with a range of recognizable generic tonalities—from the acid trip as depicted in countercultural novels and journalism of the 1960s to the environmental apocalypse that is the climax of many science-fiction novels, to the moment of sublime landscape rumination around which Enlightenment and Romantic travel narratives are frequently organized. All of the other generic fragments will sort themselves to some extent along this straight-fantastic cleavage, After this setup, for instance, a long paragraph detailing visits to local experts on construction and navigation of the lake sets up the bureaucratic development of the project as a foil for the next instance of low-fi sublimity, which emerges during a rive to Rozel Point.*! Here the tone shifts, and a long, science-

fictional passage begins, leading to his selection of a site for the jetty:

‘As we traveled, the valley spread into an uncanny immensity Unlike the other landscapes we had seen. The roads on the map became a net of dashes, while in the far distance the Salt Lake existed as an interrupted silver band. Hills took on the appearance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. We followed roads that glided away into dead ends. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stoney matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediments were countless bits of wreckage (p. 8). Panning the broader landscape in the general vicinity of his site, this passage claims the eerie (and sudden) dematerialization of its hills, roads, and sandy slopes as a kind of site‘generated affect that signals the viewing subject to pay attention to an emerging, latent strangeness. Smithson's sublimity Geiger counter has begun to tick. And so it is no surprise that, framed. by the clunky tonality of “suspense” (‘Slowly, we drew near the lake"), the next sentences will, in establishing a close focus on the details of this enigmatic wreckage (the piers, oil rigs, and shacks) shift from the broad spatial concerns of the area to the minute and increasingly sublime temporal implications of the man-made wreckage—the “evidence of a succession of manmade systems mired in abandoned hopes” that generates “great pleasure.” But, by claiming that this pleasure simply “arose” from seeing these structures, Smithson refuses to treat his reading as a subjective epiphany claimed by an “I.” “Not to say that one resorts to ‘subjective concepts," but rather that one apprehends what is around one's eyes and ears, no matter how unstable or fugitive.” Thus Smithson at once theatricalizes affect and attributes it, often with subtle humor, to bizarre ‘material (not subjective) determinations. And, in fact, it is part of Smithson’s humor that despite this magnetic encounter with this dilapidated landscape, he selects his site, we learn in the next paragraph, “about one mile north of the oil seeps” (p. 8). ‘Smithson obviously didn't want his jetty to be one object amid a panorama of debris. But the jolt between the practical decision and the elevated description that preceded it suggests that the sublimity Smithson locates in the landscape (like the “immanent” linkage of object to context) can be turned on and off at will.®* Indeed, after Smithson establishes this new site as “one of the few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland,” he will begin an account of that site's sublimity that has little to do with potential dump-truck access. Subject to a kind of creaky, eerie repetition, Smithson’s sentences (here and throughout the essay) begin their apocalypse

again and again, collapsing distinctions between interior and exterior ("the sun burned crimson through the lids"), shifting scales (“the shore of the lake became the edge of the sun"), merging organic and inorganic (“I was on a geologic fault that groaned within me”), mute and anthropomorphic (‘the sun vomited its corpuscular radiations”), and reversing object and frame (“the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rook still"). Finally, after the more general, classically paced aesthetic claim that “From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty.” his visions will touch down in a more specific and implausible origin of the Jetty’s form: “Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape ofa spiral” (p. 8)." Matter? Collapsing? Mirroring? Nor are we helped by Smithson’s playful qualification that “no ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence,” since none of Smithson’s “evidence” seems to be able to hold itself together as an actuality, By now the formal Photo: Martin Hogue, 2003,

choice of the spiral has been filtered through so many conflicting hallucinations, so many divergent potboiler sci-fi conclusions, that its immanent unity with the site cannot appear as anything but the self-consciously exaggerated myth of the inspired artist merging organically with his landscape site in order to forge his Creation. Smithson’s central epiphany is itself a blank quotation. ‘Sublimity emerges again after a bureaucratic section describing the purchasing of the land and a series of arthistorical and philosophical assertions. But by this later point in the essay it has changed its coding: no longer the overwhelming threat that generates a new sense and measure of the human (and therefore allows new modes of expression of that humanity), sublimity becomes, rather, that which confounds the legibility of the human as a category, Smithson thus moves toward @ kind of dynamic sublimity stripped of its recuperative humanist payoff..® We see this throughout the sunstroke section of “The Spiral Jetty,” which begins with “rays

of glare” hitting the observer's eyes “with the frequency of a Geiger counter

Surely, the storm clouds massing would turn into a rain of blood. Once, when | was flying over the lake, its surface ‘seemed to hold all the properties of an unbroken field of raw meat with gristle (foam); no doubt it was due to some freak wind action. Eyesight is often slaughtered by the other ‘senses, and when that happens it becomes necessary to seek out dispassionate abstractions. The dizzying spiral yearns for the assurance of geometry. One wants to retreat into the cool rooms of reason. But no, there was Van Gogh with his easel on some sun-baked lagoon painting ferns of the Carboniferous Period (p. 10). Here the “actuality” of the site's hallucinatory “evidence” has worked not so much to suggest formal analogies for a giant environmental sculpture as to present a morphing series of menacing (if funny) crises that, emerging equally from the landscape, now seem to send the distressed observer out into the sunbaked terrain in search of the cool assurance of a nonexistent bummer tent. Though excess sublimity pulses through every clause of this weird experience, the result is not any new measure of man other than as one subject to sunstroke and its wild derangements. At one level, the text here recalls the kind of epiphany one might find in a pulp 1960s drug novel—the kind collaged into the margins of Raymond Pettibon's early drawings—where the progressive narrative of expanded consciousness through drug experimentation moets its terrifying limit, where Altamont eclipses Woodstock. Of course, beneath the surface of the prose, we can certainly notice that Smithson here is at once working through (and transforming) art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s claims that “the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world” and participating, more generally, in a move away from optical modes of aesthetic interaction.®° But, if Smithson’s passage allows us to consolidate such art-historical insights into anything like a “position,” this position is stretched across a patchwork of divergent genres, rather than grounded in art-critical or art-historical conventions and tonalities. ‘Smithson certainly understood art-critical positions as oddly embodied. A central example is his famous October 1967 letter to the editor of Artforum in response to Michael Fried’s attack on the “theatricality” of Minimalism in “Art and Objecthooa” (published the previous June). Smithson sees as paradoxically theatrical both Fried’s celebration of instantaneousness in Anthony Caro and Kenneth Noland and his fear of the infinite temporal and spatial extension of Tony Smith's drive along the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. After describing Fried as a “drama critic” and applauding the “long overdue

spectacle” Fried has provided the art world, Smithson goes on to “stage” Fried’s position as a drama: The terrors of infinity are taking over the mind of Michael Fried. Corrupt appearances of endlessness worse than any known Evil. A radical skepticism, known only to the dreadful “literalists” is making inroads into intimate “shapehood.” Non-durational labyrinths of time are infecting his brain with eternity.”

Critics have noted that Smithson points here to the theatricality not only of Fried’s but of all critical positions; they have also noted the central role Smithson played in relativizing the would-be binding avant-garde narrative Fried sought to enforce—that is, in effecting what used to be called the shift from modernism to postmodernism.* But Smithson is equally interested in literalizing Fried’s model of eternity and thereby exploding it as a possible “position”

At any rate, eternity brings about the dissolution of belief in temporal histories, empires, revolutions, and counterrevolutions—all becomes ephemeral and in a sense unreal, even the universe loses its reality. Nature gives way to the incalculable cycles of nonduration. Eternal time is the result of skepticism, not belief. Every refutation is a mirror of the thing it refutes—ad infinitum. . . . Could it be there Is a double Michael Fried—the atemporal Fried and the temporal Fried? Consider a subdivided progression of “Frieds” on millions of stages.*° In his odd sweep through history that begins the passage, ‘Smithson takes his critique of naturalistic temporality to its truly science-fictional (and vaguely theological) conclusion—a conclusion that, in fact, obliterates the very positionality that he seems to have put forth as an unavoidable condition of criticism.** That is, what begins as an opposition between temporal and atemporal art-critical “positions” —between a stance (like the Minimalists’) that celebrates “real time” and one (like Fried’s) that focuses interpretation around a paradoxically timeless instant—becomes in turn a literalization of the condition of timelessness. Within such a condition a subject is no longer free to “value” timelessness, to put it forward as a belief—as though there were a choice—but instead becomes subject to it, subject, that is, to “incalculable cycles of nonduration.”"® ‘This play between generic dramatization and literal obliteration returns us to “The Spiral Jetty”: After the scenes of sublime duress that characterize its middle section, the last, passages make a transition from barraging the observer with bodily threats to removing him from the site of the Jetty. In fact, as Smithson takes us through a sequence of distanced viewing episodes that moves from a helicopter tour to his own film treatment, to aphorisms on cartography, and finally to a

turning inside out of the museum, he does not merely thematize the remote Spiral Jetty’s inevitable mediation through

photography, film, and writing—but constructs the Jetty as literally inaccessible in both space and time. This process begins in Smithson’s account of his helicopter ride over and around the newly completed Jetty. Rather than allowing the sensations of movement, distance from the surface of the Harth, and perspective more generally (all of which we might expect from a

helicopter ride), the trip instead initiates another version of science-fictional stasis (acceleration expiring “into a rippling stillness of reflected heat”) that gives way to an experience of the viewing self as microscopic: “I was slipping out of myself again, dissolving into a unicellular beginning, trying to locate the nucleus at the end of the spiral” (p. 11). ‘Then, as Smithson reflects on the filming process, he associates the medium not with any technologically produced immediacy, any capturing of or pointing to the real, but with a

defamiliarization that casts modern industrial tools and their wielders in prehistoric costumes: “The movieola becomes a ‘time machine’ that transforms trucks into dinosaurs. Fiore pulled

lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a} derthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth" (p. 11) Rather than seamlessly representing the Jotty’s construction somehow the movie has cast that process in another inaccessible past—a problem that Smithson then extends to his film editor friend Bob Fiore, whose very act of manipulating the film, now in the more recent past, is similarly transposed into a museum of natural history display of Neanderthals hunting, Nor can maps provide any conceptual access to the spatial

and temporal Nonsite of the Jetty. As Smithson studies these ‘maps, they begin to invert his previous claim about wreckage near his chosen Jetty site: If in looking at the abandoned oil rigs Smithson could see the technological projects of the recent, past as a geologic record, now the absolute present tense of maps somehow brings to life the otherwise hidden “monsters of the geological record. Here again geometr bstractions— black circles” and “squares'—become threatening obstructions, “Plerodactyls” and “flesh-eaters.” As the essay's (like the film's) “disparate elements assume a coherence,” this visionary cartog. raphy will link up (through proximity as much as through thematic connection) with a metainstitutional interpolation from John Taine’

science-fiction novel The Greatest Adventure,

depicting an interpreter struggling to reconeile a model of a dinosaur in a museum with what is geologically known about ita drama that intensifies and changes scales in the essay's last paragraph about the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in New York's

American Musoum of Natural History, where, as “the great outdoor ;hrinks phenomenologically to the scale of a prison and the indoors expands to the scale of the universe,” light bulbs are transformed into “dying suns” (p. 12),

Certainly the seoure spaces and times of maps and dinosaur displays are being overwhelmed here by a variety of wild temporal and scalar effects. And certainly this process removes both us and the essay’s protagonist from any experience of the Jetty—whose “actuality” seems now to have vanished. The last sentence of “The Spiral Jetty” strands us within the nonhuman time of the geological specimen and within the spatial nondestination of a road without visual purchase on the Jetty: “The camera shifts to a specimen squeezed flat by the weight of sediments,

then the film cuts to the road in Utah” (p. 13).

Where then does this conclusion leave us with the strange specimen of Smithson’s essay itself—the essay, that is, as an ostensible explanation of the sculpture? The piece obviously does not definitively explain why there is now a spiral jetty in the Great Salt Lake, how Smithson's choice of the spiral form emerged as a logical response to his “site,” and why his research involved the precedents it did and not others. That these seemingly unavoidable questions are left open is part of the essay’s great appeal—and its performance. Because, if Smithson is not performing rhetorical closure, he is certainly

performing something. Indeed, our movement through his essay has been not toward an increasingly buttressed answer to these questions but instead through a series of physicalized encounters with sites and ideas. These encounters do not develop but operate in analogical chains at different scales. Like Smithson’s account of film as “impenetrable material,” the seeming transparency of discourse keeps giving way to its materiality. If we can now take Smithson at his word that “language ‘covers’ rather than ‘discovers’ its sites and situations,”

here this cov: ering, this sedimentation in language, has accrued

through a loose series of generic quotations in which, as the more mundane and bureaucratic documentary mode oscillates with the fantastic, we move through science fiction, geology, travel narrative, philosophy, poetry, art oriticism, pulp drug novel, cartography, and film treatment. Each of these generic contexts embodies or literalizes concepts relevant to conceptualizing and constructing the Jetty, as happens most diagrammatically early in the film when Smithson dramatizes the following passage from Thomas H. Clark and Colin W. Stearn’s Geological Evolution of North America: “the Barth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into ‘small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing.” By asking Nancy Holt to film him throwing “handfuls of ripped up pages from books and magazines over the edge” of the quarry, Smithson claims to treat the geology passage as a “fact” (p. 12). And, we are also asked to extend this understanding of “fact” to Smithson's essay as a whole, where the various results of his field trip to this barren Utah lake environment have been. pushed toward a series of distinct generic frames. If science fiction is the dominant tonal note, the organizer of a subset of fantastic genres, this is because it allows Smithson to theatricalize affect, while claiming the strange “immanence” of his findings. Fredric Jameson argues that “if the historical novel ‘corresponded’ to the emergence of historicity, of a sense of history in its strong modern post-eighteenth-century sense, science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or the blockage of that historicity.” For Jameson this waning is, of course, a problem: “Only by means of a violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ that is our capacity to organize and live time histori cally.”** For Smithson, however, precisely this blockage is of interest—not because he is symptomatic of the kind of amnesia that Jameson would diagnose, nor because he shares the synchronic model of the Structuralists, but because he wants to challenge a naturalistic mode of history telling that is paradoxically characteristic of the avant-garde: “History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy." If Smithson’s essays and, indeed, his larger self-siting in the art world could thus be thought to effect a “violent formal and narrative dislocation,” such an operation was not designed to “restore life and feeling” to historicism (avant-garde or otherwise) but rather to enervate and derange historicism, so that, entering now as an assortment of fictions, paradoxes, and voids, its constantly distanced specter will help him, negatively, to build a nonnaturalistic rhetoric capable of forging experimental and counterintuitive links between empirical places and physicalized concepts. a2

‘To understand the positive moment of this link making, one needs to move from time to space. As Watten wrote of Smithson twenty years ago, “the ironies of representation are located on the temporal axis, which is partial, entropic, and negative, while the affirmations of Smithson's literary method are in space, which is not ironic.** Understood in its broadest sense, this affirmation does not simply celebrate three-dimensionality but also permits a kind of utopian quality to emerge from the spatialization, the literalization, of discourse. It is a conception of space, therefore, that underlies Smithson's arrangement of shifting generic tonalities, whose infinite substitution (along the general division between documentary or scientific and aesthetically sublime) allows at once for the “siting” of artworks like the Spiral Jetty, and for the rendering literal or material of critical positions. Ultimately what is oceurring in this seeming conflation between substance and language is not merely the materialization of language but a more specific rhetorical operation that, because it refuses to separate concepts from the generic tonalities in which we encounter them, we might call the materialization of tone. In Smithson’s writing, neither the concept (his atomic unit) nor the position (a constellation of concepts, that has become social and institutional) is accessible through a uniform voice of summary; instead, concepts, like positions, wedge themselves into recognizable and distinct generic frames that exert tonal pressure on citation, This is the conceptual basis of Smithson's inconsistent tone—in “The Spiral Jetty” and elsewhere. And it is through this concept ofa materialized tone that Smithson’s writing dramatizes generically distinct concepts and positions in an eternal battle with commonsense notions of time and space. Notes, 1. Smithson noticed similar temporal displacements five years eater in analyzing subUrban developments, highway constuction sites, and car dealerships. See “A Tour ofthe Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (originally published in Artforum 7, no. 4 [December 1967] as “The Monuments of Passaic"), in Robert Smithson: The Collected \itings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: Unversity of California Press, 1996), pp. 68-74 Uke the new roadways that would allow frictionless passage tothe competing subur ban utopias, so the various designs of the “WIDE TRACK PONTIACS—Executive, Bonneville, Tempest, Grand Prix, Firebirds, GTO, Catalina, and LeMans” (p. 72) use futuristic fin and new finishes to project discrete, purchasable futures. These futures ‘are obliterated or superseded by the next year's model, so time as a uified and Singular experiential frame is overwhelmed in Smithson’s thought more generally by ‘2 multiplicity of confcting temporal arguments emerging from material objects. 2, See the reprint of Robert Smithson's “The Spiral Jet” inthis book, p. 9. Al fue ‘ther quotations will be marked parenthetically. This and other writings by Smithson ‘are published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Whiting. Unlike many of Smithson's ‘other influential essays, “The Spiral Jetty” was not published in Artforum, but in @ collection of essays: Arts ofthe Environment, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: Bazil, 1972). Though the collecton’s contributors come from widely different disciplines— planning, Iterary cticism, architecture, art, science, psychiatryKepes frames the collection in his introduction in terms of the burgeoning field of ecology: “Disregard for ‘nature's richness leads tothe destruction of ving forms and eventually to the dogradation of man himself” (Kepes, introduction to Arts ofthe Environment, p. 2). This cortext therefore seemsto operate as an initial frame for Smithson's counterclaim that

Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon, 1970 138

his “trogments ofa timeless geology laugh without mirth atthe timesfiled hopes of ecology” (p. 13) '3, Smithson, “A Museum of Language Inthe Vicinity of At” (1968), in Robert ‘Smithson: The Collected Whitngs, pp. 79-80. 4. Smithson, interview forthe Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, by Paul Cummings (1972), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Wiitings,p. 294 5. Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” p. 78. 6. This section is certaintya revision of Willam Carlos Williams's soll sample in book thee of Paterson. See Wiliams, Paterson (New York: New Directions 1948), 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsty’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984), p. 106 8. Friedrich Schiegel writes, ‘We already have so many theories of the genre. Why don't we have any concept of genre? Perhaps then we would have to get along with ‘a single theory of the genres" (Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, tuans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsyivania State University Press, 1968}, p. 127.) {9, Stephen Melle, “Robert Smithson: A Ltealist ofthe imagination," in Seams: ‘Art as a Philosophical Context, ed. Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe (Amsterdam: G & B Arts, 1996), p. 34. 10, Jean Frangois Lyotard writes of two conditions of satire, which he locates as the postmodern form of philosophical art erticism: “the reversibility of what i visible with hat sees, of what can be sald with what speaks” and “an impossibility of making [aesthetic experiences] topographically contingent and synchronous.” This opens sate to1an endless, sampling relation to gene: “you have free rein, and according to the ‘occasion you can turn pedagogical, cissertational, narrative, conversational, ical, epic, or dry 26 an auditor et the Government Accounting Office” (Lyotard, “Contribution 10 an Idea of Postmodern,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin [Oxtor: Blackwel, 1989], p. 189). 114, Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projets,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Wings, p. 112. 412, Miwon Kwon, One Place ater Another: Site Specific Art and Locational lien (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 29-30. Smithson is thus the kind of exception Kwon seems to anticipate, but not adress, when she claims that her chronolog‘al account of ste specify in terms of “phenomenological, Social/insttuional, and discursive" models isnot a matter of “stages in a neat linear trajectory of historical development” but of ‘competing defritions” (Kwon, p. 30). OF discursive site spec fcity, Kwon wrtes, “More than just the museum, the site comes to encompass relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies, including the studio, gallery, museum, art criticism, art history, the art market, that together constitute 8 system of practices that is not separate from but open to socal, economic, and pol ‘al pressures. To be ‘specific to such a site, tun, isto decode and/or recode ‘the institutional conventions s0 8s to expose thelr hidden yet motivated operations” (Kwon, p. 14). Like many more recent artists. Smithson insists on this simultaneity of definitions. 413. Robert Hobbs, fo instance, usefull relates Smithson's wings to his sculpture in ‘the inital monograph on the artist, Rabert Smithson: Sculpture (hace, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1981). The book also contains essays by Lucy ippard, Lawrence ‘Aloway, and John Coplans. 44. These ar, respectively, Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art ater Babe! (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 2003); ‘Suzaan Boetiger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: Unversity of California Press, 2002); Jennifer Roberts, MirorTravels: Robert Smison and History (New Haven, Conn: Vale Univesity Press, 2004) | have learned a great deal from each ofthese authors. | am especially indebted to Barrett Watten’s book Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern llinois University Press, 1985), whose chapter “Total Syntax The Work in the Word,"pp. 140-67 (not cited in any ofthe above, later books on Smithson) remains the best account of Smithson’s writing. 15. Shapiro usefully compares Smithson's “surrender of conscious control” in this passage to Anton Ehrenaweig’s concept of ‘sediferentiation" (Shapiro, p. 90). 16. Boetiger.p. 201. OF Smithson’s “Incidentsof MirorTavel in the Yucatan,” published in Artforum in September 1969, Boetiger writes, “Smithson interweaves dead an narrative and phantasmagorcal extrapolationto present his philosophy of art anc ‘of life" (p. 197). But she does not go on to explain ether how such interweaving might ‘be bound up with this philosophy, nor precisely what this philosophy is 47. J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (1966; repr, London: Tiad/Panther, 1985), p. 116. 418. Watten wites, “Smithson creates a new iterary form—better than the short story {because more motivated) and in fact supplanting that form. It isa prose of investiga 126

tion and results, with the agency ofthe herortist, where once was either 8 hero or detective, 2s 8 metaphoric paradigm working against the transparency of statement” (watten,p. 85). 19. Ballard may be an exception here: “Perhaps it was [the] git of time which ‘accounted forthe eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting ‘and architecture. Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than thelr ‘own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, proviing that ‘unmistakable premonition of immortality sensed within St. Pete's or the palace at "Nymphenburg. By contrast, the architecture ofthe twentieth century, characterstically ‘one of rectangular unornamented facedes, of simple Eucidesn space and time, was ‘that of the New Word, confident ofits frm footing inthe future and initferentto ‘those pangs of mortality which Raunted the mind of old Europe” (Ballard, p. 148). 20, Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 14, Shapiro writes ofthis and related passages in Smithson “in attempting to transvalue the concepts of the monument and of... at historical ‘temporality, Smithson is beginningto elaborate a form of postperioization” (Shapiro, pp. 26 and 27), 21. For an account of Smithson’s relation to the term earthworks, see Boettger, pp. 61-63, Boetiger also claims that the entropio account of the sandbox at the fend of Smithson’s “The Monuments of Passaic" “presents anather parallel between Smithson’s ideas and Alaiss's book, as the theme of a dessicated world is also that of Earthworks” (p. 63). 22. See, respective, Shapiro, p. 27. and Reynolds, p. 8. 23. As with most of his interests, Smityson’s readings in fletion were quite wide: ‘tom Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe to the nouveau roman, of which Smithson was a comparatively early American enthusiast. Smithson had works by Michel Butor, "Nathalie Sarraute, and Alain Robbe Gril in his library (see the compilation of ‘Smithson’ library by Lor Cavagnaro, in Reynolds, pp. 297-345). Obviously, however, the inventory cannot be taken as @ onetoone list of Smithson’s readings. 24. Bian Adis, Tillon Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: ‘Atheneum, 1986), p. 26. 25. “Many people were ‘left cola’ by them, or found thelr nish ‘too dreary. These Cbstructions stood as visible clues of the future. A future of humdrum prctialty in the shape of standardized office buildings...” Smithson also comments on @ pas ‘sage ofa scienco‘ition novel by Damon Knight, that it has “none ofthe ‘values ofthe naturalistic ‘iterary’ novel, I is crystaline, and ofthe mind by virtue of being ‘outside of unconscious action” (Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” pp, 14-15.) 26, Michae! Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim, in response to questions from Willoughby ‘Sharp about the choice of the artist's materials, in a 1968-69 discussion with Heizer, (Oppenheim, and Smithson, In Robert Smithson: The Collected Waitings, pp. 251 and 242 (quoted in Boetger,p. 152). 27, Jack Flam links Smithson’s interest in “bastard” literary genres and ‘mixed’ cultural ste, such as science fiction wring and the American Museum of Natural History" to his discovery ofthe witings of Borges (Flam, introduction to Robert ‘Smithson: The Collected Whiting, p. x) 28. Watton, p. 8. 29. See “The Domain of the Great Bear” (1966) and “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Wings, pp. 26-33, Pp. 68-74, respectively. 20, Jennifer Roberts writes, “Athough his wrtings after 1968 were rarely as explicit in their crystallographic reference (largely because by then he had toned down much of the sciencefitional tenor of his fist wntings), certain motifs borrowed from crystal: raphy would remain operative in his work throughout his carer” (Roberts, p. 40) 34. ts importantto note that this paragraph is laced with sight hints of narrative ‘rama, like the suggestion of angry ranchers" who resent Smithson's intrusions. 32, Jennifer Roberts's reading of the relation between the Spiral Jetty and the Golden ‘Spike provides a rch way to link Smithson’s Interest in the nearby national historic site to models of arthistorca! temporality and valuation (see Roberts, pp. 131-36) 33. Watten wrtes of related techniques in other of Smithson's essays, describing the antis’s project in “Utramoderne” (1967), for instance, as one of generating “metaphorical extensions of the theme in one-sentence units” (Watten, p. 79) In @ slignty more general way, Shapiro suggests that the “rush of Smithson's prose” in 2a description ofa quarry in "The Crystal Land” (1966) its “heaping one form of threat oF fall upon another, has the same quay asthe site it evokes” (Shapiro, p. 72) {34 Later inthe essay, just ater his discourse on scale, Smithson claims a series of ‘analogical relationships at which the spira's fundamental form is repeated at scales both smaller and larger than the Jetty itself: “each cubic salt crystal... advances:

‘around a dislocation point, inthe manner of a screw. The Spiral Jetty could be consis ‘ered one layer within the spiraling crystal latice, magnified tnilions of times” (0. 9). 35. na 1984 essay, Lyotard argues tha. in postwar art, the terror usualy associated withthe sublime project of evoking the unrepresentable poses a new threat to avant {garde nations of progressive temporal Sequence. This treat is “the possibilty of nthe Ing happening, of words, colours, forms or Sounds not coming” (Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avantgarde,” in The Lyotard Reader, . 198). ke Smithson, Lyotard i inte ested both in “the disappearance ofthe temporal continuum through which the exper ence of generations used to be transmitted (Lyotard, p. 209). 36, Wihelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of ‘Sve, wans. Michael Bullock (2908: rep. Cleveland: Meridian, 1967), p. 15. Certainly ‘Smithson avoids the bad primitism that allows Worcnger, elsewhere in his treatise, to fx abstraction as a (barbaric) stage of cultural development (see p. 131) 37, Smithson, “Letter to the Editor" (1967), in Robert Smithson: The Colected \witings. pp. 66-67. 38, Stephen Mole claims that “Smithson's attack seems accurate, but too easy [because]... n cling Fried ‘theatrical’ he has managed to put him aside—in just the way Fried put Tony Smith aside. But of course Fried was ‘wrong, and so also was ‘Smithson. We are no more free to walk away from the complications imposed on criticism by an acknowledgment of ts theatricality than Fried i to walk awa from the complications imposed on the history of at bythe persistence of a Smith or a Rauschenberg” (Mev, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of ‘Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conaitons of Publicity in rt and Ctcism,” October 191983}, pp. 71-72.) But, as | hope to demonstrate, by theatr calzing Fed's position Smithson is neither puting Fried “aside” nor walking away from this problem. 39, Shapiro points in this direction, when he writes of futile attempts by writers ike Judd and Fried to avoid the “abyss,” suggesting the alternative that Smithson offers by constructing “strategies that would alow us to acknowledge ft, even if this involves an uncontrolable vertigo." Smithson, he argues. “points out that Fried, turing away fom the abyss in his exticism of Tony Smith, nevertheless finds an abyss a ‘good!’ abyss this time in the painting of Morris Louis” (Shapiro,p. 93). 40. Smithson, “Letter tothe Edit.” p, 67. 41 Smithson performs a similar operation with Wortinger, who, like his mentor Alois Riegl, often writes of geometric abstraction as “crystalline” (Wortinger, p, 94). The Kinship between the actual structure of all “crystalline inorganic matter” and abstract repetitive motifs, according to Worringer, was “not known to primitive man” but was ‘a “consequence af the most profound inner connection of al ining things” (id . 35). Smithson, turing this would-be coincidence toward the crystaline, builds sculptures according to litera principles, instead of making “erystaline abstractions" in Worringer’s sense. Smithson thus approaches what influential art historians see as the very basis of abstraction in order to recode and problematiz the term. Writing ieety of Worringer, Smithson asks, “What are the latices and grids of pure abstac. tion, if not renderings and representations of a reduced order of nature? ... There is ro escaping nature through abstract representation; abstraction brings one closer to physical structures within nature self. But this does not mean a renewed confidence in nature, it simply means that abstraction is no cause fr faith. Abstraction can only bbe vala if accepts nature's dialectic” (Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape" {2973}, n Rabert Smithson: The Collected Whiting, 162). For an account of Smithson’s complex relation tothe actual scienife discussion of Crystallogr, See Roberts, pp. 36-59, 42. In focusing onthe importance of Smithson's religous pat ings within is later thought, Roberts is right 10 claim that “the ferocious wit of Smitnson’s letter has tended to obscure the fact that, even as late as 1967, Smithson had not rescinded his own claims to eternity." and that he would “adopt a strategy of infinite skepticism, Infinite fragmentation, infinite duration, in order to ative at eternal tine.” But what ‘separates Smithson from Fred here is not only Smithson’ refusal to “stuff the ried accumulations of history back into a single point or “instant”"—to use Roberts's nice rase—but also his refusal to postion an aesthetic subject in whom the instant neous experience of infinty might be registered Indeed Smithson’s historical panorama of the “incalculable cycles of nonduration” points to a conition ofa eral nfnitude that would necessary surpass and obliterate the subject. 43. Frearic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logie of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Unversity Press, 1991), p. 284. 44. Smithson, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums" (1967), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Wrtings.p. 4. 45, Watten, pp. 80-81 aa

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Talking with Robert Smithson Kenneth Baker

‘Sometime in late 1970, soon after I began writing for Artforum, then-editor Philip Leider asked if I would be interested in interviewing his friend Robert Smithson for the magazine, Naturally, I jumped at the assignment, though I knew only some of ‘Smithson’s writings and some of the work he had shown in New York galleries. Artforum had already published several of ‘Smithson’s essays and had run in its September 1970 issue three of Gianfranco Gorgoni's photographs of the Spiral Jetty, images soon to become nearly as iconie as the work of Land art itself, ‘Smithson and I met several times in 1971, as his calendar indicates, but neither I nor Nancy Holt, who was also in the studio during each visit, can remember on which occasion the taping took place. By then, in any case, Smithson and I had begun an ongoing conversation about art and politios within and beyond the art world. The taped conversation, whenever it precisely happened, took on a slightly stilted air at moments, as we both—I, especially—felt faintly obliged to give the recorded dialogue the cadence of an interview. 1 transeribed the interview not long after it was done. ‘Smithson read and edited the typescript, making some deletions and additions in his own hand. The text that follows incorporates them. Meanwhile Phil Leider retired as editor of Artforum, replaced by John Coplans, the magazine's other cofounder, ‘who soon began to think differently about its content and contributors. Consequently my interview with Smithson has not appeared in print until now. It languished in my files for decades until I glimpsed the tape during the upheaval of move across San Francisco in late 1998. (I had forgotten at the time that the transcript already existed and have since been ‘unable to locate the tape again.) I mentioned this history to Lynne Cooke when we happened to see each other during a “Spiral Jetty Weekend” in Utah in September 2004, organized by the International Sculpture Center and the Salt Lake Art Center. After reading the transcript, she asked permission to include it in this book. I hope it will contribute something to our understanding of Smithson's art and thought.

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Robert Smithson: Museums began as replacements for palaces and churches back in the early nineteenth century. Vast imperial pantheons were built in order to sanctify antique fragments from Greece and Rome. ‘Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the Renaissance was invented; this development placed emphasis on painting. Since then the museum urge has extended its collections deeper into the past and to the brink of the present. Civilized man’s museum seems from the brink to be more of a prison than a literating force, more of a setfinflicted punishment than a salvation. Why do even the best installed shows have the appearance of a dud? Why are the plain white rooms of a modern museum as oppressive as the imperial halls of our older museums? Could it be that we spread culture not to liberate but to enchain? It seems strange to me that the “disadvantaged” should want to enter into the cultural trap: if you join our mess we will give you the benefits of our discontent. The need to transcend experience seems a dubious enterprise. The civilized man tries to convert us away from fecund stupidity to sterile purity. If the artist achieves purity his vain abstractions might attract praise. This also could be considered a stupid situation, but generally we accept it as a high state of consciousness; consciousness is the booby prize. Unhappily we overestimate the “nothingness” of our predicament. Mental discontent drives one toward absolute abstraction—this provides an illusion of repose far from the uncertainties of nature, Each abstraction is but another block in the psychic prison. Abstract artists want to transcend nature through their craft; they are afraid of the contingencies of the external world. But the mind is crumbling, To have faith in abstraction is an empty hope; after that there is mud, torpor, and darkness. But today's disorder may be tomorrow's order. My view of nature and art is entropic. | agree with Claude LéviStrauss that we need a new discipline called entropoiogy. Kenneth Baker: What did you mean when you said once that the Nonsites had to do with the “entropy of the urban"?

aandring Sty, 3973 MEANDERING ‘Spiral Island (Charred Troe Limbs ‘and Asphalt, 1971

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RS: Well, | probably said that in passing. The notion is this: The gallery is a closed structure and | take that for granted, and the Nonsites are a closed structure but they point to an area of dispersal outside the gallery, outside the interior space. And so it became a matter of going out and gathering these fugitive rocks and putting them into a closed containertype situation that more or less mirrored the condition of the interior room. In other words, that natural aspect was invading the purity of the abstraction. So, in that respect, | guess it’s a kind of concentration of a diffuse situation that extends outside the confines of the gallery space. KKB: Were the shapes of the early Nonsites determined by the effort to “release scale from size"

RS: What | was doing was setting up a dialectic that pointed to a condition that was outside the gallery and that somehow returned to the gallery. This cycle is endless. {In terms of abstraction, there seems to be one urge, and that is toward the development of a purely mental construct that is then transferred into a physical object. And the notion that surrounds the Nonsite has to do with a dialectic that exists between interior and exterior space. So that the open limits of the site enter the closed limits of the Nonsite, and there’s no attempt to foster any idea of freedom within the confines of the room. In fact, the notion of constriction and contraction is emphasized in the Nonsites. The outer coordinates of the site are brought into the inner coordinates of the Nonsite; and there's no addition to the site, rather a subtraction. The actual shape of the Nonsite is determined more or less by my response to the phenomena of the site and how it strikes my temperament, rather than any rational logic. In a sense, it exists in an area that | would call the “surd,” where you go from logic into a kind of alogic or the alogon state, which is suggested in some of the earlier pieces where the symmetries are in a sense disrupted, and thrown into three-dimensional illusions. Rather than give you any kind of certainty, they upset that. So the information on the site is scattered, whereas the information in the Nonsite is contained. ‘And you might say that the site operates as a periphery as opposed to the concentrated centrality of the Nonsite. So you get this kind of back-and forth situation between a visible presence that really has nothing to do with what it comes from and yet there is a relationship; | think this is where external world invisibly invades visible abstraction, and that sort of sets off the dialectic. Then the dialectic begins to seek its convergence. So that’s where that particular activity led me. Spiral, 1970

KB: How about the boxlike forms and channels in, say, Nonsite—Site Uncertain or Mono Lake Nonsite. Were they meant to relate to the rectilinearity of interior space?

‘Spleal Jetty, Great Salt Lako, ia, 1970

RS: The physical states that we come across suggest a concatenation of orders. An interior is called by many names—a room, a hall, a cellar, an attic, a cell, a chamber, an office, a gallery, etc. All these suggest man-made habitations. An exterior is called by many names—a field, a hill, a desert, a swamp, a mountain, a valley, a lake, etc. All these suggest natural habitations. Yet, interior and exterior states tend to merge into airports, quarries, roads, mines, parks, dumps, gardens, etc. Grids and plans subdivide the Earth into a global map. Conflicts among all these orders produce disorder, which is not the absence of order but rather a disparate combination of many orders. The Sites and Nonsites disclose a lack of coordination. Functional and formal relationships vanish into thickets and dumps. The uncertainty of location increases entropy. All the Nonsites are atopias (not utopias), which are filled with debris from the points unknown on the sites designated. You speak of a Nonsite—Site Uncertain. The coal fragments in the “boxlike forms” point to a land mass that no longer exists on the land surface. The coal was once a swamp of tropical vegetation. Virginia and part of Pennsylvania were once covered with seas. So, the site is prehistoric, gone for ever. The rectilinearity of the bins and the interior of the gallery tell us nothing about the mines that the coal came from. Geography has a way of vanishing in my three-dimensional maps, which | call Nonsites. Scale enters entropy. The point is that there is no point.

Yet, all the Nonsites follow a development. One is led to the outdoors then one is thrown back into an indoor situation and each one has its own particular coordinates, which are to @ degree unknowable; so that they're rather irrational equations, you might say, between two points, two unknown points you might even say. And it's my temperament that follows these rather hazardous paths. Each situation is totally unexpected, so that one is made aware of the problems of the inside and one is made aware of the problems of the outside and there's no conclusion. The whole situation is approachable, but | would say ungraspable. Now, the museum itself is a container and the instinct is to go out and search the backwaters and byways for art to fill museum space, so that you have this circumscribed space that is constantly being filled with artworks, and the sources of these artworks are rather obscure. | mean the reasons for the making of these objects are quite perplexing. You might say, each Nonsite is a museum, a museum of debris, a museum within a museum. One might even say curatorial aphasia sets in. ‘That whole sense of place seems to me questioned in this type of work. In other words, | think art need not be geared to a predictable kind of installation. | think that’s more or less run its course, the typical idea of exhibitions in a museum. | think it would be quite possible to make art in a quarry, a mine, @ lake, or a canal—you know any number of places. To build directly out of the ground of the site is one of my intentions. | think a symptom of artists’ need to find their own kind of place is indicated in the tendency toward the warehouse rather than the white neutral room or the usual gallery interior. | just think there are lots of possibilities where art can go and it would be good if artists could put their work there. Also | think there's a kind of problem with the tendency toward abstraction, which fosters a sense of absolutism, of arriving at a state of purity that involves a kind of insular studio consciousness. And | think we're feeling a kind of dissatisfaction with having to continue down the same dreary path again, follow that out, you know, carry out that notion that abstraction is something apart from the physical world, so that abstraction tends toward a kind of idealism, | could almost say ersatz spirituality, where some absolute is postulated in terms of an essence. | want my work to be a part of the world rather than to withdraw from it into some kind of abstract idea. | think that the idea of abstraction is predicated upon a fear of the physical world. | think the art I'm working with is more uncertain. It's not predicated on solutions so much as on problems. And it's dialectical and not abstract. The origins of my own consciousness go back to the Site/Nonsite situation which in a sense finds its synthesis in the Spiral Jetty. KB: Is there such a thing as an urban site for your temperament? And what do you make of architecture inasmuch as it deals with sale and size?

RS: If we consider the urban situation which | would consider a kind of civilized situation where the activity is going on right now—it's what LéviStrauss calls a hot situation as opposed to the cold situations that the primitives are involved in. . .. It was interesting to me to get out of the hot urban centrality into the kind of sprawling penumbral primitive area, where once there did exist a civilization, But | wanted to stay away from the archaeological ruins and just explore the unnoticed sites that sur rounded them, so in a sense | was going from no place to no place and to record that and deal with that rather fugitive experience in terms of the mirror, in terms of the light hitting the mirror and the whole transitoriness of that and then somehow reflect it in terms of the article and the photographs. But in retrospect what one ends up with is an entropic complex, @ maze of orders. | worked in a kind of ocean of undifferentiated observation that allowed the phenomena to emerge out of probability rather than out of any kind of determination. So that | found myself wandering, you might say, and trying to draw that into coherence, and that's what the article is. The article is as much about dismantling as it is about making, so that both things coincide, the dismantling and the building, the building and the dismantling. | was trying to deal with a fringe area, and the Yucatan offers a variety of sites that | had no way of preparing for. So it was a matter of working with the unexpected and trying to deal with that.

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KB: How do you answer people who read a surrealistic aspect, into your work, in the things with mirrors, for instance?

RS: | would say that where | would differ from that attitude is that Surrealism originates in the head, in dreams and in nightmares and the subconscious. But I'm concerned with the physical remains of the actual world, and | draw my motives from that rather than from an interior kind of introverted exploration of internalized fantasy. The whole investigation is extern m not interested in dredging up my personal psycho-

Untitied (3 Spiral Jetty drawings Partial Trostment: First Part of ‘The Movie Spiral Jetty, 3970

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logical situations. And in many respects | think abstraction is basically psychic, | mean it’s based on the psyche, reducing things to a surface, something that’s understandable in terms of the head, and | think that's why a lot of early abstractionists sort of emerged from a kind of Surrealism. | don’t subscribe to Surrealism because I'm concerned with a phenomenon that doesn’t originate in my head, it originates in the world; there's a difference, | think. The more conscious you are, the less you're going to resort to the unconscious, but in the end both of them don't really amount to too much. I don’t think they really give you any clues. And a word like Surrealism is just another program, it's another way to circumscribe a situation that seems rather difficult and murky. So, you know, you say “Surrealism” and immediately you feel you understand something because the word imprisons a whole spectrum of activities. | think that's just an urge on people's part to try to circumscribe; again | think that urge is always with us to imprison whole bodies of artworks within a label. In a sense, it makes things very easy, | mean, in a sense, you might say that the word Surrealism as @ word, or any category, is @ kind of Nonsite for all these fugitive kinds of difficulties. All those -isms just seem to me little vessels for the academic, little stepping stones along the way. In one respect what we're trying to do in this discussion is to compress about five years of work into a few hours, and already you're getting into trouble. You're trying to link up many activities that in a sense can't really be linked up, the connections are always breaking down, so that all we can come up with are

Particles again, like bits and pieces. We're compacting a whole range of work that's developed over a period of years, how can you possibly do that? But we're always trying to do that, and that’s another reason why | think the Nonsite is pertinent. The Nonsite in a sense tries to entrap something that seems to relate, but there’s no way we can possibly comprehend all the time that has worked over those rocks or all the unknowns there, you know. But we try our best to compress; that’s what we're doing in terms of language. And the language is always deteriorating, it's always collapsing, So that to try to bring all these things together is like trying to build a verbal Nonsite. With an interview, there’s no beginning and end to it, it's basically a morass. And within that morass there are certain elements that you have to extract like a miner, you have to go looking for them and extract ‘them and clean the dirt off and see how clear they are. | have no faith in any kind of beginningto-end situa: tion. To me it’s a patchwork, and we move over this field and extract from particular data. There’s no way you can determine an interview. It’s basically a conversation and a conversation tends to bog down, tends to be bright at certain moments, it has its peaks and valleys. But interviews are also dismal. KB: Is there a more positive role of language in relation to art than you have been suggesting? I mean, it seems to me that part of the implication of recent art has been an effort to recover a concrete fundamental sense of the word in relation to experience.

RS: My view of language would be that it does have a physical weight to it, that it’s a medium and it's not going to disappear. Once you get it out there and in the pages, it’s an actual physical manifestation. And the thing is that there's this other school of thought in terms of language, especially Conceptualism, which to me is a substitute for spirituality, a kind of superstition, or it's a kind of withdrawal from the world into a cult of abstraction. | would say that a word to me is matter, it’s quite physical, but it's informed by the mind, to get back probably to the phenomenological view, and it puts in its appearance, | mean, it’s there, And there are many facets to this word or this sentence or paragraph that you can extract from it. My urge ‘would be to construct a language physical enough so you could literally mine it. In other words it would have 1o final meaning because the world doesn’t function like that. That to me invalidates the whole sense of being and nothingness, which is still involved in a kind of spiritual hangover. I'm more in favor of a phenomenological, structuralist view of language as, not even a fact, but a terrain, a patch of ground within the age that you could extract various meanings from, according to your temperament. So that my articles really don't explain or educate, they generate. In terms of language I'm not interested in retreating into an abstract context of definition. | find that just a complete evasion of the world on every level. A lot of artists feel that language will disappear, especially abstract artists, you know, they say, it disappears, there's nothing there, don’t listen to it; but it keeps piling up. It's not that language discovers anything in art, it covers it—it sort of inundates it. And | feel that if you could write in that way and expand this consciousness from the writing, @ sentence could be viewed as a landscape. And if the words are well put together, you can extract different kinds of meanings from that, and not one of these meanings will have any priority. There'd be no certainty about any of them, so that the language is always tending to crumble. If you set out to try to convince somebody, like a lawyer—which is the way Michael Fried writes—you keep them for a while, but eventually it doesn’t hold up. It may sound very convincing, very true and deep, but eventually you see all the holes in it. Why not write knowing that writing is full of holes, writing is full of holes, writing is full of contradictions. Talking is even more of a tangle. KB: Was the Gravel Mirror corner piece about gravity? How about the Mirror Displacements? RS: I'd say it's about shoring up an essentially elusive situation. The mirrors tend to symmetricize an essentially asymmetrical situation. You do have the presence of the actual material and the reflection of the material, and there again you're into that whole situation with the reflection being the Nonsite and the material as the site, or a particle of that site. Although the mirror situations are different from the Nonsites.

RS: Well, they're following a rather unpredictable trail. There's no clock out there in the jungle that you can refer to. There's an aspect of the wilderness that may be another reason why I chose that area. The wilder ness is full of thickets and undergrowth and somehow those places escape time. They don't function in terms of certainty once again. | mean we can always look at the clock and we're reassured, but time is still passing by, it’s still going by and it’s somehow irreversible; that's the whole idea of entropy coming in again—that irreversible process. No matter how clear or how timeless art might be, it's still affected by this loathsome irreversibility. It’s not even loathsome really; it's kind of reassuring at times. Time is a oneway trip. The future is promises, expectancy, while the past is full of colorless gray tones. The future is more colorful, you know, it builds on our hopes. The past is sort of like this dim reservoir of faded photographs. | think most people live in their expectancy, they really expect something, but they're just constantly moving ‘out of that and there’s nothing left but these fossil situations, residues and debris of the past. So, you're left with this long trail of reflections. KB: What is the situation of the photograph and other means of documentation within the dialectic?

think photographs have a lot to do with energy loss. A lot of people are disturbed by them, they're threatened by photographs, because photographs disclose instants gone forever. The photograph always exists in the past. It doesn't correspond to your experience, so your ego is threatened by it; it’s a constant reminder that you're moving toward your grave. The photograph to me is an entropic residue, and I'm fascinated by that. I'm fascinated by the threat of the photograph, the way it can reduce everything to a kind of Jelly. The emulsions and all that sort of thing scare people. Photographs are maps, little entropic bits that siphon off moments of experience. That arrested moment is constantly upsetting, it keeps haunting you. You're constantly faced with reminders of things you would rather forget. It's like an albatross around your neck—the camera, | mean—it tends to excite guilt and a primitive dread, like the primitives who imag ine that when you take a photograph of them you're stealing their spirit. And since abstraction is so involved in spiritbuilding and convincing people they're on the right track and that they have some kind of purpose, the photograph comes along and completely erodes that whole hope. So it’s a very problematic thing, not a solution. | find them interesting for their timelessness, you might say. XB: It would seem that photographs would encourage people to see the things you do as objects. Is that a problem? RS: It's an isolated fragment again of something that's essentially fugitive. Everything comes back to that entrapment. Part of the idea of the Nonsites is that we can’t help but bring things back to a square shape, to a rectangular situation, no matter how irregular we think we are or how free and infinite we think we are, we end up locked in, That's what | was trying to talk about in terms of the prison idea; inside you feel there's a prison, and then you go outside, and there's another one. But that can be exhilarating, | mean. knowing that. Consider Genet. And artists who try to get into museums or who want to show on white walls are really like convicts trying to break into prison. KB: You said earlier that the dialectic of Site and Nonsite finds its synthesis in the Spiral Jetty. Could you explain that?

Unttied (Spirae), 1870

RS: | think if we talk about the Spiral Jetty in terms of its existence in the Great Salt Lake, what we get is a kind of bringing together of these two ideas of interior and exterior within the piece, so that there's a ‘correspondence. Because when you're out in an open area like the Great Salt Lake, you're dealing with an expansive horizon that tends to circulate, and you get this sense of spiral centrifugal phenomena. If you're walking on the Jetty, you're in a sense thrown out onto an outer edge, and then you move into a kind of interior situation, and in the film | did allude to this, to the prison aspect of the Jetty. Once again, the

constriction or concentration exists within the inner coils of the Jetty, whereas on the outer edge you're kind of thrown out, you're aware of the horizons and how they echo through the Jetty. So it exists both inside and outside in terms of the actual experience of being on it. That's something | was leading up to through all my ‘work beginning with the “Aerial Art" article in 1966 for the airport project, where that whole problem had suggested itself. {At the beginning of the film, the section in the Hall of Late Dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History suggests an idea of a kind of interior immensity, there's a kind of expansion. Also the light bulbs in that sequence could in a sense be interchanged with the stars. So those two scale situations suggest it. | could probably reverse them again constantly keep reversing that scale, but | think it moves toward a kind of synthesis. KB: In your essay on the Spiral Jetty and on the film (to be published elsewhere) you mentioned a “sense of scale that resonates in the eye and the ear at the same time.” Could you explain that?

hat's in regard to the film. That refers to the sketch by Brancusi, the portrait of Joyce. To a degree | think Joyce's view of time is essentially auditory, it's not a visual understanding of time. When you read his work, you're really not presented with any kind of image, you're really carried or conveyed by the sound of the words. The ear resonates and the eye reflects, so it’s possible to get these two going together. Also when you're on the Jetty, you experience it in terms of the sounds around it, ike the lapping of the water, ‘a continual kind of lapping and rippling and the wind has a kind of resonating, droning, primordial sound. | would say that my film is a direct descendant of my writing, because the film is a kind of essay. Its structure comes out of certain areas of my writing. In a sense, it's a fusion of a lot of disparate or tangential aspects of my work. One of the aspects that | did bring out in this article I wrote was that there’s a kind of correlation between the water in the Salt Lake and blood. In a sense the salt water is a very primitive kind of blood. You're getting down to raw materials, and | think that the art that affects you is dealing with this raw state, getting to that raw state that in a sense envelops you. There's one scene in my film where the helicopter pulls up and I'm at the end of the Jetty but in a sense | sink into the rock I think the strongest art really projects you over millennia now; it really encompasses a lot of time and ‘not just somebody's specious idea of history that you're living up to. it's getting away from a kind of humanist idea of history too, you know, mancentered history. think that the more your work can be made to resnate or suggest, the stronger it is, and not that it’s simply a matter of personal talent. You know, talent is cheap, there are thousands of talents. It's a matter of setting up that contact with age upon age upon age, ‘and any way one can arrive at that is satisfactory to me, | saw a film of Australian Aborigines, and they use blood in their pigments. It was a remarkable film, where they would pierce their arms and let all this blood spray out and then use it to mix their pigments, and that was a sort of basic source for them. You know, the filmmaker Jean Renoir said that you can't have art without a little blood, and there might be a certain truth to that.

KB: In the essay you speak of the wrong sense of scale giving rise to a language or object that “appears to be certain.” What is the connection between sense of scale and language? 5: Well, it gets back to that other abstract and apply it to a particular that thing and that you're secure in and the thing as much as possible. about scale.

situation we were talking about. If you take a word like object or thing, then it locates that thing and gives you a sense that you've found your perception of it. Then it becomes a matter of reducing the word That gives you that sense of certainty, but it doesn't tell you anything,

KB: Is the Spiral Jetty about restoring a sense of scale to our perceptions? RS: Well, that might be an aspect of it but I can’t really say that's part of the intention. | mean in a sense language got me to that point but | don’t know whether that will formulate any kind of new language situa: tion. There’s no way to control that. Language to me is just out of control, and there's no way of really stabilizing it. Hopefully the Jetty will excite all these different reservoirs within each individual. | can't really present anything that will convince anybody, | mean, there's no program that I have to offer, there's ro thing that I'm searching for. There’s no point in me saying that I'm trying to get at reality KB: Could you comment on the use of the Great Salt Lake as a mirror, which comes across in the film? RS: There is a reflective aspect of the lake which involves actual light reflection and that light tends to be rather fugitive. The film uses the sun as it burns through the Jetty. Since the sun is what keeps the Earth going, it attracts our attention. | used @ stock shot of the sun at the beginning of my film as what | would

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The sun just hangs in the sky completely indifferent to our moral problems. Banal, blinding, almost sickening, it has obsessed us. We regretfully consider its energy and suppose it to be the giver of life. ‘That's how the spiritual filmmakers see it, unity and all that crap. To me it is a portent of entropy, a kind of groaning circle of hot marmalade. That's why in my film the sun gives off the sound of a hospital respirator. The sun drove Van Gogh mad; it's the curse of art. The reflective aspect of the lake and the lake itself, especially the Salt Lake, is a kind of ocean of entropy, because it's a shrunken vestige of a great ocean that once existed there. It's supersaturated with all these salts and the salt is deposited on the edges of the spiral actually through the action of the sun. KKB: What do you mean in speaking as you have about “entropic film"?

: Well entropy, | think, would mean that one wasn’t striving for any kind of technical uniqueness or any avant garde idea of film. | think it would really emerge more out of the films we see at local movie houses, that somehow we go to see from time to time and not from any idea of experiment. | think experimental film has too much to do with the laboratory, a kind of studio art where the whole thing is controlled and you can be very abstract. I's like an attempt to end up in that state of abstraction again, which keeps out all of the impurities.

KB: You have spoken about a dialectical art and quoted Lenin and such and it begins to sound terribly political at moments. What is your thinking about polities in relation to art?

RS: Politics seems to involve land masses to a degree. The identities of nations are coming apart. Boundaries are no longer certain. Yet, the Big Powers still think they know where they're going—they have an objective. What's united about the United States? The name doesn't equal what goes on in this continent. The inventions of language have created political monsters. Political language has generalized itself into a gray haze. Within the abstract walls of the Pentagon statistics are shuffled. Those doing the shuffling, imagine an objective on the other side of the world, but their results are groundless and murderous. Phantom states are everywhere and nowhere. As long as politics exist no one will be happy. Politics are strife and discard, whether petty or monolithic. KB: What do you make of the fact that the moon is now accessible and of the possibility of leaving the Earth?

Spiraling Jety io Red Sait Water, e. 1970 Untted (Sum Golng Through Jetty) «1970

would say one thing about the moon, and that first of all it's accessible in terms of technology, and that it takes great expenditures of economic resources to get there. It's a consolidation again of lots and lots of scattered resources. Basically we're unhappy with the Earth, | guess, or we wouldn't want to leave it. It’s another aspect of escapism. To go to the moon means some kind of escape, trying to break out of the boundaries of the earthly prison again. And once they get up there, they're all chained into this machine and they're actually more constrained than they'd ever be in a local vacant lot on Earth. And they wander around, and they end up picking up a few pounds of rocks. So that to a degree there is, | guess, a kind of relationship in terms of the Nonsites again, where one goes out into some kind of obscure area and picks up some rocks and somehow it’s supposed to have some kind of relevance. Moon rocks are brought back and they're studied and examined, they're supposed to have some kind of meaning, Also looking back onto the Earth from the moon, the Earth contracts again into golf-ball scale. But the whole response is rather banal, certainly there's nothing exciting about it, about the people going up there. I mean, who are they? ‘The feedback in terms of the cameras and everything is supposed to be a great technical feat, but it comes across like a kind of bad scienceffiction movie. Maybe that's what I'm trying to get at, that no matter how great our technical resources are, it doesn’t necessarily mean a good movie. They have a certain technical knowhow, but somehow it comes back as something rather dreary, something that's kind of a letdown. We expected so much more. There's this kind of contraction and debilitation that set a demoralization. There's no way of doing anything with the moon as far as | can see.

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KB: Speaking of TV, doesn't it have something of the Nonsite character? Rs: Yeah, nothing seems to belong there, does it? There’s this little box there consolidating all this dis. parate information that doesn’t seem to add up to anything. Yet we're continually contending with it, looking

at it, and it passes onto us what we call news, whatever that is. I'm constantly amazed by the undifferenti ated material that shows up on TV and how it all sort of fits in that box from day to day. | mean, just take the news, there's always just enough so that it fits in there and somehow we can’t make heads or tails of it. | mean I'm eager to look at it, but it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. But it obviously has some kind of meaning—it's not an abstraction, that's what | think I'm getting at. Maybe,

it’s just electrical shit.

KB: Have you read anything lately that pertains to your art or from which you've drawn ideas? fell, | just picked up a book called Western Horizons, a collection of essays on the “Western.” ‘The Western movie as compared to the studio movie is Kind of an interesting situation. Did you know the first Western (The Great Train Robbery [1903]) was made in New Jersey? I'm kind of interested in the morality that's been put on the landscape in terms of the figures that inhabit it. Let's say like the difference between King Vidor and John Ford. King Vidor has been sort of denounced by French filmmakers as being involved in a kind of superirrational area, whereas John Ford is the classicist. And | disagree with that; there's an aspect of a kind of anarchy that appealsto me. I'm a little repelled by John Ford's putting John Wayne in control of the Western landscape. And most underground movies strike me as not dealing with landscape at all, But my reading just sort of tumbles onto me. | have a book now on lost continents which interests me, with continental drift and the whole idea of what man’s view of the Earth is. | read a book called Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, which is a history of how people have looked at the world from Biblical times right up to the nineteenth century, and the transformations, the impact of geology on ethics, and that sort of thing. Why valleys are good and mountains are evil and how that was reversed, and how people project their needs on socalled nature

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Time in the Film That Became a Classic! Diana Thater

Tonight | am going to speak about the Spiral Jetty, a film that Robert Smithson made in 1970. | am not going to talk about the sculpture, which | am sure you all know, at least from photographs, quite well. However, in talking about the film, certain questions of the sculpture itself wll surely be addressed. | have set up this talk in such a way that | will be able to show you the film in three sections: the beginning, middle, and end. Ill talk about each part and make some comparisons before going on to the next. | have not arbitrarily demarcated these sections—they are clearly delineated within the work by the filmmaker himself.

t 1: Going to the Jetty Here are images of two well-known geoastrological monuments, large earthworks whose size, shape, and orientation are related to the positions of the sun, moon, or constellations. It has been theorized that Stonehenge is some kind of great cosmological clock, while the coils of the Great Serpent Mound represent the constellation Ursa Minor and correlate to the solstices and equinoxes." I show you these two images first and Task you to remember them as I talk about the Spiral Jetty. It is not a great feat to note, nor is it particularly difficult to believe, that the Spiral Jetty is a film that uses the tropes of science fiction to make its meaning. Smithson’s writing itself is crammed with bits from science-fiction novels set alongside quotations from actual science texts and poetry; these usually are equally referenced and thus are given equal weight.

‘Stonehenge, Salsbury Plain, England, (reat Serpent Mound, Ohio, c. 500-1000 AD

In the first sequence from th film, the subject is introduced. the Spiral Jetty. We begin quite far away from the Jetty, on the sun in fact, and end up driving down a bumpy dirt road, On our journey from the surface of the sun to a lake in Utah, we

pause briefly for a short history of the world. Here we find history” strewn in bits and pieces, blowing through time like the torn maps spilling down a hillside. History is partial and is therefore mostly speculative. Smithson tells us in his writing that “various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each othe,” so in this filmic place fiction is as rele vant as fact While driving down the road, we spend an equal amount of time looking forward at the road ahead and backward. The road behind us is hidden in a cloud of dust kioked up by the truck's wheels. This cloud obscures the path, and we find once again that looking backward (historical looking) can be problomatio. This is also emphasized by the next image: a stack of intermingled science and science-fiction books: From the top to the bottom the titles are: The Lost World, Mazes and Labyrinths, The Realm of the Nebulae, Sedimentation, and The Day of the Dinosaur. The stack sits on a mirror that divides it in the middle, thus reversing the order. ‘The books are striated like the Earth, only the order is mixed up, with the heavens (The Realm of the Nebulae) caught somewhere in between the

surface (Mazes and Labyrinths) and the Sedimentation below For Smithson, looking at the strata of the Barth is like looking down through a heap of language, waiting, needing to be deciphered.’ Geology—the readable history of the Earth—is jum: bled and thus abstracted.

a Film stilts trom Spiral Jetty, 1970,

Atlantis, aka Eden, Paradise, Mu, and Lemuria (we don’t think it existed, but maybe it did) finds a place in Smithson’s history —as real a place as the hypothetical southern end of the pri‘mordial supercontinent Gondwanaland (we think it existed, but maybe it didn’t). At this point in the film, Smithson overlays a prehistoric world map on a contemporary map and then dissolves into a detailed map of Utah. The prehistoric and the modern worlds coexist just as Smithson has already made fact and fiction coexist. In this first section, Smithson speaks in several ways about the Earth: first, an observation, “the Barth’s history seems at times like a story recorded in a book”; then commentary on the Great Salt Lake's mythic whirlpool, “the myth was not dispelled until 1870—long after people should have known better”: then an exclamation, “The Lost World!” Finally the narration slips into the first person, quoting Samuel Beckett's 1958 novel The Unnamable, where the doubtful “I” speaks over red-tinted images of the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History.

‘Seventeenth-century map of Atlantis The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria, 1969 ‘Flim stil from Spiral Jetty, 1970

The age of the dinosaurs is the territory of science fiction. In this section, Smithson couples empirical science, archaeology. and speculative sc ence with the real monsters of prehistory.

By this point in the film, all of the sci-fi cues have been set up for the audience—an audience certainly acquainted with the terms of the genre. The years 1970 through 1972 were peak for science-fiction film, with the release of the following clas-

sics: A Clockwork Oran, 1971), Omega Man (1971), The ndromeda Strain (1971), THX 1138 (1971), Slaughterhouse. Five (1972), Silent Running (1972), 1 Solaris (1972). A few years before, in 1968, the mother of all sci-fi epics, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released.

Film sits from Spal Jetty, 1970

Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, itis the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through,” wrote

G. K. Chesterton in Alarms and Discursions.* Here is a montage that I put together from 2001: A Space Odyssey; it is intended to highlight the fact that at least half of this film is lit in red. Certainly this sequence

from 2001 tells us what red means. The gaze of Hal's single red eye brackets the battle between Hal and the astronauts ‘As Hal gains control of the ship and loses control of himself, the tension escalates until the entire film glows red. Red disappears with Hal's death Precedents for single-color tints also exist in film art from the same period, particularly in the works of Hollis, Frampton and Michael Snow. We 1n think of Frampton's

Process Red (1966), The Red Door (Magellan at the Gates of Death, Part1), and The Green Door (Magellan at the Gates of Death, Part I1) (both from 1976)* or of Michael Snow's film Wavelength (1967), all of which were at least partially tinted red,

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Both Frampton't and Snow's films are tinted with gels or col

cored lenses (the same method Smithson used, as opposed to the process used in 2001, which was actually lit with red lights). Wavelength is a forty-five-minute zoom across an eighty-foot loft, The film is, of course, so much more, particularly in that it (unlike most film art made immediately before it, such as the early films of Andy Warhol like Sleep [1963] or Empire [1964)), takes note of the standard tropes of narrative cinema: four separate events occur, including a man’s death, during which the camera mercilessly continues its zoom across the room impervious to all the human events that take place, ‘The sound of the strect gives way to an electronically produced soundtrack: a continually escalating sine wave, so that the effects of the events, the soundtrack, and the camera combine to escalate the viewer's sense of anxiety until the last image, when the film settles on a still photo of the ocean In the Spiral Jetty, Smithson also alternates live sound with sound effects. Here are several comparisons with sciencefiction films of the time. Imagine this sequence played in darkness without accompanying images: Sound like that of a respirator from the Spiral Jetty, followed by 2001's Frank breathing inside his space suit. ‘Then, the echoing footsteps, ticking clocks, and metronome from the Spiral Jetty, followed by the reverberating footsteps of the police from George Lucas's THX 1138, ‘Then, the electronic noise from the Spiral Jetty, followed by the ‘nevermind . . ." electron’ joise sequence from THX 1138,

In science fiction, machine sounds are diegetic; they appear to be internally generated, from within the film, and are presumed to come from the technology used in the story. Electronic sound, the indicator of technology, accounts for most of the soundtrack in the majority of sci-fi films.

‘Film sit from Michaet Snow, Wavelength, 1967 am

Part 2: Making the Jetty Here I will not introduce any images other than those that make up the sequence: the lake and the machines building the Jetty. In this second section, clearly separated from the first, Smithson utilizes a straightforward dialectical structure, which, as Sergei Eisenstein noted in his book Film Form, is inherent to the medium, since one image must always follow another and the two together produce an idea (if not an idea, then @ notion) in the viewer and thus provide the ground for the next series of images, and so advance the story forward. In this sequence, Smithson intercuts the forces at work on the Jetty, allowing them to counter one another. Two forces are given character through this dialectical pairing. The cut ting back and forth between the aggressive machines and the seemingly passive lake gives the water the power of silence, as contrasted with the roar of the machines. And, in the end (which will occur maybe ten thousand years from now), it is, of course, the lake that will win the battle, since these apparently gentle, lapping waves will cover the Jetty, beat it down, and wear it away.

Film sits rom Spiral Jetty, 970, a7

‘There are two anomalous still frames (a stegosaurus at the opening and a horned lizard toward the end)—internal brackets in the sequence—that effectively turn the machines into roar ing dinosaurs in all of their primordial grandeur.” All of the sound in this sequence is live, and all of the other footage

documentation In the first section of the film, the subject—the trans formation of monuments by time and the language needed to discuss it—is laid out, Here, in the second part, that same transformation is demonstrated, effected through what fil makers consider one of the most basic editing structures: parallel editing, which is used to make a viewer think of simultaneous times

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Part 3: The Spiral In the first shot of this third sequence, we track along the Jetty, following the spiral path from beginning to end, and when we reach the end we pull back up into the sky to see the sculpture for the first time as a whole. It has been opened up to us slowly. It is like a revelation, and it is certainly magnificent and certainly monumental, yet Smithson describes the Jetty using the most mundane of all language, directions and a list of elements: “North—Mugd, salt crystals, rocks, water / North by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water / Northeast by North— ‘Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.” This drone continues for several minutes and belies the beautiful structure being revealed to us on film; this banal language cannot properly describe the monumental. Here too Smithson is back in the realm of science fiction, in which this dichotomy is a pat fcularly well-known, trope. In fact, much of the tension in sci-fi films is derived from the space that is opened up between language and image.” Imagine this: Here is an audio sequence from 2001, when you hear Frank and Dave talking with Hal, who has just murdered three of the other scientists,

‘The animated voice of the computer stands in stark contrast to the deadpan voices of the astronauts, Think also of the transmissions heard regularly from men traveling in space: “Well, Mission Control, it certainly is beautiful up here, and Td like to say hello to everyone at home, and happy birthday to my lovely wife.” In sci-fi, as well as in reality, the language of empiricism ‘cannot approach what the space traveler encounters, what he feels and the significance of it. All the astronaut can do is try to describe it or ignore it. There is a huge rift between poetic language and scientific truth: How ean one speak in a compelling way about the magnificent?

Film stills trom Spiral Jetty, 1970 a

Once we follow the Jetty and find it in its monumental whole. ness, we get a short, factual description of the spiral formation of salt crystals, which is an obvious point to whieh we will return, This is accompanied by sound effects similar to those din the first section of the film. After the tiny crystals, we find the Jetty partial again and ‘Smithson himself now standing upon it. He runs, drawing the Jetty for us with his bod} so that we may see the scale of

the thing: It takes this many steps, it takes this amount of time to run from the beginning to the end of it. All the while, artist is followed and menaced by the shadow of the helicopter holikos in Greek meaning “spiral”). When the artist reach the end, the helicopter pulls away, losing him in the frame, but the Jetty is now man-sized and drawn on the film to scale,

‘This entire sequence is accompanied only by live sound, the primal groan of the helicopter. The artist has now made a sec ond drawing of the Jetty for the viewer ‘Smithson standing on the end of the Jetty is a compelling, image. So often in science fiction the protagonist-scientist stops to contemplate the realm he seeks to control, save, or destroy.

Flim sits from Spiral Jetty, 1970 a5

Most often in these films what man contemplates is nature itself, Here is one such scene from Silent Running. ‘The question in late 1960s and early 1970s sci-fi was the landscape. In most of these films, man must either leave Barth forever, never to see the landscape again, or he must find his way back to Barth, the landscape representing what is lost to him. In Silent Running, the alienation of man from nature is

0 complete that the last remaining bits of it—tiny Edens—are launched into outer space, and their sole guardian can only dream of what nature once was."

Fm stills from Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, 3972 a6

In THX 1138's final scene, a man, who has never seen the sun, is gloriously re ited with nature,

‘This scene leads us into the last Jetty sequence, Remem: ber, 80 far we have seen the Jetty traced by the helicopter and then retraced by the artist running along it. Now, in the final

sequence, the helicopter races over the ground and heads straight for the Jetty, which no longer must, or can, be drawn, From the outset it is whole. On the soundtrack, Smithson gives up on factual language and tur sto two pas ages from contem: porary science-fiction novels to describe what soience cannot

Fm sits from THX 1138, directed by George Lucas, 1974

Here is Smithson’s storyboard (apparently made for the helicopter pilot), describing how this sequence is to be shot. His directions are clear: position the reflection of sun in the center of the Jetty. The sun flares off of the lens, forming the wonderful flares so loved by artist-filmmakers, and what has happened? ‘The Jetty has become a galaxy with a star at its center.

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‘Movie Troatmont: Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, 1970, Fm still rom Spiral Jetty, 1970

Remember that the first shot in this section traced the Jetty? Remember that immediately following this shot of the whole of the Jetty, Smithson greatly reduced the scale to focus on minis cule salt-crystal spirals? We saw the Jetty made microcosmic ‘Then, the Jetty returned for another description, this time by a human figure. The Jetty was made man-sized, and we under

stood its s hape and form though a body to which we could relate. In the final shot, as it rotates and turns on its side, the Jetty becomes a galaxy with a sparkling sun at its center. From to macrocosmic, the spiral is one of nature's basic designs. A magnified salt crystal, a reflected galaxy, the Spiral Jetty becomes a geoastrological monument

Film stills fom Spiral Jetty, 1970 a9

Disconcertingly large changes in scale are one of the great visual tropes of late sixties and early seventies science fiction. Here, a baby is as big as a world in the final sequence of 2001 ‘The ocean in Solaris is actually a thinking brain, a massive consciousness on which a stunned helicopter pilot has seen a huge baby floating. At the center of this ocean is a whirlpool into which the thoughts of the characters are sucked. Compare now two quotations. First Smithson: “There are times when the great outdoors shrinks phenomenologically to the scale of a prison, and times when the indoors expands to the scale of the universe."

‘And, Parker Tyler in @ book on scifi titled The Shadow of an Airplane: “The science fiction drama . . . is destined to cope with that combined spatial megalomania and spatial paranoia that I define as mankind's oldest known sort of self-harassment."®

‘Flim stil from 200%: A Space Odyssey, 1968 ‘Flim sit from Solaris, directed by Andel Tarkovsky, 1972

In sci-fi, filtering and effects are used to transform the Earth's landscape into that of another planet. Making Earth foreign 1s the subject of artworks, as well. In Michael Snow's La Région Centrale (1971), there is no narrative, nothing in fact other than the Canadian tundra and a motion-control camera dosigned by the filmmaker, Nothing other than the mechanical

movement of the machine, accompanied by the internally generated noises that indicate the camera change of direction, are required to defamiliarize the landscape: What should be com. prehensible becomes incomprehensible. A small plot of land just a few yards in diameter expands beyond our understanding over the course of the film's three hours,

Fm stil from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 lm si from Michael Snow, La Région Contrale, 973 ae

Smithson’s last words in the film describe sunstroke, quoting a medical textbook—telling us again as he did with the very first, shot to think about the sun. ‘There is a Spiral Jetty that is a sculpture in Utah. There is also a Spiral Jetty that is a film. Why should the Spiral Jetty be two things? If the film were a documentation of the making of the sculpture, then surely we would call it one artwork with a supplement. However, this film is not documentation; it is a work of art that employs the techniques of the filmmaker to create a subject, a thing that can transform: machines become dinosaurs, and history becomes fraught with tension, as the past, present, and future become simultaneous. The Jetty can be the infinitesimal spiral of a salt crystal and then a galaxy spinning in space. Just as water-time will eventually wear the Jetty down to nothing, film-time can tu xn the Jetty into a galaxy, This is the transformation that film can effect. And in the final silent scene, Smithson puts the period at the end of the sentence with the shot of the flatbed on which he out the film. The film reels are mirrored in the photo of the Jetty pinned to the wall above. This final image reminds us that the artwork is neither tiny nor massive but the size of a film, whose reels are spirals of sorts,

Film si from Spiral Jetty, 1970 ‘Spiral Jetty, 3970 Photo: George Steinmetz, 2002

Photo: Gianfranco Gorgon, 1970,

Building the Jetty Bob Phillips

understand you'll build my jetty.” These were the first words I heard from Robert Smithson over the telephone. ‘That was in March of 1970, more than thirty-four years ago. The effects of that call go on today. I could have never imagined that I would now be talking again about the Jetty, something that happened so long ago.

‘This all started while I was doing construction work on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, building dikes for evaporating ponds for Great Salt Lake Minerals. This involved building up dirt dikes and placing rocks over the top to keep the wind and waves from washing them away. It was also necessary to dig a trench underneath the dike and to mix the layers of the sand and clays together, so that the fresh water could not penetrate and come up through the salt water—slowing the evaporation and concentration of the mineral salts. Parson Construction Company, my employer, had earthmoving equip‘ment to build the dikes but did not have the excavators required to do this trenching, and so that portion of the work was subcontracted to Whitaker Construction, in Brigham City, my present employer. I would spend time at the dike construction there at Great Salt Lake Minerals, but I lived in Logan, some fifty miles north, and would visit with Bob Whitaker on my way home, and collaborate on what we were doing and where we were going with the work. One day, as I stopped by to visit, with him, he said, “You've got to hear this one. This is really good. My brother Dennis met with a band of gypsies, and they want to build a dike with an island on it for helicopters to land on.” I said, “You're kidding.” “No,” he said. “'m serious, Dennis was there. He told ‘em we'd do it, but we're not going to.” We talked about what they might be doing with dikes and helicopters out there, and I must have said something to the effect of “Sounds like the same stuff we're doing out at Great Salt Lake Minerals.” So the conversation went, “Well, are you interested in it?” Whitaker said. “Well, yeah, I have some interest in it— Td like to talk to them.” ‘The next morning, the phone rang, and there it was: “I understand you'll build my jetty.” I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went from there, but T was kind of stunned, “Yeah—well—I'll—yeah—we'll talk about it,” or "We'll see, I don't know that I said I'd build it.” Smithson’s response was, “Well, I need to talk to you about it. I'm in Brigham City. How do I get there?"—Should take thirty, forty minutes to get there.” It seemed like he hung up the phone, and then there he was at my office in Ogden. He was a remarkable man to meet, and I immediately knew he wasn't a gypsy. But he was dressed in dark clothing, and he had such long hair that he had trouble keeping it out of his eyes. But what I really picked up on were those eyes. ‘They were penetrating eyes, with dark, heavy eyebrows, so penetrating that, as I looked at him, the thought came to me, “You better be careful what you say to this guy, ‘cause he can see right through you and knows what you're thinking.” His wife, Nancy Holt, was with him, and he introduced her and said, “She's an artist, too.” I think that was the only time that ‘Nancy and I ever talked about anything. The rest of it was with Smithson.

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He had prepared to meet with me. The first thing he wanted to do was to express his credentials and prove that he was for real. He was about my age (thirty). He talked about his schooling and what he had been doing in New York and New Jersey. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to him, as I was thinking that he looked like a character out of West Side Story. But he had the most soothing and calm voice when he talked, and he expressed himself well. You could tell he was a very educated man. Then he opened up this portfolio of projects that he had done, and there were thirty, forty of them in there—at least—and he talked about most of them. Over the years, I really could only remember three. He talked about some mounds that he had built in Europe. I looked at them—they were just mounds of dirt, and I thought, “Why in the world would he go clear to Europe to mound up this dirt?” Another one that intrigued me had to do with mirrors. I think it was in the Yucatan, where he took mirrors that he had made and mounted them on a cave wall so he could carry the sun down into the earth. That sounded like that would be fun, to do something like that, The other one was just a box, and it was full of rocks. As I said, I worked in construction—worked on a rock crusher sometimes—and one of the things they'd tell you if you messed up was “ fell, you're dumber than a box of rocks." So,

you know, I hope I didn't smile or laugh at him, but I might've, because I really didn't get it, what he was trying to do, All the time he was talking, I was trying to get through to him that I knew all there is to know about building dikes out in the

Great Salt Lake. I was trying to impress that upon him: “I need to tell you how to do it, you don't need to tell me how to do it.” Anyway, when he got done going through these projects, he said that he was anxious to get started on this one. I asked, “Well, how can you make a living doing this kind of stuff?" You know, I couldn't believe T'd said that, but he didn’t even flinch. He went right into a conversation about some of the projects that he anticipated working on. Again, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention, but there were a couple of interesting ones that I picked up on—one was an earthwork at the end of an airport runway. There’s a big opportunity with an area there that could be beautified, and it would have a calming effect on people as they were coming in and out of the airport, they'd enjoy it, and it would be a good use of the land, as well as serving a purpose. ‘The second thing he talked about was the opportunity to build earthworks on the interchanges along interstates. He'd been talking to the Federal Highway Administration about that. He thought there'd be an opportunity to do something there, and though you can't have anything that’s complicated to look at if somebody's in traffic, something that’s pleasing to look at would have a calming influence. Well, I thought, sounds like those would be good things, but what's that got to do with

the jetty? It’s out in the middle of nowhere, where no one will see it. ‘Smithson started getting serious about building the Jetty and explained what he had planned. I said, “Now, before you can do this, you have to have an engineered plan—we can't just go out there and build this—you have to have permits and approvals in order to do this work.” To my surprise, there were permits, and he had a lease on the ground from the state: he had a permit from the Bureau of Reclamation to remove the rock; he had a remediation plan, or a way to put it back together after he was done. He was ready to go. “Okay. Well, now we need some kind of a plan, something that we're going to use.” And so he showed me the maps that he had, And on those maps there was a little J drawn, or little circles drawn on the bottom of it, very tiny. And, I said, “No, that's not going to be good enough; we've got to have some better drawings ‘than that.” So he showed me some of the sketches that he'd done. I was trying to convince him that he needed an engineer ‘opposite: Splral Jetty with Temporary Truck Cross: Over, 1970, ‘Map for Insurance company, c. 1970

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to do this, to prepare a design. “Then I can give you a bid on constructing the Jetty and how it must be built.” I'm not an engineer, but I tried very hard to make him think I was. I was trying to impress him with my knowledge of construction and that he was now in my domain—so he'd better pay attention. I did my best to explain the concerns with this type of construction, and how expensive it would be. talked about what I had done with the duck clubs along the shores of the lake, and talked about the challenges at Great Salt Lake Minerals, and also out at Rowley at what was then National Lead. “You've got to have soils reports. The ground pressure out there is only two hundred PSI (pounds per square inch), and it won't support the construction equipment, and you've got to have design calculations in order to get it up to fifteen hundred PSI as required. It takes one foot of fill to raise the ground pressure five hundred PSI. We may have to use track machines with cleats and widen the tracks in order to work on the soft surface. The dike needs to be eight feet wide at the top and needs to be sloped enough to hold rock on the sides to prevent wave damage. We need to know how deep the water will be in order to size the rock large enough to withstand the wave action. This is very important, since salt water is much heavier than the fresh water you are used to.” I told him about building a dike out into the lake, where the water was only two feet deep. “A storm came up and in one night wiped out a week's work, just like it had never been done. In another area, there was a soft spot. So, truckload after truckload of rock was dumped into it to try to stabilize it. After a day's work, it was noticed that the ground had pushed up some fifty fect away. It was like a bottomless pit.” It didn't appear that Smithson was paying a whole lot of attention to my concerns, but I evidently wont through some costs—gave some numbers out, estimates of what fill and rock would cost, how much might be needed, and how expensive this might be. I didn't scare him, and we finished. He said he would bbe back with whatI nested. After Smithson and his wife left, there was a fair amount of curiosity in the office. I don't think I did a very good job explaining who Robert Smithson was and what the Spiral Jetty was going to be. Later in the day, my boss, Paul, found me and wanted an explanation. After our discussion, it was obvious he didn’t want to take the risk of sinking the equipment into the ooze, tipping over a truck, or exposing it to the salt water without a method of rinsing it off daily. The site was too far away, and it wasn't worth the risk. I hoped against hope that my discussion of the construction difficulties and costs would scare away Smithson, and I wouldn't hear from him, A very short time later, what seemed like hours but was actually a couple days, Smithson returned to negotiate a contract. He had gone back and made a drawing. It's a sizeable sketch. He had it gridded on fifty-foot centers, and he had a

cross section of the way he wanted the dikes. I took it, went through it, drawing on it with a red pencil, “No, this is the way the dikes have got to look, and they've got to be at least three feet high, and you've got to put the rock over the top of them. ‘We can’t put it underneath like that.” He didn’t say anything, except, “Okay, that’s fine, when can we go to work?”I said, “Okay, let me put together a bid.” I don’t recall exactly how ‘soon—but probably the next day—I wrote up a bid with the specifications on it, which were three or four lines of what we would do. The price was $8,362, or something like that. He looked at it for just a minute and said, “That's not right. The price you gave me totaled six thousand dollars. You said, fifteen hundred feet times four dollars is six thousand dollars, and that’s what I've budgeted with my gallery."—“I said that?"— “Yes. Remember?” So, in fact, he was paying close attention; I just thought he wasn't—and I couldn't remember enough to dispute it. So I lined through the cost and initialed it, and said “Okay.” T don’t remember the look on Paul's face when I told him. Thad a contract for the Jetty, even though he had said he wasn't interested in doing it. I do remember his comment—how did I know I would get paid? Since the Jetty had no value and ‘Smithson was from New York, prospects weren't good. I needed something more than his name on a proposal. The next obstacle I threw against Smithson was to make sure he could pay for the job. I informed him that when we do a job like this with somebody from out of state, we need to set the money up in an escrow account at a local bank to draw from. He said, “Why don't I write you a check?” I took the check to my boss and his response was, “How do you know the check’s any good?” Tasked Smithson about it, and he wasn't annoyed, assured me it was fine, and wanted to proceed with the work without waiting for the bank. I visited with my company’s accountsreceivable manager and told him I needed to make sure the check would clear. I tried to explain to him what it was for, but he said, “What in the world are you doing? Why are we going to do something like that? If there's any question at all about it, why?” My response was, “Well, we need to do it because I told him we would do it.” Finally he said, “You realize this is a longdistance call?” I guess he called to ask the bank how much money Smithson had, and they told him that they didn't give out that kind of information but assured him that we didn’t have to worry about that. The money was taken care of—we needed to go to work, Paul was emphatic that he didn't want to send our equipment out there to get stuck in the mud, We needed ‘Rorel Point South of Golden Spike, 1970 Cross-Section of Sprang Jetty, 970

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to think about it a little bit. He said to me, “Tell you what, if you can go and get ahold of Boozie, get him to take his loader out there, maybe we can get something worked out.” Now, Boosie is Grant Busenbark—but other connotations of why he'd have that name would be accurate, He was an owner-operator that we (Parson Construction Company) used when needed. He had a dump truck with a trailer, and a Traxcavator (a little tractor with a loader bucket on the front and rippers on the back). He's the kind of guy who's happy as long as he's working. He was willing to go—anxious to go—saying, “If I'm making another dollar or two an hour on the truck, Til be even. more excited about it.” And so we made the deal. Parson furnished a rubber-tired loader, to load the rocks, and one other dump truck. The five-man crew went out to Rozel Point with the two trucks, the Traxcavator that would work out on the dike, and the other loader for loading the rocks into the trucks from the bank and maintaining the roadway. ‘The first day on the job was almost the last. When we arrived, Smithson had the access road and the direction of the Jetty all laid out, While building the access for the trucks, the loader broke through the area where the solid salt bottom meets the sand of the beach. The creamy gray mud oozed up and trapped the loader. When the other equipment attempted to pull it out, one of the trucks got stuck. We were hours away from getting help, and it looked like the project would literally sink into the mud. Fortunately, Boozie and the other loader ‘operator, Roger, are very good. They managed to work their way out of the mess and stabilize the access with rock fill. The question of whether to continue or not never came up, but all the crew and Smithson gained an appreciation for the risks involved. We had lost a day and a half—but we were underway. learned something recently that I hadn't thought about. Thad always thought that Smithson did the staking by running down from the top of the hill and putting the stakes in the lake. But he actually set a stake in the middle, and then staked the spiral around it. He went up and back to make changes or adjustments as the Jetty was forming. How in the world did he lay that spiral out from that distance—without engineering equipment—and make it come out complete the way he did? I thought things were going well, but a day or two later I got a telephone call late in the evening from Smithson. “You need to replace Grant. We can't proceed with the work any longer.” I said, “I can't replace Grant—he’s the only guy we've got.” And, he replied, "No, you need to replace him. We need people who understand what we're trying to accomplish.” said, “Boy, I just don't know how we can do it.”—"Well, we've got to do something. You're going to have to replace him.” ‘There was no compromise, so I hung up and called my boss, Photos: Gianfranco Gorgon, 1970

His response was, “Tell the guy—tell him that's it, we're done— ‘well be out of there then. That's the way the contract is, and they can't tell us who to use. We don't have anyone else, and besides, it's Boozie’s equipment.” ‘The next morning, I got up and drove out to the site. That, ‘was the longest hour-and-forty-five minute drive I've ever had. I was sure I was going out there to get right in the middle of the fray with no solution but to quit. As I pulled up, Smithson came running over in his waders, more waddling than running; he came over to me and before I could get out of the truck he said, “Everything's taken care of. Don't worry about it, everything's fine. I got things worked out. Don't do anything.” He turned around and went back up to his station and kept airecting the work that was going on. I couldn't get anybody to stop to talk to me for a long time; everybody was busy, everybody was working, everything was happening. Everybody was organized, with each truck ready to back out on the Jetty as the other one came out. It was like an orchestra, with Robert ‘Smithson as the conductor. Finally, at night, when they were cleaning up, I asked Boozie, “What in the world happened hore?" He said that he didn’t know anything happened. “Last night we were just oleaning up and getting ready to leave, and ‘Smithson was pacing up and down the roadway, looking out over the Jetty. He stopped and looked at me, and I just said, ‘tt turns me on, it turns me on. Now, turn me off, so we can go home.’ He must've taken offense at that.” This gave me some insight into the importance Smithson placed on this work. He didn’t want people that were just dumping rocks in the water; he wanted people that were building his Jetty. He wanted to instill the feolings that he had for this project into them. And, boy, that would be tough deal to get those workers to understand what he was trying to accomplish. But I'd have to say that Grant's—Boozie's—attitude after that incident certainly changed a lot. This guy is a marvel on that machine, and I sometimes wonder if the Jetty could have been built with anybody else but him working on that dike and placing those rocks. When he'd get a rock off the line a little bit, Smithson would get him to pull them up and move them back over, and I seriously think that Smithson knew where every one of those rocks were supposed to be in that dike. Thad another evening phone call from Smithson saying that things were going well, and he was going to go to Moab to ook at some other sites, and maybe he'd have some more work for us to do. “Do you think you can handle it?" he said. My answer was, “Yeah, I can handle the job while you're gone." But what I was thinking was that he couldn't run fast enough to get me to do another job like this. I went out to the Jetty, ready to take the leadership role, but it seemed like he was immediately back. “I thought you were going to Moab.” He said that, he did go to Moab, but that it was just too big—"There is no

way I could make an impression in that area." I don't know if that was true, or whether he didn't trust anybody to be working on his Jetty without him. I think probably it was the latter, he wanted to be there while the whole thing was going on. But for a while, I thought he was going to turn it over to me. Smithson was making all the decisions, He laid out all

the work. He interacted with the workers. he encouraged them, and seemed to have all the answers. I wanted to get involved in it, Howeve he, in a very professional, even careful way, let

‘me know that he could handle it without me—but would keep me advised. One of the challenges we had was that rock out there, basalt rock, is very heavy, very angular and sharp. If you just drop it in the truck beds, it will ruin the truck beds. And an

angular rock that isn’t covered can cut a tire. So one of the things the crew did was put earth in the bottom of the bed, then put the rocks in. There was a constant argument with ‘Smithson about how much dirt to put in and how mueh rock Bob wanted more rock than dirt, and they wanted more dirt, because it would make it smoother for them to work on. The amount of dirt versus rock was making the Jetty look like a highway with the rocks buried in it. How could I resolve that? Tcame up with a hairbrained idea: to mount a water pump in the middle of a big rubber inner tube; somebody would be out pulling that, while another guy with a fire hose would wash the dirt out from around the rock. I thought, boy, this was a

‘00d idea. Itried to get Smithson to buy off on it, but he said, No, I don't think welll need it, No, we won't need it. No, it's fine, we won't need that.” He quit complaining about the amount of dirt in the loads, so I thought I'd show him—t'd make it and do it anyway—but I didn't do that. If 1 would have sprayed the Jetty with high-pressure water, I could have cleaned the rocks, but I would have clouded the water, changng it from red to gray, and covered the white salt base with dark mud. How did Smithson resolve the problem? After all the rock and fill was in place, he asked Grant (he never did call him Boozie) to turn the machine around and drop the rippers and then rip the dike all the way through. You s

that in the film—over and over he ripped through the rock, rais ing them above the dirt. When he got done, the finished Jetty looked like the section that he drew on that plan, with the rocks all sticking out all through it. Then there's the picture Pd drawn that didn't look anything like it. It looks exactly like what he drew. He somehow knew what he was going to end up with— watching that machine work, he knew what he could get out of it. The water remained red and the white salt base didn't get stained with mud. The job was completed as per the drawing. At that point, it was a spiral with a bulb on the end of it, or an island on it. I looked at it and said, “It's done,” and ‘Smithson said, “You did a good job.” We didn't have a gettogether or a celebration or anything like that. Everybody

‘Smithson with Richard Serra, April 1970

Photos: Gianfranco Gorgeni, 1970

just went home, About a week later, I got an anxious call from Smithson. “It's not right. It's just not right.” ‘What?”—"Well, the jetty, we've got to fix it. It's all wrong. We need to fix it.”

1 replied, “We looked at it, you said it was fine."—"Well, its fine, but it’s not right. You need to look at it. Where can I meet you?" ‘We made an appointment for the next day, and I spent a long night trying to find another way to say no. I remembered the first day when we broke through the salt into the mud ‘That was at the edge of the lake—what would it be like to go through out in the middle? I didn't think I could get Boozie back and he had done such a good job ripping the rock in the Jetty, st would be very difficult to get material or equipment back out there. The contract was completed as agreed, and I was not being unreasonable to decline. So we met. He had a Polaroid picture and a ballpoint pen. ‘He was trying to write on the picture, trying to make another oop on the Jetty. “It's not right. We need to take that out and continue the Jetty around. You understand? We need to pull that out." I kept saying “No, it's okay—it's as per contract. wwe need to pull that . . ” He just pressed harder and harder, trying to make the pen write, and it wouldn't. As I stared at it, the ballpoint went right through that card. As I looked at that, T expected blood to come running out. And I looked at it and looked at it, and I didn't dare look at him, because those eyes would just melt me, and I'd be a pile of ashes. But when I looked 1up, T guess with the deor-in-the-headlights look, I think he thought that I finally was catching on. He said, “So, you see, that's what we need to do," and handed me the card. “Let's get it done.”"—"Well,” I said, “I can't do that for nothing.”

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‘we've got to pay, I'll pay for it."—"Okay, I'l figure out what Toan do.” I didn't dare tell Paul I was going to go back out thore, but when I asked Boozie about it, he was just happy to be working: “Yeah, I'll go back out. I ean do it with my truck and Traxcavator” I prepared a change order for three thousand dollars, stating the work to be done and that one thousand dollars was to be paid prior to going out there, and the other two ‘thousand dollars was to be paid when we finished. I couldn't help thinking I had finally won one, and I had gotten my money back from the original contract price cut. Smithson signed the contract, gave us the one thousand dollars, and we went back out to finish the job ‘The work was completed in three days with Boozie able to mine almost all the rock he needed from the island. What additional material he needed, he carried out with the Traxcavator. AAs the coil of the Jetty closed, the machine could almost span across the last loop, Smithson directed the placement of the rocks and Boozie was able to align them into the last loop. It Top photo: Gianfranco Gorgon, 1970 ‘Bottom photos: Robert Smithson, 1870,

was difficult with the machine balancing on the rocks. He had to put large rocks in the loader bucket to balance the machine. By raising and lowering the bucket, he could swing the rocks into position, When I asked him how he did that without getting out on the lake bottom, he just smiled and said, “That's why they pay me the big bucks.” Smithson told me he was now satisfied with the Jetty. And, again, we didn’t have a party or anything after that was over. But, when it was done, I went out to look at it, and it was absolutely astonishing—the feeling I got looking at it that second time, compared to what I got the first time. It went from “That's a good-looking dike I built” to “My word, that's sensational, the way that looks.” It was just—it was beautiful. Sometime later—it must've been a couple of years later, even—Smithson called and said that he had finished the film, and would we like to see it? He would come up and show it to the Parson company. So I agreed to that, “Certainly would, we would like to see that." We set up a time and set up the conference room downstairs in the Parson's building. Everyone was invited to come down and see the construction of the Jetty. ‘They started out the film, and there was an older fellow there that was one of the vice presidents—the general manager—and he had a very loud, booming voice. He said, “What the blanketyblank is this? This is a. . . You—you've got to be kidding! Do Thave to sit through this? . . . You've got to be kidding!” And he got up and stormed out. Pretty soon, a couple of the other people got up. I was trying to watch it, butI was more embarrassed about what was going on there. I looked over at ‘Smithson, and it didn't appear to be bothering him. He was watching the film intently. By the time it was over with, of the forty people that were there, I don't think there were ten, people left in the room, ‘Smithson came over to me, and I started to apologize, but he just brushed it off. “My work isn’t for everybody. Some people don't understand it.” Then he said, “Well, did you think that was good? Did you like the way I did this? Did you . . ” While I'm trying to apologize, he started saying things that I spun to mean that he couldn't have built this without me, that he really appreciated the work I did, and that it really turned out well. He hoped I was as satisfied with it as he was. As we were sitting there, one of the bookkeepers came up to me and said, “Oh, Bob, I want to thank you so much for inviting me. ‘This was just so . . . I've never seen . . . This was so special, This was really great! Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.” [introduced her to Smithson, and they exchanged pleasantries. As she left, I thought, “So there’s somebody that understood what we were trying to accomplish.” ‘Smithson talked to me for quite a while about it—he was just bubbly about the film and what it was. He said, “Well, T've got some things for you.” He gave me three of the stills from

the film—while the Jetty was being built, and the equipment was working. He gave me one section of the film that we were able to make copies from. Then he said, “And I guess this is what you're waiting for.” He had two eight-by-ten black-andwhite pictures of the Jefty, and he took out a felt pen and signed, “For Bob Phillips, Robert Smithson.” Right at the end, it smeared just a little bit. So, on the second one, I said, “Write that a little higher, so that it won't smear.” And he said, “No, Tm just going to sign the one. You put that one away, and this one that isn’t signed, that's the one you put on the wall. But you put this one thatI signed away.” I didn't know what that meant, and I stuck the two together—it was twenty years later when I realized that I might have the one and only signed. picture of the construction of the Jetty. So now it is put away very carefully. Tasked him for a copy of the whole film, rather than just that one piece of the film. He explained to me that it belonged to the gallery. That I just couldn’t get that. At that time, I thought, oh, so it isn’t the Jetty that was the work he was doing, it was the film that was the work he was doing. So I had to think about that a lot over the years. And now, I know that it was two or three things; it was three projects in one—not just one. The jetty being one of them, the film being another— and the construction itself another part of it. ‘There can be no question that Bob Smithson built this Jetty. And though Busenbark was great on that loader, he was orchestrated, everything he did was by Smithson. His lack of ego kept the project going. The way that I treated him on two or three occasions, you would've thought that he would've gotten up and left, certainly, with that fiasco at the construction company office. After it was over, I took that little piece of film and had it printed up and made two really large pictures. I think they cost seventy-five bucks—or maybe it was seventyfive bucks each. I mounted them. I wanted to hang one in the main office, but they told me there was no place to hang it ‘there. So I gave that one to Grant Busenbark, and it hangs in his home in Alpine, Wyoming; he's really proud of it. I was going to hang the other one in the office where I was at, and they said that ifI wanted to hang it, I had to hang it in my office. So I took it home, and it’s spent its life in my home. I've had a lot of people come in and look at that through the years, asking what it was, and I had a hard time explaining what it was. “Well, that's the Spiral Jetty."—“What does it do?" —"It's a piece of art. It's something you look at.”"—"Oh. Where is it?"— “Well, it's really hard to get to, and right now it's underwater.”

Bob, you've done really a great project, that does nothing, you can’t see it, but there it is. I knew that I had gone from being an obstacle in getting his work done to feoling that I was an asset to his project at the time of that mosting in Parson's office. Maybe there was even

some friendship between us, This was confirmed some time later, when he called and said, “We're in Logan, and we're going out to enjoy the Jetty, Would you please come with us?

And, I said, “Well, boy, I don't know how I can do that.” And he said, “Well, we want to come down and visit with you." I gave him the address in Logan, and he came down, and there he and Nancy were with a young gentleman—t think he was from France or Italy, My third son was sixteen months old, rolling around on the floor. He had a pair of brown-and-white saddle oxfords. The young man that was with Smithson was just fascinated with these saddle oxfords; he got down and played with Michael on the floor. I looked over at Smithson, and that was the first time I'd really seen him at ease and smiling and having a good time. I thought, hey, I have Robert Smithson in my home, talking about kids and the weather and the Jetty. Over and over again, “Don't you really want to come with us?" And, I said, “No, I—you know, I just can’t go." It wasn't but a year later that we got the call to look in the Newsweek or Time, “Your friend Bob Smithson was killed in an airplane crash 1 got the magazine and read it, and, sure enough, there it

killed while looking at a site for future earthworks in Texas. Thave thought about that over many, many years—when you don't take an opportunity, that’s what you get. I had the opportunity to be with genius and turned it down. But I've always been—I don’t know whether the word's grateful—but with all the trouble I gave him in getting the Spiral Jetty built, at the end, he thanked me for helping him do it

was—a picture of Smithson and the Spiral Jetty. He had been

397

Footnote to

the Spiral Jetty Expedition Look deeply into nature and you will understand everything better. —Albort Einstein Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous. the soil. ‘Mary Austin, Tho Land of Litto Rain, 1903

During a recent visit to the Spiral Jetty, several people asked me to identify one particular plant that we saw through the windows of the van: a low reddish pink carpet growing profusely among the stands of tall, tensile sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) and alongside the wild unkempt pungently aromatic Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) that is a dominant plant of the droughtstruck, windy, arid desert of the Great Basin." Waning silver, gold, scarlet. Golden spike. White, Great Salt Lake. Saline crust. Black basalt sheltering sink scrub. The unusual, low-growing plant (which for now I shall call the Spiral Jetty plant) had transparent fanlike winged sepals that looked like flowers but were, in fact, remnants of an earlier flowering—the ary persistent floral envelope that botanists all the perianth. ‘These and the stems were streaked with scarlet “arteries,” “veins,” giving the plant its prevailing hue and warmth. Growing close to the stems were multitudes of fleshy green buds, broceolilike florets or cymes making up the inflorescence. ‘They were about to open—yet more flowers, yet more seeds. Without my glasses, I mistook these incipient flowers for succulent leaves, but this plant, typical of its community, is virtually leafless at this time of year (early fall) or at least has leaves 80 reduced as to be barely conspicuous, It occurred to me that in a habitat of such extreme salinity it was likely that the Spiral Jetty plant was a member of the Chenopodiaceae—the goosefoot family, so named for the shape of the leaf in the Atriplex and Chenopodium genera, both, belonging in this family and, also on that day, growing at our feet. The Chenopodiaceae are predominantly halophytes, plants that tolerate, even thrive, in an alkaline salty soil, severe conditions where the saline content would trigger reverse osmosis in most plants and thus certain death. Halophytes have evolved survival strategies by storing salt in their cells to achieve equilibrium with the alternating drought and saturation of their environment and may in fact have fluctuating concentrations of salt in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the tides. A few days later, I was to see under the microscope gleaming “orbs, glands of salt water, suspended, adhering to the whole body of Chenopodium album. Yet another species had salt crystals, deposited on the surface of the leaves, like the crystalline outer shell on Robert Smithson's black basalt. Leaves are the safest haven, and a conduit. In the autumn, leaves fall and the salt is removed from the plant to return to the earth. ‘The chenopods have another striking characteristic that we see in further family members, such as beet, spinach, and chard. They are included in the Centrospermae (or Caryophy!lales) order, and like other families that belong here, such as, the Cactaceae, they contain peculiar substances: betalains, or scarlet nitrogenous pigments, which are responsible for the crimson brilliance of the beetroot stain, the shocking magentapink iridescent flash of the fleeting cactus flower, and, of

199

course, the wine red streaks of the Spiral Jetty plant in a drought year. ‘There is a desire in all of us to know the names of the plants we see. For the taxonomist, the art of seeing is the prelude to collecting and to the act of describing, the establishing of the “type.” For the horticulturalist, the label is the prelude to the culture and propagation of all plants; in my profession, naming—in a language none of us speaks—is the music and poetry of the discipline, as much as it is the science. It is where the choice of word and the act of naming are simultaneously precise and deeply personal. And it is all too easy to while away an afternoon unraveling the biographical and botanical intricacies of nomenclature. So I inevitably returned to the Huntington Botanical Gardens on Tuesday with a bag full of herbarium specimens in the hope that John Trager, curator of Desert Collections and a formidable field botanist, could identify them. He reoognized some but was baffled by the Spiral Jetty plant. And so we turned, for language, to keys in a Utah flora and eventually to the manuals of Jepson and Munz (California flora).? But, in the absence of accompanying line drawings, keying out from a flora is never easy, especially as Linnaean classification depends on an instinct for plant anatomy and morphology and, above all, on the recognition of sexual characteristics that are usually discretely buried beneath petals and sepals. In the Chenopodiaceae, these are so minute as to be invisible. So for vision we went to the lab, with cactus tweezers and an unfolded Paper clip, to a microscope at forty-five times magnification, John has worked for twenty years avoiding cactus spines; his hands are as steady and sure as the best surgeon, and he understands plants. Under the scope, he split apart a fresh bud from the floret (glomerule) of the Spiral Jetty plant and revealed a flower with only female parts, a superior ovary (fruit) with a single ovule (seed). The ovule, not yet ripe, was covered with a membranous veil, the immature seed coat or integument, and, as he delicately removed this, he pulled back from the microscope, turned to me, and said, “Just take a look at this.” Peering deep into the dazzle and beam of nature magnified, I could see a glistening grass green SPIRAL, a tightly coiled serpentine embryo, the beginnings of the new generation, perfect in proportion, flawless, pristine, fecund— expectation, duration. At the urging of his assistant Karen Zimmerman, John painstakingly unwound the spiral to its full quarter-inch length to uncover yet two more buried spirals, the two cotyledons, or seed leaves, of the dicotyledonous plant. We see the spiral form everyday in the Huntington cactus nursery, in the Fibonacci sequence that is the mathematical repeating spiral spination typical of some cacti and other succulents such as the Euphorbiaceae. We grow xerophytic plants, such as Albuca spiralis, with spiraling leaves (surely a strategy

to reduce the rate of transpiration, whereby the leaves turn back on themselves), but I have been unable to find a reference anywhere to another order that has a coiled embryo. Embryos are usually straight and, even within the family Chenopodiaceae, are just as likely to be annular or curved. But, in witnessing the spiral embryo, we had located the characteristic critical to isolating the Spiral Jetty plant in the pages of the flora. Its name: Halogeton glomeratus C. A. Meyer (1829), from the Greek, halos for “salt,” geiton for “neighbor,” thus growing alongside salt, or salts neighbor. A thing of great beauty—we all noticed it—there is nevertheless a dark side to this plant. It is not, as I had expected, ‘a native of the playas of Utah. It was introduced into North America from the salty wastes of southwestern Siberia and northwestern China in the 1930s for agricultural use, as forage for sheep, a beet or spinach for the herds. But, alas, it is high in oxalates, the bitter poison of rhubarb, and has been responsible for great loss of livestock. It is in fact an annual, a noxious and toxic weed, especially in its maturity in the autumn, 4 listed Red Alert species capable of producing one hundred thousand seeds annually. Like the derelict amphibious vehicle and the decaying oil jetty at Rozel Point, it is the failed debris of capitalism littering the deserts of the West—“abandoned hope,” caught in the “sediments” of the salt flats at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Intervention, disturbance, spoiled slope, “this is our inheritance,” a desert garden by proxy. Last Monday I was struck by the modesty of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, not iconic as suggested in so many reproductions, but instead integrated and integrating effortlessly into the limitless Utah landscape, a subtle echo of a horizon both infinite and enveloping. Cloud synonymy, salt etching, trace. It seemed to have an association and affinity with a landscape and a cos‘mos one could barely comprehend. Mysterious Rozel Point. Snake, ant, lizard. Sagebrush ocean. And at our fest and across the Great Basin in autumn were thousands of microscopic seeds containing spiraling embryos that we can never see, only imagine. Sight and nonsight. Swathes of scarlet, “ruby currents"—Halogeton glomeratus in bloom across the cold basin and range of Utah. Notes 4. This essay was written following the author's trip tothe Spiral Jetty withthe ‘Scholars anc Fellows of the Getty Research Institute in September 2008, and it was fist addressed to this group. The theme of their coming year’s work was “Duration, the dimension of tie I works of wsual art. 2. See Utah Fora: Great Basin Naturalist Memotr, no. 9, ed. StanleyL. Welsh et al. (Provo, Utah: Brignam Young Univesity ress, 1987); The Jepson Manual: The Higher Plants of California, ed. James T. Hickman (Berkeley University of California Press, 11993}; and A California Fora, ed. PhilipA. Munz (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 1968)

Loc.: Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Date: September 20, 2004 Weather: Sun, high clouds, snow at high elevations, ‘Temp.: 63 F. Habitat: Salty wasteland, disturbed barren alkaline soils, sagebrush serub community

Halogeton glomeratus Chenopodiaceae Atriplex canescens Chenopodiaceae Atriplex confertifolia Chenopodiaceae Bassia hyssopifolia Chenopodiaceae Chenopodium album Chenopodiaceae Salsola kali Chenopodiaceae Artemisia tridentata Asteraceae Chrysothamnus nauseosus Asteraceae Grindelia squarrosa Asteracese Helianthus annuus Asteraceae

Books Aarons, John, and Claudio Vita-Finzi. The Useless Land. London: R. Hale, 1960, ‘Adams, Prank Dawson. The Birth and the Development of the Geological Sciences. New York: Dover, 1954." Alberro, Alexander, ed. Robert Smithson: Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2004, Introduction by Alberro, writings by Smithson, Aldiss, Brian. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1986 Bagrow, Leo. History of Cartography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966.* Ballard, J. G. The Crystal World. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966. Repr. London: Triad/Panther, 1985, Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable (1953). In Three Novels: Molloy, Malone ies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 1968." Boottger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 Brock, G. C. The Physical Aspectsof Aerial Photography. New York: Dover,

Selected

Bibliography Writings by the artist

‘A Cinematio Atopia.” Artforum 10, no, 1 (September 1971): 59-58, Reprintedin The Writings of Robert Smithson (1979), pp. 105-08, and Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996), pp. 198-42. For the Spiral Jetty project files, see Robert Smithson and Naney Holt Papers, 1965-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The Spiral Jetty” (1972). In Arts of the Environment. Bd. Gyorgy Kepes, ‘Smithson (1979). pp. 108-16, and Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (2996), pp. 149-99, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Bd, Jack Flam. Berkeley University of California Press, 1996, ‘The Writings of Robert Smithson. Bd, Nancy Holt, New York: New York. University Press, 1979. Interviews Norvell, Patricia. Interview with Robert Smithson, June 20, 1969, In Recording Conceptual Art: Barly Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner. Ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, pp. 124-94. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, Robbins, Anthony. “Smithson's Nonsite Sights.” Art News 67, no. 10 (Pebruary 1969): 50. Roth, Moira, "An Interview with Robert Smithson” (1973). Ed. Naomi ‘Sawelson-Gorse, pp. 81-94. Berkeley: University of California Press, in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004 Expanded from its original publication: “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: ‘An Interview.” Artforum 12, no. 2 (October 1973): 197-99, Stuckey, CharlesF Interviews with Virginia Dwan, Archives of American Art. Oral History Program, Smithsonian Institution. March 21 through June 6, 1984. See, especially, pp, 35-96,

Brown, Lloyd. The Story of Maps. New York: Bonanza Books, 1949.* Bunn, C. W. Crystals: Their Role in Nature and in Science, New York: ‘Academic Press, 1964." Burnham, Jack. Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post: Formalist Art. New York: Braziller, 1974 Churehward, James. The Lost Continent of Mu, New York: Paperback Library, 1959." Clark, ThomasH.. and Colin W. Stearn. Geological Evolution of North ‘America. New York: Ronald Press, 1960, Repr. 1968.* Conley, Brian, and Joo Amrhein, eds, Robert Smithson: A Collection of Writings on Robert Smithson on the Ocoasion of the Installation Dead Tree at Plerogi 2000. New York Pierogi Gallery, 1997, Texts byJ. G. Ballard, Mel Bochner, Brian Conley, Joan Jonas, Richard Kavesh, Kim Levin, Sot LeWitt, Joseph Masheck, Sabine Russ, Gregory Volk, John Weber, Lawrence Weiner, and Allen 8. Weiss. (Crawford, ArthurL., ed. Geology of Salt Lake County. Salt Lake City Utah Geological and Mineralogical Survey, 1964,* Dana, Edward Salisbury. A Textbook of Mineralogy, with an Extended ‘Treatise on Crystallography and Physical Mineralogy. Revised and. nlarged by Willan E. Ford. New York: Wiley, 1908. Dantzig. Tobias. Number: the Language of Science. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954."

on mm ae

De Camp, l. Sprague. Last Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature. New York: Dover, 1970." De Camp, L. Sprague, and Catharine de Crook. The Day of the Dinosaur. New York: Doubleday, 1968.° Donnelly, Ignatius, Atlantis: The Antedifuvian World. 1888. Repr. New York: Gramercy Pub. Co, 1988. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Lost World, New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1912." Dreiblatt, David. The Economics of Heavy Earthmoving. New York: Praoger, 1972." Earth Art, Ithaca, N.X: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1969. Texts by Thomas W. Leavitt, William C. Lipke, and Willoughby Sharp, Symposium with statements by Smithson et al Farb, Peter. Face of North America: The Natural History of a Continent. New York: Harper & Row, 1968." Fax, Wiliam L, The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000, Field Trips: Bernd & Hilla Becher, Robert Smithson. Porto, Portugal: Pundagao Serralves, 2002 Gallant, Roy A., and Christopher J. Schuberth, Discovering Rooks land Minerals: A Nature and Science Guide to Their Collection and Identification. Garden City, N.Y. Natural History Press, for the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 1967." Gamow. Goorge. The Birth and Death of the Sun: Stellar Evolution and ‘Subatomic Energy. New York: New American Library, 1960.* Gorgont, Gianfranco, and Grégoire Muller. The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies. New York: Praeger, 1972. Text by Grégoire Maller. Graziani, Ron, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 Greenhood, David. Mapping: Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964,* Herdeg, Walter. The Sun in Art: Sun Symbolism, from the Past to the Present, in Pagan and Christian Art, Popular Art, Fine Art and Applied Art. Zurich: Graphies Press, 1962. Hobbs, Robert. Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell University. Pross, 1981. With essays by Lawrence Alloway, John Coplans, Robert Hobbs, and Lucy Lippard Holden, Alan, and Phylis Singer: Crystals and Crystal Growing: Garden ity, N.¥:: Doubleday, 1960.*

Hubble, Edwin, The Realm of the Nebulae, New York: Dover, 1958.° Kastner, Jeffrey, and Brian Wallis. eds. Land and Environmental Art. London: Phaidon Presa, 1908 Kepes, Gyorgy, ed. Arts of the Environment. New York: Braziller, 1972 Kiepenheuer, Karl, The Sun, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959.* Kubler, George. The Shape of Timo: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. Kushi, Michio, Spirals. Boston: The Order of the Universe Publications, n.d." Legget, Robert F. Geology and Engineering. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961." Loomis, Frederic Brooster. The Field Book of Common Rocks and Minerals, Now York: Putnam, 1948," Matthews, William Henry, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of ‘Their History and Development, London: Longgman’s and Green, 1922. Miller, David B. Great Salt Lake Past and Present, Salt Lake City: Pamphlet of the Utah History Atlas, 1939." Morgan, Dale, L. The Great Salt Lake. New York: Scribner, 1995. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Whaca, N.Y: Cornell Univer sity Press, 1959, Repr, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997, 11 Soeps at Rozel Point. Special Studies 5. Pamphlet of the Utah Geological and Mineralogical Survey, n.d." Panofsky. Erwin, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, New York: Doubleday, 1955.° Reynolds, Ann. Robert Smithson: Learning from Nw Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Includes a compilation of ‘Smithson’s library by Lori Cavagnaro, pp. 207-345, Robert Smithson: Mapping Dislocations. New York; James Cohan Gallery, 2001. Essay by Ann Reynolds. Robert Smithson; Soulptur/Tegninger, Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1984, ‘Robert Smithson: Zaichnungen aus dem Nachlass—Drawings from the Estate, Munster: Westfalisches Landesmuseum flr Kunst und Kulturgoschichte, in association with Vestsjaolland, Kunstmuscum, Soro, Denmark, 1989. Texts by Dan Graham, Eugenie Tsal, Eva Schmidt, Dieter Mesched, and Friedrich Meschede. Roberts, JenniferL, MirrorTravels: Robert Smithson and History. New Haven, Conan.: Yale University Press, 2004,

ROBERT SMITHSON: SCULPTURE

jack burnham,

great western salt works

Rudolph, William B. Vanishing Trails of Atacama, Research Series, no. 24. [New York: American Geographical Society. 1963.° ‘Schmidt, Eva. Zwischen Kino, Landschaft und Musoum: Erfanrung und FFiktion lm Werk von Robert Smithson (1938-1973). Frankfurt: P. Lang, Shapiro, Gary, Eurthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel. Berkeley: University of California Pross, 1095. Shaw, Lytle, Cable Factory 20, Berkeley: Atelos, 1990, Sobleszek, RobertA. Robert Smithson: Photo Works. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1903, Southall, James P.C, Introduction fo Physiological Optios. New York: Dover, 1961." Spence, Lewis. History of Atlantis, New Hyde Park, N.¥.: University Books, 1968." ‘Stephens, John Lloyd, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. Vol. 1. 1843. Repr. New York: Dover, 1963." ‘Taine, John. Tho Greatest Adventure: Three Science Fiction Novels. New ‘York: Dover Publications, 1963. See, especially, The Time Stream (1931), ‘Tiherghien, Gilles A, Land Art. New York: Princeton Architectural Prose, 1995. ‘Topping, Gary, ed. Great Salt Lake: An Anthology. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002 ‘Tsai, Eugenie, Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 ‘Twai, Eugenie, with Cornelia Butler, eds. Robert Smithson, Berkeley: University of California Press, in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004. Essays by Alexander Alberro, ‘Suzan Boettger, Thomas Crow. Mark Linder, Ann Reynolds, Jennifer L. Roberts, Robert A. Sobleszok, Eugene Tsai, an interview by Moira Roth, ‘and a 1973 compilation of bibliographic roferences for the contents of Smithson's library by Valentin Tatransky. ‘Twenhofel, William. Treatise Sedimentation, New York: Dover, 1961.* Verma, Ajit Ram, and P. Krishna, Polymorphism and Polytypism in Crystals, New York: Wiley, 1966.° Vernant‘Smithson, Special issue, Kalejdaskop, no, 4 (1082) Watton, Barrett. Total Syntax. Carbondale: Southern Minois University Press, 1985. See, especially, the chapter “Total Syntax: ‘The Work in the Wortd, Welsh, Stanley L., ed. Utah Flora: Great Basin Naturalist Memotr, no. & Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1987,

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Paychology of Style. Trans. Michael Bullock. 1908; Repr. Cleveland: Meridian, 1967. Articles and essays Alloway, Lawrence, “Artists as Writers, Part Two: The Realm of Language.” Artforum 12, no. 8 (April 1974): 30-36, ——.. “Robert Smithson’s Development.” Artforum 11, no. 3 (November 1972): 52-61 Baker, Kenneth. “Icons: Robert Smithson—Spiral Jot.” Tate Ete, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 5-8, ——.*0f course—but ..." Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 1971 Bear, Liza, and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, and Smithson.” Avalanche, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 48-71 Beck, David L. “A Massive Art Work Lies Under Lake Surface.” Salt Lake Tribune, August5, 1973: H5, Bongartz, Roy. “It Called Barth Art—And Boulderdash.” New York Times ‘Magazine, February 1, 1970; 16, 122ff ‘Butlars, Lori, “Up from the Depths.” Art News 101, no. 11 (December 2002): 37 Campagnolo, Kathleen Merrill. “Marked Sites: Land Art and Photography 1969-1970." Master’s thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, Landon, 1996. Soe, ‘especially, pp. 20-42, Childs, Elizabeth C. "Robert Smithson and Film: The Spiral Jetty Reconsidfered.” Arts Magazine 56, no. 2 (October 1981) 68-81 Coplans, John, “Robert Smithson: The Amarillo Ramp.” Artforum 12, no. 8 (April 1974): 36-45, Criqui, Jean-Pierre. “Rising Sign.” Artforum 32, no. 10 (Summer 1994): 80. Dogu, Hikmet. “An Intermittent Iusion: Local Reaction to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.” Master's thesis, Hunter College, City University of Now York, 1996, Includes an interview with Bob Phillips “Barth Art in Great Salt Lake." Utah Geological and Mineralogical Survey Quarterly Review5, no. 2 (May 1971): 1 gan, Dan. “Coming Around: First a Joke, then a Jewel for Guys Who Built Spiral Jetty." Salt Lake Tribune, no. 28 (November 1900): Jt Friedman, Bruce Jay. “Dirty Pictures: Dig? (Yes, dig)” Esquire (May 1971) sieft Giiber-Rolfe, Jeremy, and John Johnston, “Gravity's Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty." October, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 65-85,

—— “Gravity's Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty (Part 2).” October, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 71-00. “Gravity's Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty (conchusion) " Ootober, no. 8 (Spring 1977). 90-102, Holt, Nancy, and Hikmet Sidney Loe. “History of the Sun Tunnels Near Lucin, Utah.” In Great Salt Lake: An Overview of Chang. Ba. J. Wallace Gwynn, pp. 561-68. Salt Lake City: Utah Geological Survey, 2002 Howett, Catherine. “What Do We Make of Nature Now?” Harvard Design ‘Magazine, no. 10 (Winter’Spring 2000) 21-20. Israel. Nico, “In Search of Spiral Jetty." Artforum 41, no. 1 September 2002): 172-77. Jones, Caroline. “Preconcious/Posthumous Smithson: The Ambitious Status ff Art and Artist in the Postmodern Frame.” Res, no. 41. Cambridge, ‘Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002: 15-37. Kuspit, Donald B, “The Pascalian Spiral: Robert Smithson's Drunken Boat." ‘Arts Magazine56, no. 2 (October 1981): 82-88. Lee, Pamela M. “The Cowboy in the Library: The New Robert Smithson.” Bookforum 11, no.a (December 2004 January 2005): 6-22, Leider. Philip. "How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” Artforum 8, no. t (September 1970) 40-49. "Robert Smithson: ‘The Bssays." Arts Magazine 52, no. 9 (May 1978): 96-97. “Smithson and the American Landscape.” Art in America 89, no. 1 (January 2001); 74-79, Lippard, Lucy. “Two.” Studio International 186, no. 959 (October 1973): 162 ‘Loe, Hikmet Sidney. “Robert Smithson's Spiral Jotty:" In Great Salt Lake: ‘An Overview of Change. Ra. J. Wallace Gwynn, pp. 553-60, Salt Lake City Utah Geological Survey, 2002 ‘Maladonado, Gutemie. "La Spiral Jetty de Robert Smithson.” Connaissance des arts, no, 599 (November 2002): 108-09. Martin, Reinhold, “Organieism's Other” Grey’ Room, no, 4 (Summer 2008) 34-51 -Masheok, Joseph. “New York: Robert Smithson.” Artforum 9, no. 5 (Ganuary 1971): 73. ‘Meltzer, Eve. “Now You See It: Eve Meltzer Visits Robert Smithson's Reemerging Spiral Jetty.” Frieze, no. 72 (January-February 2003) 48-49, Melville, Stephen. “Robert Smithson: A Literalist of the Imagination.” In ‘Seams: Art as Philosophical Context. Ea. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, pp. 30-40, Amsterdam: G&B Arts, 1996,

VERNANT SMITHSON

“Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of ‘Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in ‘Art and Criticism.” October. no, 19 (1981): 55-62 ‘Morgan, Stuart, Book review of The Writings of Robert Smithson, Art Journal 29, no, 2 (Spring 1980); 217-21 Ottinger, Didier. “Spirals.” Les Cahiers de Musée d'art snodemede la ville de Paris (Winter 1986). 190-87, (Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodfernism.” October, no. 12 (Spring 1980): 67-86. —— *Barthwords." Oetober,no, 10 (Fall 1979): 121-30, ——. "Photography en abyme” October, no. 5 (Summer 1978): 85-88. Post, F J. “Life in the Great Salt Lake.” Utah Science, vol. 36 (1075): 45. Rateliff, Carter, “The Compleat Smithson.” Art in America 68, no. 1 January 1980): 60-65, Reynolds, Ann, “Reproducing: Nature: The Museum of Natural History as ‘Nonsite.” October, no, 45 (Summer 1988): 109-27. Huwodel, Mark. “The Land As Historical Archive." American Art 10, n0. 1 (Spring 1996) 36, ‘Schjeldahl, Peter. “He Made Fantasiesas Real as Mountains.” New York Times, August 12, 1973, p. 127. ‘Tatransky, Valentin. “Themes with Meaning: The Writings of Robert ‘Smithson.” Arts Magazine 52, no. 9 (May 1978): 138-43, Uroskle, Andrew V, “La Jetée ‘en spirale’: Robert Smithson's Stratigraphic Cinema.” Grey Room. no. 19 (Spring: 2005), What on Earth!” Life. April 24, 1969; 81-82, * from Smithson’s library as compiled by Lori Cavagnaro, in Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003. pp. 207-345,

Afterword

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Dia Art Foundation’s colleotion is the impossibility of holding it within any four walls, not even the 250,000-square-foot Riggio Galleries at Dia:Beacon opened two years ago to present large installations and indepth selections. Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Robert ‘Smithson, among other artists, began in the 1960s to inscribe ‘their work outside the confines of the gallery, most dramatically in the vast open spaces of the American Southwest desert. Now the province of memory and art history, some of those works—De Maria's 1968 Parallel Lines in the Mohave Desert, Heizer’s 1970 Circular Displacement, and Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1969)—were ephemeral and brought to the art world largely through photography. Others—Heizer's 1960 Double Negative, Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty, De Maria's 1979 Lightning Field—were intended to become long-term interventions in the landscape and have entered museum collections, albeit fixed in their distinctly nonmuseum sites. ‘Smithson's Spiral Jetty, first sponsored by Virginia Dwan through her innovative New York gallery, was acquired by Dia in 1999 as a gift from the Estate of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, the late artist’s wife and an important artist in her own right. This acquisition augmented other related works in the collection of this “museum without walls”: Commissioning and maintaining De Maria's Lightning Field, Dia is also the primary sponsor of Heizer's ongoing City project in Nevada and a patron of both James Turrell’s unfinished Roden Crater and Donald Judd’s installations in Marfa, Texas, now maintained by the Chinati Foundation. Dwan’s early patronage of some of these artists’ extra-gallery ambitions in the 1960s was carried on by Dia's subsequent sponsorship in the 1970s. Now Dia continues this activity in collaboration, and with support from, the New Mexico-based Lannan Foundation, which was instrumental in Dia’s acquisition of the Spiral Jetty. Nancy Holt, present when Smithson built what has arguably become his most important and well-known sculpture, {is dedicated to sustaining Smithson's legacy over many years and numerous exhibitions and publications. Dia is deeply grateful to her not only for her gift of Smithson's masterpiece but for her continuous support and involvement in this publication. ‘An historical appreciation is due also to Bob Phillips, the capable builder who helped realize Smithson’s vision, and Bob Fiore, his principal collaborator on the Spiral Jetty film. Phillips and Fiore, as well as photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni, continue to assist research projects, not least this one. Smithson's Spiral Jetty comes and goes with the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake; it is now an integral element of the landscape of the lake and the state of Utah. Dia recognizes and greatly appreciates the attention given by the Utah Department of Natural Resources and the staff at the nearby Golden Spike National Historie Site, to promoting safe public access to the

Jetty and the Rozel Point site. Art historian and librarian Hikmet Sidney Loe, residing in Salt Lake City, has also become a constant source of support, knowledge, and documentation for the Spiral Jetty, and we are indebted to her efforts. ‘This publication was conceived by Dia's Curator Lynne Cooke with the assistance of Karen Kelly, Director of Publications. They assembled an extraordinary group of writers and guided the research that resulted in what is now the most comprehensive documentation of Smithson’s major project. One of the significant contributions of this research, argued compellingly in Cooke's essay, has been to recognize that Smithson's artwork encompasses not only the fifteen-hundred-foot spiral of basalt rock in the Salt Lake, but also an equally ambitious film and a text, which together expand Smithson’s ideas into cinematic and literary space. Authors George Baker, Ann Reynolds, and Lytle Shaw focus their scholarship on each respective aspect of Smithson's, singular project, yet in so doing they open new directions into the critical evaluation of the artist’s oeuvre. Enhancing this core group of essays, the recently discovered interview by Kenneth Baker contextualizes the Jefty project squarely within the artist's own thinking at the time; artist Diana Thater examines each section of Smithson’s film by making inspiring comparisons with other films concurrently made; Bob Phillips, in recalling his own experiences during the construction of the Jetty, conveys his growing admiration for the artist and his work, Horticulturalist Catherine Phillips has contributed a surprising story of an unexpected find at the site of the Jetty. Photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni, who made many of the iconic historical photographs that brought the Jetty to public attention, has also generously contributed his work to this publication, Now that the Jetty has emerged from the red waters of the lake, startling new photographs are also emerging; Mark Ruwedel has repeatedly visited the Jetty, finding it in a distinetive state on each occasion. The constantly changing nature of the sculpture is also evidenced in the variety of images taken by several other photographers who have made their images available for this publication. ‘This book has come together through the exceptional skills of Dia's dedicated publications staff, under Karen Kelly's inspiring direction, specifically Bettina Funcke and Barbara Schréder, whose editorial insights are highly valued, It was also a privilege to work again with designer Katy Homans, who has produced a striking book that pays tribute to the astonishing Spiral Jetty, in each of its forms—earthwork, film, and essay. ‘This publication has also benefited from Dia’s shared pursuit with the University of California Press, and we thank Deborah Kirshman and her staff for their encouragement. ‘The James Cohan Gallery has been generous with time and

guidance, especially from Elyse Goldberg and Michael Goodson, Others who have been helpful in putting this book together include Elizabeth Mazza, caretaker of Smithson's estate in New York; Ric Collier and Jim Edwards of Salt Lake Art Center; Kitty Cleary at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Judith ‘Throm and Wendy Hurlock Baker at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Lisa Mark ‘and Elizabeth Hamilton at the Musoum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Finally, we are especially grateful to Philip B. Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons MD, who sponsored this publication. Among the many people who have been inspired by Smithson’s great artwork, they are rare in their special dedication to support its legacy and understanding by a larger public. Michael Govan Director, Dia Art Foundation

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Photo credits

All works by Robert Smithson © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photographs by Matt Coolidge. Thomas Crow, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Martin Hogue, Nancy Holt, Fred W. MeDarrah, Eve Meltzer, Catherine Phillips, Marie ‘Ruwedel, Tom Smart, George Steinmetz courtesy and © the photographers Film stills from Spiral Jetty, courtesy Museum of Modern Art, Cireulating Film and Video Library, New York ‘Front and back covers, photos by Arunas Kulikauskas ‘Endpapers © Mark Ruwedet ‘Title page © Gianfranco Gorgoni, courtesy Bstate of Robert Smithson, Pages 14-15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 24, 25 courtesy Hstato of Robert ‘Smithson; p. 52 Estate of Robert Smithson, photo Cathy Carver; p. 85 (left) Collection Sylvio Peristein, courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York: . 88 (right) courtesy Nancy Holt, photo Bernd Hoffmann; p. 57 Fondazione SandrettoRe Rebaudengo, Turin; p. 88 (Lop) Collection of HerbertF. Johnson ‘Museum of Art, Cornell University, Gift of Nancy Holt; pp. 58 (middle left), 64, 67 (right), 78, 81 (top), 89, 84, 88, 98, 98, 109, 148 (left and right), 140 (right), 150, 152, 153, 159, 161, 162, 178 (top), 189 (top) James Cohan Gallery, Now York: p. 58 (bottom left) Collection of Statens Museum for ‘Kunst, Copenhagen, photo SMK Foto; p. 58 (right) Collection of Tate, London, photo © Tate, London, 2004; p. 59 Collection Virginia Dwan, courtesy James Cohan Gallery; p. 60-61 © Artforum, September 1969, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yuoatan,” by Robert Smithson, photo Cathy Carver: pp. 62 (top) and 188 (middle) courtesy James Cohan Gallery, Collection Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina fat Greensboro, Museum purchase with funds from the Dillard Company for the Dillard Collection; p. 62 (bottom) courtesy James Cohan Gallery, Collection Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Museum purchase with funds from the Lynn Richardson Prioket Aoquisitions Endowment and The Judy Proctor Acquisitions Endowment, 2002; pp. 63 (left), 82, and 127 courtesy Nanoy Holt: p. 66 ‘courtesy Michael Heizor; p. 67 (left) Collection The Museum of the Cityof ‘New York; p. 70 courtesy Robert Smithson and Naney Holt Papers, 1905-1997, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C: p. 71 courtesy Tacita Dean; p. 78 courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York, photo Christopher Burke; pp. 80 and 81 (bottom) Herbert Collection, Ghent; p. 86 (let) © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, NY, photo Andy Warhol Foundation, Ino/Art Resouroe, NY; p. 86 (right) Collection Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo: p. 87 Private Collection: p. 88 (left) Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Katherine 8, Dreier, © ‘Suovession Marcel Duchamp, 2008, ARS, NY: p. 88 (right) Private collection © ARS, Now York, photo Giraudon/Art Resource, NY; p, 90 Collection Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Gift of Virginia Dwan, photo Brian Forrest; p. 91 Collection Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of the Estate of Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery, New York, photo David Wharton; p. 92 © Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, photo Lee Stalaworth; p. 03 Collection Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund, photo Tim Bonham; . 97 Private collection, Cambridge; pp. 101-03 © Artforum, September 1971, “A Cinematic Atopla,” by Robert Smithson, photo Cathy Carver; p. 107 Collection of Virginia Dwan, photo Holly MeDade; pp. 116 and 146 The Over Holland Collection, courtesy James Cohan Gallery; p. 117 courtesy The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection; p. 120 Private Collection, New Jersey, courtesy James Cohan Gallery; pp. 128-48, 187, 202, 203, 204, 205 courtesy Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, 1905-1967, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., photos Lee Stalsworth: . 149 (eft) and 189 (bottom) Collection Tony and Gail Ganz, Los Angeles, courtesy James Cohan Gallery; p. 157 Collection Mel Bochner and Lizbeth Marano; p. 163 Collection Ann Tenenbaum and ThomasH. Lee; pp. 170, 180 (top), 181 (top) courtesy MGM: p. 171 courtesy Anthology Film Archives: P. 176 courtesy Universal Pictures: p. 177 courtesy American Zoetrope Warner Brothers; p. 180 (bottom) courtesy Mosfilm Studios / Sovexportflim; p. 181 (bottom) courtesy Anthology Film Archives; p. 189 (middle) courtesy NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team; p. 186 Collection Alice and Harris Weston, courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

Dia Art Foundation Board of Trustees

Leonard Riggio, Chairman Ann Tenenbaum, Vice Chairman James M, Allwin Frances Bowes Sandra J. Brant Constance R. Caplan Frances R. Dittmer Carla Emil Glenn R. Fuhrman Nathalie de Gunzburg William L. Haines James R. Hedges IV Pentti Kouri Linda Macklowe Stavros Merjos ‘Timothy Mott Nancy Brown Negley Bradford J. Race Howard Rachofsky Louise Riggio Donna Rosen Charles B. Wright Jan Cowles, Emeritus John ©. Evans, Emeritus Fariha Friedrich, Emeritus

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that year, and the third component in this ensemble, an essay also titled “The Spiral Jetty” was published in 1972. In 1999, the Estate of Robert Smithson donated the sculpture to

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