I was in Utah to see, and walk on, Robert Smithson’s mighty piece of
land art, Spiral Jetty, built in 1970
at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake, about a 100
miles from Salt Lake City. It’s
Smithson’s masterpiece I think, although given that he died comparatively young,
in a small plane crash, in Texas, while scoping out the site for another work, who
knows what else he might have achieved?
Spiral Jetty is, I suppose, an
earthwork, or possibly a causeway, 6000 tons of basalt arranged in a 1,500-foot long, 15-feet-wide counterclockwise, swirl. It isn’t always easy to see. As the lake’s waters rise it may become
invisible: 4,195 feet is the crucial number, and there’s a handy website
waterdata.usgs.gov which tells you the level. In fact it was under water for the best part
of 30 years - but these days of drought have made things much easier. Not entirely however. I’d tried to go earlier in the year but was
driven back by terrible rain and rising waters.
No such problems in September 2015 however.
The lake was low, and Spiral Jetty was a long way from any
water. It was just an arrangement of black
rocks on the salt flat. That was pretty
cool too, though it affected the way you engaged with it. If the water was surrounding it you’d be forced
to walk on the rocks themselves, but since the water was out, I and the others I
saw there (a total of four people) walked on the lake bed, inside the spiral, as it were, rather than on it. It was much easier that way, and certainly
one of the girls I saw there, in flip-flops, would have had an impossible time negotiating
the basalt.
Of course Spiral Jetty is big in one sense, but compared to the overall
size of the whole lake it seems pretty small.
And so having walked in, or on the jetty, you inevitably start walking across
the lake bed itself. You might do this
even if there was no Smithson work nearby, but its presence changes
everything. Random chunks of old wooden (non-art)
jetty, and industrial detritus were sticking out of the land, but they suddenly
looked very much like art too. And
earlier visitors had evidently been inspired also to become artists of a sort,
rearranging rocks, writing things in the sand.
I like to think Smithson would have been perfectly happy with this.
Smithson was at least somewhat concerned with walking. The 1971 movie Swamp, a collaboration with his wife Nancy Holt, has the two of them tramping through
the wilds of the New Jersey wetlands.
His essay titled “Frederick Law Olmstead and
the Dialectical Landscape” (don’t you just hate it when artists use the word
dialectical, unless maybe it’s ironic?) describes a walk in Central Park, where
at one point he encounters a “sinister looking character” whom he fears is
going to steal his camera – he doesn’t – and Smithson heads off into an area of
the park known as The Ramble “a tangled net of divergent paths.”
Smithson writes, ”Now the
Ramble has grown up into an urban jungle, and lurking in its thickets are ‘hoods,
hobos, hustlers, and homosexuals,’ (I’m pretty sure he’s quoting John Rechy)
and other estranged creatures of the city ... Walking east, I passed graffiti on boulders. Somehow I can
accept graffiti on subway trains but not on boulders … In the spillway that pours out of the
Wollman Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket
half-submerged in the water. Further down, the spillway becomes a brook choked
with mud and tin cans. The mud then spews under the Gapstow Bridge to become a muddy slough that inundates a good part of The Pond,
leaving the rest of The Pond aswirl with oil slicks, sludge, and Dixie cups,”
Well,
the land around the Spiral Jetty is very clean and free of litter though there
is oil oozing up from the lakebed. I guess
that’s a “natural” process. Certainly
nobody has desecrated Smithson’s art with graffiti, though I imagine its
guardians live in constant fear of that.
Spiral Jetty
strikes me as those great works of art that isn’t “about” anything: it simply is. And merely by existing it raises and
exemplifies all kinds of issues about land usage, time, mortality, change,
nature and culture, entropy and so on.
But of course art always come out of something else.
Phyllis Tuchman who (with Gail Stavitsky)
created the exhibition “Robert Smithson’s New Jersey,” at the Montclair Art Museum, in 2014 reckons that Smithson was at least partly inspired by the Lincoln Tunnel
connecting Manhattan with Weehawken, specifically by its exit/entrance ramp on
the New Jersey side known as (would you believe, or maybe everybody knows this
already) the Helix.
We’re also told, in an article Smithson
write titled “The Crystal Land” (a nod to JG Ballard no doubt) that he and the
sculptor Donald Judd, and their wives, once drove though the tunnel together
and admired its minimalist qualities.
Smithson writes, “the countless cream colored tiles on the wall sped by,
until a sign announcing New York broke the tiles’ order”
Now, as it happens, there
was a period of my life when I took a bus once a week in either direction
through the Lincoln Tunnel. I could see
that the long curving ramp (I certainly never thought of it as a helix) was quite
a feat of engineering, although my admiration rather evaporated as the bus regularly
got stuck there in traffic for 30 to 60 minutes. I certainly noticed the
tiles, but what really got my attention as an enthusiastic pedestrian was that
raised walkway you can see on the right-hand side of the tunnel.
I always wondered in
what circumstances members of the public would be allowed to walk through the tunnel:
I imagined only in the event of some kind of catastrophic traffic pile up. I assumed the walkway was used by
maintenance workers but I never, ever saw one of them walking there.
In
fact there are circumstances in which the tunnel
is open to pedestrians, the annual Lincoln Tunnel Challenge, a race through the
tunnel from Weehawken to New York and back again. They have about 3000 competitors. Elephants have also been known to walk there.
I’m sure Spiral Jetty
looks different every day and at different times of the day, and obviously it’s
completely transformed by the presence or absence of water. And possibly it looks best of all from a
helicopter: Smithson certainly filmed it from up there, but that does mean you
lose the opportunity for a good walk.
