Insight
2013-2014
EXPERIENCE HONORS
HONORING:
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HONORING CREATIVITY 14
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A GLIMPSE INTO EARTHWORK HISTORY
WRITTEN BY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
Chelsea Adams
Julie Ransom
T
he white barren land gives way to a sharp blue sky. Only the occasional wisp of cloud breaks up the endless blue. Below, rosy pink water, colored by salt-tolerant bacteria and algae, reaches out to the horizon. The Spiral Jetty, carved by time, feels like an extension of the shoreline. The only noise in the area is the wind blowing through the sparse brush, the waves washing up on the shoreline, and the occasional traveler wading through the water. Speaking seems forbidden here. Sunflowers, scattered among the black boulders on the hillside, are the only familiar sight. The air smells slightly sulfuric because of the nearby salt marshes. This is a completely new experience, like stepping into a science fiction novel. That’s just what Robert Smithson had in mind when he created his Spiral Jetty; he wanted visitors to feel connected with the cosmos when they journeyed to and walked on the spiral. Smithson became obsessed with the connection between the cosmos, nature, and art when he visited southwestern Ohio in
the late 1960s. He went to see the Great Serpent Mound, the largest known serpent carving ever discovered. After a thousand years, it looks like something nature-made. To this day, anthropologists can only theorize why the work was created. Smithson, as one of the founders of the art form known as Earthworks, looked at this great snake and saw more than the remains of a long-lost ancient culture. He saw a spiraling connection between the earth and history. He saw a spiral serpent—winding through the trees on a large cliff into which time has embedded it—and he was inspired to create his most famous earthwork, the Spiral Jetty. A jetty is an earth structure that strives to protect the shoreline from nature’s storms. It is a creation meant to control nature, yet over time, storms erode it until the jetty starts to look like part of the nature it strove to control. Julie Ransom, a humanities professor at byu who takes her students to the Spiral Jetty each year, believes that Smithson had this in mind when he decided to create the Spiral Jetty. “He had some very deep ideas in his own mind about the nature of entropy and the relationships between history and place,” she says. Smithson was obsessed with the idea of entropy: that all things will progress through cycles of deterioration and re-creation, a cycle from order to chaos that will eventually result in equilibrium.
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“The spiral is a timeless reminder of how life rarely sends us in a straight direction. If we’re smart, we get wiser with each revolution.”
“I suspect he’d be thrilled with the way the jetty has changed over time,” Ransom says. Each revolution of the Spiral Jetty is at a different stage of erosion, and it adds to the dynamics of the piece. Some revolutions are completely submerged, and others are completely exposed. Ransom isn’t surprised that Smithson chose to make his jetty a spiral. She says the spiral can be found everywhere in nature, history, and art, which fits in perfectly with his idea that all things are connected with each other, and that they change together over time. Smithson used the spiral to show that art could be part of nature instead of forced on it, and that art, carved into the land, could become a part of history. He found the spot for his spiral masterpiece at the north end of the Great Salt Lake among the ruins of a pier surrounded by junk and wreckage. Some unused oil rigs from a failed oil-drilling attempt lie in stark contrast to the polar ice cap landscape that surrounds them; the thick layer of salt that encrusts the land makes it look like perpetual winter. The jetty, snaking out of the salted land, turns this wasteland into an alien-like scene. “There’s no place like it anywhere,” Ransom says. “We would never in a million years go all the way out there unless there was this crazy spiral dumped into the water to draw us there.” The 1,500-foot long counterclockwise spiral took a lot of hard work to create. In 1970, Smithson hired Parson’s Construction, a company in Ogden, Utah, to haul the black basalt rock he would need into the lake. Two dump trucks, a tractor, a front loader, and 6,550 tons of rock later, he had the materials he needed. But Smithson, choosy about where he wanted each rock placed, spent
his time maneuvering around in a front loader until he was convinced each rock was in the right spot. When he was done, the mud and salt crystals from the Great Salt Lake began to wash over the rock and soon encrusted it with a white film. Nature provided something even Smithson couldn’t have foreseen—the salt crystals are made up of miniature spirals, an extension of his vision of the Spiral Jetty. Yet while the salt serves as an extension of the work, the water serves entropy. A few short years after Smithson built the Spiral Jetty, the water submerged it, rapidly eroding the masterpiece and encasing it in the salty sand. Like the Great Serpent Mound, the jetty is beginning to look like an extension of the land. The Spiral Jetty emerges from the water periodically when there is a drought, and people come from all over to get a glimpse of Smithson’s greatest earthwork before entropy finishes its course. Everyone that visits is certain of one thing: it is only a matter of time before Smithson’s landscape artwork disappears altogether. Still, as the Spiral Jetty fades out of existence, the spiral shape will remain embedded in nature. “The spiral is a timeless reminder of how life rarely sends us in a straight direction,” Ransom tells her class before they head out to the jetty. “We tend to circle around and around the same lessons or experiences. If we’re smart, we get wiser with each revolution.”
NOTES Collier, Ric and Jim Edwards. “Spiral Jetty: The ReEmergence.” Sculpture Magazine Vol. 23 No. 6. July/ August 2004. “The Great Serpent Mound.” http://greatserpentmound.com/ James Cohan Gallery. Robert Smithson. vaga, Inc. http://www.robertsmithson.com/index_.html Logan, Burt. “Serpent Mound.” Ohio Historical Society. http://www.ohiohistory.org/museums-and-historic-sites/ museum--historic-sites-by-name/serpent-mound/history