This is a place I did not go.
  • This is a place I did not go.
In researching classic Southwest land art this year, I had to pick and choose which places to visit and which to skip. I chose to go to Double Negative, The Lightning Field, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Wendover, Utah, base. I chose to skip, most notably, Spiral Jetty.

Given Jetty creator Robert Smithson's practice of creating Non-Sites—piles of earth arranged in a gallery, taken from and corresponding to a remote location—it seemed like Jetty would be the most interesting to skip. The time I would have spent getting there and back, I instead spent reading Smithson's words, and reading about Smithson's works, creating my own pile-of-words non-site for the time being. Instead of describing my firsthand experience of the sculpture in my essay, I used a story told to me by Henry Art Gallery curator Liz Brown, who got lost while trying to find the Jetty—until she saw a camera lens cap lying on the ground near its terminus. She knew then that this was the hallowed, which is to say, forever photographed, place. The spiraling action of the Jetty itself suggests a celebration of misdirection. I will probably go to Spiral Jetty soon, but for now I'm happy with my spiraling misdirection.

But the Jetty is not just an abstract concept. In 2008, when proposed drilling near it became a cause celebre, we were all reminded that the Jetty is a real thing sitting in the real world. There's a great essay about the whole episode that you really should read, by Jeffrey Kastner, called Entropy and the New Monument, and it's printed in full online. Here's a snippet:

Interestingly, in the weeks after the Pearl Montana drilling plan became public, another viewpoint started to percolate up from the art community and blogosphere: Would the whole scenario—somebody floating a bunch of modern industrial equipment out into the Great Salt Lake in order to dig down through layers of space and time to find something produced by the entropic action of geologic forces on organic matter from eons ago—really have bothered Smithson? Might he not, in fact, even have appreciated it? It's a fair enough question. After all, this is an artist who not only tolerated but in fact courted ruin and decay; who teased ecologists as "people [who] want to stop eating [because] they are afraid the lettuce they are eating has feelings"; who once described his preferred work zone as "that area of terror between man and land"; and who, of a failed desalination plan for the Salton Sea, once said, "Here we have an example of a kind of domino effect where one mistake begets another mistake, yet these mistakes are all curiously exciting to me on a certain kind of level—I don't find them depressing."

Smithson is my favorite of the classic land artists.

Another outtake here.