Chronicle: A Downward Spiral

By Joelle Seligson

This article was published in Museum, May/June issue 2008.

Spiral Jetty, one of the world’s seminal works of land art, vanished for years. The 1,500-foot swirl of black basalt rock that Robert Smithson constructed in 1970 slipped beneath the swollen Great Salt Lake around the time of his death—a plane crash—three years later. When the lake receded and the jetty reemerged in 1999, it was forever altered: Salt encrustations had blanched the structure white, so that today the coil blazes against water that is pale pink at some points, at others, blood red.

Life, death, rebirth, transformation: No wonder Spiral Jetty elicits religious responses from those who view it. Diehard fans who won’t take no for an answer—no road, for example, leads to the earthwork in isolated Rozel Point, Utah—exalt the potholed trek as a pilgrimage, the work itself as a place of worship. “There are people who make this trip every year, following the progress of Spiral Jetty,” notes Erin Hogan, author of the forthcoming book Spiral Jetta, which documents her 2004 travels (via Volkswagen) to several examples of land art, a 1960s movement that considered earth the source of art rather than its setting. “For them it’s like following the Grateful Dead. They really do attach that level of reverence to it.”

If the jetty transforms again in 2008, it may be due more to the site’s economic potential than its spiritual one. Lured by the promise of oil in the Great Salt Lake’s northern arm, Canada’s Pearl Montana Exploration and Production Ltd. has applied to drill exploratory boreholes about five miles from the earthwork. The proposal has spurred a global response from an outraged art world, convinced that the drilling will spoil the jetty’s sanctity and the lake’s ecology. But industry has received unexpected support from another segment of this same population, concerned that preserving the jetty could jeopardize Smithson’s intent for the work to succumb to progress and change. To this group, Spiral Jetty represents the thin, twisted line between protecting and desecrating art.

When it got word of Pearl’s application, the Dia Art Foundation, Spiral Jetty’s New York-based arbiter, made its own appeal. “This proposed oil drilling . . . will endanger one of the most widely recognized and cherished American sculptures of the late twentieth century,” the foundation declared in a Feb. 6 press release. The drilling would “disrupt the viewshed and the area’s isolated character,” increase traffic and noise pollution and “degrade the natural environment of the lake.” Dia urged the public to contact the state of Utah in protest.

The public complied. Jonathan Jemming, who collected input on the drilling as director of the Utah Governor’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, received 100 letters, 300 phone calls and 2,967 e-mails from around the world—the largest reaction he’d ever witnessed. Jemming can’t say for sure that the response was unanimous; some letters, such as the ones postmarked South Korea, have to be translated. But he ventures to state that “the vast majority is adamantly opposed to the project.”

The question remains of whether Smithson would share this sentiment. The artist left no instructions for the care of Spiral Jetty when he died at 35. His widow—fellow artist Nancy Holt—Dia and other interested parties have pored over Smithson’s writings and interviews to try to piece together his intentions, often drawing conflicting conclusions.

One thing that’s known for sure: Oil motivated Smithson’s choice of Rozel Point to host his most famous creation. Pearl is among several companies that have sought fortune here; the shoreline was already littered with rusted rigs, deserted pumps and dilapidated shacks when Smithson discovered it. The refuse appealed to him. As he described in a 1972 essay on Spiral Jetty, “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 I selected my site.”

Smithson’s fascination with desertion and decay ties into his embrace of entropy, a measure of how all matter and energy progress toward a state of disorder or randomness. When applied to art, entropy suggests that the work should be left to natural, chaotic forces, ultimately resulting in its deterioration. In a 1973 interview two months before his death, Smithson put the theory in layman’s terms:

Perhaps a nice succinct definition of entropy would be Humpty Dumpty. Like Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. . . . You have a closed system, which eventually deteriorates and starts to break apart, and there’s no way that you can really piece it back together again.

To Dia, this means that natural change, such as rising water levels, is an integral, acceptable element of Spiral Jetty. Man-made change is not. The foundation’s underlying goal is to maintain the works in its care—also including Walter de Maria’s earthwork Lightning Field—as close as possible to their original state. While environmental shifts cannot be avoided, the incursion of industrial or real estate development must be, states director Jeffrey Weiss. And while Weiss acknowledges that Smithson was interested in the intersection of technology and landscape, he maintains that the artist would have wanted Dia to prevent new growth from affecting his art. “When he chose a site for a work such as this one, he chose it with the idea that it would remain intact. That’s the premise on which we base our defense of the site,” Weiss says.

Others have a different take on Smithson’s wishes. “Entropy” has become a buzzword throughout the blogosphere’s debate over the drilling. Arts writer Steven Kaplan alerted readers to Pearl’s plans on his blog in February, posting a copy of the letter he wrote demanding that the drilling be stopped. But he admitted sending the note with “certain misgivings,” adding, “The proposed oil drilling near Rozel Point could be viewed as a welcome entropic intervention, something Smithson, were he still alive, might accept as part of a continuing dialog. So all the well-meaning, knee-jerk PC activity to ‘save’ the natural, pristine beauty of Spiral Jetty might run counter to Smithson’s own aesthetic predilections.”

After reading Dia’s press release, Erin Hogan also dutifully typed a letter of protest—but remained ambivalent even while pressing “send.” “I certainly understand both sides, and I won’t say that, when I sent the e-mail to Utah, I didn’t think, ‘I’m not really sure about this,’” she recalls.

It’s hard to say what Smithson would have preferred, says Hogan, who received her doctorate from the University of Chicago with a specialization in 20th-century American painting. “Smithson was interested in damage; he was interested in time taking its toll. He was interested in the way things would change, the way bacteria or salt or algae would change the work. . . . Part of me thinks that Smithson would’ve wanted things to move on as they move on.”

Entropy is “an argument that is too easily made,” counters Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, who was named one of the most influential people in art by New York magazine in 2006. While Storr agrees that conservators must avoid overzealous preservation, he contends that precious artworks must be protected from careless destruction. “My rule of thumb—basically the artistic equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath—is ‘first do no harm.’ You don’t paint over the Mona Lisa to repair its cracks. . . . At the same time, you don’t let somebody tear out the wall behind the Mona Lisa and pretend it won’t affect the painting.”

Rozel Point, the wall to Spiral Jetty’s canvas, has been drastically revamped already. In 2005, two Utah Geological Survey (UGS) agencies took it upon themselves to enhance the visitor experience of the jetty. It hauled out 18 dumpster-loads of “junk”—including boilers, pumps and other artifacts likely dating to Smithson’s time—and proudly announced on the UGS website, “If you have ventured to the area before . . . you may not recognize it when you return!”

Dia says it wasn’t consulted on the decision. “While it was done in good faith, it’s something we probably would not have advocated,” Weiss says. “There was nothing we could do.”

So has the damage been done? Hogan interprets the cleanup as another random occurrence that Smithson would have embraced. After all, the state probably wouldn’t have tidied up the site if Spiral Jetty hadn’t been there. “It’s kind of like an anthropologist going in to observe a ‘native tribe’ and therefore completely changing the dynamic,” she says. “I do think in the end Smithson was someone who wanted the dynamic to change.”

As for the drilling, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining will make the final call. While spokesman Jim Springer says the division will take public input into consideration, he warns that it would take a serious issue to keep Pearl from moving forward. The company has held leases on the land since 2003, giving it a valid right to drill so long as it fulfills standard requirements. “If you went to the driver’s license division in your state and passed the driver’s exam and did everything you were supposed to do . . . and then the division didn’t issue you a license because it didn’t like the kind of car you were driving—well, that’s pretty much the position we’re in,” Springer explains. Still, Dia is planning several trips to Utah to raise awareness about Spiral Jetty and prevail upon the state to deny Pearl’s permit.

But whatever the outcome of process and paperwork, natural change may take over before long—just as Smithson would have wanted it. “Utah’s had a lot of snow this year,” Jemming observes. “The water will be rising again.”