The trippers gather in Catherine's office. After coughing up the dough, we scan a rather impressive array of maps on the wall. Maybe "impressive" isn't the word but after hours of clicking around Google Earth, running my fingers over paper maps with pins and sticky notes are a tactile surprise. A sticky note with small hand drawn spiral falls to the ground. "Uh, oh. Did we just lose the Spiral Jetty?" We hadn't even gotten on the road yet we've already lost the Jetty.
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"Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jig-saw puzzle that composes the salt flats. As I 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 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 mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still. The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.
ReplyDeleteAfter securing a twenty year lease on the meandering zone, and finding a contractor in Ogden, I began building the Jetty in April, 1970." -- Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty,