Earth as Art

Spiral Jetty (1970) is an earthwork sculpture constructed by the American artist Robert Smithson in 1970. Built of mud, precipitated salt crystals and basalt rocks, the large-scale Earth art is located at the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, with a counter-clockwise coil jutting from the shore.

Locating in an isolated and dehumanized area, I believe that the outdoor installation has little involvement with broad environmental issues and consciousness, but more of the artist’s personal emotions towards the reconnection with the natural environment. Smithson denounced that galleries as “mausoleums for art" which bounded his true artistic spirit and freedom while going back to nature allows him to free his inner-self. (Renshaw 2013) Earth art is a special category that our planet is used as the specific site for artistic creations and installations. Other than the location, what’s more, in Smithson’s work, natural materials from the land are also in use for the contribution of the massive coil. However, the problem with Earth art is that the issue of natural decay and decomposition is inevitable, especially when Spiral Jetty is a hundred percent natural including its site and materials. On the other hand, the preservation issue, to me, is indeed the essence of this earthwork.

Smithson had mentioned previously in his essay “Entropy and the New Monuments” about monuments in current era that “they are not build for the ages, but rather against the ages.” (1966) Instead of using natural materials like granite and marbles, the artist found out that new monuments are made of synthetic materials like plastics and electric lights. The idea of having monuments is to remember the history and the past, yet the current productions of monuments neglected the future and seemingly stopped the time for the monuments to be naturally age. Undeniably new monuments can be kept in good condition, however, the symbolism of the aging history is reduced by the artificial materials. I found this idea similar to the concept of Spiral Jetty. The nature of Earth art is about using the natural landscape to create artworks, in which material decaying is one of the natural process and that might lead to its ultimate disappearance. Such process is also a part of the piece that extended to the discussion of the potent environmental ethic. As an earthwork, I personally do not think that the piece should be preserved in an unnatural way as it is not like fine arts in galleries. I also do not see the point of preserving it as the artist indeed intended letting his earthly attributes remain in the state of not being kept from destruction. (Means, 2016) It is just the vanity of human wishes to keep the piece from natural entropy but it is destroying the jetty itself in a faster pace as such practice is a confrontation with the natural power that Earth art embraces. What Spiral Jetty displaying is the inexorable passage of time, also the essence of the galaxy, like its own shape.

Reference:

Renshaw, Amanda. Art & Place: Site-Specific Art of the Americas. London: Phaidon Press, 2013.

Means, Sean. “Contractor brought Spiral Jetty to life.” Salt Lake Tribune, April 19, 2016.

Smithson, Robert, and Jack Flam. “Entropy and the New Monuments.” Essay. In Robert Smithson: the Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California press, 2017.