This paper analyzes Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty as a highly complicated and visionary text, in which earthwork, essay, film, photography, and his other works have been conjured up and interrelated through the operation of ‘scale’.
The Spiral Jetty (1970), has been regarded as the pioneering and iconic work of the earth art movement. However, is the Jetty to be categorized as an earthwork? Smithson not only constructed a jetty on the Great Salt Lake but produced a film titled Spiral Jetty in 1970 and wrote an essay with the same title in 1972. In 1973, the Jetty, which sits on a deserted, desolate, and practically inaccessible spot, was suddenly submerged by heavy rain and melted snow. Thereafter, for around for 30 years, it could only be viewed through the essay, film, and photographs. Therefore, although the Jetty is commonly categorized as land art or sculpture, it could be said to remain as pure ‘conceptual art’.
Many questions arises from such an ironical state of the Jetty. To what extent does the Jetty exist as an earthwork? Or, is the Jetty as in non-material forms such as film and essay more important than the earth Jetty? Are film and essay indeed free from materiality? Focusing on the symposium’s title, “Art as Non-material,” this paper attempts to deconstruct two mythologies surrounding the Jetty either the great earth piece or the non-material art as documentations.
The Jetty is considered to open a new realm of relation between art work and the viewer, that is, the phenomenological approach to art. As Krauss contends, the Jetty is not an autonomous sculpture with a center to be viewed; it should be appreciated by walking on and through it. Such an experience, however, is very limited because the earth Jetty is hard difficult to get to and was underwater. Instead, the film and essay are where materiality and our bodily experiences are operating. The film was made in order to evoke physical responses from the viewer. Smithson emphasized that even the essay has a material looks and provides a totally new mode of writing that deconstructs the traditional boundaries between novel, science, picture, geology, etc.
Rather than being considered either an earth work or pure conceptual work, the Spiral Jetty should to be regarded as a continuation of Smithson’s earlier theme of the dialectics between the site and the non-site. Without referring to each other, the work does not function. As such an infinite dialectical text, the Spiral Jetty has multiple forms that continuously dislocates one another to create cross-relational meanings. Then, to move from one body to another, one needs to view the works in terms of ‘scale’, not ‘size’. Through the spectrum of scale, one perceives the object in a new dimension. Boundaries between time and space and between the physical and mental are also eradicated in the Spiral Jetty.