response 1B

THE SPIRAL JETTY ( 1972)

Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the

fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this

world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.

G. K. Chesterton

My concern with salt lakes began with my work in 1968 on the Mono Lake

Site-Nonsite in California. 1 Later I read a book called Vanishing Trails ef Ata­

cama by William Rudolph which described salt lakes (salars) in Bolivia in all

stages of desiccation, and filled with micro bacteria that give the water surface

a red color. The pink flamingos that live around the salars match the color of

the water. In The Useless Land, John Aarons and Claudio Vita-Finzi describe

Laguna Colorada: "The basalt (at the shores) is black, the volcanos purple, and

their exposed interiors yellow and red. The beach is grey and the lake pink,

topped with the icing of iceberg-like masses of salts:' 2 Because of the remote­

ness of Bolivia and because Mono Lake lacked a reddish color, I decided to in­

vestigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Arts of the Environment, edited by Gyorgy Kepes, 1972

This and the following illustrations show the Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, April 1970. Coil I 500' long and

approximately IS' wide. Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water (algae). All photos are by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

144

From NewYork City I called the Utah Park Development and spoke to Ted

Tuttle, who told me that water in the Great Salt Lake north of the Lucin Cut-

off, which cuts the lake in two, was the color of tomato soup. That was enough

of a reason to go out there and have a look. Tuttle told my wife, Nancy Holt,

and myself of some people who knew the lake. First we visited Bill Holt who

lived in Syracuse. He was instrumental in building a causeway that connected

Syracuse with Antelope Island in the southern part of the Great Salt Lake. Al-

though that site was interesting, the water lacked the red coloration I was

looking for, so we continued our search. Next we went to see John Silver on

Silver Sands Beach near Magna. His sons showed us the only boat that sailed

the lake. Due to the high salt content of the water it was impractical for ordi-

nary boats to use the lake, and no large boats at all could go beyond the Lucin

Cutoff on which the transcontinental railroad crossed the lake. At that point I

was still not sure what shape my work of art would take. I thought of making

an island with the help of boats and barges, but in the end I would let the site

determine what I would build. We visited Charles Stoddard, who supposedly

had the only barge on the north side of the cutoff. Stoddard, a well-driller, was

one of the last homesteaders in Utah. His attempt to develop Carrington Is-

land in 1932 ended in failure because he couldn't find fresh water. "I've had the

lake," he said. Yet, while he was living on the island with his family he made

many valuable observations of the lake. He was kind enough to take us to Little

Valley on the east side of the Lucin Cutoff to look for his barge-it had sunk.

The abandoned man-made harbors of Little Valley gave me my first view of

the wine-red water, but there were too many "Keep Out" signs around to

make that a practical site for anything, and we were told to "stay away" by two

angry ranchers. After fixing a gashed gas tank, we returned to Charles Stod-

dard's house north of Syracuse on the edge of some salt marshes. He showed

us photographs he had taken of "icebergs," 3 and Kit Carson's cross carved on a

rock on Fremont Island. We then decided to leave and go to Rozel Point.

Driving west on Highway 8 3 late in the afternoon, we passed through

Corinne, then went on to Promontory. Just beyond the Golden Spike Monu-

ment, which commemorates the meeting of the rails of the first transcontinen-

tal railroad, we went down a dirt road in a wide valley. As we traveled, the val-

ley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscapes we had

seen. The roads on the map became a net of dashes, while in the far distance

the Salt Lake existed as an interrupted silver band. Hills took on the appear-

ance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. We followed roads that

glided away into dead ends. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of percep-

tion. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint vio-

let sheet held captive in a stoney matrix, upon which the sun poured down its

crushing light.An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sedi-

ments were countless bits of wreckage. Old piers were left high and dry. The

mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a

145

world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devonian industry, the remains

of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period

were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud.

Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. A series of

seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For

forty or more years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool.

Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut

mounted on pilings could have been the habitation of "the missing link." 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. Irregular beds of

limestone dip gently eastward, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over

the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance. It is one of few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. 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 hori-

zons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the en-

tire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the flutter-

ing 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 indetermi-

nate 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 explo-

sion 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.

After securing a twenty year lease on the meandering zone, 4 and finding a

contractor in Ogden, I began building the jetty in April, 1970. Bob Phillips, the

foreman, sent two dump trucks, a tractor, and a large front loader out to the

site. The tail of the spiral began as a diagonal line of stakes that extended into

the meandering zone. A string was then extended from a central stake in order

to get the coils of the spiral. From the end of the diagonal to the center of the

spiral, three curves coiled to the left. Basalt and earth were scooped up from

the beach at the beginning of the jetty by the front loader, then deposited in the

trucks, whereupon the trucks backed up to the outline of stakes and dumped

the material. On the edge of the water, at the beginning of the tail, the wheels

of the trucks sank into a quagmire of sticky gumbo mud. A whole afternoon

was spent filling in this spot. Once the trucks passed that problem, there was

always the chance that the salt crust resting on the mud flats would break

through. The Spiral Jetty was staked out in such a way as to avoid the soft

146

muds that broke up through the salt crust; nevertheless there were some mud

fissures that could not be avoided. One could only hope that tension would

hold the entire jetty together, and it did. A cameraman was sent by the Ace

Gallery in Los Angeles to film the process.

The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the

viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A

crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand

Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system.

Scale depends on one's capacity to be conscious of the actualities of percep-

tion. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or

language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty. To be

in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. On eye level, the tail leads one

into an undifferentiated state of matter. One's downward gaze pitches from

side to side, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the inner and

outer edges, while the entire mass echoes the irregular horizons. And each

cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lat-

tice. Growth in a crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the manner of

a screw. The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiraling

crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times.

This description echoes and reflects Brancusi's sketch of James Joyce as a

"spiral ear" because it suggests both a visual and an aural scale, in other words

it indicates a sense of scale that resonates in the eye and the ear at the same

time. Here is a reinforcement and prolongation of spirals that reverberates up

and down space and time. So it is that one ceases to consider art in terms of an

"object." The fluctuating resonances reject "objective criticism," because that

would stifle the generative power of both visual and auditory scale. Not to say

that one resorts to "subjective concepts," but rather that one apprehends what

is around one's eyes and ears, no matter how unstable or fugitive. One seizes

the spiral, and the spiral becomes a seizure.

After a point, measurable steps ("Scale skal n. it. or L; it. Scala; L scala usually

scalae pl., I. a. originally a ladder; a flight of stairs; hence, b. a means of ascent" )5

descend from logic to the "surd state." The rationality of a grid on a map sinks

into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog,

and welcomes the unexpected event. The "curved" reality of sense perception

operates in and out of the "straight" abstractions of the mind. The flowing mass

of rock and earth of the Spiral Jetty could be trapped by a grid of segments,

but the segments would exist only in the mind or on paper. Of course, it is also

possible to translate the mental spiral into a three-dimensional succession of

measured lengths that would involve areas, volumes, masses, moments, pres-

sures, forces, stresses, and strains; but in the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and

leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality. Am-

biguities are admitted rather than rejected, contradictions are increased rather

than decreased-the alogos undermines the logos. Purity is put in jeopardy. I

147

Detail of tumbleweed coated with salt crystals. The Spiral Jetty, detail.

took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resem-

bling a spiral lightning bolt. "We have found a strange footprint on the shores

of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to ac-

count for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in constructing the creature

that made the footprint. And lo! it is our own." 6 For my film (a film is a spiral

made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the

Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps.

Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primor-

dial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some

pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes

of Rozel Point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids.

I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight

was saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake,

pumping into ruby currents, no they were veins and arteries sucking up the ob-

scure sediments. My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood

blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere; I

thought of Jackson Pollock's Eyes in the Heat (1964; Peggy Guggenheim Col- lection). Swirling within the incandescence of solar energy were sprays of

blood. My movie would end in sunstroke. Perception was heaving, the stom-

ach turning, I was on a geologic fault that groaned within me. Between heat

lightning and heat exhaustion the spiral curled into vaporization. I had the red

heaves, while the sun vomited its corpuscular radiations. Rays of glare hit my

eyes with the frequency of a Geiger counter. Surely, the storm clouds massing

would turn into a rain of blood. Once, when I was flying over the lake, its

surface seemed to hold all the properties of an unbroken field of raw meat

with gristle (foam); no doubt it was due to some freak wind action. Eyesight is

often slaughtered by the other senses, and when that happens it becomes nec-

essary to seek out dispassionate abstractions. The dizzying spiral yearns for

the assurance of geometry. One wants to retreat into the cool rooms of reason.

148

But no, there was Van Gogh with his easel on some sun-baked lagoon painting

ferns of the Carboniferous Period. Then the mirage faded into the burning

atmosphere.

From the center of the Spiral Jetty

North -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

North by East -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northeast by North -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northeast by East -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

East by North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

East -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

East by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southeast by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southeast by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

South by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

South by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southwest by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Southwest by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

West by South - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

West by North -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northwest by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Northwest by North -Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

North by West - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

The helicopter maneuvered the sun's reflection through the Spiral Jetty

until it reached the center. The water functioned as a vast thermal mirror.

From that position the flaming reflection suggested the ion source of a cyclo-

tron that extended into a spiral of collapsed matter. All sense of energy accel-

eration expired into a rippling stillness of reflected heat. A withering light

swallowed the rocky particles of the spiral, as the helicopter gained altitude. All

existence seemed tentative and stagnant. The sound of the helicopter motor

became a primal groan echoing into tenuous aerial views. Was I but a shadow

in a plastic bubble hovering in a place outside mind and body? Et in Utah ego. I

was slipping out of myself again, dissolving into a unicellular beginning, trying

to locate the nucleus at the end of the spiral. All that blood stirring makes one

aware of protoplasmic solutions, the essential matter between the formed and

the unformed, masses of cells consisting largely of water, proteins, lipoids, car-

bohydrates, and inorganic salts. Each drop that splashed onto the Spiral Jetty

coagulated into a crystal. Undulating waters spread millions upon millions of

crystals over the basalt.

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The preceding paragraphs refer to a "scale of centers" that could be disen-

tangled as follows:

(a) ion source in cyclotron

(b) a nucleus ( c) dislocation point

( d) a wooden stake in the mud

( e) axis of helicopter propeller

(f) James Joyce's ear channel

(g) the Sun

(h) a hole in the film reel.

Spinning off of this uncertain scale of centers would be an equally uncertain

"scale of edges":

(a) particles

(b) protoplasmic solutions (c) dizziness

(d) ripples

(e) flashes of light

(f) sections

(g) foot steps

(h) pink water.

The equation of my language remains unstable, a shifting set of coordinates,

an arrangement of variables spilling into surds. My equation is as clear as mud

-a muddy spiral.

Back in New York, the urban desert, I contacted Bob Fiore and Barbara

Jarvis and asked them to help me put my movie together. The movie began as

a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things

obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of vis-

cosities both still and moving. And the movie editor, bending over such a

chaos of "takes" resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not

yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfin-

ished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Film strips hung from the cutter's

rack, bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses

of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of

footage. Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One

is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the earliest known geological

eras. The movieola becomes a "time machine" that transforms trucks into di-

nosaurs. Fiore pulled lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a

Neanderthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth. Outside his 13th

Street loft window one expected to see Pleistocene faunas, glacial uplifts, liv-

ing fossils, and other prehistoric wonders. Like two cavemen we plotted how

to get to the Spiral Jetty from New York City. A geopolitics of primordial re-

ISO

turn ensued. How to get across the geography of Gondwanaland, the Austral

Sea, and Atlantis became a problem. Consciousness of the distant past absorbed

the time that went into the making of the movie. I needed a map that would

show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I existed in.

I found an oval map of such a double world. The continents of the Jurassic

Period merged with continents of today. A microlense fitted to the end of a

camera mounted on a heavy tripod would trace the course of "absent images"

in the blank spaces of the map. The camera panned from right to left. One is

liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hy-

pothetical monsters that lurk between the map's latitudes; they are designated

on the map as black circles (marine reptiles) and squares (land reptiles). In the

pan shot one doesn't see the flesh-eaters walking through what today is called

Indochina. There is no indication of Pterodactyls flying over Bombay. And

where are the corals and sponges covering southern Germany? In the empti-

ness one sees no Stegosaurus. In the middle of the pan we see Europe com-

pletely under water, but not a trace of the Brontosaurus. What line or color

hides the Globigerina Ooze? I don't know. As the pan ends near Utah, on the

edge of Atlantis, a cut takes place, and we find ourselves looking at a rectangu-

lar grid known as Location NK 12-7 on the border of a map drawn by the

U.S. Geological Survey showing the northern part of the Great Salt Lake

without any reference to the Jurassic Period .

. . . the earth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing .... 7

I wanted Nancy to shoot "the earth's history" in one minute for the third

section of the movie. I wanted to treat the above quote as a "fact." We drove

out to the Great Notch Quarry in New Jersey, where I found a quarry facing

about twenty feet high. I climbed to the top and threw handfuls of ripped-up

pages from books and magazines over the edge, while Nancy filmed it. Some

ripped pages from an Old Atlas blew across a dried out, cracked mud puddle.

According to all we know from fossil anatomy that beast was comparatively harmless. Its only weapons were its teeth and claws. I don't know what those obscene looking paunches mean- they don't show in any fossil remains yet found. Nor do I know whether red is their natural color, or whether it is due to faster decay owing to all the oil having dripped down off them. So much for its supposed identity. 8

The movie recapitulates the scale of the Spiral Jetty. Disparate elements as-

sume a coherence. Unlikely places and things were stuck between sections of

film that show a stretch of dirt road rushing to and from the actual site in

Utah. A road that goes forward and backward between things and places that

151

are elsewhere. You might even say that the road is nowhere in particular. The

disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cos-

mic rupture. Nevertheless, all the improbabilities would accommodate them-

selves to my cinematic universe. Adrift amid scraps of film, one is unable to in-

fuse into them any meaning, they seem worn-out, ossified views, degraded and

pointless, yet they are powerful enough to hurl one into a lucid vertigo. The

road takes one from a telescopic shot of the sun to a quarry in Great Notch

New Jersey, to a map showing the "deformed shorelines of ancient Lake Bon-

neville," to The Lost World, and to the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in the American

Museum of Natural History.

The hall was filmed through a red filter. The camera focuses on a Or-

nithominus Altus embedded in plaster behind a glass case. A pan across the

room picked up a crimsom chiaroscuro tone. There are times when the great

outdoors shrinks phenomenologically to the scale of a prison, and times when

the indoors expands to the scale of the universe. So it is with the sequence

from the Hall of Late Dinosaurs. An interior immensity spreads throughout

the hall, transforming the lightbulbs into dying suns. The red filter dissolves the

floor, ceiling, and walls into halations of infinite redness. Boundless desolation

emerged from the cinematic emulsions, red clouds, burned from the intangi-

ble light beyond the windows, visibility deepened into ruby dispersions. The

bones, the glass cases, the armatures brought forth a blood-drenched atmos-

phere. Blindly the camera stalked through the sullen light. Glassy reflections

flashed into dissolutions like powdered blood. Under a burning window the

skull of a Tyrannosaurus was mounted in a glass case with a mirror under the

skull. In this limitless scale one's mind imagines things that are not there. The

blood-soaked dropping of a sick Duck-Billed Dinosaur, for instance. Rotting

monster flesh covered with millions of red spiders. Delusion follows delusion.

The ghostly cameraman slides over the glassed-in compounds. These fragments

of a timeless geology laugh without mirth at the time-filled hopes of ecology.

From the soundtrack the echoing metronome vanishes into the wilderness of

bones and glass. Tracking around a glass containing a "dinosaur mummy," the

words of The Unnameable are heard. The camera shifts to a specimen squeezed

flat by the weight of sediments, then the film cuts to the road in Utah.

NOTES

r. Dialectic of Site and Nonsite

152

Site

r. Open Limits

2. A Series of Points 3. Outer Coordinates 4. Subtraction 5. Indeterminate

Certainty 6. Scattered

Information

Nonsite

Closed Limits

An Array of Matter Inner Coordinates Addition Determinate

Uncertainty Contained

Information

7. Reflection 8. Edge

9. Some Place (physical)

IO.Many

Mirror Center No Place

(abstract) One

Range ef Convergence The range of convergence between Site and Nonsite consists of a course of hazards, a double path made up of signs, photographs, and maps that belong to both sides of the dialectic at once. Both sides are present and absent at the same time. The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Nonsite) rather than the art placed on the ground. The Nonsite is a container within another container-the room. The plot or yard outside is yet another container. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional things trade places with each other in the range of convergence. Large scale becomes small. Small scale becomes large. A point on a map expands to the size of the land mass. A land mass contracts into a point. Is the Site a reflection of the Nonsite (mir- ror), or is it the other way around? The rules of this network of signs are discovered as you go along uncertain trails both mental and physical.

"No fish or reptile lives in it (Mono Lake), yet it swarms with millions of worms which develop into flies. These rest on the surface and cover everything on the imme- diate shore. The number and quantity of those worms and flies is absolutely incredible. They drift up in heaps along the shore."W H. Brewer, The Whitney Survey, 1863.

2. London, 1960, p. 129. 3. "In spite of the concentrated saline quality of the water, ice is often formed on parts

of the Lake. Of course, the lake brine does not freeze; it is far too salty for that. What actually happens is that during relatively calm weather, fresh water from the various streams flowing into the lake 'floats' on top of the salt water, the two failing to mix. Near mouths of rivers and creeks this 'floating' condition exists at all times during calm weather. During the winter this fresh water often freezes before it mixes with the brine. Hence, an ice sheet several inches thick has been known to extend from Weber River to Fremont Island, making it possible for coyotes to cross to the island and molest sheep pastured there. At times this ice breaks loose and floats about the lake in the form of 'icebergs.' " (David E. Miller, Great Salt Lake Past and Present, Pamphlet of the Utah History Atlas, Salt Lake City, 1949.)

4. Township 8 North ef Range 7 West of the Salt Lake Base and Meridian: Unsurveyed land on the bed of the Great Salt Lake, if surveyed, would be described as follows:

Beginning at a point South 3000 feet and West 800 feet from the Northeast Cor- ner of Section 8, Township 8 North, Range 7 West; thence South 45° West 651 feet; thence North 6o0 West 651 feet; thence North 45° East 651 feet; thence Southeast- erly along the meander line 675 feet to the point of beginning. Containing 10.00 acres, more or less. (Special Use Lease Agreement No. 222; witness: Mr. Mark Crystal.)

5. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (College Edition),World Pub- lishing Co., 1959, U.S.A.

6. A. S. Eddington, quoted on p. 232 in Number, the Language ef Science, Tobias Dantzig. Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954.

7. Thomas H. Clark, Colin W Stern, Geological Evolution ef North America, New York, Ronald Press Co., n.d., p. 5.

8. John Taine, The Greatest Adventure, Three Science Fiction Novels, New York, Dover Pub- lications, Inc., 1963, p. 239.

153