response 1B
1
Negative Map, Showing Region of the Monuments Along the
Passaic River.
A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey
Robert Smithson
He laughed softly. ‘I know. There’s no way out. Not through the Barrier. Maybe that isn’t what
I want, after all. But this—this—’ He stared at the Monument. ‘It seems all wrong sometimes. I
just can’t explain it. It’s the whole city. It makes me feel haywire. Then I get these flashes—’
—Henry Kuttner, Jesting Pilot
. . . today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and
painted world.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
On Saturday, September 30, 1967, I went to the Port Authority Building on 41st Street and
8th Avenue. I bought a copy of the New York Times and a Signet Paperback called
Earthworks by Brian W. Aldiss. Next I went to ticket booth 21 and purchased a one-way
ticket to Passaic. After that I went up to the upper bus level (platform 173) and boarded the
number 30 bus of the Inter-City Transportation Co.
2
I sat down and opened the Times. I glanced over the art section: a “Collectors’, Critics’,
Curators’ Choice” at A.M. Sachs Gallery (a letter I got in the mail that morning invited me “to
play the game before the show closes October 4th”), Walter Schatzki was selling “Prints,
Drawings, Watercolors” at 331/3% off,” Elinor Jenkins, the “Romantic Realist,” was showing
at Barzansky Galleries, XVIII—XIX Century English Furniture on sale at Parke-Bernet, “New
Directions in German Graphics” at Goethe House, and on page 28 was John Canaday’s
column. He was writing on Themes and the Usual Variations. I looked at a blurry
reproduction of Samuel F.B. Morse’s Allegorical Landscape at the top of Canaday’s column;
the sky was a subtle newsprint grey, and the clouds resembled sensitive stains of sweat
reminiscent of a famous Yugoslav watercolorist whose name I have forgotten. A little statue
with right arm held high faced a pond (or was it the sea?). “Gothic” buildings in the allegory
had a faded look, while an unnecessary tree (or was it a cloud of smoke?) seemed to puff up
on the left side of the landscape. Canaday referred to the picture as “standing confidently
along with other allegorical representatives of the arts, sciences, and high ideals that
universities foster.” My eyes stumbled over the newsprint, over such headlines as “Seasonal
Upswing,” “A Shuffle Service,” and “Moving a 1,000 Pound Sculpture Can be a Fine Work of
Art, Too.” Other gems of Canaday’s dazzled my mind as I passed through Secaucus.
“Realistic waxworks of raw meat beset by vermin,” (Paul Thek), “Mr. Bush and his colleagues
are wasting their time,” (Jack Bush), “a book, an apple on a saucer, a rumpled cloth,” (Thyra
Davidson). Outside the bus window a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge flew by—a symphony in
orange and blue. On page 31 in Big Letters: THE EMERGING POLICE STATE IN AMERICA SPY
GOVERNMENT. “In this book you will learn . . . what an Infinity Transmitter is.”
The bus turned off Highway 2, down Orient Way in Rutherford.
I read the blurbs and skimmed through Earthworks. The first sentence read, “The dead man
drifted along in the breeze.” It seemed the book was about a soil shortage, and the
Earthworks referred to the manufacture of artificial soil. The sky over Rutherford was a clear
cobalt blue, a perfect Indian summer day, but the sky in Earthworks was a “great black and
brown shield on which moisture gleamed.”
The bus passed over the first monument. I pulled the buzzer-cord and got off at the corner of
Union Avenue and River Drive. The monument was a bridge that connected Bergen County
with Passaic County. Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the
river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like
photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a
detached series of “stills” through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge,
it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and
steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but
a continuous blank.
3
The steel road that passed over the water was in part an open grating flanked by wooden
sidewalks, held up by a heavy set of beams, while above, a ramshackle network hung in the
air. A rusty sign glared in the sharp atmosphere, making it hard to read. A date flashed in the
sunshine . . . 1899 . . . No . . . 1896 . . . maybe (at the bottom of the rust and glare was the
name Dean & Westbrook Contractors, N.Y.). I was completely controlled by the Instamatic (or
what the rationalists call a camera). The glassy air of New Jersey defined the structural parts
of the monument as I took snapshot after snapshot. A barge seemed fixed to the surface of
the water as it came toward the bridge, and caused the bridge-keeper to close the gates.
From the banks of the Passaic I watched the bridge rotate on a central axis in order to allow
an inert rectangular shape to pass with its unknown cargo. The Passaic (West) end of the
bridge rotated south while the Rutherford (East) end of the bridge rotated north; such
rotations suggested the limited movements of an outmoded world. “North” and “South”
hung over the static river in a bi-polar manner. One could refer to this bridge as the
“Monument of Dislocated Directions.”
Along the Passaic River banks were many minor monuments such as concrete abutments
that supported the shoulders of a new highway in the process of being built. River Drive was
in part bulldozed and in part intact. It was hard to tell the new highway from the old road;
they were both confounded into a unitary chaos. Since it was Saturday, many machines
were not working, and this caused them to resemble prehistoric creatures trapped in the
mud, or, better, extinct machines—mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin. On the edge
of this prehistoric Machine Age were pre- and post-World War II suburban houses. The
houses mirrored themselves into colorlessness. A group of children were throwing rocks at
each other near a ditch. “From now on you’re not going to come to our hide-out. And I mean
it!” said a little blonde girl who had been hit with a rock.
As I walked north along what was left of River Drive, I saw a monument in the middle of the
river—it was a pumping derrick with a long pipe attached to it. The pipe was supported in
part by a set of pontoons, while the rest of it extended about three blocks along the river
bank till it disappeared into the earth. One could hear debris rattling in the water that
passed through the great pipe.
Nearby, on the river bank, was an artificial crater that contained a pale limpid pond of water,
and from the side of the crater protruded six large pipes that gushed the water of the pond
into the river. This constituted a monumental fountain that suggested six horizontal
smokestacks that seemed to be flooding the river with liquid smoke. The great pipe was in
some enigmatic way connected with the infernal fountain. It was as though the pipe was
secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice, and causing a monstrous sexual
organ (the fountain) to have an orgasm. A psychoanalyst might say that the landscape
displayed “homosexual tendencies,” but I will not draw such a crass anthropomorphic
conclusion. I will merely say, “It was there.”
4
Across the river in Rutherford one could hear the faint voice of a P.A. system and the weak
cheers of a crowd at a football game. Actually, the landscape was no landscape, but “A
particular kind of heliotypy” (Nabokov), a kind of self-destroying postcard world of failed
immortality and oppressive grandeur. I had been wandering in a moving picture that I
couldn’t quite picture, but just as I became perplexed, I saw a green sign that explained
everything:
YOUR HIGHWAY TAXES 21
AT WORK
Federal Highway U.S. Dept. of Commerce
Trust Funds Bureau of Public Roads
2,867,000 State Highway Funds
2,867,000
New Jersey State Highway Dept.
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new construction
that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the
buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise as ruins before they are built.
This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out
of date” things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of
history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past—
just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle,
and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River
Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMINOUS, SAND, and CEMENT.
Passaic seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and
solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying,
the memory-traced of an abandoned set of futures. Such futures are found in grade B
Utopian films, and then imitated by the suburbanite. The windows of City Motors auto sales
proclaim the existence of Utopia through 1968 WIDE TRACK PONTIACS—Executive,
Bonneville, Tempest, Grand Prix, Firebirds, GTO, Catalina, and Le Mans—that visual
incantation marked the end of the highway construction.
Next I descended into a set of used car lots. I must say the situation seemed like a change.
Was I in a new territory? (An English artist, Michael Baldwin, says, “It could be asked if the
country does in fact change—it does not in the sense a traffic light does.”) Perhaps I had
slipped into a lower state of futurity—did I leave the real future behind in order to advance
into a false future? Yes, I did. Reality was behind me at that point in my suburban Odyssey.
5
Passaic center loomed like a dull adjective. Each “store” in it was an adjective unto the next,
a chain of adjectives disguised as stores. I began to run out of film, and I was getting hungry.
Actually, Passaic center was no center—it was instead a typical abyss or an ordinary void.
What a great place for a gallery! Or maybe an “outdoor sculpture show” would pep that place
up.
At the Golden Coach Dinner (11 Central Avenue) I had my lunch, and loaded my Instamatic. I
looked at the orange-yellow box of Kodak Verichrome Pan, and read a notice that said:
READ THIS NOTICE:
This film will be replaced if defective in manufacture,
labeling, or packaging, even though caused by our
negligence or other fault. Except for such replacement,
the sale or any subsequent handling of this film is
without other warranty or liability. EASTMAN KODAK
COMPANY DO NOT OPEN THIS CARTRIDGE OR YOUR
PICTURES MAY BE SPOILED—12 EXPOSURES—SAFETY
FILM—ASA 125 22 DIN.
After that I returned to Passaic, or was it the hereafter—for all I know that unimaginative
suburb could have been a clumsy eternity, a cheap copy of The City of the Immortals. But
who am I to entertain such a thought? I walked down a parking lot that covered the old
railroad tracks which at one time ran through the middle of Passaic. That monumental
parking lot divided the city in half, turning it into a mirror and a reflection. One never knew
what side of the mirror one was on. There was nothing interesting or even strange about
that flat monument, yet it echoed a kind of cliché idea of infinity; perhaps the “secrets of the
universe” are just as pedestrian—not to say dreary. Everything about the site remained
wrapped in blandness and littered with shiny cars—one after another they extended into a
sunny nebulosity. The indifferent backs of the cars flashed and reflected the stale afternoon
sun. I took a few listless, entropic snapshots of that lustrous monument. If the future was
“out of date” and “old fashioned,” then I had been in the future. I had been on a planet that
had a map of Passaic drawn over it, and a rather imperfect map at that. A sidereal map
marked up with “lines” the size of streets, and “squares” and “blocks” the size of buildings.
At any moment my feet were apt to fall through the cardboard ground. I am convinced that
the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday’s
newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our
rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or
places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.
Has Passaic replaced Rome as The Eternal City? If certain cities of the world were placed
end to end in a straight line according to size, starting with Rome, where would Passaic be in
6
that impossible progression? Each city would be a three-dimensional mirror that would
reflect the next city into existence. The limits of eternity seem to contain such nefarious
ideas.
The last monument was a sand box or model desert. Under the dead light of the Passaic
afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness. This
monument of minor particles blazed under a bleakly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen
dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans—no longer were there green forests
and high mountains—all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones
and stones pulverized into dust. Every grain of sand was a dead metaphor that equaled
timelessness, and to decipher such metaphors would take one through the false mirror of
eternity. This sand box somehow doubled as an opened grave—a grave that children
cheerfully play in.
. . . all sense of reality was gone. In its place had come deep-seated illusions,
absence of pupillary reactions to light, absence of knee reaction—symptoms
all of progressive cerebral meningitis: the blanketing of the brain . . .
–Louis Sullivan, “one of the greatest of all architects,” quoted in Michel Butor’s
Mobile
I should now like to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune experiment for
proving entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on
one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times
clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have
him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a
greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.
Of course, if we filmed such an experiment we could prove the reversibility of eternity by
showing the film backwards, but then sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost
and enter the state of irreversibility. Somehow this suggests that the cinema offers an
illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution. The false immortality of the film gives
the viewer an illusion of control over eternity—but “the superstars” are fading.
7
Originally published as “The Monuments of Passaic”, Artforum, December 1967, p.52-57.
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
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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.
149
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