![]() ![]() Creative potential, here, is synonymous with the demonstration of the temporalities that coexist in matter and its transformation in its translation into moving images. ![]() Robert Smithson was a prolific writer and his texts allow us to locate certain concepts and themes that clarify his relation with what he considered the cinematic state of the real – decomposable and captured by the camera – and whose creative potential could be managed through editing, montage. For cinema seems to be, for Smithson, a technique (a poiesis) based on a set of operations that use devices - the eye of the camera is a favorite figure of Smithson - that allow for the ordering of the scattered fragments of destruction that nature has become. The film is, I propose, an expanded cinematographic work that articulates Smithson's concerns regarding art and the great narrative of matter that cinema allowed him to create. Although these are independent artistic objects, we can, however, think of the abovementioned film as more than a mere documentation of the process of the jetty’s construction. The Spiral Jetty project, was a complex that comprised the creation of the earthwork – a jetty – the homonymous film, the text that Smithson wrote around the experience of Spiral Jetty's production and filming, and the creation of an underground cinema that would be located in a bellow ground cave and would project only the film of its own construction. The above quotes are from Robert Smithson and underline the artists’ thinking on cinema and the construction of the film Spiral Jetty (1970), a film of the artwork (made of salt, rocks and mud) by the same name, which Smithson created in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Now in the collection of the New York DIA Center of the Arts, the condition of Spiral Jetty is being documented by DIA since its reappearance.The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art.Īnd 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 unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Since then, water level fluctuations have allowed episodic re-emergences. Rising water levels caused the earthwork to be submerged just a few years after its completion, remaining as such until the 1990s. Constructed at an elevation of 4,195 feet, it was intended to appear and disappear as the lake’s water level varied. The design reflects Smithson’s interest in entropy and was influenced by the physical nature of the site which suggested the spiral form. Originally very dark rock against reddish water, salt encrustations have created a much whiter form against pink-hued water. Smithson was attracted to this remote location by the landscape’s stark qualities, abandoned industrial relics, and the presence of red-tinged algae which grows in the otherwise lifeless northern arm of the salt lake. The 1,500-foot long counter-clockwise spiral, built of earth, basalt rock, and precipitated salt crystal, reaches out into the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah. This earthwork, designed by the artist and sculptor Robert Smithson in 1970, is an icon in the field of land art. ![]()
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