The transformation from homage to influence begins with “Untitled (Rainbow),” Peter Coffin’s luminous, gorgeous, clever, and deceptively easy-looking spirals: a small one (2006) that ascends from a pedestal and a large one (2005) that covers a wall. Assembled from photographs of landscapes around the world that have two things in common—they produce rainbows and they’re worth looking at in themselves—they make one of Smithson’s more accessible points, which is that art can bring us to pay attention to things: even (and especially) boring things we might otherwise overlook. Another artist who remembers this is Melanie Smith, in whose hypnotic video “Spiral City” (2002) a helicopter repeats the movement of walking “Spiral Jetty” in the airspace over Mexico City. Although the wall plaque compares this to Smithson’s film of the newly-completed structure, which for the thirty years it spent under saltwater was the closest one could come to seeing it, “Spiral City” is as unlike that film as it is analogous to walking the spirals and feeling the setting—lake floor, water, islands, distant mountains—spin around one. One of the problems with Smithson is that so few who take an interest in him can have experienced the original works.
If Smithson did his work no direct favors by siting it in remote and inaccessible places, or making temporary objects that have disappeared, he compensated with a mythic dimension that empowers the many visionary statements he made about possibilities for art’s future, which may yet prove a more lasting contribution. Examples have been surgically extracted by the UMFA and placed on the walls above the works they helped inspire, hovering like illuminating spirits whose influence can be discerned below. Whether holding forth on entropy, or the appeal of boring and dull subject matter, on language, history, nature and the natural, urban panoramas, or ruins yet to be built, Smithson comes across as a prophet whose visionary perceptions form fertile aesthetic soil. Speaking of dirt, one literal reminder that the ‘earth’ in Earth Art didn’t always require the monument scale typified by “Spiral Jetty” comes from Sam Durant’s “Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) and Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock)” (1998). Here two grave-like mounds of freshly-turned soil, in which the artist attempts to bury simplistic counterculture myths about America’s recent past, rise from mirrors on the floor. Here and elsewhere, reflections bring us into the work, suggesting how much that past has to do with our fractured present.

Sam Durant, Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock), 1998, mirrors, dirt, amplified audio system, audio CD, courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA.
At some point one may wonder what Smithson would have thought of all this had he not died in a plane crash in 1973. His own use of video was essentially documentary: in the famous film, his camera captures black basalt spiraling through a reflection of the sky on water tinged red by brine shrimp with the guileless enthusiasm of a proud parent. Perhaps it’s the arrival of a new generation who grew up in front of their parents’ video cameras, their every epoch moment immortalized, and came of age against the backdrop of YouTube, but many of the videos on display here work hard not to serve any subject but their makers. Like Tacita Dean’s “From Columbus, Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed” (1999), Renée Green’s “Partially Buried” (1996) takes Smithson’s work, and the mysteries that surround it, as starting point for what is essentially a memoir. Given that the unknowns and challenges they begin by exploring are unavoidable due to circumstances surrounding Smithson’s life, we may well wonder if these films would attract as much attention if equipped with narrative devices and quality production available to their makers, or whether their deliberately rough surfaces are part of their appeal in the art market.

Renée Green, Partially Buried, 1996, film still, courtesy of the artist, Free Agent Media, and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
That there is still a market for this work is one topic the exhibitors, like the artists, address only obliquely. Smithson, following the increasingly dominant influence of Marcel Duchamp, consciously rejected the commodification of art. Why else build a major work in an almost inaccessible place or in the path of imminent destruction? Nothing Smithson made could hope to pay its own way. The $1,200 we hear him say in Lee Ranaldo’s “RS for SD “(2004) he paid for the Rozel Point site of “Spiral Jetty” sounds affordable, but it’s a fraction of the work’s total cost. The fact is he never explained how the work was paid for, though details of the gallery system that raised the money have since emerged. Today’s art is largely paid for by a closed system that permits an interested minority to bypass popular support from an audience that sometimes feels spoon-fed. Depending on the taste and judgment of these patrons, a work may be accessible or it may not. Meanwhile, are we to believe that, when Duchamp argued for breaking the connection between art and objects that could be bought and sold, he envisioned an art used to promote the civic virtues of cigarette manufacturers? This seems to be one of the strategies (to use one of the few terms in contemporary art that is as accurate as it is useful) Smithson promoted that remains open to question.
At least two other films merit mention as alternatives to the descending spiral of so much video. Deborah Ligorio, an artist with a truly cinematic perspective, turns the search for Spiral Jetty into a search for America in “Donut to Spiral,” a seven-minute miniature of an Italian art film, complete with obsessive Italian-language monologue, subtitles, and long stretches in which the camera appears to reveal two incompatible landscapes as the foreground dashes by while distant vistas loom eternally. Whether this is all tongue-in-cheek or sincere hardly matters; we enjoy being in her company for seven minutes, whether she’s really with us or not. Meanwhile, Cyprian Galliard’s “Real Remnants of Fictive War V” (2003-8) offers images of such beauty and mystery it is easy to sit through its brief presentation several times. With two possible endpoints and no clear narrative, this endlessly repeating film includes a shot of trees in a park that tracks so flawlessly a balustrade in the foreground appears to be what’s moving, rather than the camera. In the visual ballet that follows, one tree explodes and disappears into a white cloud that eventually dissipates, leaving the tree unharmed, if not unchanged. It could be read as a parable of the progress of nature (or the viewing of art), but it can also be appreciated, like the spiral jetty, just because it is there and we have eyes to see it.
Of course, unless we are neoplatonic philosophers who believe that theory dictates reality, rather than the other way around, we can take art any way we choose. It’s not necessary to accept the premises of Mark Dion’s “Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered,” which attempts to duplicate the experience of 19th-century naturalists like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, in order to appreciate this illustrated parallel to Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Who hasn’t been in a gallery where someone was copying the kind of esoteric symbols that fill the pages of Shannon Ebner’s “The Sun as Error” into a notebook? And so what if there’s too much? The answer must be to choose wisely, or else to come back, because as a benchmark of what passes for art in the twenty-first century, this is essential viewing.

Mark Dion, Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered (collection cupboard), 2008, wooden cabinet with found objects, cotton batting, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar, New York
We measure marathons by distance rather than time. What one runner can do in an hour requires four hours of another. In setting out to assemble an anthology of artists and works influenced by Robert Smithson, the curators of the UMFA have created an indispensable survey of turn-of-the-twentieth-first-century media, but they have also produced a sprawling smorgasbord of drawings, paintings, photographs, videos, audios, sculpture, installations, and books. No one seems to know exactly how long it would take to see and hear the moving parts end to end, let alone contemplate the often elaborate ‘static’ pieces, but the inescapable fact is that it must be measured by the clock. As a critic, I don’t normally feel it’s my job to tell viewers what to look at, but here wandering into one of the small, dark galleries that open off a long hallway lined by video monitors and audio headsets, or putting on one of those pairs of earphones, can mean committing a knowable quantity, like an unrecoverable hour, to unknown quality. Consider Tacita Dean’s “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty” (1997), an audio tape recorded in her car while following DIA Art Foundation’s infamous downloadable directions to the best known of Smithson’s works. Anyone who has done this may enjoy the memories it brings back, but not need to hear its entire 27 minutes. Those unfamiliar with the site’s inaccessibility are likely to feel lost among doubtful voices and loud noises. Perhaps its only true audience is those who know the story but have yet to undertake the challenge.
“Spiral Jetty” (1970) is not only Smithson’s best known work, but the only one the average person may have heard of. Made of loose rock poured into a shallow part of the Great Salt Lake to form a 1,500-foot long, 15-foot wide path, it starts out running straight over the water, but then bends and spirals in on itself like water running down a drain. The shape is a metaphor for one of the artist’s major concerns: entropy, or the inexorable loss of energy and organization that science proposes as the whimper, not bang, lying in wait at the end of the universe. Shortly after he finished it, “Spiral Jetty” disappeared under the rising waters of the lake, which at one point reached a depth of sixteen feet above it. A few years ago it emerged as the water level fell, just in time to rekindle interest in its maker, sparking both art pilgrimages to its remote site and reconsideration of Smithson’s projects and, more broadly, his ideas. This history makes the jetty an apt metaphor for an exhibit that gathers together works by 23 artists celebrating his accomplishment and displaying his influence. For instance, the protean scale and variety of component parts prevents either being seen in exactly the same way by two different viewers. Some parts accessible to eye and mind seem to emerge above the murky postmodern waters that submerge others. In fact, the most accessible works—those that directly quote “Spiral Jetty,” which fill the first room and form a thoughtful introduction to the show’s subject—are finally the least interesting. The more an artist liberates Smithson’s themes to play out in new material, the better.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts