7/25/2023 0 Comments Spiral jetty corinne utSmithson’s earthworks wager with time, though the artist refused any claim to posterity or monumental ideality of form-a vision of destructive temporality best conveyed as retrogression. Importantly, Spiral Jetty inverts a drain’s natural flow, its counterclockwise spin opposing natural order and historical progress alike. Its coiling form conveys no stable system or desirable order but instead a threatening vision of tumult and disintegration, a destructive “whirlpool,” as Smithson suggests (“Four” 227). Yet the sculpture is perhaps an even more apt reflection of today’s calamitous political-ecological moment. The grand, purposeless spiral of Smithson’s self-defeating Jetty evokes the contradictions of his time, its heady ambitions and wicked defeats. The equivocal phrase neatly captures a paradox of this historical conjuncture, its odd combination of terminal and inaugural time, when public consciousness reaches a peak at the same moment that climate fatalism begins to take hold in liberal and progressive discourse. In the midst of a cataclysmic wildfire season in Australia, a firefighter suggested that the start of the new decade could mark “year zero” for environmental politics (Goldrick). ![]() New and newly energized movements in ecology and climate justice (such as the climate strike movement and Extinction Rebellion) have significantly broadened public awareness of global heating even as local policies and international accords fail to stem the frightening growth of so-called “negative externalities,” from rising sea levels and ocean acidification to secular drought and mass extinctions. Like a turn in Smithson’s diminishing, self-consuming spiral in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the returning date of this half centenary brings stark new threats and a powerful urgency to environmentalism. At stake, precisely, is the question of time in ecological consciousness. ![]() Fifty years after the building of Spiral Jetty, the significance of Smithson’s contretemps with environmentalism has come into focus. To ecology Smithson opposed the dispiriting concept of entropy to political activism he advised suspending the will and, to Earth Day protesters who seized the occasion, Smithson might have suggested dwelling in the “arrested moment” of geological time (“Four” 228). And yet Smithson’s aesthetic vision was largely at odds with environmentalist discourse. Like the broader Land Art movement of the 1960s, Smithson’s sculptural work reflects the social ferment and ecological consciousness that would lead, within a few months of the inaugural Earth Day, to the founding of the US Environmental Protection Agency. The historical convergence is significant, if somewhat ironic. ![]() A petroglyph in rubble, a gnomic symbol in a desert sea, Smithson’s most celebrated artwork is indelibly linked by that shared date to a formative moment in modern environmentalism. Robert Smithson broke ground on his visionary sculpture Spiral Jetty in April 1970, the month of the first Earth Day demonstrations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |