(piano music)
- [Steven] In 1970, Robert Smithson hired several people
to help him create Spiral Jetty.
We're standing right in the middle,
at the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
- [Beth] But we're not seeing this
the way that it existed when Smithson first created it,
where it was an intersection between the land
and the very odd water of the Great Salt Lake.
- [Steven] This is a terminal basin,
a huge lake that had been largely freshwater,
but there is no outlet,
so the water, once it flows here from rivers and streams,
collects and then simply evaporates.
Which means that the water is dense with minerals.
- [Beth] And especially with salt,
very much like the Dead Sea in the Middle East.
And this is one of a handful of these terminal basins
that exist in the world.
- [Steven] Almost nothing can live here.
There are a few fish that live at the outlet of some of the
freshwater rivers, and--
- [Beth] And there are brine shrimp,
and algae, in fact there's a particular kind of algae
that makes the water turn pinkish-red,
and that was true when Smithson created Spiral Jetty.
But today as we look out at the lake, it's blue.
- [Steven] With help from the Dawn Gallery,
which represented him, Smithson was able to bring
a front-loader and dump trucks, a tractor,
to help move these basalt stones and sand
and some soil into place.
- [Beth] By creating a spiral,
Smithson created lots of opportunities
where the land and the water could meet one another.
- [Steven] But right now,
because the American West is in the midst of a drought,
the water has receded
and is at a great distance from this earthwork.
- [Beth] So, instead of the water
filling the spaces in between the spiral,
we have sand.
So this was very much meant to be a work of art
that changed, based on natural principles.
- [Steven] Smithson was interested in the idea of entropy,
the idea of the way things break down.
And his intervention in this natural landscape,
it's an expression of the way in which
artists thought about the landscape for many years.
- [Beth] We could go back to
artists like Caspar David Friedrich,
who thought about the overwhelming size and power of nature
and the smallness of man,
and that's certainly one of the themes here,
for me, as we stand here.
But we could also think about the importance
of the vastness of the American landscape
in 19th-century American painting,
or even its importance to the Abstract Expressionists
in the 1950s.
- [Steven] We can go even further back
and look at the artwork of indigenous peoples
in the Americas, long before the Europeans arrived,
the geoglyphs, better known as the Nazca Lines,
in Peru, in South America,
or the earthworks that come out of the
Fort Ancient culture in North America.
And in fact, the very shape of Spiral Jetty
is a form that has shown up in petroglyphs
throughout the American West.
- [Beth] And it's a form that appears in nature,
quite frequently.
- [Steven] One of the anecdotes
that Smithson was apparently aware of
was the centuries-old idea
that the Great Salt Lake contained a whirlpool
that somehow connected it to the Pacific Ocean.
So the idea of a spiral or whirlpool
is active even in these stories that predate Smithson.
But this is also a sculpture
that is rooted in the 20th century,
in an industrial culture.
1970 was the year of the first Earth Day,
and that signaled an important early moment
in the environmental movement.
The idea of the ruination that man was visiting on nature
is clearly informing work like this.
- [Beth] And Earth Day being this time when we
reflect on environmental issues,
but the relationship between the growing industrial nature
of the United States
and the amazingly beautiful, vast, virgin landscape
that was here when Europeans arrived,
is a theme throughout 19th-century American painting.
And as we stand here, we see mountains,
we see the basalt
that's formed from a volcano.
So we have a very powerful sense of the passage of time
that I think was very interesting to Smithson.
By putting art outside in the world
it becomes part of the process of nature.
It can't be conserved.
- [Steven] In 1970, this was still a radical idea,
the idea of taking art off the wall,
bringing it outside, outside of the confines of a home
or a museum.
- [Beth] And thereby outside of the commercial,
of a work that could be bought and sold.
- [Steven] Smithson was interested
in creating a porous relationship
between that more controlled gallery experience
and the experience of art in the world.
So can a work like this also exist in Manhattan?
Can it also exist in a gallery?
- [Beth] Well, we did drive two hours
from Salt Lake City.
So one does have to make an intentional pilgrimage
to see this.
We're really in the middle of
a vast, empty space in the American West.
- [Steven] And yet this artwork
was not conceived of as existing only here.
- [Beth] There's a video,
there are aerial photographs.
And so, like many works of art in the 1960s and '70s
that were ephemeral,
they exist through their documentation.
Although this still exists here also.
- [Steven] And I have to say,
I wouldn't feel as if experienced this work of art fully
had I not come out here.
- [Beth] Standing here looking at Spiral Jetty
and being really aware of how different it is
than when Smithson created it in 1970
really makes me think about museums
as places where we entrust works of art.
We lock them away from time,
we conserve them and create special conditions
to stop time from hurting them.
But here Smithson creates something
that time is supposed to change.
- [Steven] Museums in a sense try to do the impossible,
which raises a really interesting question:
what do we do with the significant work of art
that was intended to change over time?
This work of art and the land that it sits on
came under the control of the Dia Art Foundation.
What does an institution like Dia do
with something like this?
Does it try to protect it?
Does it allow natural and industrial forces
to play with the landscape around it?
And so what Dia did is,
in concert with the Getty Conservation Institute,
is to make the decision to regularly document this object.
- [Beth] You mentioned this idea of entropy,
which was so important to Smithson,
this idea that the tendency of all things,
according to the laws of physics,
is to move from order to disorder, to chaos.
And I think we have that sense of things coming apart here.
- [Steven] So Smithson is imposing a geometric order
into this natural landscape,
into this vast space that is in the process,
over millions of years, of disassembling.
Here, more specifically, we can see
the way his intervention is slowly coming apart.
- [Beth] And I think that sense that
over millions of years this will come apart
makes us aware of the brevity of our own lifespans
in the grandeur of time.
(waves lapping)