by Kevin Freitas
“People who tell us that the solution to our problem is drilling offshore are peddling our addiction,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “The drug is oil, and they don't want us to get off it.”
With the latest brouhaha in Congress over George Bush’s recent lifting of a presidential moratorium, established by his father George H.W. Bush in 1990 limiting offshore drilling along our southern coast and parts of Alaska, it doesn’t take an oil rigger to figure out that our dependency on the “black gold” and its derivatives permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. It affects us in our addiction to foreign oil, the prices we pay at the pump, how much heating oil we can afford to stock up on, and the candidate we will choose in this year’s presidential election. Lou Reed sang about another type of addiction, heroin addiction. Here’s a small excerpt:
Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, its my wife and its my life
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I’m better off than dead
Or out of gas.
Oil is America’s heroin. A habit no methadone or corn oil is going to replace anytime soon.
I don’t want to argue the pros and cons of oil dependency. I do want to see fewer Hummers on the road, and a few less Republicans steering this doomed Raft of the Medusa we call government. However, on a smaller scale, oil has seeped into areas of our lives we likely never even considered shoring up – our appreciation for art. And since I know more about art than I do oil drilling (not surprising), I would like to demonstrate how a public outcry earlier this year and a recent trip to the Great Salt Lake of Utah, increased my love for one and my distaste for the other. My thanks go to an iconic figure and his mythical artwork entitled “Spiral Jetty.” Who is this personnage? His name is Robert Smithson, artiste extraordinaire.
The Spiral Jetty
Smithson is someone you would call a “learned man,” a colloquialism at best but entirely accurate. I’ve only minutely scratched the surface and range of his writings and artworks, available to us today via countless photographs, publications, archives, film, and documentation, which were for the most part produced before a tragic plane crash in 1973 took his life. He was 35 years old. His intelligence and a keen perception of people and things, grouped with an insatiable curiosity, led him into fields outside of art such as science, crystallography, geology, indigenous cultures, film studies, astronomy, and literature, and on and on.
A brilliant man and artist, he would forever change the physical landscape and how we perceive it. Should you ever have the good fortune to delve into some of his writings or read what has been written about him, you’ll find the word entropy used quite often to describe the basis or foundation of his thinking, philosophy and sculptural underpinnings. What does it mean and how does it relate?
Entropy (definition Merriam-Webster): 2a the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity; b a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.
Smithson was a Land artist, part of a larger group of sculptors (working outside in nature), whose movement or trend, if you will, was later christened
Earthworks. This new direction in art was attributed to its original founders, Robert Smithson and Claes Oldenburg - better known as a pop artist. In 1967, Oldenburg created what would later be recognized as the first earthwork. He paid a union grave-digger to dig a six foot long trench (shortly thereafter refilled in) or a “Hole” as it was titled, in the middle of New York’s Central Park. This act would also serendipitously open the doors to future art movements that would produce Conceptual and Minimalist sculptures. As I write this last sentence, I’m painfully aware of the sometimes hedonistic and inclusive nature of the art world at the expense of the society in which it exists, hermetically carrying about its business, naming its own movements, interests, and direction. The question I am often asked — “Is it art?” — continues to plague me to this day.
Suzaan Boettger, author of Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, writes, “Oldenburg’s Hole was the first contemporary sculpture made directly in the ground. Yet it was dug at a time when the use of those unrefined materials specifically associated with the surface of the earth – dirt and sand – was gaining increasing importance in sculpture. In the United States the most immediate artistic precedent was the project (Robert) Smithson described in his 1967 article Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site.”
Whether something is art or not, can be answered perhaps, in how it changes your perceptions, assumptions, and ideas about the ordinary.
However, entropy and earthworks meant different things to different artists of this generation. To hear Smithson tell it, we’re all victims of our own self-induced entropy by being consumers, with the resulting havoc it has on the environment (waste) and our destructive obsession to standardize social etiquette, habitats, and work. Sadly and a bit prophetic, some 35 years later, Smithson is still right.
In April of 1966, Artforum published Smithson’s more sober "Entropy and the New Monuments". Boettger writes that “For his first essay in this influential journal Smithson made the bold inversion of declaring that the severe and hulking (often greater than human scale) geometric sculpture that would come to be called ‘Minimal’ displayed the condition of entropy, a term in physics for a state of decreasing order.” These sculptures would “bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age.” Smithson’s fascination with all things entropic, of systems breaking down, of decay and ruin was a large part of his art-making practice and his worldview. Often critical of an ever conforming society, he often used minimal sculpture as an analogy by, “likening this work to the cold glass boxes along Park Avenue, which helped foster the entropic mood.”
More importantly though, it was how he positioned himself as an artist, in relation to events going on at the time. Boettger again writes:
Although Smithson’s sensitivity to deterioration and loss came out of personal experience and provided a perspective for him on art, architecture, and geological sites, the concept of entropy also offers an apt metaphor for the societal mood of the late 1960s. It describes the public’s apprehension over the deterioration of nature from pervasive pollution, of the country’s slackening economic pace under the burden of the Vietnam War, and on the social level, a late-sixties society that was itself undergoing disruption. The experience of increasing disorder in a system could serve as a macrocosmic explanation for the sense that, under the stress of civil rights protests, antiwar divisiveness, and the broad rejection of tradition in all forms of art and social mores that was destabilizing familiar conventionality, the country itself was experiencing breakdowns and fractures.
Looking across the lake
Sound familiar? Hindsight is 20/20 as you know, and I admit, it is quite easy to compare and contrast events of the past with events of today, finding similarities to prove a point. My interest in bringing this up for discussion is to exemplify the cohesive thinking and complete system of beliefs held by Smithson and his fellow artists. Does this mean the time is right for another Earthworks movement, since even today, we’re experiencing similar social and economic breakdowns? Probably not. Beyond the prohibitive cost and funding needed, I can imagine only too well the slew of permits and ordnances it would require even to begin. But you could, I believe, argue that the push toward everything “green” to regulating your carbon footprint is – now that every corporation in America wants to be seen as David against a polluting Goliath – just another form of Earthworks, commercialized and packaged for those who can afford to play and pay. Inasmuch as Smithson viewed his work and the work of fellow minimalists as homage to the “anti-monument,” and the entropic sedation of the grand public, there was also a concerted effort to counterbalance the previous 10 years or so of Abstract Expressionism that had the art world in its throes.
In avoiding the engrenage of a commercialized art world – galleries, patrons, collectors, museums, auctions et al, well on its way to becoming the norm (see 1980s) – and by building your sculpture under the stars, it did two things: create an instant shroud of the unknown or undiscovered, requiring an eventual pilgrimage, and the assurance that the artwork in question would be un-sellable, not like some painting on some gallery wall. You couldn’t exactly possess some bulldozed trench in the middle of the Nevada desert now, could you?
Red Sea
The biggest difference I believe, between Smithson and artists working today is that they lack the drive, political discourse, and incentives (personal as opposed to commercial) that such an ambitious project like the “Spiral Jetty” would require. The art world today is also in a state of entropy, surely what Smithson would label in a state of “cultural confinement.”
In "Entropy Made Visible – Interview with Alison Sky" [The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt], Smithson talks about the energy crisis during his lifetime as yet another form of entropy. It’s difficult not to make the same associations to our own current energy crisis in 2008. He states, “...the earth being the closed system, there’s only a certain amount of resources and of course there’s an attempt to reverse entropy through the recycling of garbage.” This recycling, this attempt to reverse entropy, also exists within the art world and especially within the art market. By recycling the art stars and eventually consuming them as mere combustible products, organizing blockbuster exhibitions, granting unwarranted retrospectives, and increasingly inflated auction prices. Art it seems is à la mode.
My point is this: times have changed obviously, and America a lot. Are we better off than we were in 1968, the age of world revolution? It’s debatable. Was 9/11 just another form of entropy too? Maybe. There exist issues in America, and problems of values, morals, religion, black, white, borders/no borders, the economy, Bush, and then more Bush, with no end in sight. Have we lost our innocence or us as individuals? Our collective virginity? Certainly so. I guess it doesn’t matter. But where is the art in all of this? I keep going back to the art and its artists. Who’s taking up the slack where Smithson and others left off? I would like to know, I would like to meet them and shake their hand. Have I lost faith, have I lost art? Help me.
The solution, I believe, is ideas. You need an idea, the desire to see it realized, the courage to take the risk, the perseverance to continue when it is crumbling around you, and the vision, strength, and stamina to see it through. You may not think dumping 6 ½ tons of basalt rock into a lake bed in the form of a reverse spiral is significant. You may even think it is a waste of time, energy, and resources. I’m here to tell you differently. If you haven’t yet stood on the edge of the Spiral Jetty as I have, and like many before me, looked out across the lake and saw where the horizon line designates where one of the Earth’s four sides ends, then you won’t be able to understand the human spirit and the innate desire to create.
I stand and dream. I see an abandoned oil jetty in ruin from the 1900s (Amoco Oil tried to resurrect one in the '70s), 500 yards to my left – man’s failed attempt at reverse entropy. I am on solid rock, on a solid shape, created in harmony with nature, that is slowly being absorbed, coddled, blanketed by the ebb and flow of a lake, its salty breath heaving in and out, its even respiration ever steady, not ready to stop, not crumbling, not retiring as the jetty holds this part of the Earth together. The Spiral Jetty is a gift to the Gods, an ancient symbol, a testimony and a sacrifice on the altar of a red algae sea, poised gracefully (delicately) within the landscape, it is a marker of time and of a man’s imprint. I stand, pelicans fly overhead, F-16s follow, and then there is silence. Only the airless vacuum of the sun’s rays and blinding white heat, glistening off the icy white crystals floating like miniature icebergs or clinging to molten rocks, licking their pocked faces, filling their orifices with slippery fluids, ebb and flow, hardening, crystallizing, growing, expulsion, rebirth. I am a sacrificial lamb, a victim to the lake that drains the moisture out of my body, I am ALIVE. I am such a small insignificant part of this vast ecosystem, helpless, defenseless, and puny. I am grateful to be here.
At the jetty, finally arrived
Smithson created a roundabout to infinity; he is nature’s beloved architect. To the very bowels of the earth, he has staked a claim where Man is allowed to stand freely, on par with the Gods if for only a moment, before we are sent back down the entropic slide into Hell. Time is of the essence now, and we are threatened – you, me, the jetty and art. The Spiral Jetty has finally emerged from its archaic slumber within recent years, having been submerged or partially for most of its life, the lake waters dropping, in part due to record dry seasons. I dare say global warming? It has risen like a Phoenix from the womb, from its source, for a reason. What should we do with it now? Let me help you decide.
Rock Salt
The cycle begins
