Smithson's Jetty is a creation devoid of any frame or boundary. Water, in an uncanny kind of foreshadowing, running red (the algae giving it its hue), weaves through it, a shimmering spiral unraveling into its open rock-structure.
Incidentally,
Red is... the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.
—G.K. Chesterton
—Mark Rothko
This masterpiece is exquisitely attuned to the lake's ever-changing conditions. As the water’s level and salinity shift, so does the jetty. Salt crystals assume a pivotal role in this dance. As a scholar of crystallography, Smithson foresaw the rocks would cloak themselves in a spectral layer of salt. He often remarked that salt crystals could grow in spirals, stating that the piece would perpetually spiral, like a fractal, endlessly intricate no matter how closely observed. Each inch of Spiral Jetty becomes a delicate, dizzying interface where the artwork and the world entwine.
Indeed, "the Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within a spiraling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times," like a mirror that is only a fragment within a spiral of mirrors. And then within another spiral. You get the idea.
Smithson beckoned viewers to traverse the spiral’s brackish curves, inviting a deliberate disorientation. "Following the spiral steps we return to our origins," he mused, "back to some pulpy protoplasm." To visit the jetty is to dissolve into its very essence. It is to evolve and to devolve.
Spiral Jetty, a testament to contingency, surrenders itself to ceaseless transformation, eschewing any illusion of permanence. Fifty years after Smithson's passing, the lake's ecosystem struggles to recover from a devastating drought, echoing the concept of entropy he had an enduring fascination with. Desiccated and laid bare, Spiral Jetty exposes this crisis while inviting us to confront our radical inseparability from the earth.
Why is this important, aside from the fact that it is unbelievably cool and haunting?
I first learned about Spiral Jetty while watching Deseret (the title refers to the name the territory of Utah chose for itself when campaigning for statehood in the 1860s), an audiotextual film by James Benning of 1996.
Through the haunting lens of journalistic anecdotes, Benning weaves together 93 New York Times stories about what is now known as Utah—its violences and the history of Mormonism—juxtaposed with static shots of the stone’s Anasazi petroglyphs (the pre-European history of Utah is typically divided into three categories, the Archaic Indian Period, the Fremont/Anasazi Indian Period, and the Ute Indian Period), the rock art originating from each of those), ruins, and sediment. Each sentence introduces a new landscape in which to lose oneself. Fonts, colors, and latent fears gradually morph over time, as the careful curation of image and narrative intertwines and then diverges.
Stationary shots intertwine with the weaving of historical events, the violence conveyed linguistically contrasts sharply with the nearly-static visuals, often creating, indeed, a sense of disorientation, going back to the experience of the Jetty that we started with.
The history and its various forms of man-made violence, the radioactive particles, like an unlikely fatal snow, corrupting the crystals, are swirling around the ancient rocks with their art, carved into the stone by those who came long before us, in itself a kind of archaic newspaper, the images the purpose of which is often fabled and mysterious.
Speaking of the violence of Mormonism and its infamous doctrine of blood atonement, the omission the of extremely infamous Lafferty murders (see Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer) is a bit inexplicable, especially since we hear about Gary Gilmore and the specifics of his death by firing squad, as detailed in The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer.
Let me return, however, to the question of the immutable, the many faces of violence, and suffering. According to Emmanuel Levinas, a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry and a key thinker of ethics in the 20th century, “all suffering relates back to evil.”
In The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals, Adi Ophir, a contemporary Israeli (pro-Palestinian) theorist, asserts that "we need to study the production of evils as concretely as we study geology," calling for a detailed and systematic examination of human actions and their destructive impacts, analogous to how geologists study the Earth's physical structure and processes. This concept can be deeply explored through the lens of Benning's film Deseret, which juxtaposes the enduring nature of geological formations in the Utah desert with the transient yet profound violence inflicted by human activities, such as nuclear testing.
In this film, the permanence and timelessness of the desert's landscape—its rocks, sand, and vast open spaces—serve as a backdrop that highlights the stark contrast between the natural world's stability and the disruptive force of human intervention, as presented by The New York Times news reports. The geological features of the desert, shaped over millions of years, embody a sense of continuity and resilience. They stand as silent witnesses to the passage of time and the episodes of human-induced violence, without, however, being impervious to it. Even the stone-newspaper is gradually being erased.
Benning's film meticulously documents various human atrocities, including the aforementioned historical episodes of nuclear testing, that have scarred the landscape irrevocably. These events represent what Ophir describes as the "production [and distribution] of evils." With their immediate and long-lasting effects on the environment and human health, the destructive power of atomic tests exemplifies how human actions can introduce profound and often irreversible harm to the world.
It is then possible to theorize the irremediable brought by man-made violence as the new, terrible permanence, in a way that the Qliphoth is the perverse upside-down of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
By presenting the desolate beauty of the desert alongside archival news reports and visual records of nuclear tests, Deseret provides a compelling narrative that underscores the duality of permanence and impermanence, as well as, I would argue, the ultimate inversion and redefinition of the two, the earth itself now acquiring an abyssal flimsiness to it. This juxtaposition reflects Ophir’s call for a concrete study of evils: just as geologists meticulously analyze rock formations to understand natural history, we must scrutinize the origins, mechanisms, and consequences of human actions that produce and/or fail to alleviate ongoing suffering and destruction.
This is a film that is created out of the rift between what we see and what we hear, plunging our senses into cognitive and affective disarray. Perhaps this is the rift we must dwell on, if we want to confront both Ophir’s imperative and the forever-tainted crystals of the Jetty itself.
And the red, "the most joyous and dreadful thing in the physical universe," flows forth. It shall flow no more when the mountains dance in the wind like leaves, when the human shadow is etched into stone.
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