John Coplans and I met Robert and Nancy Smithson in Salt Lake; we were going to drive from there to see Spiral Jetty, a piece Smithson had made on the north shore. Smithson told us that Serra had called from Missouri, where he was tearing his hair out trying to make a piece. Smithson has a very low and very evil grin, which he breaks out in his gleeful moments. “I told him,” he said grinning, “it was going to be tough.” Every time you thought you found your place in a site the site kicked you out of it. Makes you feel like a fool. That’s what Serra was going through. (I think that’s what Smithson was saying.) Smithson had had site trouble too. He had been looking around the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake for two months without a hit. “Then this guy told me he knew a place where there was a red lake. I said “Where?”
On the way we talked about the ecological groups, which Smithson finds confused. There had been a lot of ecological language used in the furor that had preceded the Canadians’ decision to cancel the island of broken glass, an ecologically harmless piece. And ecology-minded people had grumbled against Serra’s Pasadena piece, for wasting trees. Smithson felt that in both cases the community had made of the art scapegoats for their own failure to come to grips with what they knew was killing them. It was true, I thought. The ecological conscience of Moraga would be out-raged by both pieces; people from Canyon, on the other hand, would simply have taken them as ecology pieces, pretty good one. (To which Serra might say, “Ecology pieces! Where’s that at?”)
The handwriting was on the wall for ecology, Smithson felt. “All of those sins. And here’s 2000 coming so near. Sin everywhere. The dead river, with its black oil slime. The crucified river instead of the crucified man. When do you think they’ll start burning polluters at the stake?” Such talk makes me nervous, so I said something about Spiral Jetty. Smithson had been making fun of something I’d written about the “ever-deepening” political crisis. He though there was a phony moral urgency in the use of term like that. “Yeah,” he said balefully, “the ever-deepening spiral of politics.”
The red lake is on Rozel Point, described in one of Smithson’s geology of books as “… a small, blunt peninsula… extending southward on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake.” The Great Salt Lake, Smithson told me happily, had successfully resisted any and all attempts by man to put it to any constructive use whatsoever, from the day men first laid eyes on it right up to now. I had also discovered that for a long time it had been an oasis of chills and thrills in the humdrum desert of geology: “The notion,” says the Guidebook to the Geology of Utah (a must for art critics), “that the lake must be connected to the Pacific by a subterranean channel. At the head of which a huge whirlpool threatened the safety of lake craft was not dispelled until the 1870s.” A bad decade for geology, the 1870s, worse for the always useless and now not even interesting Great Salt Lake. Is art supposed to give back what science takes away? Smithson I remembered, gets into conversation with Mexican gods.
Art is nature, re-arranged. Like everyone else, Smithson learned it in high school. In a free society, artists get to re-arrange nature just like everyone else, lumber kings, mining czars, oil barons; nature, a kind of huge, placid Schmoo, just lays there, aching with pleasure. Smithson, reaching for his artistic birthright, kept turning up another kind of nature: “The non-sites let you know about the entropy of the urban.” Planting a tree upside down, a relatively elementary re-arrangement, turned out to change not only the object, but the subject: “art for the flies.” Holding the mirror up to nature in the Yucatan, an even more rudimentary re-arrangement, reflected a vast conspiracy of pre-scientific forces moving over the face of the earth. The system obviously wasn’t working right: you were supposed to re-arrange nature, not join it.
Art is also art re-arranged, and Spiral Jetty does what it can. There was Andre’s Lever, and Brancusi’s Endless Column before that. You don’t get a piece like Lever to turn in on itself by fooling around with a length of rubber hose, as Smithson had undoubtedly discovered by looking at New York art for the last few years.
It took a long time walking out onto Spiral Jetty. Smithson kept being amazed at all the changes the piece had gone through since he’d last seen it. Thick deposits of salt had outlined the piece in white. A completely unexpected yellow mineral had appeared, mixing with the rosy water and the white salt crystals along many edges of the piece. Best of all, an electric storm was coming up across the lake, lightning and all. The piece was a fantasy. In the middle of Utah. Well, isn’t that what artists do? Make fantasies?