![]() All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere I thought of Jackson Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat. My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. My sight was saturated by the colour of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents, no they were veins and arteries sucking up the obscure sediments. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. On the slopes of Rozel Point I closed my yes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiralling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times.Ĭhemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Growth in a crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw. And each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal’s molecular lattice. One’s downward gaze pitches from side to side, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the inner and outer edges, while the entire mass echoes the irregular horizons. On eye leve, the tail leads on into an undifferentiated state of matter. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. A crack in the wall, if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jigsaw puzzle that composes the salt flats. It is one of the few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. ![]() Irregular beds of limestone dip gently eastward, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance. About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site. In the paragraphs below extracted from a longer essay, Robert Smithson poetically evokes the primordial forces that called his Spiral Jetty into being: Occasionally an artist does a better job than critics eliciting through words the majesty of a work of art. Robert Smithson, “Sprial Jetty,” Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970.
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