Innocence [4]
When Smithson first saw Rozel Point, the eventual location of Spiral Jetty, he was captivated by the abandoned oil rigs and industrial detritus that littered the shore of the lake. He wrote, “from that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty… My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other.” The website of Dia Foundation, which owns Spiral Jetty, notes: “As a path for walking and looking, Spiral Jetty is a sculpture to be experienced” in “the prehistoric environment that Smithson selected for it.”
If an environment can be prehistoric, it must also be posthistoric. Nothing that is past can be seen, or wishes to be seen.
One night at a bar in Iowa City, I sat talking with friends about our hometowns. One of them asked me why conspiracy theories and alien abductions are so common in the Southwest. “People there feel alienated from their own landscape,” I responded. “If you get high up enough in the desert, you can see everything laid out for you. But none of it makes any sense.” I was surprised by what I said. I walked home wondering if I really believed it as a rule, or if I was just speaking personally.
Tahualtapa was once the highest mountain in San Bernardino Valley, sacred to the Cahuilla people. Significantly quarried, now little more than a hill, it’s currently known as Mount Slover, after a fur trader who was killed in a bear attack. Lewis DeSoto, a Cahuilla artist, created photographs, sculptures, maps, and public art of Tahualtapa and its changing shape. In his images, the quarry is haunted by its former silhouette—in one, it looks like a light flare from a nearby streetlight; in another, cement splatters outward from an absent form, suggested on the horizon. The shape of the mountain is unavoidable, preserved despite its many changing names, materials, and perspectives. deSoto says the work originated from a passing remark by a friend, who said it was “too bad the mountain wasn’t there anymore.”10 The disappearance had been so gradual deSoto hadn’t seen it happening—a different dialectic of site and non-site.
9 Smithson, Robert, and Jack Flam. “The Spiral Jetty (1972).” Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif. Etc., 2017, pp. 146.
10 Lippard, Lucy R. Undermining: A Wild Ride in Words and Images through Land Use Politics in the Changing West. The New Press, 2014, pp. 54.