Holt/Smithson Foundation Presents: Spiral Jetty
Still from Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970), 16 mm film, Color, sound, Duration: 35 minutes, © Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Through April and May 2020 Holt/Smithson Foundation is inviting the public to join them for a series of Friday Films.
Between 12 pm on Friday and 12 pm on Saturday (Mountain Time [MST], the time zone of the Foundation’s home base in New Mexico), every Friday in April and May, the foundation will present a moving image work by Nancy Holt and/or Robert Smithson on Vimeo and IGTV.
The second Friday Film selection is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), introduced by William T. Carson, Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Program Manager. Between 12 pm on Friday, April 10, and 12 pm on Saturday, April 11, MST, the film will be accessible here.
© Holt/Smithson Foundation
Smithson made the film Spiral Jetty upon returning to New York from Utah in 1970, after completing his landmark earthwork of the same name in April of that year. Spiral Jetty is located on the Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake. Made from over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and soil collected from the site, Spiral Jetty stretches 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide in a counterclockwise spiral.
In 1999 Nancy Holt and the Estate of Robert Smithson donated the earthwork to Dia Art Foundation, who continue as owners and stewards of the work. Dia partners with the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College, Holt/Smithson Foundation, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah to further advocate for Spiral Jetty. The Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands within the State of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources oversees the lakebed where Spiral Jetty is located.
As well as the earthwork and film, “Spiral Jetty” is the title of an essay Smithson wrote in 1972. He describes returning home from Utah to New York (“the urban desert”), where he “contacted Bob Fiore and Barbara Jarvis and asked them to help me put my movie together.”
Lasting thirty-five minutes, the film is, in Smithson’s words, “a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving.” The film starts with an image of the sun, moving to a bumpy drive out to the Great Salt Lake, to torn pages from an atlas discarded on the ground. Smithson’s voice forms the soundtrack. He tells stories and cites references as the film shows the making of the Spiral Jetty earthwork, the galleries of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Smithson himself running around the coil of the earthwork.
Smithson was fascinated by relationships between geological and human time, and this film highlights both. In the voiceover, he compares industrial construction to the formation of the earth, and dinosaurs to digging machines and dump trucks. There is something wonderfully eerie and hypnotic about the film.