The cramped paradox of English life: a tiny island that is often hard and sometimes impossible to get around. You can imagine a prospective visitor from Arizona studying a map of England and deciding, ‘Yep, we should be able to do this little puppy in a couple of days.’ But how long does it take to travel from Gloucester to Heathrow? Anything from two and a half hours to. . Well, best to allow five to be on the safe side.
In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We had turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at one o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, Jessica and I drove 450 miles to Springdale, on the edge of Zion, in Utah. There were just two of us now, a husband-and-wife team, and we got to Springdale exactly on time for our dinner reservation. After a couple of nights in Zion we headed to the Spiral Jetty.
Yes, the Spiral Jetty—the wholly elusive grail of Land Art! Instantly iconic, it was transformed into legend by a double negative: the disappearance of the Jetty a mere two years after it was created, followed, a year later, by the premature death of its creator, Robert Smithson. Water levels at the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah were unusually low when the Jetty was built in 1970. When the water returned to its normal depth the Jetty went under. On 20 July 1973, Smithson was in a light aircraft, reconnoitering a work in progress in Amarillo, Texas. The plane ploughed into a hillside, killing everyone onboard: the pilot, a photographer, and the artist. Smithson was thirty-five. After the Jetty sank and his plane crashed, Smithson’s reputation soared.
For a quarter of a century the Spiral Jetty was all but invisible. There were amazing photographs of the coils of rock in the variously coloured water — reddish, pink, pale blue — and there was the Zapruder-inflected footage of its construction, but the Jetty had gone the way of Atlantis, sinking beneath the waveless waves of the Salt Lake. Then, in 1999, a miracle occurred. Excalibur-like, it emerged from the lake. And not only that. The Jetty was made out of earth and black lumps of basalt (six and a half thousand tonnes of it), but during the long interval of its submersion it had become covered in salt crystals. In newly resurrected form, it was pristine glittering white.
Even now, after this spectacular renaissance, the Spiral Jetty is not always visible. If there is exceptionally heavy snowfall, then the thaw does for the lake what the globally heated polar ice pack threatens to do to the oceans. Once the snowmelt ends up in the lake, it can take months of drought and scorch to boil off the excess and leave the Jetty high and dry again. Was it worth travelling all this way to see something we might not be able to see? Well, pilgrims continued to turn up even during the long years when there was definitely nothing to see, so it seemed feeble not to give it a chance. (There is probably a sect of art-world extremists who maintain that the best time to have visited the Spiral Jetty was during the years of its invisible submergence, when the experience became a pure manifestation of faith.)
We drove north towards Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the grey-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft (‘hard’ in England) shoulder. Salt Lake City did its bit, its level best, coming to meet us well before we got anywhere near it — and not quite saying goodbye even when we thought we’d got beyond it.
With all the space out west there’s no incentive for cities not to sprawl. In the case of Salt Lake City, mountains to the east and the lake to the west mean it does most of its sprawl along a north-south ribbon. Still, there was room for the interstate to gradually assume the width, frenzy — and, eventually, stagnation — of a Los Angeles freeway. Salt Lake City merged, imperceptibly, into Ogden, where we were staying. Not a bad place: fringed by Schloss Adler mountains in at least two directions and looking, on 25th Street at least, as if it was making a Spiral Jetty—style comeback from a downturn in fortunes still afflicting other parts of town. Or maybe it was just the alpine winter, which, even in mid-May, had still not shot its wad. Trees weren’t convinced they’d got the all-clear; leaf-wise, none of them were venturing out.
In the hotel I read again Lawrence’s essay about Taos. Whereas ‘some places seem temporary on the face of the earth,’ Lawrence believed, ‘some places seem final’:
Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality. Not like a great city. But, in its way, like one of the monasteries of Europe. You cannot come upon the ruins of the old great monasteries of England, beside their waters, in some lovely valley, now remote, without feeling that here is one of the choice spots of the earth, where the spirit dwelt. To me it is so important to remember that when Rome collapsed, when the great Roman Empire fell into smoking ruins, and bears roamed in the streets of Lyon and wolves howled in the deserted streets of Rome, and Europe really was a dark ruin, then, it was not in castles or manors or cottages that life remained vivid. Then those whose souls were still alive withdrew together and gradually built monasteries, and these monasteries and convents, little communities of quiet labour and courage, isolated, helpless, and yet never overcome in a world flooded with devastation, these alone kept the human spirit from disintegration, from going quite dark, in the Dark Ages. These men made the Church, which again made Europe, inspiring the martial faith of the Middle Ages.
Taos pueblo affects me rather like one of the old monasteries. When you get there you feel something final. There is an arrival.
What a piece of writing and thinking! It’s as off-the-cuff as Kerouac; it’s analytical, hypnotic, profound, and you get the impression that Lawrence wrote the whole thing — in 1923—without giving it so much as a second thought. Like Vedder’s painting, it tells us so much about the power that some places exert and why we go to them. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.
The weather in the morning, as we prepared for our assault on the Jetty, was not auspicious: sagging cloud, hardly any light and, the moment we drove off, drizzle. On the way out of town we got stuck behind a Dirty Harry school bus. By the time we were back on I-15 it was pouring.
We turned off the interstate at Brigham City, heading towards Corinne, a small farming community. It already felt far more remote, in atmosphere, than it was distant in miles — like Snowdonia or Mull, and just as soggy and drear. The sky was heavy with grey but at least it was only leaking now, not properly raining. Khaki-coloured hills crawled out from beneath a tarpaulin of cloud. The route to the Jetty took us through the Golden Spike National Historic Site, commemorating the spot where the two parts of the first transcontinental railroad met in 1869. It was at this point that we began participating in our own form of interactive art commentary.
Smithson was the prime mover in the Land Art scene: not just creating work but organizing exhibitions, setting out credos, proselytising, writing reviews and providing dense theoretical cover for the whole Earth Works hustle. He was a prolific, even torrential writer, and an omnivorous reader. For current tastes he was a tad too caught up in what might be called the discursive practice of the day, but his writing is replete with moments of compelling lucidity and sustained flights of pragmatically visionary appeal. The cover photograph of his Collected Writings shows the artist on the Jetty, gazing dialectically at his own reflection, looking like Jim Morrison, or like Val Kilmer when he played Morrison in the Oliver Stone movie, embodying his motivating ideas of taking art out of the museum and into the open. Keeping faith with this strategy, I had read out and recorded Smithson’s account of his own first trip here and burned it onto a CD to play on the car stereo. As we drove, we listened to this weirdly Anglicised Smithson describing the landscape through which we were passing.