‘The valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscapes we had seen. . Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stony matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. . A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. . This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.’
The irony is that in February 2008, Dia organized a petition opposing plans by Pearl Montana Exploration and Production to drill boreholes in the Great Salt Lake — the latest, in other words, in a long history of attempts ‘to get oil’ that was part of Smithson’s original fascination with the area. Which means that the campaign to protect the Spiral Jetty is, in some ways, at odds with the convergence of inspiration and circumstance that led to its construction.
We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the Spiral Jetty—‘Another.5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate’—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned to their lot. The sky slumped over a landscape at once monotonous and always subtly changing. There were constant reminders of Britain, the Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he wrote of ‘visionary dreariness.’ Suddenly there was a brown cow — the black sheep of the family — and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That, in any case, was where we were headed.
We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it gave up any claim to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car, began walking. There had been no signs for a while but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck and — interestingly — an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulphur. It was a location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where the shining sea turns out to be a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the Spiral Jetty? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. There had recently been a certain amount of debate as to whether to try to preserve the Jetty, to raise it up and stop it disappearing again or just leave it to its own devices, to decay gracefully and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But no, it couldn’t be that far gone. Could it? We kept walking in a state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?
No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks — not white, and far smaller than expected but exuding unmistakable Spiral Jetty—ness. Smithson warned that size is not the same as scale, that ‘size determines an object, but scale determines art.’ Fair enough, but I’d seen photographs with people — those centuries-old indicators of scale — on the Jetty, dwarfed by it. In the midst of all this sky and land the real thing was quite homely in size and scale. Unlike The Lightning Field, the Spiral Jetty looked better in photographs than it did in the rocky flesh.
We walked towards the circles of stone, could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. This was the Spiral Jetty. We were no longer coming to the Spiral Jetty. We were at the Spiral Jetty, waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival — not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence had experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of colour.
We clambered down to the Jetty—there was no path — through a slope of black rocks where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The Jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inwards. The water was plaster-coloured, slightly pink, changing colour as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.
We had hoped the Jetty would be visible. Not only was it visible — you could walk on it too. The magical coating of white crystal was largely gone, rubbed off, presumably, by people like us tramping all over it. But what’s the alternative? You can’t cordon it off like some relic in a museum, so we did our bit in helping to take off the residual shine, further restoring the Jetty to its original condition. Compared with Angkor Wat and the pyramids, the Jetty was not doing too well. It had aged at the rate of the rain-smeared concrete of the Southbank Centre or council estates done on the cheap and put up in a hurry. In less than forty years it already looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. The Lightning Field looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time, the Spiral Jetty had acquired the bleak gravity and elemental aura of prehistory. It would be easy to believe that it had been built millennia ago by the people who first settled here — but why would they have settled here of all places?
The artist John Coplans wrote that entering the spiral involved walking counter-clockwise, going back in time; exiting, you go forward again. That’s true, part of the conceptual underpinning of the experience. But he forgot another, no less important, lesson of perambulatory physics, what might be called the Law of Sink Estate Directness. At Downing College, Cambridge, signs — and hundreds of years of observed convention — warn that only Fellows may walk on the grass. Rather than walk across the prairie-size quad, you have to take a frustrating detour around the edges. In less august settings any attempt at decoration or elaboration that involves lengthening people’s journey time is destined to fail. Rather than walk two sides of a square — even if it is named after Byron or Max Roach — people will cut across it diagonally, lugging orange-bagged souvenirs of their pilgrimage to Sainsbury’s cathedral, creating their own, urban version of a Richard Long. Before long — or contra Long — the grass starts to wear out and a so-called ‘desire path’ is formed. Same here. Although the stretches between the spiraling rock were underwater, the salt beds were soggy but firm. So you didn’t need to walk around the spiral, you could just step across! Why walk back in time when you can jump-cut across it in a flash? In moments you are at the end of the spiral — the dead centre of the space-time continuum, the still point of the turning world.