Three Days in Utah
19th-20th February 2017
'To reconstruct what the eyes see in words, in an ‘ideal language’ is a vain exploit. Why not reconstruct one’s inability to see? Let us give passing shape to the unconsolidated views that surround a word of art, and develop a type of ‘anti-vision’ or negative seeing.' - Robert Smithson
I’ve been trying to write about my trip to the Spiral Jetty for weeks, months really, but the words aren’t coming. I’ve never been one to struggle with the written word (I usually have the opposite problem...) and lately my thoughts have shifted from simply trying to explain my experience towards trying to understand why that explanation so escapes me.
One factor, I think— I had been thinking and writing and reading about the site for so long. For so long that, for me, the Spiral Jetty lived in words. It was words. It was the photographs too, to be sure, but my love for it came from discussion. That’s hardly unusual with art. I’ve loved so many pieces of art that I’ve never seen. But it is significant. It’s significant that that’s all I ever expected.
Being there though— it wasn’t about words. It was about a lived experience. It was about time and duration and some kind of inner reality. It was about awareness.
Spiral Jetty also became so much more than the time I spent standing at Rozel Point, looking at the Great Salt Lake and the mountains and the low sky. It was more than the eight minutes it took me to walk from the rocky beach to the centre of the spiral. It was more than the alien landscape I found there, more than the way the site had changed since its construction, more than strange quality of light.
It was everything I did to get there. It was about a journey and expectations and anticipation. It was about feeling lost and alone and a little bit uncertain. It was about being somewhere I never could’ve imagined being, about a landscape I never had conceived of. It was about witnessing a way of life that I couldn’t conceptualise. It was about being denied and chance and relief.
Before I went out to the Spiral Jetty from Salt Lake City with my mother, driving the world’s ugliest rental car, we went over to Wendover hoping to see the Sun Tunnels. We had planned to spend the night in one of the city’s many strange desert casinos, drive to the Tunnels at first light, and then carry on around the lake towards Spiral Jetty. We would essentially be following the old railroad tracks that connected the two, Lucin to the Golden Spike.
Nature and luck, it turned out, had different plans for us. We got through to Montello and were told that the roads were shut— days before we arrived, a dam had broke in the area and everything was flooded, washed out. There was no hope of getting through and no sign of when it would be passable again. The Sun Tunnels were just on the other side of the mountain range, and we were still an hour’s drive away.
We headed back to Wendover through the countryside on dirt roads, forced off the state highway we had taken up to that point by more repair work. It was muddy and honestly, it was terrifying. I was so aware of our isolation. Pilot Peak was up ahead of us, and we drove towards it, hoping that we’d make it back to pavement before it started raining or before we blew a tire or before our wheels got stuck. It was 33 miles away.
‘I had an overwhelming experience of my inner landscape and outer landscape being identical. It lasted for days. I couldn’t sleep... I was struck by the awareness of being an individual in the vastness of space... it was like being the first person on the planet to walk on this particular piece of earth at this moment. That sensation stirred up thought of the astronauts walking on the Moon for the first time.' - Nancy Holt
When you’re going to the Sun Tunnels, depending on which way you decide to drive, one of the directions you’re given is basically ‘drive 45.5 miles down a dirt road.’ When I was researching my thesis, I had read that instruction more than once, but I had never quite understood what it really meant. What it meant in terms of being properly in the middle of fuck all, what it meant in terms of being tense and unsure and on edge for so long.
Driving 45.5 miles into a desert on a dirt road means that you’re at the mercy of nature and that try as you might to plan, the unexpected is always possible. It means that you start to take stock of your landscape. It means that you cling to the landmarks you’re given. It means that when you see the mountains up ahead, you drive towards them and you trust.
I didn’t get to see the Sun Tunnels, but I do think that I experienced a huge part of what they mean and what they can teach you. I learned so much by trying and failing to get there. I maybe even learned more that I would have if I had succeeded. I learned what it was to be called out of your comfort zone. I learned what it was to experience the landscape. I learned about time, about journeys. I learned about suspense. I learned about nature. I saw and experienced what it felt like to go to a place you can’t imagine anyone had ever been to before, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I kept thinking ‘Nancy Holt came out this way. She lived here even, for weeks on end.’ But I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. It all felt so spread out. It felt so infinite and timeless and placeless. I know exactly what she meant when she said that she left like the first person on the moon. It felt wild. It felt like I had gone out of bounds.
Art usually tugs you into city centres. It makes you go through the busy squares, the tourist hubs. It brings you into packed galleries and makes you queue with your timed ticket. This time, art brought me into an infinite landscape, a remote wilderness. It brought me back to myself and showed me where I had come from. It’s almost like it brought me nowhere. Even just in Wendover, a town that sits between timezones, it was like being out of time.
And so it was with that experience at my back that I came to drive to the Spiral Jetty. It had been keeping an eye on my weather app and knew that it had been raining up there for days. With my 33 miles of experience on dirt roads, I knew that rain wasn’t a good omen. After my adventure with the Sun Tunnels, I wanted to go into the drive knowing everything that I could, so I did a quick google search and found more bad news— an Instagram post from the day before showing a small river running across the road to the jetty. It was definitely impassable.
'As we travelled, the valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscapes we had seen. The roads on the map became a net of dashes, while in the far distance the Salt Lake existed as an interrupted silver band. Hills took on the appearance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. We followed roads that glided away into dead ends. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled and impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stoney matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediments were countless bits of wreckage. Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of the tapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory.' - Robert Smithson
I warned my mother and then drove the two hours, expecting nothing but another refusal. I had made peace with my failure to reach the Sun Tunnels, and this was just to be an extension of that. The failure was part of the journey, part of the meaning, part of the art. It was about the attempt. It was about seeing what I could see and knowing a new kind of landscape.
So we drove. We drove past huge distribution centres and a rocket testing facility. We drove past many fields full of cows and past the Golden Spike. We reached a sign that warned that the roads were in bad condition up ahead. We drove on. I was ready to turn back. I saw the small white sign pointing towards our seemingly impossible destination, and we turned.
And the river I had saw had gone. The gully it had cut into the earth was there, but it was dry. It was all dry. We picked our way carefully over the trench, and we were through. The jetty was hiding behind a small hill, around a corner, as I knew it would be, but the lake was spread out before us and there were already signs of the landscape that was to come. The black volcanic rocks began to dot the fields around the dirt road, appearing suddenly like strange apparitions. The first few times I saw them, my eyes couldn’t understand and my mind turned associative. I mistook one for a small dog, another for a Jeep. The scale was confused. We were getting close. I still felt somewhere inside of me that we would never arrive.
Then, we came around a corner, and it greeted us. It shocked in its actuality. Here was the very thing I had read so much about, had seen so many photographs of. Here it was, existing. It had changed over the years of course. It had eroded as it was always meant to, and the lake had receded, leaving the Jetty alone on the beach. It was simple and honest and wise. It was a place of ruin. It seemed to hold some memory of an unknowable past. It told me exactly what I had always known. It seemed to hold things back.
'Smithson’s ruins— unlike the ruins of romanticism….— seek to remain faithful to the experience of ruin, to the ruin of experience. Rather than reverse the process of ruin, then, the Smithsonian artwork intensifies ruin. It tells us that ruin is irreversible, that there is nothing but ruin.' - Eduardo Cadava
The site, of course, was vastly beautiful— the low sky, the heavy clouds, the distant mountains, the shore stretching out forever, the water way out in the distance. In between it all, the bright fire of the sun starling, like gold. Even though I had visited place even more remote than the Jetty just days before, the sense of being far away, of being removed was still there. That tense, alive feeling, of being alone somewhere so vast. In my relief in finding the way clear, I had the feeling of accessing something that should well be inaccessible. I had a feeling of being somewhere that humans were never meant to tread.
 |
It was like nowhere I’ve ever been. The basalt rocks, crusted with salt. The strange vegetation. The green clay. The feeling of walking the spiral. I wound tighter, so aware of duration. It was after all, as Rosalind Krauss always said, a piece of art that was about time. Water had collected in the centre. From there, you could see nothing but horizon and the rocks around you echoed that. I’ve never been more aware of where I was standing. I’ve never been more aware of my place on this planet. A type of centre in an universe where centres can’t exist.
We drove back to Salt Lake in silence, and I’ve been trying to find the words ever since.
0 comments:
Post a Comment