Smithson's Spiraljetty and The Ghosts of the Site Specific past

Last week i was advised by my tutor to look at Robert Smithson's 'Spiraljetty', A piece of site specific art in which the earth was moved to form a 1500 footling and 15 foot wide spiral out of basalt and other rocks protruding from the shore of a salt lake in Utah, USA. The Spiraljetty is a fine example of site specific art as the spiral is situated in a particular salt lake where the rocks give off a reddish color due to microorganisms that thrive there and the spiral itself representative of what the salt crystals in the lake look like close up. Smithson's work can be compared alot with Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series. Monet was a french imprssionist who painted a cathedral at a certain time each day as to get what he considered the perfect sunlight to gather the ideal perspective on his artwork on canvas, except with robert Smithsons work he did not use nature as a bridge between him and his hanvas, he used the earth itself to create a canvas right in nature itself. ''By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.'' (Smithson, 1968) http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm

Gianfranco Gorgoni’s famous picture of the Spiraljetty

The idea of the Spiraljetty leads to the idea of 'ghosts' and memory of a site that i was reading about in relation to site specific performance where there was discussion about what you leave as part of you at a site for example when you go to a festival on the first day you enter lush green pastures and by the lime you leave the are which the festival was held looks lie a site where a battle had taken place, there would be rubbish everywhere, lost items of clothing, and even weeks after when all the debris has been cleared the earth and grass will still look damaged, so the imprint of the performance (the festival) has been left as a memory in the site. This again is apparent in the Spiraljetty artwork in a sense that Smithson has created an imprint in the site of a lake that will be there for a very long time even when the beauty of the intended look has been diminished the imprint and the evidence of tourists attending the the site will be there for a very long time.

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