#Spiral jetty how to
#Spiral jetty movie
#Spiral jetty series

It is not a question, then, of thinking about the aggregative character of the cinematographic device, but of thinking about temporalities and the inscription that the material can make in a film and vice versa. In Smithson, cinema was not what he called rationalism, that is, naturalism, but rather a relationship with matter (material), which is the diegesis of the film, a geological space that he considered as having a transitive relation with cinema and which, because the archaeological markers of the jetty film are the past and the future, brings to the screen an «any space whatever.»

#Spiral jetty how to

But, in the context of an extended experimentation with the moving image, that enters the gallery space and the movement that sculpture makes out of the pedestal, how to classify this expanded cinema? What interested Smithson was the cut, the montage, the reordering of shots and movements, in order to deconstruct space and affix time to strata.

#Spiral jetty series

The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of ‘stills’ through my Instamatic into my eye.» įrequent cinemagoer, Smithson's relationship with moving images seems to be, on the one hand, based on a productive conception of cinema, in the sense that the camera was considered a technique for the artist and, on the other hand, in the cinematic possibilities of articulation and reflection of the various temporalities which Smithson saw existing in the world and the mutability of matter. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. He writes in A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967): «Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. In Smithson, cinema is a construction, a survey of the obscurities of matter, a technical procedure that gives back in another cinematic form, the cinematic that the artist finds on the surface of reality. Creative potential, here, is synonymous with the demonstration of the temporalities that coexist in matter and its transformation in its translation into moving images. Robert Smithson was a prolific writer and his texts allow us to locate certain concepts and themes that clarify his relation with what he considered the cinematic state of the real – decomposable and captured by the camera – and whose creative potential could be managed through editing, montage. For cinema seems to be, for Smithson, a technique (a poiesis) based on a set of operations that use devices - the eye of the camera is a favorite figure of Smithson - that allow for the ordering of the scattered fragments of destruction that nature has become. The film is, I propose, an expanded cinematographic work that articulates Smithson's concerns regarding art and the great narrative of matter that cinema allowed him to create. Although these are independent artistic objects, we can, however, think of the abovementioned film as more than a mere documentation of the process of the jetty’s construction. The Spiral Jetty project, was a complex that comprised the creation of the earthwork – a jetty – the homonymous film, the text that Smithson wrote around the experience of Spiral Jetty's production and filming, and the creation of an underground cinema that would be located in a bellow ground cave and would project only the film of its own construction. The above quotes are from Robert Smithson and underline the artists’ thinking on cinema and the construction of the film Spiral Jetty (1970), a film of the artwork (made of salt, rocks and mud) by the same name, which Smithson created in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

#Spiral jetty movie

The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art.Īnd the movie editor, bending over such a chaos of ‘takes’ resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels.