White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

4

Thinking about places like the Hump, the Devil’s Chimney, The Lightning Field (or, for that matter, sites such as Angkor Wat or Borobudur), I keep coming back to the painting that I saw in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the day I’d hoped to see Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Elihu Vedder’s The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) shows a dark-skinned wanderer or traveller, ear pressed against the head of the sphinx that emerges from the sea of sand in which it has been submerged for centuries. Apart from a few broken columns and a human skull (an earlier questioner?), nothing besides remains. In a way it’s an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world (the sky is black but it doesn’t seem like night), a reminder, painted in the midst of the American Civil War, that plenty of civilizations before our own have suffered apocalyptic extinction. One could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, Planet of the Apes—style. Vedder was in his twenties when he did this painting. He had not been to Egypt but had seen illustrations of the Sphinx at Gizeh. His painting seems emblematic of the experiences that crop up repeatedly in this book: of trying to work out what a certain place — a certain way of marking the landscape — means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.

Time in Space

Maybe it is not the natives of Texas or Arizona who fully appreciate the scale of the places where they have grown up. Perhaps you have to be British, to come from ‘an island no bigger than a back garden’—in Lawrence’s contemptuous phrase — to grasp properly the immensity of the American West. So it’s not surprising that Lawrence considered New Mexico ‘the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.’

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.

‘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.

Near this centre earlier visitors had arranged rocks and stones so that they spelled out names in the white salt of the enclosed lake bed: missy (with a heart underneath), ida marie and estelle.

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely in a subdued and desolate way. It felt abandoned but it was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained — or generated — its own dismal nodality. The answer to the obvious question — was it worth coming all this way? — might have been no, but it didn’t occur to us to ask. The Spiral Jetty was here. We were here. That was the simple truth. Could the more complex truth be that if it wasn’t so difficult to get to no one would bother coming to see it?

André Malraux famously cherished the idea of a museum without walls. In a way, places like the Spiral Jetty are jails without walls. They are always about time, about how long they can detain or hold you. I remember the governor of a U.S. prison saying, of a particularly violent inmate, that he already had way more time than he’d ever be able to do. That’s exactly how the Jetty looked — like it already had more time than it could ever do — even though, relatively speaking, it had hardly begun to put in any serious time.

In uncertain tribute, we stayed longer than we needed to, waiting for any potential increments of the experience to make themselves felt. One or the other of us kept saying, ‘Shall we go?’ and, in this way, our visit was gradually extended. Nothing happened except the slow erosion of urgency and purpose. We were often ready to leave, but every time we thought about leaving we remembered the previous time we had thought about leaving and were glad the urge had not been acted on.

And then, eventually, without a word, when the desire to leave was all but extinguished, we began walking back to the car. The air was irritable with sandflies. I almost trod on a long, grey, indifferent snake. The lone and level lake stretched far away.