"A sense of place" has become the dominant cliche in describing the effect of recent works in the landscape. It alludes, however unconsciously, to the celebrated admonition of the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope, who advised that one "Consult the Genius of the Place in all."¹⁸ In other words, one should design in conformity with nature, drawing out the best characteristics of the site, and thereby enhance the work created upon it. Spiral Jetty, as revealed in Smithson's own writings, provides a particularly lucid example of this correspondence between art work and site. Smithson was a prolific if occasionally confused writer;¹⁹ indeed, it was as much through his numerous essays as through his sculptures that he was largely responsible for engaging the attentions of a large and influential art-world audience—including curators, critics, and magazine editors—for the landscape activities of the avant-garde.

Two years after the completion of the Spiral Jetty, Smithson published an essay about the work.²⁰ In it he detailed finding the site, his reactions to it, and how they resulted in this particular piece. It is an illuminating account and worth quoting at length. He described driving down a wide valley toward the Salt Lake, "which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stoney matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light." He reached the lake at a place called Rozel Point, where industrial wreckage and abandoned vehicles bore witness to recent unsuccessful efforts to extract oil from tar deposits. "A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of manmade systems mired in abandoned hopes." This infatuation with decay and industrial ruin had a great influence on Smithson (though it was more particularly manifest in the reclamation projects that postdated the Spiral Jetty). He continued:

About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site. Irregular beds of limestone dip gently eastward, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance. It is one of the few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jig-saw puzzle that composes the salt flats. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty.

If the spiral form of Smithson's jetty was derived from a reading of the local topography, it had additional relevance to the site. The salt crystals that coat the rocks on the water's edge form in the shape of a spiral. "Each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice.... The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiraling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times." In addition, while visiting the region Smithson had learned of a legend that the Great Salt Lake was connected to the ocean by an underground channel, which revealed itself in the middle of the lake as an enormous whirlpool. The spiral was thus a key not only to the macroscopic world, but the microscopic and mythological as well.

Smithson was drawn to the Great Salt Lake by the knowledge that it contained a microorganism that colored the water pink. He had read of similar lakes in South America and was eager to see this phenomenon for himself. One knows from his writings that he was invigorated by the kind of desolation encountered at this site: "A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched."²¹ Smithson's vocabulary—shattered, fractured, corrosion—reveals his preoccupation with entropy as a measure of disorder. The spiral_open, irreversible, "coming from nowhere, going nowhere," as Smithson put it²²—accords with this preoccupation. At the Spiral Jetty, the gyre is not widening, but falling inward: it is "matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral."²³

After the Spiral Jetty, Smithson's work took a different turn. In 1971 he was invited to the Netherlands to participate in an international exhibition called Sonsbeek 71. Feeling that the Dutch landscape was already very cultivated and that a work of art upon it would be superfluous, he asked to work at a disrupted site instead. A virtually exhausted sand quarry that was destined to be converted into a recreation area was found for him in Emmen, in northeastern Holland. It became the location of his first effort to reclaim an industrially devastated landscape through art.

Smithson's sand quarry was composed of white and yellow sand, red and brown loam, and a blue- green pond. At one edge of the water, Smithson had a slope graded flat, a curving channel cut into it, and an arced jetty built out into the water, forming the Broken Circle (about 140 feet in diameter). On the slope above, Spiral Hill was made of overburden and a covering layer of topsoil, with a counterclockwise path of white sand that wound to the top. While the latter work is not particularly distinguished for either the deftness of its execution or the originality of its form, Broken Circle is intriguing for its symmetry of opposites: semicircles of water and soil, canal and jetty. It is also given an enchanted quality by the huge glacial boulder that was discovered while grading the site. The boulder apparently plagued Smithson, who felt that it added an undesirable focal point to the work, but it proved too large to be moved. In the end, Smithson grew to appreciate this boulder for its associations with prehistoric burial markers found in the area.²⁴

The significance of the Broken Circle and Spiral Hill lay in the incentive they gave to Smithson to pursue his pairing of art with land reclamation. "Across the country," he wrote in the aftermath of these works, "there are many mining areas, disused quarries, and polluted lakes and rivers. One practical solution for the utilization of such devasted places would be land and water re- cycling in terms of 'Earth Art.' "²⁵ Smithson did not entirely detest industrial activities, recognizing them as a necessary corollary of the life we have developed for ourselves. He viewed human interventions in the landscape as no more unnatural than earthquakes and typhoons. What he did take exception to, however, was the lack of sensitivity he perceived among industrialists to the visual values of the landscape, which he rightly realized were "traditionally the domain of those concerned with the arts."²⁶ He wrote to a host of mining companies offering his services to enhance the visual qualities of their reclamation activities. "Art can become a physical resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist," he claimed, facilitating the aims of both.²⁷

In two cases, Smithson's ideas received considerable elaboration, though both failed to reach fruition. In 1972 he entered into negotiations with the Hanna Coal Company, which was beginning the reclamation of a thousand-acre site in the Egypt Valley in southeastern Ohio. Smithson proposed incorporating his earthworks not as a substitute for but an addition to the company's standard efforts, in order to add visual focus to the site and draw attention to the surrounding reclamation work. In October of that year he sent the company two drawings for a specific piece. It would have been morphologically related to Broken Circle, with a curved jetty embracing a semicircular cove on the shore of a lake. Paths along the shoreline would have been covered with crushed limestone, and portions of the piece would have been planted with crown vetch, a legume that aids in preventing soil erosion and restoring fertility.

Early the next year, Smithson began discussions with the Minerals Engineering Company of Denver concerning the disposition of tailings at their mine in Creede, Colorado. Tailings are the waste material that remains after the desired ore is extracted from mined rock. Because they often contain residue of valuable minerals, they are set aside in the event that future recovery becomes practicable. Smithson proposed utilizing these tailings to build a group of earthworks. Some of the waste was being flushed into basins; he suggested building a series of concentric dams down the slope of a hill, creating ponds that would gradually fill to become terraces as they received the tailings. One drawing indicated the scale at which he hoped to work: it was for a semicircular pond that would be 2,000 feet in diameter, and contain nine million tons of material deposited over twenty-five years. Two other drawings propose a Garden of Tailings—curved berms radiating from a common center—and a Meandering Ring—random piles with bulldozed pathways between them, the whole forming a circle with an open center.

It is significant that in neither of these proposals did Smithson suggest disguising entirely the postindustrial character of his site and materials. He felt it was inappropriate to attempt to recreate a perfect landscape and endeavored instead to evolve an artistically enriched and distinctly man-made landscape that acknowledged technological use. Smithson's proposals thus have a brutally realistic character, and something of a commemorative function. His projects for tailings would have stood as memorials to industrial disruption of the landscape, and as provocations to contemplate the efficacy and necessity of our resource development policies.

Frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations with these mining companies, Smithson accepted the opportunity to work on a ranch in west Texas. He selected a site on the shore of an irrigation lake and staked out the shape of an ascending ramp forming an open circle 150 feet in diameter. While he was making a routine inspection of the planned piece from the air, the plane crashed, killing Smithson, the pilot, and a photographer. The Amarillo Ramp was subsequently completed by Nancy Holt and Smithson's friends Tony Shafrazi and Richard Serra. Smithson's early death effectively foreclosed further consideration of his reclamation proposals. They remain, however, his richest legacy, a source of inspiration for a host of subsequent artists.

Like Smithson, Robert Morris was invited to participate in Sonsbeek 71; he too had been developing his ideas for art in the landscape for several years. Among the first had been a Project in Earth and Sod (1966), a large grassy ring proposed for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. Over the next several years Morris produced numerous other proposals — for serpentine mounds, spiral hills, and the like—but his invitation to Holland in 1971 was his first opportunity to see any of these works realized. The result was his Observatory, originally built near the Dutch coastal town of Velsen. It was razed at the conclusion of the exhibition but, largely through the efforts of its original sponsors and with considerable

Dutch governmental support, it was rebuilt in a slightly enlarged form on new land created from the vast Ijsselmeer or Zuider Zee. This new land, or polder, is formed by erecting long, thick dikes and pumping out the seawater. Once the bottom of a shallow inland sea, this land is unwaveringly flat and consequently ideal for the purposes Morris had in mind.

As reconstructed in 1977, Observatory consists of two concentric rings of earth with an outer diameter of nearly 300 feet. The inner ring—nine feet high and seventy-nine feet in diameter—is formed of earth piled up against a circular wooden stockade. The outer circumference consists of three embankments and two canals. Entrance to the piece is gained via a triangular passage cut through the embankment to the west; a path leads from there through a break in the central enclosure. Once inside the stockade, three other openings are visible. The first looks due east along two parallel channels, each of which terminates in a ten-foot-square steel plate propped on a diagonal. The interval between these plates, as seen from within the central enclosure, marks the posit.on of the sunrise on the equinoxes. Two other openings look thirtyseven degrees northeast and southeast, through notches on the outer embankment lined with granite boulders and marking the points of the sunrise on the summer and winter solstices, respectively.

Courtesy of Abbyville Press copyright 1989 Cross River Press