The Spiral Jetty through the eyes of Tacita Dean

Student Reference: 12916523

Word Count: 15,261

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Abstract

This paper examines Smithson’s most iconic work, The Spiral Jetty (1970), which com-

prises the earthwork, based at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the film and the essay and its

relationship with two more recent works by Tacita Dean that relate to Smithson’s ensem-

ble. These are Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997), a sound work created as a result of

Dean’s search for the Jetty and JG (2013), a movie inspired by Smithson’s relationship

with the author J.G Ballard, which is shot on 35mm film and demonstrates exquisite tech-

nical skills as well as Dean’s aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations. Smithson’s work

was prophetic, questioned the traditional perceptions about the art object and set the

framework for the artists of the following generations. Dean is a good demonstration of an

artist that has been inspired by Smithson’s significant contribution to the field of art history.

I was therefore interested in studying the relationship between the two artists and their

specific works and I will do so by discussing Smithson’s role in introducing aesthetic and

conceptual propositions for the artists of the following decades and Dean’s own current

practice. In this research, I will identify the impact of Smithson’s colourful legacy on Tacita

Dean and will explore whether Dean was able to respond to the challenge and create two

independent, aesthetically and conceptually complete new artworks around Smithson’s

legendary work. The research has been based on the existing bibliography on the two art-

ists and the specific artworks, but also on independent study, by considering both scholar

and non-scholar material such as articles and press reviews in magazines and newspa-

pers. I have also contacted the galleries that represent the Estate of Robert Smithson and

Tacita Dean, raised questions and accessed their archives, resulting, in Dean’s case, to

identify further material. I have conducted an extensive research and analysis about the

two artists and these specific works and identified the conceptual, thematic and technical

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similarities. This paper highlights that Dean is a mature artist and a significant artistic fig-

ure of her own generation as well as a great supporter of her preferred medium, the film.

Through her two works with Spiral Jetty as their central theme, Dean offered to the audi-

ence a new reading of Smithson’s’ landmark ensemble, revived his practice and added her

own substantial contribution.

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Contents

Introduction 5

Robert Smithson 9

Spiral Jetty (1970): The Earthwork 14

Spiral Jetty (1970): The film 20

Spiral Jetty (1972): The essay 28

The Spiral Jetty ensemble 30

Tacita Dean 32

Trying to find the Spiral Jetty (1997) 34

JG (2013) 40

Conclusion 49

Bibliography 54

Appendix 62

Appendix 1- Images of Artworks 62

Appendix 2- Dialectic of Site/Non-site 80

Appendix 3- Link to extract from Spiral Jetty film 80

Appendix 4- Directions to Spiral Jetty provided by DIA Foundation 81

Appendix 5- Link to Tacita Dean's Lecture at Arcadia University 81

Appendix 6- Press quotes for JG 82

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Introduction

This paper explores the relationship between Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) (here-

after, SJ) and two recent meditations on Smithson’s SJ by Tacita Dean, entitled Trying to

Find the Spiral Jetty (1997) and JG (2013). I was intrigued by Dean’s approach to the SJ

and wanted to analyse the work under the spectrum of another artist’s perceptive, through

the eyes of Tacita Dean. Further, this paper investigates Smithson’s influence on Dean

and her two works, making the first extensive research analysing the relationship between

the works, the two artists and the recurring themes in their works.

The main focus of the paper is to examine the way in which Dean’s manifestations

of the SJ affect the viewer’s understanding of Smithson’s original works. This is done by

identifying shared concepts and themes between the older and more recent works, explor-

ing the influences of Smithson’s work to Dean’s practice, the autonomy of each work, and

finally Dean’s intentions, both artistically and generally, when creating her two works.

SJ, the sculpture at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the film and the es-

say are the three manifestations produced by Smithson in the early 1970s. The works ar-

ticulate themes of time, entropy, scale, the use of the senses and the importance of space

and context in comprehending artworks. I explore the central meanings of the works,

question the autonomy of each of the three manifestations and examine the experience of

the viewer each time. I identify concepts common to both Smithson’s and Dean’s practices

and similarities between the two artist’s works throughout the analysis.

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Smithson matured artistically in the aftermath of the American post-war boom, an

era of disillusionment with the American dream amidst the country’s increasing involve-

ment in the Vietnam War. The period is known for its frustration with conventional systems

of thought, with artists questioning the canon of modernist practice and theories. The

avant-garde emphasised the relationship of the art object to the outside world and its sur-

roundings, exploring the notion of context while incorporating phenomenology and notions

of audience experience and participation.1 Smithson is today recognised as a leading fig-

ure of this generation.

Through his ingenious and restless investigations of multiple media, themes, fields

and artistic genres, Smithson set a lasting conceptual framework for subsequent genera-

tions of artists. Smithson’s writings and films, as well as his ‘radical dislocation of the site

of production and the artist’s role’2 through his extensive studies on the subject of site-

specificity, deeply affected the discourse around the ‘post-studio condition’,3 which consid-

ers the relationship between process, the studio, objects and exhibition making and im-

pacted artists two generations later such as Sam Durant, Liam Gillick, Michael Nelson and

Tacita Dean.

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury and studied both in England and

abroad. She initially became known for her involvement with the second wave of the

Young British Artists.4 Common themes in Dean’s work are the sea, time, history, seren-

1 Nicolas de Oliveira outlined that since the later sixties, the making and thinking about art was influenced by psychoa-nalysis and led to an appreciation of the audience’s position in relation to an artwork in Nicolas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry and Michael Archer, Installation Art (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), p28 2Ibid 3Eugenie Tsai, ‘Robert Smithson: Plotting a Line from Passaic, New Jersey, to Amarillo, Texas’ in Tsai, Eugenie (ed), Butler, Cornelia (ed), contributions by Crow, Thomas, Alberro, Alexander, Boettger, Susan, Linder, Mark, Reynolds, Ann, Roberts, Jennifer L., Sieburth, Richard, Sobieszek, Robert and Roth, Moira, Robert Smithson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press and Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), pp.7 and 31 4According to Tate’s website, ‘The label Young British Artists (YBAs) is applied to a loose group of British artists who began to exhibit together in 1988 and who became known for their openness to materials and processes, shock tactics and entrepreneurial attitude. Young British Art can be seen to have a convenient starting point in the exhibition Freeze

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dipity, journey, exploration and the medium of film. She creates technically and aestheti-

cally sophisticated analogue films employing groundbreaking practices, as well as draw-

ing, photographs, sound works and texts.

Dean was inspired by Smithson and his mysterious Jetty, visiting the remote sculp-

ture in 1997. This first voyage to the site and her futile efforts to find the work resulted in

the creation of Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty. She later returned to the subject of the SJ in

the 2013 work JG, in which she explored Smithson’s common interests with the author J.G

Ballard, following two additional research trips to Rozel Point.

The works reveal Smithson’s influence on Dean’s artistic production. For the analy-

sis of Dean’s works, I explore her interpretation of Smithson’s work by highlighting the core

elements of her response and investigating how these are linked with Smithson’s SJ en-

semble. Key themes include time, journey, the relationship between the indoor and the

outdoor, the importance of scale and experience in understanding artworks, entropy and

disappearance. In addition, I discuss whether Dean adds to the collective understanding of

the SJ by creating new artistic material and experiences for the viewer. I also discuss

whether the works can stand independently from Smithson’s manifestations of the SJ. Fi-

nally, I also consider Dean’s intentions when creating the works.

I have used the most objective methods and processes to plan and conduct my re-

search. Throughout the study I have evaluated my methods, adjusting them appropriately.

For the analysis of Smithson, I referred mostly to the extensive academic bibliography. I

realised early in my research that although there was a broad bibliography on Smithson

organised in 1988 by Damien Hirst (the most celebrated, or notorious, of the YBAs) while he was still a student at Gold-smiths College of Art. Tate, 'Young British Artists' http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/y/young-british-artists

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and the SJ, it was difficult to obtain unpublished archival information to add colour to the

existing literature. The galleries that represent his Estate directed me to sources I was al-

ready familiar with, such as his official website and books. It was also difficult to obtain

press cuttings from older exhibitions where Smithson’s manifestations of the SJ were pre-

sented. I therefore focused on articles from journals and websites in addition to conducting

extensive research on Smithson’s older and more recent bibliography, taking into consid-

eration both the early and more contemporary views on his practice and the SJ.

The material available on Tacita Dean’s works, on the other hand, is less devel-

oped. Although there is a significant bibliography, the only book to consider her relation-

ship with Smithson was a catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition ‘JG’ at the

Arcadia University Art Gallery in 2013. While the book contained useful information, it did

not offer an extensive analysis of the oeuvres of the two artists, offering instead a collec-

tion of articles and essays on Tacita Dean and her new work alongside an abstract from

Smithson’s SJ essay. This led me to search for alternative sources and contact the galler-

ies that represent Dean, Marian Goodman Gallery and the Firth Street Gallery, who kindly

opened their archives. I identified a plethora of press coverage on the exhibitions ‘Tacita

Dean’ (2013) at the Frith Street Gallery in London and ‘JG’ (2014) at Marian Goodman

Gallery. I also conducted independent research on the works and identified non-scholar

sources such as articles in art magazines and press reviews on newspapers, popular

magazines and websites.

I intended to include diverse sources in my research and to follow an objective ap-

proach, minimizing the impact of my ‘biases, contexts and presuppositions’5 on the subject

in order to provide an in depth analysis. I hope that this research adds to the information

5Russell T. McCutcheon in The Insider/ outsider problem in the study of religion (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 2

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on this topic and enlightens the reader about Dean’s interpretation of the Spiral Jetty

demonstrated in her own artistic ventures.

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey in 1938. He moved with his family be-

tween several locations in suburban New Jersey and was given a middle-class upbringing.

At the age of eight his family took him on a trip around America, which left a deep impres-

sion on him. His father built a zoo and a small natural history museum in the basement of

their house when he was 10 years old, including exhibits on reptiles, fossils and artefacts.

Smithson spent lots of time here as a boy and there are reflections of these experiences in

his preoccupation with travelling and journeys, natural history, time passage, geography,

crystology and earth sciences.

After graduating from high school, Smithson joined the American Army rather than

going to college. Receiving an honourable discharge a year later, he hitchhiked around the

United States and Mexico before moving to Manhattan. Tsai notes that ‘he acquired a vast

reservoir of knowledge through his travels and extensive reading…his unconventional way

of looking at things reflected the vantage point of an autodidact.’6 Smithson’s oeuvre in-

cludes Earthworks, as well as film, sculpture, painting, drawing and photography, nimbly

crossing the boundaries between media.

In the late 1960s, Smithson’s work began investigating the relationship between art

object and place by producing numerous artworks in landscapes. Michael Kimmelman ar-

gues that the turning point in Smithson’s career came in the mid 1960's, when he pro-

posed making art for an airport in Texas. His proposal included placing mirrors, cameras

6Tsai (2004), p.13

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and other materials in nearby fields, so that they would be visible from airplanes, ‘opening

up sculpture to vast scale, the outdoors and aerial views.’7 Another landmark in Smithson’s

career was a day in 1967, when he walked around Passaic and documented highway

abutments and drainage pipes with a Kodak Instamatic camera. Smithson recorded his

journey through the industrial relics as an investigation of human intervention in natural

and urban landscapes. His images and text were published in Artforum as ‘The Monu-

ments of Passaic.’8 Several critics have identified this essay pioneering. Kimmelman, for

instance, states that it ‘opened up a new world of artistic inquiry.’9

Smithson’s mature career was shaped by the end of the economic boom era that

succeeded the Second Word war and lasted until the mid 1960’s. The mounting financial

and human cost of the American military involvement with the Vietnam War coincided with

a halt in the expansion of Kennedy-era liberal social programs such as the ‘War on Pov-

erty’10, Medicare, the enforcement of Civil Rights Act, the Wilderness Act, the space pro-

gram and the National Endowment for the Arts.11 The decline was accompanied by cyni-

cism, anger and the blossoming of counterculture groups like the hippies, who challenged

accepted social conventions. The arts reflected this trend, with visual artists challenging

modernist norms by redefining the physical boundaries of artwork and experimenting with

the scale and sites of their works. Many American artists started making works outside gal-

lery and museum spaces, in an attempt to criticise the prevalent commercial gallery sys-

tem and the commodification of art, birthing the idea of site-specific art in urban and natu-

7Michael Kimmelman Sculpture From the Earth, but Never Limited by It’, New York Times, 24 June, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/arts/design/sculpture-from-the-earth-but-never-limited-by-it.html?_r=0 8The essay by Robert Smithson, ’The Monuments of Passaic” was published in Artforum, December 1967, p.48 9Michael Kimmelman, (2005) 10 Lisa Phillips, The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000, (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), p.173 11 Susan Boetger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2002) p.29

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ral environments.12 New art movements emerged around the time of this destabilised envi-

ronment, including Minimalism, Post-minimalism, Land, Video, Performance, Body and

Conceptual art.

During that period, renowned site-specific sculptures were created by artists such

as Walter de Maria, Nancy Holt, Richard Long, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, to

name a few. These artists eschewed traditional production of sculptural objects, interven-

ing directly on the landscape by producing permanent large-scale installations called

Earthworks, and by creating temporary sculptures made of earth and natural materials in

gallery spaces. In an article published in Artforum in 1970, Smithson was the first to an-

nounce the practice and to use the term, ‘earth works’ (as two words) in an art context.

Discussing the creation of holes in the earth he wrote, ‘The boring, like other 'earth works,'

is becoming more and more important to artists. Pavements, holes, trenches, mounds,

heaps, paths, ditches, roads, terraces, etc., all have an aesthetic potential.’13 Smithson

heralded the arrival of Land art as its own movement.

Smithson’s works often constructed a discussion between remote outdoor spaces

and conventional indoor exhibition locations, such as the gallery or museum using natural

materials, maps, film, photography, which he called ‘fringes’. He called his dialectical tech-

nique Site/Non-Site, where Site was the actual location of the earthwork and Non-Site the

indoor sculpture that related to the earthwork. He identified and noted characteristics for

each of these two terms (Appendix 2). He explained, ‘The non-site exists as a kind of deep

three dimensional abstract map that points to a specific site on the surface of the earth…

12 Krauss introduced in 1979 the ‘expanded field’ as an extended physical and mental terrain for understanding sculp-ture. She argued that modernist sculpture had lost its relation to a specific site and repositioned contemporary sculpture in relation to landscape and architecture’12, encouraging an interdisciplinary approach in Krauss, Rosalind ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, October 8 (Spring 1979), p.40. 13Susan Boettger, ‘Behind the Earth Movers’, Art in America, Vol. 92 No 4 , (April 2004), p.60

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kind of backwaters of fringe areas.’14 Photos, drawings, rocks and earth provided a physi-

cal rather than a functional experience. He acknowledged that viewers would not visit the

actual sites but believed the documentation was essential. His research and practice on

these themes have made Smithson a key figure in later studies of site-specificity and influ-

enced artists of future generations in the way they connect to the outdoors and present

their works in the gallery.

Lawrence Alloway identified the birth of Land Art in Smithson’s series of trips and

excursions along with his wife, the land artist Nancy Holt, as well as with the artists, Robert

Morris and Carl Andre and the gallerist, Virginia Dwan. These excursions where docu-

mented in a photo album and were later used for his essays.15

The site/non-site dialectic has also influenced Dean and her interrogation of places.

Dean’s work is often based on the exploration of a theme, which she conducts by travel-

ling to several locations to create her works. Like Smithson, she travels to remote locations

and investigates sites. Her works, which are then presented in the confined environment of

a gallery or museum, link the audience with the far flung location through the use of film,

drawing, text and sometimes relics from her sites. This was very much the case with JG,

as I will discuss later, where she presented the work alongside with relics from the sites

she visited. Dean comments, ‘artists rely on the physical encounter of viewer and object in

a space… artists care about the uniqueness and aura of their objects and their presence

in the spaces they are shown’.16

14Robert Smithson quoted by Lawrence Alloway, in ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites’, Hobbs, Robert (ed) Lawrence Alloway, John Coplans, Lucy R. Lippard, Herbert F. Johnson, Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaka, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp.41-42 15Alloway (1981), p.41 16Tacita Dean quoted by Nicholas Cullinan in Cullinan, Nicholas, Film: Tacita Dean (The Unilever series), (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p.15

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In the late sixties, key figures mostly of the American art world embraced Land Art

and introduced the use of film and reproductive media to represent the objects in exhibi-

tions.17 Virginia Dwan was one of the main supporters of Land Art, often funding and join-

ing the artists on their journeys to identify appropriate site for their projects. Dwan contrib-

uted to the development of Land Art through the artistic program of her gallery and her cul-

tivated network.18 In 1968, Dwan and John Webber mounted the exhibition ‘Earthworks’ at

Dwan Gallery, including actual earthworks and their documentation, produced or con-

ceived by 10 male artists, including Robert Morris and Michael Heizer. Amongst them was

Smithson's Franklin Nonsite, a series of five large container of limestone gathered at a

mineral dump in Franklin, N.J. These pieces formed the ‘non-site’ for the project, compli-

menting the actual ‘site’. The work was accompanied by an aerial map of the site cut into

five trapezoidal pieces corresponding to the containers, 20 Instamatic snapshots of the

site and a descriptive paragraph that offered tours of the location.19

Tsai’s situates Smithson within the art scene of the time by highlighting the differ-

ence in his approach compared to his contemporaries. She writes that his essay ‘The ico-

nography of desolation’ presented a soul-searching struggle to come to terms with what

art-making represented and could be seen as evidence of Smithson’s dislike of the state of

contemporary art.20 Yet, he had close social and intellectual connections with numerous

contemporary artists, often discussing his work with them. In his interview with Moira

Roth,21 he describes his collaborations with minimalist and land artists such as Morris, An-

dre, Oppenheim, Heizer and Serra, who all had an interest in working with the earth. Fur-

17Lea Vergine, Art on the Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements: A Guide to Contemporary Art Movements (Milan: Skira, 2001), pp 138-139 18Boettger (2004), pp.54-63 19Ibid, p.57 20Tsai (2004), p. 16 21Robert Smithson, in his interview with Moira Roth, ‘An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973)’, in Robert Smithson (2004) pp.81-94

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ther, Smithson married to the land artist Nancy Holt in 1963 and together they often trav-

elled to research and produce their ambitious projects. In the same interview, Smithson

articulates his deep appreciation for Duchamp. Smithson specifically highlights his admira-

tion for Duchamp’s contribution to the development of American art history through his dis-

tinctive, playful approach to modernism and his unique way of ‘stepping out of the process

of what constitutes the everyday world.’22

Robert Smithson’s life came to a tragic end at the age of 35, in a 1973 plane crash,

while he was overseeing one of his earthworks. His premature death, combined with the

earthworks and voluminous body of eccentric texts, sculptures, films and photographs he

produced, contributed to a colourful legacy, establishing him as one of the fathers of con-

temporary art for artists of subsequent generations. Tsai, who studied Smithson extensive-

ly, argues that Smithson laid out a set of conceptual and intellectual propositions for future

artists, becoming a ‘pivotal figure in postwar American art’23 through his prolific work and

his expansive vision of art production.

Spiral Jetty (1970): The Earthwork

The Spiral Jetty is located near a disused oil drilling operation at the Rozel Point on the

northern edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. That part of the lake was completely under-

developed when Smithson visited the lake. This was also one of the reasons he was at-

tracted by this location, as he was interested in boosting the profile of underprivileged

places through increased visibility and audiences.

22Ibid, p.82 23Tsai (2004), pp.7 and 31

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Smithson was fascinated by texts describing the bizarre reddish colour of the salt

lakes in southern Bolivia and tried to find a similar vividly coloured lake in continental

America. In March 1970, he learned of the lavender/red water at Rozel Point.24 With

the financial assistance of Dwan and the Ace Gallery of Vancouver, Smithson negotiat-

ed for approximately 2 months to contract with the state government a twenty-year

lease (which has since then been renewed) of 10 acres of lake. He commenced con-

struction of the work and production of the 35-minute film about the work. The construc-

tion of the earthwork lasted two weeks and involved an earth moving company taking

6,650 tons of dirt and black basalt rock from the area and moving it into the lake to form

an immense and imposing spiral, 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. The work was ac-

companied by a film, essay, drawings and photographs, which I will discuss later.

In a 1973 interview with Roth, Smithson argued25 that time, beauty and mytholo-

gy are all themes discussed in the SJ, stressing that the work is open for interpretation

and inviting everyone to make their own projections on the work. Dean seems to have

taken up Smithson’s offer in her work, supported by a letter from Ballard exhorting to

Dean to ‘treat (the SJ) as a mystery that your film will solve.’26 The comment suggests

that, for him, the SJ was a work that required decoding by whoever engages with it.

Dean responded to Ballard’s challenge and embarked on her journey to decrypt the

work and to create her own narratives about the SJ.

SJ articulates Smithson’s obsession with entropy and the passage of time. En-

tropy is understood as the condition of the universe continuously moving towards chaos,

24Boettger (2004), pp.54-63 25 Moira Roth, ‘An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973) in Robert Smithson (2004), p.81 26Tacita Dean in Dean, Tacita and Self, Will Tacita Dean: JG, Key Stroke (Philadelphia: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2013), p.15

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even evolution in the reverse. Smithson was thoroughly fascinated by this concept and

it is one of the central ideas to his practice.

Smithson’s interest in the progression to chaos, entropy, often became obvious

in his work, though the selection of sites, materials and shapes.27 The Great Salt Lake

and the spiral demonstrate this exact point. Tsai observes that ‘the site, a disrupted

landscape bearing the remnants of deteriorated shed and some oil drilling equipment

surrounded by ‘lurid’ red water resembles an entropic landscape that simultaneously

embodies a prehistoric past and a science fiction future.’28

Drawing from one of the most ancient art symbols, the spiral shape of the work

was a symbol of energy unfurling over time, which Smithson said ‘comes from nowhere

and goes to nowhere’29 in the Great Salt Lake. Smithson’s interest in entropy as a

measure of order and chaos is further evidenced in the interactive, co-dependent and

ever-changing relationship of the spiral with the surrounding water as well as Smith-

son’s vocabulary when describing the landscape ‘shattered, fractured, corrosion.’30

John Beardsley31 argues that the spiral shape of the work was inspired by the physical

structure of the salt crystals that came to coat the rocks within the lake, which form in

the shape of a spiral.

Like Smithshon, Dean was equally preoccupied by the shape of the SJ and its

references to the unfolding of time. She notes that Smithson’s research into the prehis-

tory of the place, referencing that a folk belief that underneath the Great Salt Lake was

27Lucy Lippard, ‘Breaking Circles: The Politics of Prehistory’ in Robert Smithson: Sculpture (1981), pp31-40 28Tsai (2004), p. 11 29John Beardsley in Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (Abbeville Modern Art Movements) (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1998), p.22 30Ibid 31Ibid

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the center of an ancient universe. Smithson’s spiral that heads nowhere could be linked

to this story, functioning as the gate leading to this universe.32 This statement suggests

the connection of the work with prehistory and ancient myth. It also demonstrates that

Dean investigated the stories and legends of the Great Salt Lake, perhaps as research

for her own work.

Entropy, disappearance and the interconnection of past and present are common

themes in Dean’s works. She creates co-ordinates to space and time and makes con-

nections between past and present, reality and fiction, real and personal, inner land-

scapes, which are ‘defined by one’s own desires and obsessions.’33 Her work identifies

the importance of these dialectics to create a sense of physical and temporal displace-

ment and the concomitant disorientation or chaos, which can be seen though the crea-

tion of her fictional stories that could be located at any place and time.

SJ is also emblematic of Smithson’s obsession with a place’s topography. Smith-

son was deeply interested in prehistory and physical formation of a place, highlighting

the changes imposed by human intervention. This intervention in the landscape became

evident to Smithson when he first visited and saw drilling equipment and machines, be-

coming fascinated by them. He writes, ‘a great pleasure arose from seeing all those in-

coherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems

mired in abandoned hopes.’34 For him, the landscape was a place in constant meta-

morphosis, which lead to a steady disintegration, again referencing entropic themes.

Lippard understood this both as a symptom of political pessimism in relation to the new

32Tacita Dean in The Cosmic Clock with Ballard at its Core’, The Guardian, 27 April, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/27/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-art 33Ibid 34Robert Smithson, ‘The Spiral Jetty’ in Cooke, Lynne and Kelly, Karen (eds.) Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty (Califor-nia: University of California Press and New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2005), p.22

18

world, but also as a dialogue between the old and the new.35 Hobbs also noted that

Smithson, instead of glorifying man and modern technology, had created a relatively in-

accessible anti-monument.36

Ann Reynolds has provided a comprehensive analysis of the experience of visit-

ing the SJ.37 In 1988, she wrote that as she was familiar with the work though the film,

photographs, drawings and texts, she considered a visit to the site unnecessary. She

states, ‘because of its location few of us have actually experienced it in this way… in-

stead we see it neatly reproduced as the preferred symbol... with its self-sufficiency still

assumed to be intact.’38

However, on visiting the site, she realised that although she felt part of a familiar

image, a photograph or film, the earthwork itself was different. For instance, she men-

tioned that when arriving by car to the SJ, it appeared smaller. When visiting the site,

one needed to differentiate from the preexistent description of the SJ and ‘is forced to

invent a story of one’s encounter, to create a fictional space for its experience to inhabit

and a way of speaking and operating in relationship to it.’39 She realised that the other

media provided an alternate description of the work while the actual experience of the

site provided a different, mental and physical, spatial and temporal description. She

notes that she ‘had to abandon the idea that the SJ needed to refer to nothing outside

itself, that Site and Non-site collapsed into a singular, albeit vertiginous pattern.’40

Through her writings, it became obvious that the SJ remained an ever-changing work

that one needed to view in relation to the surrounding and outside the frames and expe-

35Lippard (1981), pp31-40 36Robert Hobbs ‘Introduction’ in Robert Smithson: Sculpture (1981) p.19 37Ann Reynolds, ‘At the Jetty’ in Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty (2004), pp.73-79 38Ibid, p.73 39Ibid, p.74 40Ibid

19

riential restrictions imposed by other media. Additionally, a visit to the site meant that

the viewer would travel there, often from a distant location, and experience the whole

journey. Her analysis becomes very relevant with Dean’s work, as I will analyse in the

following section, through the description of the journey to the site in her first work.

Notably, Jennifer L. Roberts highlighted that today’s visitors would find the work

covered in salt, ‘which serves as a material index of the passage of time.’41 The salt be-

came an important element of the work only after it reappeared and the experience of

visiting the work was altered, as one could feel the salty, crystal-coated basalt crunching

under foot.42 She also described the colours, the red of the lake and the white of the

crystals, which become vivid in person. Dean also considered the salt and the crystals

pivotal factors for experiencing and comprehending the work.

It is interesting to include Dean’s own experience with the work, during her visit to

the Rozel Point in 2009, the SJ had re-emerged and the lake had dried up enough to

leave the spiral totally exposed. She was able to experience walking on the Jetty, re-

minding her of an extract from Ballard’s short story ‘The Voices of Time’ where Robert,

the fictional protagonist, describes his own experience of walking on a similar structure.

Dean was taken by the shifting sense of the scale of the work, which changed from vast

to smaller depending on each vista43 and confirmed her belief that a place is ‘imagined

through the senses.’44 This may not come as a surprise, as the experience of visiting

Earthworks and in particular the SJ, because of its shape, location and material, invite

the visitor to physically enter the artwork and engage further with the work through their

own senses and perception. The viewer therefore comprehends oneself in relation to 41Jennifer L. Roberts. ‘The Taste of Time: Salt and Spiral Jetty’ in Robert Smithson (2004), p.97 42Ibid 43Richard Torchia, ‘Et in Utah Ego’ in Dean, Tacita and Self, Will, J.G, Keystroke,(2013), p.3 44Tacita Dean, ‘Postscript’ in Dean, Tacita and Millar, Jeremy, Place (Art Works), (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p.178

20

the scale of the object, to the larger world and the immediate surrounding nature.

Smithson created an artwork, a place ‘in which the perceiving self might take measure

of certain aspects of its own physical existence,’45 as per the phenomenology of the

French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.46 Richard Torchia restated this fact by writ-

ing in his essay for the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition JG at the Arcadia

University Art Gallery, ‘the geometry (of SJ) admits to the possibilities of unexpected

forms..,.and co-existence’,47 while describing the trail the visitors of the SJ follow while

they walk on the spiral.

A few years after its completion, the SJ was submerged by the rising water of the

lake and remained submerged until the summer of 1993, when the level of the water

started dropping until 1995 and the work became fully visible again. The work was again

hidden by the rising water shortly thereafter until 2002, when the SJ re-emerged and

has remained visible since. In 1999, Nancy Holt and the Estate of Robert Smithson do-

nated the work to Dia Art Foundation, which maintains the work today. It is also worth

mentioning that after the completion of the work, Smithson invited the photographer

Gianfranco Gorgoni to document the site. His black and white photographs were widely

reproduced in magazines, newspapers and the media, becoming extremely well known

along with the work itself.

Spiral Jetty (1970): The film

With the financial aid of Virginia Dwan and Douglas Christmas, Smithson filmed the con-

struction of the SJ, partly from a helicopter (as Smithson noted, helix, the etymological root

45Beardsley (1998), p.27 46Ibid 47Torchia (2013), p.3

21

of helicopter, means spiral in Greek),48 which he used along with other footage to create

Spiral Jetty the film also in 1970. The thirty-five minute film, shot in 16mm film through a

red filter, provided an artistic depiction of the SJ, or as Joseph Masheck indicated ‘a geo-

poetic commentary.’49 The film presented disconnected, somehow random shots, a suc-

cession of frames of still and moving images as well as aerial views of the SJ.

The first part of the movie, briefly showed the sun and the earth as well as Smithson

walking on the spiral, towards the outer edges, with big black boots. Close up shots of the

soil, basalt and rocks that make the sculpture, as well as the shallow salt water that sur-

rounded the work were prominent in this section. Shots of dinosaurs, filmed at the Ameri-

can Museum of Natural History and of excavating machines, moving equipment and crates

which were used to create the SJ, where also included. Smithson created the film in a way

that these two elements, the dinosaurs and the machines, where presented in sequences,

so that there would be a clear relationship and visual comparison between them and their

spindly forms. He also included shots of found maps, merging the continents of the Juras-

sic period with the continents of today and creating illusions, such as made up countries

and continents, monsters and creatures.50 To achieve this, he employed a unique tech-

nique, by having the camera tracing the blank spaces of the map and taking the shots

through a microlens mounted at the end of the camera on a tripod.

In another part of the film, he depicts in one a one-minute section called ‘The

Earth’s History,’ the history of the earth. To create this, he asked Holt to shoot him while

he threw ripped pages from books and magazines from a height. This idea came from a

quote Smithson found, ‘The earth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book

48Robert Smithson, ‘The Spiral Jetty’ in Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty (2005) ,p. 9 49Joseph Masheck quoted in Eugenie Tsai ‘Robert Smithson: Plotting a Line from Passaic, New Jersey, to Amarillo, Texas’

(2004), p.29 50Robert Smithson, in ‘The Spiral Jetty’ in Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, pp.11-12

22

each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of

each page are missing.’51

The final section of the film offers various views of the sculpture, opening up the

work to spatial images. This section mostly focused on aerial views of the work of chang-

ing magnitude, including shots of the sculpture from different altitudes and angles. Foot-

age of the lake and the water were also incorporated with a close up image of the sun’s

reflection through the SJ, reaching the center of the work. Smithson referred to this as

‘Sunstroke,’52 as the viewer was left with a sensation similar to the experience of a sun-

stroke, feeling nauseous, exhausted with the stomach and head spinning from the heat

and the light change. The images interchange quickly, the scale of the sculpture changed

suddenly creating a sense of disorientation and vertigo. The final scene presents a photo-

graphic image of the sculpture and an editor’s suite and equipment, accompanied by the

distant clicking sound of a film projector.

Throughout the film, Smithson’s voiceover narrates extracts from several sources,

such as Thomas H. Clark and Colin W. Stearn’s ‘Geological Evolution of North America;’

Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Unnamable’ and John Taine's ‘The Time Stream.’ The readings

discuss the earth’s history, the geology and location of the lake, time, the sun and sun-

stroke and mentioned crystals and spirals. Furthermore, Smithson’s rhythmic voice kept

referring to the exact cardinal position and materials of the work, taking the viewer on a

journey staring from the center of the spiral. The viewer was made aware of the continu-

ous change of coordinates through these words: ’North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water’,

51Ibid, p.12 52Ibid, p.10

23

‘North by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water’, ‘Northeast by North - Mud, salt crystals,

rocks, water’53 which were changing locations until they reached the edges of the work.

Smithson’s film has a unique effect by creating a movie with a completely out of the

ordinary notion of time. It is the medium that allows the viewer to travel to different times, a

time machine that opens up the possibility to explore the history, the geology, the fauna

and the cultures of the past. Thater notes that ‘as water/time will eventually wear the Jetty

down to nothing, film/time can turn the SJ into a galaxy. This is the transformation that film

can effect.’54 The primitive monsters and dinosaurs, symbolising prehistory, were juxta-

posed with excavating machines, a symbol of modern human intervention. Hobbs notes

that by linking those two elements, ‘art marries the prosaic with the outstanding’55 creating

a sense of entropy, abstract time and an air of unsentimental. Dean similarly employs in-

novative techniques to create a striking effect in her films. She is deeply interested in the

medium’s unique characteristics, such as temporality, tone, contrast, luminosity and colour

depth. Her movies, always shot on analogue film, much like Smithson’s, often explore the

medium’s potentials and add new dimensions to the genre.

SJ the movie is filled with metaphor and symbolism, which reveal Smithson’s fasci-

nation with nature and life forms. The water in the movie, especially in the shots of the

lake, had a red effect, resembling blood. The reddish water of the lake, consisting of algae,

salts, minerals were comparable to blood, consisting of cells, nutrients and proteins. As

Smithson wrote, through blood and the viral steps one would return to its origins.56 The

various shots of the sun, a symbol of life and growth, also revealed his concerns about

53Robert Smithson’s voice in Spiral Jetty, 1970 (Film, 35 min, color, sound) 54Diana Thater quoted by Cornelia Butler in Butler, Cornelia citing ‘A lurid presence: Smithson’s legacy and post-studio art’, Robert Smithson, pp. 242-243 55Hobbs, ‘Introduction’ (1981), p.25 56Robert Smithson, ‘The Spiral Jetty’, p.7

24

ecology and the increasing threats of modern way of life and human development on na-

ture.

Notably, Smithson mentioned in the voiceover crystals as one of the mediums of

the works, however the work did not have obvious crystals on the rocks at the time. Alt-

hough present in the salt water, the crystals formed on the basalt rocks through the inter-

action of the spiral with the salt water. This fact communicated Smithson’s fascination with

the passage of time, the geology, the location and landscape of each site and crystals

themselves. Once again, crystals become central to the work, as Dean identified years

after its creation.

Several critics have discussed whether the film should be considered as documen-

tation of the sculpture or as an autonomous work. It is generally believed that the movie is

a separate artwork, existing independently from the sculpture, since it ‘employs the tech-

niques of the filmmaker to create a subject.’57 By presenting a sequence of images with

reference to the past and the future, the location, the landscape, Smithson created a fic-

tion, a story with SJ as its subject. Richard Torchia drove home this point by arguing that

the film is an artwork in its own right.58

The film offered a different reading of the work, which derived mostly from introduc-

ing scale to the understanding the work. Lippard wrote that the movie objectified the work

through aerial views,59 such that the sculpture became an object when viewed in relation

to its surroundings. She highlighted that all legitimate art deals with limits,60 however

Smithson identified some elusive limits through the presentation of diverse scales and

57Diana Thater quoted in Cornelia Butler citing ‘A lurid presence: Smithson’s legacy and post-studio art’, p. 242 58Torchia (2003), p.3 59Lippard (1981), p.32 60Ibid, p.40

25

views. She quoted Smithson ‘what you really have there are many different scale chang-

es… speaking in terms of cinema, you have close, medium and long views…scale be-

comes a matter of interchangeable distances.’61 Smithson creates a disorienting range of

perspectives on the spiral, one moment small, the next overwhelmingly large.

Smithson commented that the film encapsulated the scale of the SJ and changed

one’s perception of the indoors, which could expand into the scale of the universe and of

the outdoors.’62 He was convinced that the understanding of scale was crucial in compre-

hending the work. For him, scale was what determined art, whereas size determined an

object. He believed that scale operated by uncertainty and invited the viewer through his

film to escape the common perceptions about scale, and try to experience the SJ from dif-

ferent positions. He also offered to the audience the aerial views of the sculpture, which

they would not be able to experience by visiting the work on foot. According to him, its

scale fluctuates depending on each view, by including different elements, such as the

crystals, the horizon but also abstract views that referred to no particular location and

therefore offering various vistas of the work.63 The viewer, thus, became disoriented and

found oneself in an abstract place and time. Smithson was interested in creating this diso-

rientation, by linking elements of the past, the present and the future and various vistas.

Dean is also very much attracted to the idea of scale and the dismantling of the

viewer’s perception through the use of film techniques and the senses.64 She believes that

the determination of the size, surface and presentation of the screen and the relationship

of the screen with the wall and gallery environment have an immediate impact on the

61Ibid 62Robert Smithson in The Spiral Jetty essay, p.7 63Ibid, p.9 64Michael Newman, ‘Medium and event in the work of Tacita Dean’ in Dean, Tacita and Wallis, Clarrie, Tacita Dean, (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), p.26

26

viewer’s perceptive and understanding of the work. The bodily experience and the visual

presentation are therefore critical factors for the viewer’s experience and for the work itself.

Alloway highlighted that even if Smithson moved away from his dialectic of

Site/Non-Site through the production of site-specific Earthworks, the movie SJ reintro-

duced the concept to this work,65 as it acted as the Non-Site for the sculpture, the Site. He

explained that since more people have seen the film than the sculpture, the experience

one would gain from these two presentations of the work were separate. The film created

a different fictional reality relating to the site, which included information different to what

would be found when visiting the site. These were the dinosaurs, the excavating ma-

chines, the reflections of the sun, the red colour, the maps, the editing suite and the vari-

ous ascending views. In addition, the film provided a network of signs, like the lake, the

earth, the sculpture, indicating the absence of the site. This was picked up by Dean, who

for her own film also created a relationship between the various elements in her movie and

the SJ, through the skillful manipulation of the film and the camera, as I will present in the

next section.

Alloway also noted66 that the film, however, did not include vital information about

the location of the site, such as the landscape, the edges of the site and the oil rings in the

lake, so it produced a feeling of connecting to a site while also constructing an absence

from it. He compared this feeling with the one created in the final scene of the film com-

prising the editor’s suite. The absent sounds of the studio, the empty editing room and the

footage in the progress of creating something new, created a sense of memory and empti-

ness. The human presence was implied, but it was not there, just like the site was implied

through the non-site, but was absent in reality, emphasizing layers of human construction 65Alloway (1981), p.44 66Ibid

27

in land and film. This human absence is also central in Dean’s work, as I will analyse in the

next section.

Smithson was interested in the way his works were physically presented, as he be-

lieved in the importance of physical and mental experience through different spaces. In

fact, he spoke of the ‘cultural confinement’,67 which was often imposed by curators, who

set the limits on the way the art objects would be presented. He compared museums and

galleries to asylums and referred to them as cultural prisons, because of the restrictions

they impose through their neutral while spaces, where the artworks would lose their

charge and became ‘neutralised, ineffective, abstracted, safe, politically lobotomized’68

and portable objects. Smithson was obviously interested in functioning outside of these

restrictions, but still within the gallery framework.

Cinema intrigued Smithson and in his film, with the scale shifts, the interchange of

shots and the creation of an illusion, he followed a cinematic approach. He envisaged a

few ways of screening his film, which for him would contribute to the viewing experience.

He conceived an innovative cinema model, which would be an underground space in a

dedicated museum near the Great Salt Lake, where one would reach the cinema room

through a spiral staircase. Other ways of presenting the film would be in a ferry travelling in

a spiral journey around Staten Island. In both of these cases, the viewer would experience

the sculpture through the film, without the presence of the actual sculpture.69 These mod-

els have not been realised to date, but his film has been screened in several exhibitions,

where it usually occupies a whole room. Tsai explained that the film was shown for the first

67Robert Smithson quoted by Alloway (1981), p.44 68Robert Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’ in Jack Flam (ed), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press 1996), p.154 69George Baker, ‘The Cinema Model’ in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (2005), p.79

28

time at Dwan Gallery in 1970 along with his drawings of the underground projection space

of the movie.70

Spiral Jetty (1972): The essay

Two years later, Smithson produced Spiral Jetty the essay, which was described by Lynne

Cooke as ‘a quasi documentary, quasi poetic evocation of the process of realising the

earthwork with an excursus on the cinematic.’71

The essay referred to several subjects, such as the search for the location, the

landscape, the geology of the site, the research and the process of creating the earthwork.

He also wrote extensively about his film and the process of movie making, of which he

was very fond. He provided vivid descriptions of the surroundings of the sculpture, such as

the sun, the lake and the reflections of the sun in the water, but also described the sensa-

tion of sunstroke, much like that shown in the film.

The essay included lively analyses of the aerial views of the work, which were por-

trayed in the film, emphasising the importance of senses in experiencing and perceiving

artworks. The description of these aerial shots, where compared by Shaw with the Ameri-

can drug novels of the 1960s,72 science fiction writings like the fiction of J.G. Ballard, as

well as with sci-fi and b movies. Crystals and the process of crystallisation were also men-

tioned in his essay, disclosing once more the artist’s fascination with the mineral element.

70Tsai (2004), p.29 71Lynne Cooke, ‘A position Elsewhere’ in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (2005), p.54 72Ibid, pp.120-122

29

Smithson highlighted in the essay the importance of scale and different vistas in

perceiving and experiencing artworks and especially earthworks.73 He suggested ap-

proaching the work through the concept of abstract time and location, which were also in-

troduced through the spiral shape and the vertiginous shots of the film. As in his film,

Smithson invites the viewer to incorporate the notion of scale in understanding the work.

He proposed the use of both a visual and aural scale,74 resonated via the eye and the ear,

in order to comprehend the work. In other words, Smithson did not consider art solely as

an object that can be comprehended without the power of auditory scale. He rejected ob-

jective criticism and he believed that the viewer was unable to understand a work outside

of its context. As Shaw writes, ‘his critique of medium and size are transported in his writ-

ing.’75 Smithson therefore provided information to the viewer that would contribute to the

rounded understanding and experience of the SJ.

Shaw highlighted that Smithson aimed through his essay to set a position for him-

self in art history and criticism.76 She argued that, thirty-three years later, owing to Smith-

son’s legacy as one a key land artist and his invaluable contribution to this movement,

Smithson’s essay provided an art historical document on site-specificity. This statement

reveals the importance Smithson and his SJ ensemble played in the art historical dis-

course. His works and writings on the topics of space, the connection of indoors and out-

doors and the importance of context, amongst others, established him as a key figure in

the studies of these subjects.

The essay incorporates a variety of genres and fields, such as prose, science fic-

tion, travel descriptions, performance, ‘geology, travel narrative, philosophy, poetry, art

73Ibid, p.115 74Ibid 75Lytle Shaw, ’Smithson, Writer’ in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (2005), p.116 76Ibid

30

criticism, pulp drug novel, cartography and film treatment’77and provides a platform for the

contextualisation the sculpture. Craig Owens observed that art theories contemporary to

Smithson failed to contextualise minimalist sculptures and earthworks and, thus, the artists

often provided the framework for their works. It is also known that critical theories of the

time did not please Smithson.78 Owens stated that this ‘eruption of language into the aes-

thetic field’79 was signified, but not limited to the writings of Morris, Andre, Judd, Flavin. He

added that Smithson’s writings and especially the SJ essay ‘transformed the visual field

into a textual (and) represents one of the most significant aesthetic events or our dec-

ade,’80 restating the essay’s art historical significance.

Dean also often writes texts that accompany her works. She contributes to books,

art magazines, newspapers and exhibition catalogues through writings that often provide a

theoretical context and background information on her works as well as analyses and

studies on various topics such as the medium of film and the concept of place. Ballard ob-

serves ‘Tacita writes well, perhaps too well for an artist… (she describes) in a vivid and

gripping prose.81

The Spiral Jetty ensemble

Cooke stated that since several of his conceived projects had not been realised by the

time of his death, the SJ ensemble ‘remained the most resolved and radical articulation of

the governing paradigm in his vision.82

77Ibid, p.124 78Lippard (1981), p.31 79Craig Owens,'Earthwords', October, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1979), p.126 80Ibid, 128 81J.G Ballard, ‘Time and Tacita Dean’ in Tacita Dean: JG, Key Stroke, p,8 82Lynne Cooke, ‘A position Elsewhere’ (2005), p.54

31

The sculpture, the film and the essay complimented each other, providing a differ-

ent angle on the Spiral Jetty concept each time, a different experience and new infor-

mation on the research, the concept, but also about the artist. They created an inclusive

ensemble with different elements that the viewer should experience in order to have a pro-

found understanding of the SJ. For Smithson, site was the sculpture and through his writ-

ings and film, the non-sites, the artwork could be viewed within a different context and in-

terrogate its site-specific nature through imagination, intellectual involvement and the

senses.

Hobbs writes extensively about Smithson and stresses that in order to understand

his practice, one must examine not only the artworks, but also the contact and their

frames, as they also constitute Smithson’s object.83 Smithson, therefore, questioned the

traditional limits of the art network, by questioning whether the art object was autono-

mous.84 Hobbs explained that his art and the context are often the same, like in the case

of SJ the sculpture, the essay and the film and, therefore, they are all vital elements in the

broad understanding, physically and intellectually of the multi-faceted work, informing one

another.85

Being also completely conscious of the restrictions the neutral environment of a gal-

lery or museum space pose in the experience and understanding of an artwork, Smithson

invited viewers to challenge the apprehension of works in such an environment and think

outside of it, to mentally leave the space and think of the physical landscape that contains

the work and by imagining the actual surrounding of the work. More specifically he com-

mented ‘I am not a reductive artist, but a generative artist.’ Dean comprehended this about

83Hobbs (1981), p.16 84Ibid, p.14 85Hobbs (1981), p.16

32

Smithson and his work. She was aware of his intention to challenge the audience and to

indulge their mind and senses by vising a space outside of the confinements of the gallery

space and followed his example with Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty.

Tacita Dean

The mystery of the SJ and Smithson’s ideas and discourse has influenced several artists.

In this section, I will critically analyse two recent works by Tacita Dean, Trying to Find the

Spiral Jetty (1997) and J.G (2013) that both relate to the SJ. I will consider how these two

contemporary artworks add dimension to our comprehension and reading of Smithson’s

SJ ensemble. Dean raises issues of her own work with reference to Smithson’s, such as

the journey, the interest in the context, scale, crystals and time and added a different di-

mension to the reading of the work through her artistic ventures.

Tacita Dean, who currently lives and works in London and Berlin, studied art at the

Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, and the

Slade School of Fine Art in London. She initially became known for her connection with the

second generation of the Young British Artists (YBAs) that appeared in 1992-1993, along

with artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood, Gary Hulme, Jake and

Dinos Chapman. Dean’s work, however, has few similarities with the rest of the YBAs, with

their common shock tactics and commercial attitude. In 1998, she was nominated for the

prestigious Turner Prize Award with her work The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven

Days (Board 2) (1997).

She is mostly known for her work in 16mm and 35mm film, but she also uses a wide

variety of media such as sound, photography, drawing, found objects and writing. Her

33

films, that are often the result of the collaboration between Dean and cinematographers,

are known for the long shots and steady camera angles, creating a meditative atmos-

phere. The common themes in Dean’s work are the sea, time, history, serendipity, journey

and exploration. As Clarrie Wallis states, Dean is ‘concerned with the concept of naviga-

tion, both literally and metaphorically.’86 Dean also has a unique way of capturing and

transforming architectural spaces and landscapes through the lens of the camera.87

Her works have been internationally recognised, mostly due to the relationship the

artist has with film and her skillful manipulation of the medium. In an interview with Andre-

as Reiter Raabe, she explains that she treats her films as paintings, where she depicts

things, people and landscapes, creating a result with warm colours spanning focused and

unfocused sections.88 Her filmic narratives are often concerned with the medium’s distinc-

tive qualities, its poetic connotations and its relationship to light and time, as well as with

the process of filmmaking.

Dean has gained several commissions, with perhaps the most renowned being the

one where she created Film (2011) for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern as part of the Uni-

lever Series of commissions. The work was an 11 minute 35mm film discussing and creat-

ing debate over the threats of film’s survival as a medium posed by the rapid develop-

ments of the digital technologies and the importance of preserving film for future genera-

tions.89 Her concern about film’s uncertain future is another reoccurring theme in her

86Clarrie Wallis, ‘Introduction’ in Tacita Dean, (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), p. 9 87As noted by Nicholas Cullinan in ‘Film Still’ in Cullinan, Nicholas, Film: Tacita Dean (The Unilever series), (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p.10 88Tacita Dean and Andreas Reiter Raabe in the interview ‘Tacita Dean: Film as Painting’, Spike Magazine, Vol 29, Au-tumn 2011, p.78 89Chris Dercon, ‘Foreword’ in Film: Tacita Dean, p. 7

34

works. Dean, much like Rosalind Krauss, believes that ‘the abandonment of the specific

medium spells the death of serious art.’90

Some of her most renowned works are the two part works Disappearance at the

Sea (1996) and Disappearance at the Sea II (1997) which are based on the story of Don-

ald Crowhurst, an inexperienced sailor who joined the round-the-world ‘Sunday Times

Golden Globe Race’ in 1968 and went missing while sailing. Kodak (2006) is a film about

the Kodak factory in eastern France, which was the last one in Europe that produced 16-

mm films and which closed just a few weeks after Dean’s visit. It is also worth mentioning

a few of her recent films, where she paid an homage to significant, mostly male, artists and

thinkers, such as Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham, Giorgio Morandi,

Joseph Beuys. As Dean mentions about these films, ‘I don’t look for subjects, they just

happen…I wait for someone to break through and then I trust in that.’91 The theme of this

series, might have prompted her to dedicate two of her works to Robert Smithson, his

iconic work Spiral Jetty and further, to his relationship with the author J. G Ballard.

Trying to find the Spiral Jetty (1997)

In 1997, during a trip to New York, Dean heard that the SJ had resurfaced and decided to

embark upon a quest to the iconic site, to witness the elusive earthwork for herself. Dean

started her car journey with a friend, directions provided by the Utah Arts Council, a tape

recorder and a 35mm stills camera. Andrew Frost writes, ‘located some two hours from

Salt Lake City and 12 miles into the wilderness of the Golden Spike National Historic Site,

90Nicholas Cullinan quoting Rosalind Krauss in Film: Tacita Dean, p.9 91Tacita Dean in the interview with Andreas Reiter Raabe, ‘Tacita Dean: Film as Painting’, Spike Magazine (2011), p.84

35

Dean and her travelling companion became lost.’92 Their trip ended when they reached the

rock formation overlooking Smithson’s site, where there was no sign of the sculpture, but

rather just the water of the Great Salt Lake.

Following her journey, Dean created the sound piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty.

The sound work was based on the recordings taken during the journey to the lake and her

fruitless efforts to locate the site, along with some additional elements that succeeded the

trip. During an interview, Dean stated that before visiting the site, she was mostly familiar

with the Spiral Jetty through the black and white aerial images of the work that she saw

while she was a student93 and continues, ‘I wasn’t even making an artwork at that point. I

was just going to see it out of interest.’94 Dean states in an interview ‘…for some curious,

unconscious reason, I put my DAT recorder on… I subsequently realised that I had to

make it into a sound work, because something about that journey had been so extraordi-

nary.’95

Dean is known for demonstrating interest in certain artistic figures and paying hom-

age to them through her films. In this case, one could argue that through the production of

new work inspired by the SJ and Smithson, she also shows her admiration to the legend-

ary artist. Lippard explains that Smithson's artistic approach to the urban and natural land-

scape created an original political and ‘socio-aesthetic vision,’96 eventually forging a new

role for artists. Dean explains that Smithson has become an important figure for her pro-

fessional life, because his work allows her ‘a conceptual space... to reside’97 and she adds

92Andrew Frost ‘Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: J.G. Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean’, Ballardian, 3 March, 2013, http://www.ballardian.com/cosmic-sentinels-spiral-jetties-ballard-smithson-dean 93Tacita Dean, ‘The Cosmic Clock with Ballard at its Core’, The Guardian, 27 April, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/27/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-art 94Marina Warner quoting Tacita Dean, ‘Interview’ in Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner and Germaine Greer Tac-ita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006) 95Dean in the interview with Marina Warner, ‘Interview’ (2006) 96Lippard (1981), p.32 97Ibid

36

that artists don't discuss his work very much because of the difficulty in describing it. She

believes that this process is ‘an incredible excitement and attraction across time; a per-

sonal repartee with another’s thinking and energy communicated through their work.’98 Er-

go, Dean considers the creative process inspired through Smithson’s own work a compli-

cated one. She, as the artist who produces the new work inspired by Smithson, has to

comprehend and respect the complexity of Smithson’s own discourse.

Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty provides the audience with additional elements for the

understanding of the SJ itself by elaborating on the experience of the challenging journey

involved in getting to the site. The audience is inundated with information about the jour-

ney and Dean’s reactions throughout. The recorded sounds include Dean’s coughing and

sneezing, discussions with her friend, her camera shots, the car storming through bad

roads and rocks. One also hears Dean’s voice reading the vague directions she had been

provided and pointing out several things they encountered on their journey, such as the

sheriff’s house, closed gates, fences, relics of old oil drilling machinery. As Ann Gallagher

notes, ’the aural experience of their quest is… a fusion of fact and fiction, befitting the elu-

sive nature of their goal.’99 Based on the auditory sense, the audience of the sound piece

is confronted with a number of natural sounds and voices, and connects to the landscape

through Dean’s trip.

The sound piece is played on a continuous loop, creating an endless journey, and

everlasting search for the Jetty where time becomes irrelevant. Michael Newman also pin-

points in the work ‘a connection between a journey or search and either an uncertain des-

tination, or the loss... the search for a work of land art that may not be there any more.’100

98Ibid 99Ann Gallagher, ‘Introduction’ in Landscape (The British Council, London: 2000) p. 71 100Newman (2011), p.26

37

In other words, the work, through Dean’s pursuit, gains an additional dimension, that of the

journey.

One could argue that the sound work could function as a non-site in the gallery for

the site, the spiral at Rozel Point, creating a dialectical collision of space between the two

locations. Lippard highlighted that Smithson raised the problem of audience and accessi-

bility.101 Although he was fascinated by the idea that workers from the areas around his

sites would visit his earthworks, he was also enough of a realist to know that it would most-

ly be gallery audiences that would learn and visit his Earthworks. What Smithson wanted

to achieve with his non-sites, was a reminder for the audience about the existence of an

alternative location, the site, within the superficially neutral gallery space by inviting the

viewer’s mind to escape its physical setting. Dean, remained committed to her journey to

visit the site, gaining the experience that most of the viewers will never have and bringing

them a part of the site and her adventure within the gallery environment.

Smithson’s sculpture was materialistic, full of physical matter and with a deep inter-

est in the dialectic between subject and nature, or artwork and environment/site, empha-

sising the role of context in understanding an artwork. Smithson’s stance reestablishes

Michel Foucault’s belief that ‘dialectics could be viewed as the relationship between the

shell and the ocean. Art critics and artists have for a long time considered the shell without

the context of the ocean.’102 Smithson’s attitude was that by getting away from the sophis-

ticated space of the gallery and into the world at large, whether urban or non-urban, and

by attempting to comprehend an Earthwork totally, one goes back to the root of the per-

ception and comprehension of art and the world itself. Smithson’s unique position in rela-

101Lippard (1981), pp.31-40 102 Michel Foucault, ‘Art and Dialectics’ (1971) in Flam, Jack (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1996), p.371

38

tion to the other land artists derived from his interest in the concept of space in general as

well as the interrelation of specific spaces, the ‘hereness and thereness.’103 Dean seem to

have grasped this and acts on it by endorsing Smithson’s selected location and providing

the audience with a plethora of information about the journey to the SJ, the feel of the

place and perhaps even the desire to take a journey for themselves.

Dean comments that, ‘the journey to Rozel Point…led me back into my imagina-

tion104 ...It has become a place of time travel, of prehistory and the future, of the sedimen-

tation of thinking and the very matter and fabric of film105…it has been sort of transitional in

a way, but I had to fabricate points one to ten. So that is why it became, in a way, a fiction.

I play with the line between fact and fiction quite a lot.’106 Mixing real facts with imaginary

elements, the listener learns more about the SJ and visualises through Dean’s journey,

Smithson’s selected location, the challenges of reaching the site, the natural landscape,

the turns and the inaccessible roads, as well as the changes that may have occurred to

the site and its surroundings with the passage of time. Frost notes that this trip ‘turned the

piece into an extended work of fiction’107 by creating a work that includes real and fictional

sounds. Therefore the quest of the work sparked Dean’s imagination and creative thinking

and inspired her to produce new artworks, new narratives about the legendary work, its

remote location and its appearance and disappearance and offer a new reading of the

work.

103Hobbs (1981), p.14 104Tacita Dean, “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty: Robert Smithson,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, Selected Writing 1992-2011 (Göttingen: Steidl/mumok, 2011), p.30 105Dean (2011),p.30 106Dean in the interview with Marina Warner, ‘Interview’ 107Andrew Frost ‘Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: J.G. Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean’(2013)

39

Marcel Proust wrote that, ‘the real voyage of discovery consists of not seeking new

landscapes, but in having new eyes.’108 In the case of this work it is about engaging further

with the SJ, in order to learn more about the seemingly already familiar work. Dean does

so through her trip and the listener by following Dean’s voyage, involving the auditory

sense and the intellectual stimulation. Both Smithson and Dean seem to invite the viewer

to go on a journey through their works, to experience the work in full, by engaging with its

surroundings. Smithson understood the site ‘not only in physical and spatial terms, but as

a ‘cultural framework,’109as per Miwon Knwon’s more recent explantation of the site. The-

se, in the case of the SJ, could be the network of nature and landscape, geological time,

ruins and prehistory, symbols and myth.

The final effect created by the work is the feeling of getting lost, of being disorient-

ed, a constant search for something, a mystery, which may never be found. This becomes

obvious through Dean’s question to her friend during their journey ‘should we continue or

not?’110, demonstrating the uncertainty of whether they can continue the uninviting journey

and whether they will be able to find the work. This voyage demands a commitment from

the audience and resembles a trek, almost a search for a lost treasure. At the end of the

sound piece, when they had supposedly reached the site, one hears Dean observing the

beauty of the landscape, laughing and dropping the microphone. She then comments ‘I

am not sure if this is the SJ,’111 emphasising the elusiveness of the earthwork and the im-

portance of the journey, not of the destination. This feeling of disorientation and being lost

resembles the effect of Smithson’s SJ film, where the viewer loses itself in the film, result-

ing to find one self in an unfamiliar place and time.

108Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar quoting Marcel Proust in ‘Entrance’ Art Works: Place, p. 20 109Miwon Kwon in the essay ‘One Place after another’, Situation: Documents of Contemporary art (London: Whitechapel gallery and The MIT Press, 2009), pp. 76-77 110Tacita Dean’s voice in Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty, 1997, (Digitally recorded CD 27 minutes) 111Ibid

40

JG (2013)

Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty was presented in London in the exhibition Landscape organ-

ised by the British Council in 2000. Dean presented the sound work alongside a separate

work comprising a projection of images taken on the journey. Ballard must have become

aware of these because he sent Dean a short text he had written with the title ‘Robert

Smithson as Cargo Cultist’ for a 1997 exhibition catalogue. Following their initial contact,

Dean and Ballard started an ongoing communication, through the exchange of letters,

about Smithson and his enigmatic work. Dean drew much from her correspondence with

Ballard, particularly around the relationship of the two men’s bodies of works and their

common interests. She used this to create a new work, JG (2013), which takes its name

from the science fiction author’s first two initials.

It is believed that Smithson admired and was influenced by Ballard’s science fiction.

A copy of Ballard’s The Voices of Time, which explores the notion of time through a fic-

tional story, was found in Smithson’s library after his death. Ballard’s story ends with the

main character building a cement mandala made in a salt lake, a structure that resembles

the SJ. Dean mentions that the writer, curator and artist Jeremy Millar addressed this fact

first and was convinced that Smithson was familiar with Ballard’s short story112 before cre-

ating the SJ.

JG was commissioned by the Arcadia University Art Gallery. It was the result of

Dean’s two additional research trips in 2009 and 2012. It is a 26½ minute film in 35mm

anamorphic film shot at six different locations, including Rozel Point, Death Valley and

Mono Lake, which Smithson also considered as a possible location for his SJ. For this film

112Tacita Dean, ‘The Cosmic Clock with Ballard at its core’ in Tacita Dean: JG, Key Stroke p. 11

41

Dean advanced her aperture gate masking invention that she employed for her recent

work Film. With this technique she creates different shapes within a single frame by expos-

ing, superimposing and re-exposing the negative and hand-drawn objects in the camera

multiple times. Dean decided to film on 35mm film as a reference to Ballard’s 35mm cam-

era, which was given to her by Ballard’s wife, and she used during her trips to the site.

The film is a succession of still and moving images shown in one, two or three parts

on the screen and carrying the tactility of analogue film and the saline landscape. The ef-

fect is a striking montage, a collage, of several vistas and viewpoints of water, the sky,

rocks, pebbles, marble stones, crystals, and the natural landscape. The only creatures that

appear in the film are the armadillos and the lizards searching for something in the ground.

Excavating machines and trucks digging the earth also appear, subtly suggesting human

presence. The machinery resembles mythical creatures, just like the excavating equipment

did in Smithson’s SJ film. The feeling of absence becomes very obvious in the film, very

much like in Smithson’s film, where the machinery imply human presence and interven-

tion, however, they do not appear at any point in the movie.

Dean’s aperture gate masks also introduce objects on the screen such as the sun,

a clock, a spiral and a trapezoid, creating an outstanding aesthetic result and introducing

an other-worldly element in the movie. The sun, portrayed in various colours, red, white,

orange, yellow, as time passes, its sharp rays and its reflection on the water are key in the

film, much like in Smithson’s. The effect is striking and suggests the connection between

the sculpture, the sun and the lake. Rachel Valinsky observes ‘the reflection of the sun be-

comes a solar double, a cool counterpart marked by its saline whiteness. It is a giant land-

ing dock, quickly succeeded by a shot of Jetty… red with fire, overtaken by the sun. The

42

succession of images creates a likeness between the sun and the Jetty, positioning the

Jetty, as a receptor of solar rays (a cargo terminal).’113

The sounds in the film, which were digitally recorded, ‘form another layer of quota-

tion.’114 These are the sounds of the sites, of film being projected, machines, and a voice-

over narration. A male voice occasionally reads excerpts from Ballard’s letters to Dean,

Ballard’s short stories The Voices of Time, and Prisoner of the Coral Deep and his essay

on Robert Smithson, making connections between Ballard’s story and the two films, the SJ

and JG. The narrator recites ‘labyrinth designed in the guise of a cargo terminal.’115 He al-

so invites the viewer to think of Smithson and the main protagonist of The Voices of Time

when he sites ’for heaven’s shake Robert, there is no need to go on looking at the

clock.’116 Images of the clock accompanied by the narrator’s voice reporting the time at

specific moments of the film, dividing it up in 5 sections.

Dean states about the relationship of Smithson and Ballard ‘the two men had a lot

in common, and Ballard believed (Smithson) to be the most important and most mysteri-

ous of post-war US artists.’117 She was the first artist who elaborated on this relationship

and made it familiar to the public through her film. In fact, this relationship is key in JG,

which is full of references from Ballard’s fiction. Smithson and Ballard had a lot of similari-

ties in their works and Dean successfully summarised Ballard’s ‘modus operandi’118 and

Smithson’s approach. This common approach can be understood as the appreciation of

the beauty in the ruins and in understanding the concept of abstract time and place.

113Rachel Valinsky, ‘Et in Utah Errant: The Reel Works of J.G. Ballard, Tacita Dean, and Robert Smithson’, East Of Bor-neo, 24 March, 2014, http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/et-in-utah-erant-the-reel-works-of-jg-ballard-tacita-dean-and-robert-smithson 114Gabriela, Vainsencher, ‘It Sees Time: Tacita Dean at The Fabric Workshop Museum, Arcadia University, and Marian Goodman Gallery’, Title Magazine, 28 February, 2013, http://www.title-magazine.com/2013/02/2154/ 115Robert Smithson’s voice in Spiral Jetty, 1970 (Film, 35 min, color, sound) 116Ibid 117Andrew Frost quoting Tacita Dean (2013) 118Ibid

43

JG is filled with information and meanings that relate to Smithson’s, Dean’s and Bal-

lard’s oeuvres. Dean, through her poetic film, stresses many intriguing aspects of the SJ

and offers a new reading of the work through the lens of Ballard’s own explanation of the

work. JG highlights the change in the SJ over time through the creation of the salt crystals.

Crystals and salt are a significant factor of the work, as stated by a Raphaële Coutant at

Marian Goodman Gallery.119 Smithson mentioned that he placed the rocks and gravel on

the mud flat area in order to induce salt crystals over time.120 For him, the process of crys-

tallisation was an indication of the passage of time, a demonstration of an evolution. He

was fascinated with crystals and this could be identified in some of his works, like in The

Cryosphere, 1966. In 2004, Tsai drew a comparison between Smithson’s The Cryosphere

and Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966) and identified that this was a common interest for

the two men.121

In an attempt to encode the SJ, Ballard wrote ‘what cargo might have berthed at the

Spiral Jetty?’ …time appears to have stopped in Utah… I assume that that cargo was a

clock, though one of a very special kind. So many of Smithson’s monuments seem to be a

patent amalgam of clock, labyrinth and cargo terminal.122 He believed that Smithson’s fas-

cination with time and its passage were key elements in the work and that the SJ is a clock

that brought the gift of time to Utah, where time stays still, where the landscape is unread-

able in is in relation to time and human intervention. For Ballard SJ’s shape, the spiral, was

evidence of this cargo, time. As Dean observes that spiral ‘is analogous to time itself.’123

This observation suggests that spiral and life are linked through an abstract notion of time.

For her, the spiral is central in human biological, chemical and cosmological structures and 119Raphaële Coutant, email mail correspondence with Papapavlou, Ioanna, 23 May, 2015 120Ibid 121Tsai (2004), p. 20 122 Tacita Dean quoting Ballard in ‘The Cosmic Clock with Ballard at its core’ in Tacita Dean: JG, Key Stroke p. 11 123Tacita Dean ‘JG’ in Tacita Dean: JG, Keystroke, p.15

44

therefore it suggests nature and life. In her writings she reinstated Smithson’s idea that ‘a

film is a spiral made up of films,’124 linking spiral, time and film.

Ballard’s fiction and Dean’s art are very much inspired by the concept of time. Dean

comments ‘my interest in time, cosmic and human, future and past, as well as the ana-

logue spooling of the now, has Ballard at its core.’125 She elaborates that for Ballard the

concept of time, revealed through his fictional stories, will become relevant in the future

when facts from his science-fiction stories, which are supposedly based in the present,

may become a reality.126 The world will not exist in the way one knows it today; it will be

out of context. Smithson connected with Ballard on this concept of time, where past, pre-

sent and future interlace through his earthworks that often stand as monuments of this

theoretical meaning of time. Dean’s works also introduce abstract time to the viewer

through her long, vertical and horizontal shots, which positions the object in a time be-

tween past, present and future.127 In JG, Dean introduces this abstract time, not only

through the ever-changing collage of moving and still image, but also through the quotes

about time from the narrator and the regular appearance of a clock, which is created with

the aperture mask technique.

In an interview with Peter Yeoh, Dean states that JG is all about geological, cosmic,

human and film time.128 Dean’s real interest is therefore film time, which can offer an alter-

native to real time, as ‘it presents the past as present and future.’129 For her, film has time

at its core, not only because it creates the illusion of time through fiction, aesthetics and

technique, but also because it is the essential nature of film. Time is key for the creation of

124Tacita Dean quoting Robert Smithson, ‘JG’ in Tacita Dean: JG, Keystroke, p.15 125Andrew Frost quoting Tacita Dean (2013) 126 Ibid 127Julia Garimorth ‘Tacita Dean: Time Frames’ in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, Selected Writing 1992-2011, updaged 128Peter Yeoh, ‘Tacita Dean and “the genius of Nothing”’, The Glass Magazine, 5 July, 2013, http://www.theglassmagazine.com/tacita-dean-and-the-genius-of-nothing/ 129Newman (2011), p.24

45

an analogue film as it has an impact on exposure, the actual shot and the development of

the film.

For Smithson, the process of creating a film is completely archaic and crude, refer-

ring directly to life. He compared the film editor, who creates a sense out of the chaos of

the various disconnected images, to a ‘paleontologist who sorts out the glimpses of a

world that has not yet been completed.’ 130 Dean’s film emphasises this aspect and

demonstrates, through its complex technical practices, that the filmmaker and the film edi-

tor have unlimited possibilities for their final creation. Decisions like medium, angles, time,

exposure, location, but also the introduction of skillful manipulating techniques, much like

Smithson did with his ‘The Earth’s Story’ extract and the creation of illusional countries and

creatures, all play a pivotal role in the final result. The technically skilled and imaginative

filmmaker has the potential to make sense out of chaos and a masterpiece out of the ordi-

nary, with the use of analogue film.

The beauty and preservation of the medium of film as well as the concept of disap-

pearance are also central themes in the work. Dean highlights ‘If there was a message, it

would be that this is a beautiful medium, the medium of film.’131 She is an advocate of film

and its unique traits, which she demonstrates through her inventive and labor-intensive

techniques and exceptional tone. In JG the viewer witnesses the bold aesthetic effect cre-

ated by Dean’s artisanal aperture gate technique. For Dean this technique is a way to ‘mix

landscapes and....play with the notion of time,’132 but also a means to address the materi-

ality of the medium, through the interchange of single, diptych and triptych frames and the

appearance of the filmstrip in some of the shots. Dean, very much like Smithson did with

130Robert Smithson, ‘The Spiral Jetty’, p. 11 131Tom Wharton quoting Tacita Dean, ‘Three artistic looks at the Great Salt Lake’, The Salt Lake Tribune, (3 February, 2014) http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/entertainment2/57457509-223/lake-salt-utah-film.html.csp 132Yeoh (2013)

46

the appearance of the editing suite at the end of this film, implies an appreciation for the

filmmaker and the editor who still use the medium.

For Dean, everything about her work is about a loss, a decline, a disappearance,

not only in analogue film, but also in everything.133 This element of eventual loss is one of

Dean’s main interests, which she discusses often in her works, through a poetic and lyrical

approach. The way she treats the medium also reveals the potential loss, which could oc-

cur by the risk of error. The developed and manipulated film can never revert to its initial

form, it can be lost forever.

The notion of disappearance also has parallels with Smithson’s concept of entropy,

which is of pivotal importance in the understanding of his famous spiral ensemble. Sypher

Wylie identified entropy as the ’increasing disorder toward which our system tends…during

the course of time, entropy increases.’134 As time progress, therefore, everything in the

universe is heading towards gradual chaos, towards disappearance. Being familiar with

the elusiveness of the SJ, one could also argue that Dean’s film was made before the

sculpture would disappear again.135 Additionally, JG was the result of SJ’s condition at the

moment of time when Dean visited. Since then, there has been a surge in interest in

Smithson’s work, with several people visiting the Jetty since. Therefore, each of the expe-

rience Dean gained when visiting the work are forever lost through the attention drawn to

the work. Dean shot the footage of the SJ during her second and third visit, after a first

fruitless effort to find the work. JG could therefore be considered as a tribute to the work

before it eludes from the state in which Dean experienced it and recorded it at the time of

133Ibid 134Sypher Wylie quoted in Lippard, Lucy and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art International, Vol. 12, No. 2 (February1968), p.48 135Dean noted that despite the current mythology, Smithson did not want the work to disappear in Tacita Dean ‘Trying to find the Spiral Jetty’, p.30

47

her visits. Dean observes ‘I have this uncanny thing with filming things and then they dis-

appear.’136

According to Dean, JG had to be made at the time of its creation because film as

medium and technique is slowly disappearing.’137 Dean is obsessed by her medium, film.

She creates a number of works about film, plays with it and engages with complex tech-

niques to explore and present to the audience and her fellow artists the medium’s poten-

tials. One could argue that she is an activist for the protection of the film. Through JG, a

film demonstrating the incredible technical skills of its maker, with complex ideas and

meanings weaved throughout in the most remarkable and clever way, she achieves to

create awe in the viewer and an admiration for the medium. Therefore, for Dean, JG func-

tions both as new artistic material, but also as a means for her to demonstrate her con-

cerns about the medium and raise awareness of the potential threats of digital film. After

all, none of the handmade effects that she created in JG would have been possible in digi-

tal technologies.

It is generally believed that the appearance of Land Art coincided with the tendency

to return to the natural landscape and an increasing environmental awareness raising

concerns about natural resources and the threat machinery, chemicals, co-operations and

technology poses on the environment.138 With SJ, Smithson aimed to create a monument

that could suggest a criticism to contemporary way of living and engaging with the land

and technology. Dean’s JG, on the other hand, stands like a monument to the medium of

film before it disappears. Both works seem to criticise modern technology and the exploita-

tion of nature, or disappearance of film in Dean’s case.

136Tacita Dean in the interview with Andreas Reiter Raabe, p.84 137Tacita Dean, ‘JG’ (2013), p.15 138Boettger (2004), p.1

48

The work was originally presented at the Arcadia University Art Gallery in 2013.

Since then it has been shown in an exhibition at Frith Street Gallery in London, where it

was accompanied by another body of works by Tacita Dean, c/o Jolyon (2012 – 2013), a

selection of original postcards depicting the landscape of pre-war Kassel. Recurring

themes for these exhibitions where history and the passage of time, erosion and change.

Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris also included the work in an exhibition by the art-

ist, which included related paintings, photographs, prints and objects which Dean salinised

in the Great Salt Lake, juxtaposed with hand-painted postcards in small vitrines. These ob-

jects reminded the audience of Smithson’s own non-sites, which usually comprised rocks,

slag and dirt from his sites, usually stacked in steel bins. Smithson commented that ‘my

interest in the site was really a return to the origins of material, sort of a dematerialisation

of refined matter…a sort of rhythm between containment and suffering.’139 His non-sites

were presented within the gallery or museum context, usually accompanied by maps and

photographs and acted as evidence of the sites. This seems to also be the case with Dean

in this specific exhibition, who presented JG along with other elements found or inspired

by her sites. This way, Dean created a dialogue between the peripheral location, the site

and to the central location, the gallery, much like Smithson did. This dialectic between the

site and the non-site, was of vital interest to Smithson and a notion that had a significant

imprint on Dean’s practice.

All exhibitions received extensive positive coverage among journalists, art critics,

collectors and public. JG was admired in several levels, for the technical virtuosity, the ex-

139Robert Smithson quoted in Lucy Lippard, ‘Breaking Circles: The Politics of Prehistory’, in Robert Smithson: Sculpture (1981), p. 40

49

quisite aesthetics, the thematic repertoire and the subtle presentation of the significance of

the SJ (Appendix 7).

Conclusion

Having analysed Smithson’s and Dean’s manifestations of the SJ, I will bring this analysis

to a close by summarising the findings of my study and answering the key and secondary

questions mentioned in the introduction and explored throughout the research.

The SJ is today considered Smithson’s most important work. It is viewed as a testi-

monial of his numerous complex interests and ideas, which are being conveyed through

the sculpture, the essay and the film. The constant transformation, the importance of the

work, along with the mystery created by the appearance and disappearance of the SJ,

stimulated a wide exposure of the work, but also an increased interest in Smithson’s ideas.

The re-appearance of the SJ generated a flood of visits from public and press, who drove

to the remote location to experience the work.

Dean was familiar with the Spiral Jetty film, the essay and the sculpture as well as

with critical readings of the works. She visited the SJ, walked on it and created the narra-

tive of her own experience. She also quoted Smithson’s text about the connection of film

and spiral in her own essay about JG. Her familiarity with the film becomes obvious

through her JG and the association of creatures and machinery, just like in Smithson’s

film. Since Dean is an avid supporter of the medium, it would be difficult to imagine that

this was coincidental. She was inspired, hence, by the Jetty and developed her own art-

works around it.

50

In her two artworks, Dean approached her subject in a way that she would subtly

demonstrate similarities with Smithson’s ensemble. She selected the elements of his trilo-

gy that were perhaps closer to her interests and created new artistic material, new fiction.

Common themes in the works can be identified, such as the feeling of disorientation which

is created via Dean’s sound piece and Smithson’s vertiginous film. Smithson’s fascination

with scale is clearly demonstrated in his film and is also revealed in Dean’s film through

the constant changes of the screen frames and the interchange between still and moving

image. The importance of experience is also vital for both artists. Smithson highlights this

through his writings and film and Dean by describing her own experience. They both seem

to agree that the works should be experienced via an extended visual and auditory en-

gagement. The fascination of both artists with the notion of time become obvious through-

out their works.

Context and the dialectic between the outdoor and the indoor are also key to both

artists. Smithson’s contribution to the research around the relationship of art object and

space is considerable, with main focus on his Site/Non-site concept. Dean also approach-

es her film and sound work as non-sites for the SJ, the site at Rozel Point, which neverthe-

less constitute autonomous artworks.

Smithson’s influences on Dean’s oeuvre and on Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty and

JG are by now obvious. However, Dean is an established artist with her own agenda and

intentions. She takes Smithson’s works as her starting point and produces new work, add-

ing new elements about the SJ to the audience but also her personal signature. Dean,

through her inquiring mind and creativity, often offered an altered reading of Smithson’s

main concepts and also picked out some of the least prominent aspects of Smithson’s SJ,

adding in both cases her artistic identity to this process. After all, Dean is an artist interest-

51

ed in creating new fiction, rather than to provide the viewer with an objective analysis

about the work.

Dean, for instance, identified the importance of the salt crystals in Smithson’s work.

She pinpointed that Smithson was aware that the work would crystalise and grasped the

hints in his work, such as the voiceover in his film referring to crystals although the basalt

rocks were still black and salt-free. She developed this aspect further by awarding salt

crystals a key role in her film, through the shots of crystals and the saline work. She also

presented objects that she crystalised in the lake in the gallery environment, establishing

an ownership with the element.

Ballard’s common interests with Smithson and the mutual admiration of the two

men, is an aspect that was unknown to the majority before Dean’s JG. Although some crit-

ics, such as Tsai, picked up on their mutual conceptual interests, Dean emphasised this

through her film. The two men’s common interests were brought to light via Dean, who

suggested that Ballard had a core role in JG. This perhaps leaves the audience question-

ing whether Smithson is the main character in Dean’s film or whether he becomes one of

the many important elements of her work.

Dean loves exploration. For her films, she travels to various locations and identifies

places that correspond to her imagination. Throughout her two works, Dean emphasises

the notion of journey, navigation and the connection with the land. For her two works dis-

cussed here, Dean visited the Jetty and several other locations more than once. During

her first trip to the SJ, she remained committed to her voyage despite difficulties encoun-

tered on the way. She was equipped only with a map received by fax, before the era of

freely available Internet maps and satellite views of the location. Dean is fundamentally an

52

extremely talented filmmaker who loves the journey, the adventure and the creative pro-

cess.

Travelling and exploring were key for Smithson and the Jetty’s remote location rein-

forces this. Dean highlights this aspect within Smithson’s work and provides new infor-

mation to the listener through the description of the journey and the landscape and the

sounds of the surrounding. However, the listener is left to reflect whether Dean’s journey to

another location would have created a very different result, an altered experience and

whether the Jetty is the main protagonist or whether the exploration and the voyage them-

selves are more important.

The notions of entropy and gradual loss that comes with time, were key in both

Smithson’s and Dean’s works. This can be understood through the symbol of spiral and

his entropic landscape of the SJ. Dean’s notion of disappearance takes a different concep-

tual route. Her two works could be seen as an homage to the iconic earthwork before it

changes its condition over time. In the case of JG, the notion of disappearance, for Dean,

refers directly to her much loved medium of film. She creates the work before film disap-

pears in the era of modern technology. JG, thus, acts as a good sequence for her previous

work Film, developing her technique and thematic around the medium’s characteristics

and uncertain future.

Dean developed the ideas for these two works over a period of six years and at the

time when interest in Smithson’s work was reviving. Through these works, she convinces

the audience that she is an artist that inherited Smithson’s tradition and makes his practice

relevant thirty years later. At the same time, she expands his intellectual concerns and ex-

perimental techniques; she raises issues that are timeless and develops them further. She

53

explores Smithson’s SJ ensemble and links it with her own two works, general artistic

practice and personal interests and ultimately sets the foundations for developing her own

career.

54

Bibliography

Primary

Artworks

•Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 35mm colour and black & white anamorphic film, optical sound 26 1/2 minutes Edition of 4 © artist and Frith Street Gallery, London/Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris •Tacita Dean, Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty, 1997 Digitally recorded CD 27 minutes Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah

• Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Collection: Dia Art Foundation, New York © Holt-Smithson Foundation • Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Film, 35 min, color, sound © Holt-Smithson Foundation • Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1972 (essay) Correspondence/ Interviews • Coutant, Raphaële (Press, Marian Goodman Gallery) email mail correspondence with

Papapavlou, Ioanna. (15 May, 2015)

The Internet Ballardian •Frost, Andrew, ‘Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: J.G. Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean’, Ballardian, 3 March, 2013, http://www.ballardian.com/cosmic-sentinels-spiral-jetties-ballard-smithson-dean (accessed 12 May, 2015 • British Council, ‘Exhibitions: Landscape: Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty, 1997’ http://collection.britishcouncil.org/exhibitions/exhibition/landscape-part-of-claude-and-turner-exhibition-2003/object/trying-to-find-the-spiral-jetty-dean-1997-p7187(accessed 12 July, 2015)

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Dia Art Foundation •Dia Art Foundation, 'Sites outside NYC: Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty: Main Page', http://www.diaart.org/sites/main/spiraljetty (accessed 3 May, 2015) •Dia Art Foundation, 'Sites outside NYC: Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty: Introduction', http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/59/2155 (accessed 3 May, 2015) •Dia Art Foundation, 'Sites outside NYC: Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty: Visitor Infor-mation' http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/59/2156(accessed 3 May, 2015) •Dia Art Foundation, 'Sites outside NYC: Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty: Press Re-lease', http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/59/1382 (accessed 3 May, 2015) •Frankfurt School, ‘Introducing the Frankfurt School: Benjamin: Horkheimer: Adorno: Mar-cuse’, 28 February, 2008, https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/ (accessed 10 July, 2015) Frith Street Gallery • Frith Street Gallery, 'Exhibitions: Tacita Dean' http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/shows/view/tacita_dean/ (accessed 2 June, 2015) • Frith Street Gallery, 'Artists: Tacita Dean: Biography' http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/bio/tacita_dean (accessed 2 July, 2015) • Frith Street Gallery, 'Artists: Tacita Dean: Works: JG’ http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/works/tacita_dean/jg (accessed 2 June, 2015) • Frith Street Gallery, 'Artists: Tacita Dean: Press’ http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/artists/press/tacita_dean (accessed 2 June, 2015) • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics' http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/#SH2c (accessed 13 August, 2013) Marian Goodman Gallery • Marian Goodman Gallery, 'Tacita Dean: JG, Press Release' http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2014-01-15_tacita-dean/ (accessed 1 June, 2015) • Marian Goodman Gallery, 'Artists: Tacita Dean' http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/tacita-dean/ (accessed 1 June, 2015) • Norton Museum of Art,‘ Events/Norton Museum of Art: Tacita Dean Exhibition Brochure: Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah’ http://cdn.trustedpartner.com/docs/library/NortonMuseum2011/Events/Norton_Museum_of_Art_Tacita_Dean_Exhibition_Brochure.pdf (accessed 2 June, 2015) • Phaidon, ‘Tacita Dean takes on J.G Ballard’ (http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/february/05/tacita-dean-takes-on-jg-ballard/(accessed 2 June, 2015) Robert Smithson official website • Robert Smithson official website, 'Earthworks: Spiral Jetty' http://www.robertsmithson.com/earthworks/spiral_jetty.htm (accessed 1 June, 2015) • Robert Smithson official website, 'Drawings: Spiral Jetty' http://www.robertsmithson.com/drawings/spiral_jetty_300.htm (accessed 1 June, 2015) • Robert Smithson official website, 'Films: Spiral Jetty' http://www.robertsmithson.com/films/films.htm (accessed 1 June, 2015)

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• Robert Smithson official website, 'Essays' http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/ess.htm (accessed 1 June, 2015) • Russel, J. ‘In Search of the Centre: Tacita Dean's Visit to Spiral Jetty in 1999’, Earth-works Near You (27 February, 2009) http://earthworksnearyou.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/tacita-deans-visit-to-spiral-jetty.html (ac-cessed 19 July, 2015) Tate • Tate, 'Young British Artists' http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/y/young-british-artists (accessed 2 July, 2015) • Tate, 'Tacita Dean: Artist Biography' http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/tacita-dean-2675 (accessed 2 July, 2015) • Tate, 'Tacita Dean: Recent films and other works: Works: Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty 1997' http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/tacita-dean-recent-films-and-other-works/tacita-dean-recent-films--3 (accessed 2 July, 2015) • The Arcadia University website, ‘JG a film project by Tacita Dean’ http://gallery.arcadia.edu/jg-tacita-dean-film/ (accessed 10 July, 2015) Venice Biennale • Venice Biennale, 'British Pavilion in Venice: 1995' http://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/timeline/1995 (accessed 11 July, 2015)

Secondary Books

•Ballard, J.G, The Voices of Time (London: Indigo, 1997)

•Beardsley, John, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (Abbeville Modern Art Movements) (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1998) •Boetger, Susan, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley, Los Ange-les, London: University of California Press, 2002) •Coles, Alex (ed.) Site Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2001) •Conley, Brian, and Joe Amrhein, Robert Smithson: A Collection of Writings on Robert Smithson on the Occasion of the Installation of ‘Dead Tree’ at Pierogi 2000 (New York: Pierogi, 1997) •Cooke, Lynne and Kelly, Karen (eds.), Robert Smithson: The Spiral Jetty (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press and New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2005)

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•Cullinan, Nicholas, Film: Tacita Dean (The Unilever series) (London: Tate Publishing, 2011) •Dean, Tacita and Millar, Jeremy, Place (Art Works) (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005) •Dean, Tacita and Self, Will Tacita Dean: JG, Key Stroke (Philadelphia: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2013) •Dean, Tacita and Wallis, Clarrie, Tacita Dean (London: Tate Publishing, 2001) •De Oliveira, Nicolas, Oxley, Nicola, Petry, Michael and Archer, Michael, Installation Art (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996) •Gallagher, Ann, Landscape (London: The British Council Visual Arts Publications, 2000) •Garimorth, Julia, Newman, Michael, Dean, Tacita, Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, Se-lected Writings 1992-2011 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011) •Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul (eds), Art in Theory, 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas (London: Blackwell, 1999) •Haskell, Barbara, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) •Hobbs, Robert (ed) Lawrence Alloway, John Coplans, Lucy R. Lippard, Herbert F. John-son, Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaka, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981) •Flam, Jack (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1996) •Kaye, Nick, Site- Specific art: performance, place and documentation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) •Krauss, Rosalind, Sculpture in the Expanded Field: The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) •Kwon, Mikon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Location Identity (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) •Lailach, Michael and Grosenick, Uta (ed), Land Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2007) •.McCutcheon, Russell T., The Insider/ outsider problem in the study of religion (London: Cassell, 1999) •Meyer, James, ‘The Functional Site; or the Transformation of Site Specificity’, Suderberg, Erika (ed) Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 2000) •Obrist, Hans Ulrich (ed) and Dean, Tacita, The Conversation Series: Volume 28 (Co-logne: Walther König, 2013)

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•Phillips, Lisa, The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000 ( London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) •Pohl, Frances K., Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, New York, 2002) •Reiss, Julie H, From Margin to Centre: The spaces of installation art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) •Rendell Jane,‘Space, Place, Site: Critical Spatial Practice’, Cartiere Cameron and Shelly Willis (eds) in The Practice of Public Art, (London: Routledge, 2010) •Royoux, Jean-Christophe, Warner Marina and Greer, Germaine Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006) •Stangos, Nikos, Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism (World of Art) (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1994) •Tsai, Eugenie (ed), Butler, Cornelia (ed), contributions by Crow, Thomas, Alberro, Alex-ander, Boettger, Susan, Linder, Mark, Reynolds, Ann, Roberts, Jennifer L., Sieburth, Rich-ard, Sobieszek, Robert and Roth, Moira Robert Smithson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press and Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004) •Tsai, Eugenie, Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings (New York: Co-lumbia University Press, 1991) •Vergine, Lea, Art on the Cutting Edge: A Guide to Contemporary Movements (Milan: Ski-ra Editore, 2001) Articles from Journals •Alloway, Lawrence, ‘Artists as Writers, Part Two: The Realm of Language’, Artforum, Vol. 13, No. 8, (April 1974), p.30-35 •Alloway, Lawrence, ‘Network: The Art World Described as a System’, Artforum, Vol.11, No.1, (September 1972) •Alloway, Lawrence, ‘Robert Smithson’s Development’, Artforum, Vol. 11. No. 3, (Novem-ber 1972), pp.52-61 •Boettger, Susan, ‘Behind the Earth Movers’, Art in America, Vol. 92 No 4 , (April 2004), pp.54-63 •Coles, Alex, ‘Revisiting Robert Smithson in Ohio: Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Renee Green’, Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, (October, 2001), pp.128-138 •Dorfles, Gillo ‘Arte Ecologica (Land Art e Earth Art)’, Ultime tendenze dell’ arte oggi, Fe-trinelli, Milan, (1973)

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•Hobbs, Robert, ‘Earthworks: Past and Present’,Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, (Autumn, 1982), pp.191-194 •Hogue, Martin, ‘Lessons from Land Art and Conceptual Art’, Journal of Architectural Edu-cation (1984-), Vol. 57, No. 3 (Feb., 2004), pp.54-61 •Greenberg, Clement, ‘Recentness of Sculpture’, Art International, Vol. 11. No 14, (April 1967), pp.19-21 •Krauss, Rosalind, ‘A View of Modernism’, Artforum, Vol. 11. No. 1, (September 1972), pp.48-51 •Krauss, Rosalind ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, October, Vol. 8, (Spring 1979), pp.30-44 •Leider, Philip, ‘For Robert Smithson’, Art in America, (November/December 1973), p.80-82 •Lippard, Lucy and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art International, Vol. 12, No. 2 (February1968), pp.31-35 •Long, Richard ‘Conversation with Florian Pique’, Flash Art, No. 151, (1989) •Morgan, Stuart, ‘The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations by Nancy Holt; Robert Smithson’, Art Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3, (Spring, 1980), pp.217-221 •Owens, Craig, 'Earthwords', October, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1979), pp.120-130 •Schum, Gerry,’Video tappa Gerry Schum’, Data, No. 4, (1972), pp.70-73 •Smithson, Robert, ’The Monuments of Passaic", Artforum, Vol. 7, No. 4, (December 1967), pp.48-51 •Stapon, Nancy, ‘Our Land: Artists with Social Consciousness’, Boston Herald, (January 1990), pp.66-71 •Tillim, Sydney, ‘Earthworks and the New Picturesque’, Artforum, Vol. 7, No. 3, (December 1968), p.42-44 •Tsai, Eugenie, ‘Robert Smithson’, Arena, (January 1989), pp.40-47 •Williams, Gregory, ‘Robert Smithson’, Artforum, (October/November 2001), pp.25-26 Press Reviews • Kent, Sarah, ‘Sea Saw’, Time Out, February 2001, pp.94-95 • Kimmelman, Michael, ‘Sculpture From the Earth, but Never Limited by It’, New York Ti

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mes, 24 June, 2005 • Townsend, Christopher ‘Tacita Dean: JG’, Art Monthly, Vol. 371 (November, 2013) Press Reviews (online) • Artlyst,’ Tacita Dean Presents New Work At Frith Street Gallery London’, 11 September, 2013,http://www.artlyst.com/articles/tacita-dean-presents-new-work-at-frith-street-gallery-london(accessed 15 July, 2015) • Black, Holly, ‘Tacita Dean's JG and c/o Jolyon at Frith Street Gallery’, One Stop Arts, 18 September, 2013,http://onestoparts.com/review-tacita-dean-jg-frith-street-gallery (ac-cessed 15 July, 2015) • Blacklock, Mark, ‘JG Supplements’, You and Me and The Continuum, 13 September, 2013, https://kulchermulcher.wordpress.com/tag/robert-smithson-as-cargo-cultist/ (ac-cessed 15 July, 2015) •Dean, Tacita, ‘The Cosmic Clock with Ballard at its Core’, The Guardian, 27 April, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/27/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-art (accessed 2 July 2015) •Güner, Fisun, ‘Sci-Fi Week: Through the eyes of JG Ballard’, The Arts Desk, 28 Novem-ber, 2014,http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/sci-fi-week-through-eyes-jg-ballard(accessed 15 July, 2015) •Jager, David, ’35 mm Marvels’, Now Toronto, 8 July, 2015, https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/art/35mm-marvels/ (accessed 15 July, 2015) •Hoberman, Mara, ‘Tacita Dean’s “JG”’, Art Agenda, 7 February, 2014,http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/tacita-dean%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cjg%E2%80%9D/ (accessed 13 July 2015) •Kimmelman, Michael, ‘Sculpture From the Earth, but Never Limited by It’, New York Ti-mes, 24 June, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/arts/design/sculpture-from-the-earth-but-never-limited-by-it.html?_r=0 (accessed 2 August 2015) •Means, Sean P., ‘Two Great Salt Lake exhibits closing Sunday at UMFA’, The Salt Lake Tribune, 1 May, 2014, http://entertainment.sltrib.com/articles/view/two_great_salt_lake_exhibits_closing_sunday_at_umfa (accessed 15 July, 2015) •Rochester, Katherine, ‘Tacita Dean: Arcadia University Gallery’, Artforum, 23 October, 2013,http://artforum.com/index.php?pn=picks&id=39754&view=print (accessed 15 July 2015) •Satchell-Baeza, Sophia, ‘Tacita Dean, A Mystery that Film Will Solve’, Sleek Magazine, 14 October, 2013, http://www.sleek-mag.com/showroom/2013/10/tacita-dean-a-mystery-that-film-will-solve/ (accessed 12 August 2015)

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•Saul, Toby, ‘Tacita Dean, Frith Street Gallery’, The Art Desk, 17 September, 2013, http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/tacita-dean-frith-street-gallery (accessed 15 July, 2015) •Scorpio, Steven ‘Tacita Dean at Norton Museum of Art’ (Miami Art Articles), 12 March, 2012,http://miamiartexchange.com/2012/03/tacita-dean-at-norton-museum-of-art/ (acces-sed 12 July, 2015) •Sullivan, Robert, ‘The Source of Robert Smithson’s Spiral’, The New Yorker, 19 June, 2014,http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-source-of-robert-smithsons-spiral (accessed 2 July, 2015) •Vainsencher, Gabriela, ‘It Sees Time: Tacita Dean at The Fabric Workshop Museum, Ar-cadia University, and Marian Goodman Gallery’, Title Magazine, 28 February, 2013,http://www.title-magazine.com/2013/02/2154/ (accessed 18 July, 2015) •Valinsky, Rachel, ‘Et in Utah Erant: The Reel Works of J.G. Ballard, Tacita Dean, and Robert Smithson’, East Of Borneo, 24 March, 2014, http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/et-in-utah-erant-the-reel-works-of-jg-ballard-tacita-dean-and-robert-smithson (accessed 15 July, 2015) •Wharton, Tom, ‘Three artistic looks at the Great Salt Lake’, The Salt Lake Tribune, 3 Feb-ruary, 2014,http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/entertainment2/57457509-223/lake-salt-utah-film.html.csp (accessed 15 August, 2015)

Interviews

• Beeston, Laura, ‘Let’s get physical: Interview with Tacita Dean’, The Globe and Mail, 11 June, 2015,http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/lets-get-physical/article24920493/ (accessed 12 August, 2015)

• Dodd, Philip, 'Night Waves', BBC Radio 3, September 2013,http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039q109 (accessed 12 August, 2015)

•Reiter Raabe, Andrea in the interview ‘Tacita Dean: Film as Painting’, Spike Magazine, Vol 29, (Autumn 2011), p.78

•Searle, Adrian, 'Tacita Dean: JG Ballard, Robert Smithson and me' The Guardian, Sep-tember 2013,http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/sep/13/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-video (accessed 12 August, 2015)

•Yeoh, Peter ‘Tacita Dean and “the genius of Nothing”’, The Glass Magazine, 5 July, 2013, http://www.theglassmagazine.com/tacita-dean-and-the-genius-of-nothing/ (accessed 12 August, 2015)

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Appendix

Appendix 1- Images of artworks

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Collection: Dia Art Foundation, New York © Holt-Smithson Foundation/ licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Collection: Dia Art Foundation, New York © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photograph by George Steinmetz

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Collection: Dia Art Foundation, New York © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York Photograph by Nancy Holt

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Collection: Dia Art Foundation, New York © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York Photograph by Nancy Holt

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Collection: Dia Art Foundation, New York © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York Photograph by Tom Martinelli

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970) Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water Water coil 1500' long and 15' wide Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Photography by George Steinmetz

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Robert Smithson, circa 1970 Photograph by Nancy Holt

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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty in Red Salt Water n.d., c. 1970 Graphite on paper H: 9" W: 12” Private Collection

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Instructions for Trying to Find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty Faxed to Tacita Dean by the Utah Arts Council in June 1997

Tacita Dean, JG (Still), 2013 35mm colour and black & white anamorphic film, optical sound

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Tacita Dean, JG (Still), 2013 35mm colour and black & white anamorphic film, optical sound

Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation view, Frith Street Gallery, 2013

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Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation view, Frith Street Gallery, 2013

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Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Tacita Dean, Salt (A Collection), Salt I-VII, Salt Crystals Balls I-III, 2013-2014 (detail) Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Tacita Dean, Salt (A Collection), Salt I-VII, Salt Crystals Balls I-III, 2013-2014 (detail) Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Tacita Dean, JG Installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2014

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Appendix 2- Dialectic of Site/ Non-site

Site Non-site

Open Limits Closed Limits

A Series of Points An Array of Matter

Outer Coordinates Inner Coordinates

Subtraction Addition

Indeterminate Certainty Determinate Certainty

Scattered information Contained Information

Reflection Mirror

Edge Centre

Some Place (physical) No Place (abstract)

Many One Appendix 3- Link to extract from Spiral Jetty film Robert Smithson official website, http://www.robertsmithson.com/films/films.htm

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Appendix 4- Directions to Spiral Jetty provided by DIA Foundation Spiral Jetty is approximately 2.5 hours from Salt Lake City. 1 From Salt Lake City take I-15 north approximately 65 miles to the Corinne exit (exit 365), just west of Brigham City, Utah. Exit and turn right onto Route 13 to Corinne. *LAST GAS STATION is in Corinne. 2 Past Corinne, the road becomes Highway 83. Continue west for 17.7 miles. Follow signs to Golden Spike National Historic Site (GSNHS) Visitor Center. 3 Turn left onto Golden Spike Road and continue 7.7 miles up the east side of Promonto-ry Pass to Golden Spike National Historic Site Visitor Center. *LAST BATHROOMS are at the Visitor Center. *LAST CELL RECEPTION. 4 From the Visitor Center, drive 5.6 miles west on the main gravel road to a fork in the road. Continue left, heading west. *There are small white signs directing you the entire way to Spiral Jetty. 5 Cross a cattle guard. Call this cattle guard #1. Including this one, you cross four cattle guards before you reach Rozel Point and Spiral Jetty. 6 Drive 1.3 miles south to a second fork in the road. Turn right onto the southwest fork, and proceed 1.7 miles to cattle guard #2. 7 Continue southeast 1.2 miles to cattle guard #3. 8 Continue straight 2.8 miles south-southwest to cattle guard #4 and an iron-pipe gate. 9 Drive south for another 2.7 miles around the east side of Rozel Point. You will see the north arm of Great Salt Lake and an old oil jetty (not Spiral Jetty) left by drilling explora-tions that ended in the 1980s. 10 The road curves turning north and ends at a cul-de-sac parking lot directly next to Spiral Jetty. Tips for your visit Guests are advised to bring water, food, and waterproof boots, along with weather- appro-priate clothing. The lake’s levels vary several feet from year to year and from season to season, so Spiral Jetty is not always visible above the water line. Dia asks that visitors “leave no trace,” by carrying out anything they bring with them. Please leave the natural environment exactly as you found it; this means not painting rocks, leaving black fire pits, or stamping on vegetation. Spiral Jetty Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point Box Elder County Utah Dia Art Foundation 535 West 22nd Street New York City www.diaart.org Courtesy Utah Geological Survey Appendix 5- Link to Tacita Dean's Lecture at Arcadia University (February 7, 2013) The Arcadia UniversityArt Gallery, http://bulletin.arcadia.edu/2013/03/artist-tacita-dean-delivers-lecture-on-film-project-jg/

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Appendix 6- Press quotes for JG • Black, Holly, ‘Tacita Dean's JG and c/o Jolyon at Frith Street Gallery’, One Stop Arts, (18 September, 2013) http://onestoparts.com/review-tacita-dean-jg-frith-street-gallery ‘Here, her visually-stunning footage of the saline landscapes of Utah and California are brutally re-appropriated by overlaid stencil shapes depicting bizarre scenes, including an ominous clock and a shamanic spiral. At first these visuals are overwhelming and incom-prehensible, as the pure beauty of the imagery is narrated by an ominous voice piecing together speculative statements concerning the mysterious spiral.’ •Jager, David, ’35 mm Marvels’, Now Toronto, 8 July, 2015, https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/art/35mm-marvels/ ‘Using handmade filters, Dean super-imposes cutouts onto the film itself, a layer of uncan-ny shapes that make the already otherworldly Salt Lake pointedly ethereal. Somehow, in 26 minutes, she makes notions of eternity and fragile humanity palpable, using the magnif-icent Utah landscape as a canvas.’ •Hoberman, Mara, ‘Tacita Dean’s “JG”’, Art Agenda, 7 February, 2014,http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/tacita-dean%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cjg%E2%80%9D/ ‘While Dean’s film revels in the various formal and theoretical similarities between Smith-son’s earthwork and Ballard’s spiritual symbol, JG’s capricious, unmoored spiral also re-fers directly to Dean’s own work. As a filmmaker, she has vocally championed her medium of choice, writing and speaking eloquently and urgently about the unique qualities of cellu-loid. •Satchell-Baeza, Sophia, ‘Tacita Dean, A Mystery that Film Will Solve’, Sleek Magazine, 14 October, 2013, http://www.sleek-mag.com/showroom/2013/10/tacita-dean-a-mystery-that-film-will-solve/ ‘As with so much of Dean’s work, this is a love letter to film stock, and you can’t help but drool at the unabashed aestheticism of the film’s tone and technique. At once urgent and dreamy, we see the sprocket holes of a strip of 35 mm Ektachrome film, itself a reference to Ballard’s own 35mm camera, which his long-term partner gifted Dean before starting the shooting of the film.’ •The Arcadia University Art Gallery, ‘JG a film project by Tacita Dean’,http://gallery.arcadia.edu/jg-tacita-dean-film/

‘Mindful of Smithson’s film of his own earthwork,” says Torchia, “as well the medium’s de-pendency on the spooling and looping of celluloid though camera and projec-tor, JG proposes a matrix of visual and literary correspondences that pushes previously unimagined capacities of film. The result is a visually stunning, elliptical interpretation of a

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speculative conversation between Ballard, Smithson, and Dean that reaches across dec-ades and disciplines.’

•Valinsky, Rachel, ‘Et in Utah Erant: The Reel Works of J.G. Ballard, Tacita Dean, and Robert Smithson’, East Of Borneo, 24 March, 2014, http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/et-in-utah-erant-the-reel-works-of-jg-ballard-tacita-dean-and-robert-smithson ‘Dean’s and Smithson’s films hover around these two temporal poles, bringing them closer together than could be imagined. Both films radically engage with the shift from the still to the moving image and address the spatiotemporal gap that hangs at the interstice of the two as cosmic, geological, or historic phenomena. They also present the possibility of the equivalence of present and future, adopting Smithson’s notion that “the future doesn’t ex-ist, or if it does, it is the obsolete in reverse. The future is always going backwards.’