|
24
november 1983 Visiting
Smithson's Broken Circle/Spiral Hill
The blood is coursing through me and I feel its rush. Three am
flat in Holland night. We drove across the barren plein this afternoon,
empty fields straight lines of trees, hogs and cows not raining but
cloudy and w Dutch mist hanging lightly everywhere. holland on
broken circle/spiral hill and robt smithson Quiet
square BROKEN
CIRCLE, SPIRAL HILL went
to emmen today, way home from groningen in holland north, dragged them
all down the same dirt road to see it again. it was so fast i barely
remember it. the sky was clouded over, just after the rain, a nice pale
blanket. the water was a lovely green as though mixed with white. such
an odd color. the day clearing up (from rain) just before we arrived--i
took it as a sign of something. anyway, i saw it. climbed through the
gate which read (i think, in dutch) "keep out" --i don't know why--
climbed through and under the barbed wire into the adjacent cow pasture,
for a better photo view. the circle has been greatly restored since
last year, but it didnt look at all like photos i had seen of it-- which
is cool, i can (can't) imagine what the last supper looked like to leonardo--
what we see is a grand permutation of an image. image becoming ikon.
image becoming idea, nothing one really sees. * * * what
else about the smithson piece? in the sleepy ville of emmen, which seems
to maintain the piece in one breath, and to be unaware of its existence
in the next. on our first visit in november 83 no one seemed to know
of it at all. we ultimately discovered the location from a petrol station
attendant. we had to drive down a very worn road, unpaved, to get there.
it was dark by the time we finally found it, unmarked except for a dutch
version of "no trespassing." we could barely make it out, certainly
we couldn't see the shoreline, or the bare trees in the distance, or
even the general shape of the surrounding quarry. at
that time, even in the darkling light it was apparent that the piece
had fallen into a vast entropic well. the spiral hill was an undefined
mass of overgrowth. as for the "circle," the land bridge was submerged
and the canal had collapsed and filled in with earth. all that remained
unchanged was the central boulder, and that, which smithson had disliked
to begin with, has become the single most immutable facet of the piece.
maybe that's the very reason he disliked it--its central focus and its
resistance to erosion, to time. but i suppose at some point it too will
shudder and tumble into the quarry lake. this
year in contrast the piece was restored, everything back to some approximation
of the original relationship. like a folk song it is rebuilt w slight
alterations, the spirit remaining more important that specific boundaries.
we saw it in wonderful cool diffused light-- rich pale greens and blue-greys. this
piece reminds me of his PARTIALLY BURIED WOODSHED in many ways . . .
. it seems closer to that piece somehow than to the mirage of SPIRAL
JETTY, which existed in its perfect state and then was suddenly gone,
as though a figment. like the artist himself the Jetty went from full
flower into memory, no intermediate stages, no slow fade of the kind
built into the WOODSHED piece, or that which has taken place with BC/SH. i felt
greatly privileged to see the piece. i had to drag the same carload
of disgruntled folks that came there one and a half years ago--no-one
could understand my need to return to see it again. perhaps the most
important artist of the century, he himself might not have understood
the need to see this "crystal out of time." he
lives on as a memory, his work carried forth mostly in terms of abstract
thought or the museum pieces. how many who have seen and liked one of
his "non-sites" have actually been spurred on to visit the original
place? is this an important consideration? somehow even in the "flesh"
the exhibited pieces seem abstractions, while a visit to BC/SH is something
of another sort altogether. a spiritual reunion. a confirmation of things
known and unknown. on
the way out in the car K. asked what was the intent of this piece; i
didn't quite know how to answer this question simply. the answer is
for me bound up in everything
i feel smithson was and stood for, strived for, plus my own vision of
his vision on top of that. i felt that the visit to the site was so
important, the main focus of my involvement with the piece right now.
to replace the image from some catalogue repro with the experience of
the real thing. that was my immediate goal. the cult of experience,
unquestioning. reproductions, useful reference tools possibly, are an
abhorrent substitute for the art itself. let's not reduce the spirit
of art to one of cataloguing images for a slide show or yet another
article. i want
to stand in front of the physical work and decide for myself. if painting
loses that, it has lost everything. those who would rather read texts
w repros that look at the real and decide for themselves have long ago
missed the point. to see it in the real landscape of a backwoods abandoned
dutch quarry, in emmen, merely a small dot on the map of holland, nowhere
incarnate from the viewpt of 57th st., 2000+ miles away, in another
universe. i could offer no verbal abstractions that held up in the light
of simply being there, standing on that grassy hillside looking out
and down at it. it became a "place" at last, no longer a notion. that
was enough. someone
else in the car cynically remarked that they didnt see very much, and jokingly
or sarcastically queried where was smithson now, where did this get
him? (admittedly it was my folly, my trip, i had dragged them all along).
all i could think to answer as we jolted our way back up the wet and
crusty road was that it had "gotten" him everything, and that he was
right back there, behind us, passing through a rusty gate portal and
out into the open landscape. |