Het artikel 'Il futuro della land art' door Riccardo Venturi verscheen oorspronkelijk in het italiaans op Antinomie website. In het artikel gaat de auteur in op From Dawn till Dusk, de virtuele ontmoeting tussen twee earthworks door Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Spiral Jetty (1970) and Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) uit het Land Art Lives programma. Met de vriendelijke toestemming van de auteur herpubliceren we zijn artikel op de Land Art Lives website. Daarvoor gebruiken we de engelse vertaling zoals deze beschikbaar is op de Antinomie website.

Il Futuro della land art, by Riccardo Venturi

Connected

“Due to the weather we have to go offline for a short period to move tech to a safe and dry space”: this is what I read in the livestream program , which has been updated several times :“Due to the rain and strong wind in Emmen, we are offline. We are now moving the tech into a safe and dry place in the forest and start broadcasting from there. Apologies for the inconvenience, we unfortunately do not control the weather”, and so on.

From Dawn till Dusk is the title of a virtual meeting between two earthworks by Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Spiral Jetty (1970) and Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), the first in Utah (USA) the second in Emmen (Holland). Together with Amarillo Ramp (1973) in Texas, they constitute the set of Smithson's remaining earthworks , and the one in Holland is the only one on European soil. The meeting, organized by the HoltSmithson Foundation, the Kunstmuseum M., Land Art Contemporary (both in Holland), Land Arts of the American West (Texas Tech University), and held on September 10, consisted of a seven-hour live broadcast, from 2 to 9 pm in Europe, from 6 am to 1 pm in the United States. Various activities followed one another, with Smithson's declamation of texts in front of Spiral Jetty punctuated by long pauses. Long enough at least to keep the attention of those following the meeting remotely on a laptop screen, long enough to avoid getting distracted by doing something else: compulsively checking email, surfing the internet and social media and other activities well described by Kenneth Goldsmith in Wasting Time on the Internet (Einaudi 2017).

The day ended with an online meeting between two artists, Tacita Dean and Chris Taylor, along with Lisa Le Feuvre (director of the HoltSmithson Foundation) and, as a grand finale, Lee Ranaldo who read passages from his travel diary when, on tour with Sonic Youth, he twice convinced the rest of the band to search for Broken Circle/Spiral Hill , then as now closed to the public. It is in fact located on private land, yet another obstacle to its preservation.

I confess that I lost patience several times during the day because of the technical problems, partly due to the difficulty of coordinating the live broadcast between Salt Lake and Emmen and managing the meteors. The microphones generated echoes that multiplied and covered the voices or greatly amplified the surrounding noises, as in our conversations on the phone with headphones. Immersed in this soundscape, human voices remained little more than a faint and at times indistinct whisper. All that remained was the image: a man and a woman from behind reading Smithson aloud, in front of a waterless Spiral Jetty , with the tide low and a changing light with purple reflections. And on the screen next to it the hazy but dazzling sky of Emmen.

The morning light reflecting on the water of Salt Lake and the sun setting in the former quarry of Emmen: the span of a day in the United States and Europe before our eyes, within reach of a split screen . A “digital event” made up of voices and points of view, including the non-human one of the drone filming Smithson’s Dutch intervention from above.

It is trivial to remember that the meteorological inconveniences were foreseeable. How can I forget my visit to Broken Circle/Spiral Hill blessed or afflicted by a pouring rain that I had not foreseen and that the weather forecast announced when I was already on the move? But not only that: without this negotiation with atmospheric events, without meteors, there is simply no Land art, it matters little whether one thinks from the artist's or the spectator's point of view. Unless we are satisfied with a museological vision that boxes up what was born to be exhibited outside, we cannot separate these artistic interventions from the action of the climate, of the weather that is and will be. And not even the most sophisticated technological tools know how to manage these inconveniences and sometimes there is nothing left but to go offline.

How can we rethink “historical” Land art – that created in the 1970s – in the era of social media and new media?

Fragile

Unable to follow a seven-hour livestream , and fed up with the constant technical glitches, I leave the computer on and wander around the house, just letting the sound carpet created by the birds and the wind spread through the rooms as background, like the sound of a radio. The only constant presence is that of the wind, a wind that I am not sure whether it comes from Salt Lake or Emmen, probably from both, with the microphones that merge or mix two climatic situations so distant from each other, which find their point of convergence in Smithson. It is this simultaneity, this conversation between two iconic works of his production that makes the technical glitches and delays on the program bearable.

The windy soundscape, I realize, gives an unexpected color to the two earthworks , managing to immerse them in the duration of our present, even the most tedious, including that of a livestream . Indeed, the uninterrupted background noise, the carpet of natural sounds are the only proof that we are in front of a live video and not two photographs side by side like in the power points of university classrooms. So we remain waiting for the weather conditions to improve (they will not improve). In fact, the sky evolves too slowly to be taken as an indicator of live broadcast; in this sense, more effective are, in addition to the blowing of the wind, the strangers who, absent-minded and furtive, pass in front of the camera.

In short, basing ourselves only on the photographic documentation of Land art, or on the way in which these interventions in deliberately unreachable places are mostly captured, we leave aside the temporal factor. What happens to Land art when, instead of considering it only through the spatial dimension – starting from site-specificity – we expose it to the more volatile dimension of time?

From Dawn till Dusk is driven by similar questions: “Why is land art particularly relevant today? What are its new manifestations? How do we deal with these often impermanent works of art? And how does land art shed light on the urgent ecological and social issues of today?”. Which I summarize as follows: what is the future of Land art? A question suspended between the two images that scroll on the screen and that offer an opposite relationship with the aquatic element. On the left Spiral Jetty merges with the surrounding bedrock; on the right Broken Circleis almost submerged by water due to the rain. Drought and flood. An anomalous vision compared to the way in which these iconic works have been reproduced, imagined and studied for five decades now.

Changing

The future of Smithson’s earthworks is imponderable because of their fragility – a story that remains to be written and that becomes urgent today when the ecological question and the climate crisis are at the center of the visual arts. What to do in the face of change, contain it or leave it to its fate? I focus on the case of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill , a work by Smithson on which we have a wealth of documentation.

As expected, the artist's intention is to let the elements do their dirty work, to let the climate actively interact with the artistic intervention, exposed to all kinds of natural manipulation: "If the work has enough physicality, any natural alteration will help to enhance it. Geology has its own entropy, which has to do with sediment mixtures. Sediments have a role in my work" ^[1] , as Smithson was interviewed by Gregoire Müller in an interview published in "Arts Magazine" in September 1971.

Let geology take its course, you art historians and champions of the defense of the historical-artistic heritage – Learning from geology! At the antipodes of the famous sentence of the architect Robert Venturi praising Las Vegas, which dates back to 1972 (a year after this interview), Smithson chooses as a model of the contemporary not the postmodernism of the “mirage city” but the deep time of geological science. And if this position seems sensible today, we owe it only to the familiarity of artists with the Anthropocene.

The action of the elements and the consequent deterioration of an earthwork are combined with the entropy professed by Smithson. “ The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, is a Cruel Master” is the beautiful title of the interview with Müller – a title, incidentally, taken from Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is Laid (1968), a posthumous novel by the writer Malcolm Lowry, known for Under the Volcano (1947, recently re-edited with success in Italy). It is about supporting the action of this “merciless mistress” that is the Earth. Let us not forget that Gaia – the Earth as a living being according to the hypothesis that the English climatologist James E. Lovelock developed in the seventies together with the biologist Lynn Margulis and that Bruno Latour took up, expanded and finally distorted, placing it at the center of his political ecology – is not (only) the benign, prosperous and fertile Great Mother who holds all living beings in an embrace. It is also a cruel deity, if we think of Hesiod's Theogony with the castration of Uranus that distances him forever from Gaia on which he was well placed.

For this reason, the cinematographic documentation of earthworks , witnesses of their original state, is useful: “A work of this magnitude does not end with an 'exhibition'. It has its own way of generating continuous movement. Museum exhibitions often neutralize art by removing it from society, putting it out of circulation, making it 'abstract' and useless” ^[2] . A precise criticism of every musealizing push that tends to neutralize artistic potential, which is dynamic in essence.

Ambiguous

Now, Smithson is not a monolithic artist and his writings, although limited to a single decade, show surprising oscillations. In fact, in the space of a few days (assuming that the previous interview took place in the summer of 1971) he seems to have removed what he had reported with such verve to Gregoire Müller. In a letter addressed to the writer and critic Enno Develing, undated but attributable to September 1971, this is his wish: “I hope Sjouke Zijlstra realizes the importance of the project, and will keep it from being destroyed” ^[3] . Similarly, in another letter addressed to Dr. Sanders (we are on 10 December 1971), a lukewarm feeling of preservation insinuates itself into the artist's geological heart.

Smithson, who made entropy a creative principle, shows a dual feeling in front of his earthworks: on the one hand the will to let nature or, more concretely, the atmospheric elements take their course, on the other the very human vocation to preserve them for future generations. How to reconcile these two opposing needs? Smithson seems to get by with a paradox of which he was undoubtedly aware: creating a permanent structure subjected to change . It is a question of a few months: on December 10, 1971 Smithson and Nancy Holt write to the geographer Sjouke Zijlstra:

“The temporary restoration includes:
1 – Digging the canal deeper (about 1.5 meters in total)
2 – Filling all the eroded areas in the pier with sand
3 – Removing weeds from the hill.
Then, later in the spring, possibly proceed with the definitive stabilization and restoration with wooden poles.” ^[4] .

This is a protocol of conservation and restoration with all the trimmings, where the artist couple shows the same attention that we expect towards a sculpture en plein air , that is, the exact opposite of earthworks : “The parks that surround some museums isolate art making it an object of formal enjoyment. The objects in a park suggest a static repose rather than a continuous dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for a finished art” ^[5] , so Smithson in 1972. The parks settle accounts with the landscape and put an end to nature which, in Smithsonian poetics, is never finished.

That this was the artist's will is demonstrated by a message dated 29 September 1972, where he congratulates Sjouke and Corry Zijlstra on the stakes that have reinforced the hill ( Spiral Hill ) and the circle ( Broken Circle ) in Emmen. It is a pity that this slight consolidation is not enough to slow down the advance of a landscape in continuous metamorphosis, as demonstrated by the thick vegetation on the hill, and has even altered its original appearance: "The planting of evergreens to maintain the spiral was clearly a major mistake, as they transform the work into a sort of shapeless mass in which the circular path becomes barely visible" ^[6] .

But even without projecting ourselves into the present day, fifty years after its creation, just a few months after the closing of the international art exhibition Sonsbeek 71, Smithson's intervention was in critical condition due to its vulnerability and the autumn storms. (It is no coincidence that Smithson asked for photographs of his work in different seasons of the year.)

A degradation that does not go unnoticed. On the occasion of an upcoming Smithsonian retrospective at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo (10 December 1983-16 January 1984), Nancy Holt, now the custodian of her husband's legacy who had been dead for a decade, returns to the issue. On 7 July 1983 ^[7] she shares with Rudi Oxenaar her concerns about the conservation of Smithson's work, who, according to Holt, was in favour of riprap. This is a method, widespread in Holland, where piles of stone or concrete debris serve as breakwaters against the infiltration of water in order to prevent erosion. Some drawings by Smithson from June 1971 confirm this interventionism. But the crucial sentence that captures the difficulty of negotiating between erosion and conservation is the following: “He felt that his works should be permanent enough to withstand the flux and forces of nature”.

Holt ends up advocating a restoration similar to that of an old painting: “I feel strongly that the whole work should be brought back to the condition Bob envisaged. […] Earth could be added to Broken Circle to restore the level of the ground”. The existence of an original is thus reaffirmed, to which the restoration, begun in 1987, must adhere. Is it a restoration or something closer to a translation? Rereading the discussions that aroused at the time, the question is legitimate: “considering the result, we can once again ask ourselves whether 'restoration' is the right term to indicate this type of intervention. Rather than reversing the process and bringing the work back to the state it was in in 1971, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill has acquired a new state” ^[8] , as if it had been completed, brought to a logical conclusion and not brought back to a presumed original state.

This brings us to 2011, when Nancy Holt visited Holland to complete the film on Broken Circle/Spiral Hill , released for the fiftieth anniversary of earthwork , an occasion on which I was able to view it, soaked from head to toe, with tea in a plastic cup held by the edges so as not to burn my fingers.

Perishable

Can Broken Circle/Spiral Hill be made a historical monument to be protected, a public sculpture like those (mostly insignificant or hideous) that occupy our public spaces, a ruin propped up by steel beams or camouflagedly restored, a fossil threatened with being digested by the earth's crust? Is it an earthwork too historicized, or rather now included in our cultural heritage, to be left to rot at the mercy of the elements? It would not be the first case nor the most extreme: in 1977 Robert Morris's The Observatory (1971) was rebuilt in another location, in defiance of site-specificity . What will become of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill ? A few days ago it was rain that disrupted a livestream between enthusiasts of Smithson's work, connected in two continents with eight hours of time difference, tomorrow a severe drought or flood could make drastic remedies inevitable.

Et in Utah Ego ^[9] : this is what Smithson wrote about Spiral Jetty , providing his version of the tombstone inscription at the centre of two famous paintings by Guercino and Poussin ( Et in Arcadia Ego ). Will Broken Circle/Spiral Hill be called Et in Emmen Ego in the near future ?

^[1] R. Smithson, …The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, is a Cruel Master , in Robert Smithson: Collected Writings , edited by Jack Flam, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996, p. 256.

^[2] R. Smithson, …The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, is a Cruel Master , p. 259.

^[3] In Ingrid Commandeur, Trudy Van Riemsdijk-Zandee (ed.), Robert Smithson. Art in Continual Movement. A Contemporary Reading , Amsterdam, Alauda Publications, 2012, pp. 108-112, 227.

^[4] In Robert Smithson. Art in Continual Movement, p. 64.

^[5] R. Smithson, Cultural Confinement , p. 155.

^[6] Gilles A. Tiberghien, Restoring works in nature. Reflection elements , Paris, DITS Institut National d'Histoire de l'art, 2021, p. 53. Tiberghien here rethinks the restoration of Land art by rereading and updating Cesare Brandi's theory.

^[7] In Robert Smithson. Art in Continual Movement, p. 80.

^[8] Vivian van Saaze, The Ethics and Politics of Documentation. On Continuity and Change in the Work of Robert Smithson , in I. Commandeur, T. Van Riemsdijk-Zandee (ed.), Robert Smithson, Art in Continual Movement. A Contemporary Reading , pp. 81-82.

^[9] R. Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), p. 149.

On the cover: film still from “Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971-2011)”. Film images: Nancy Holt (1971), Benito Strangio (2011)