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Analysis
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty demonstrated the consciousness of time and dynamics between different forms of a matter through the Site and Non-site such as photographs. Nevertheless, scholars frequently debated about the issue of timelessness and fixation of its photographs and multiples referents as signifiers without the signified. Yet, what is being presented and what the “hidden meanings” of images stands for remains unclear. Considered Smithson’s use of photographs as a Non-site, this essay argues that the images of Spiral Jetty formulates a shared iconic sign, which signifies the consciousness of time, referring back to the site.

Since the 1960s, the notion of life as a multi-formed complexity has challenged the concept of space as a static condition, leading to a reassessment of the notion of temporality. Drawing from the theory of  de Landa "Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic reality. This single matter-energy expresses itself." Energy is virtual, but it also presents its physicality through natural materials. Similarly, time shows its presence through the organic and physical changes in space.

Artists had experimental responses to the temporal interactions. Borrowed from the term entropy, Robert Smithson’s earthwork provides randomness and irreversible disorder. Smithson indicated that the earthworks were “suggestions of sites external to the gallery situation.” Nevertheless, Spiral Jetty is collected in the form of photographs in museums and galleries. As flat and immobile as it seems, the images doubt the notion of entropy in temporality, and suggest another signifier: the viewer’s desire to see the “original”. However, it is exactly the accessible images that turn the whirlpool of Spiral Jetty into an iconic sign --- the consciousness of time --- which encourages the viewers to think beyond the level of denotative signified.

Either on site or non-site, crystal is a visible element in Spiral Jetty. Crystallography is not simply a passion to Smithson, but a language to shape Spiral Jetty as a sign of temporal consciousness. In his 1970 interview, Smithson mentioned his interest in working on raw materials with abstract geometrical forms. At the microscopic level, crystals resemble a cube structured with symmetrical lattices. The transparent box is supported by imaginary lines such as latitudes and longitudes, like a grid in the map. The idea of a closed space is established through the aesthetic concept of crystalline mapping. By using the structure of crystal, Smithson communicated the notion of space in an abstract way. The temporality is present in the physical changes of crystal in reality, hence it one senses the relationship between space and time.

The spiral shape on site and Non-site also signified temporal consciousness. In 1951, Burton, Cabrera, and Frank discovered the spiral growth mechanism, which can estimate the formation time of crystals. While the spiral lattice layer of crystal ladders up from the previous spiral ladder during the ongoing deformation, the entropy of thermal energy happens along the way through random redistribution. With spiraling screw dislocation in the crystal formation and the enclosed nature of the Salt Lake, Smithson created a sense of containment and movement. The Spiral Jetty wheels on the seemingly motionless photographs, suggesting a temporal continuity. Regarded as a magnified entropic crystal lattice within a transparent cube, Spiral Jetty maps the invisible gridlines on sites and non-sites. Hence, it becomes a signifier of active temporality.

A dialectical experience is created through the visible physical forms and the visualization of the invisible structure of crystals. Presented in a crystal and shape of the spiral jetty, the notion of temporality becomes solid and active. When the viewers look at the Spiral Jetty, they become conscious of temporality in their visualized contexts, in which the scale can be extended or bounded; Time is undefined but actively becoming historical, a continuing flow of time, a clock without future directions. While being conscious of the self and physical environment, viewers heightened their sensory awareness as they were conscious of the temporal asynchrony amid entropy. The complexity of matter creates an irrational “surd” area and invites viewers to appreciate and stay in different temporalities.

By rejecting Spiral Jetty as an object, Smithson responded to the institutional critique. The ephemeral material changes the properties of the artwork over time, which could be regarded as process-oriented art. The crystal internal structure is an analogy of the enclosed space and hierarchical system of galleries and museums, where artworks are passively appreciated in an anachronistically complete condition, stagnant and seemingly ostentatious. By contrast, Spiral Jetty invites viewers to produce their own contexts, allows flexibility in scale and fluidity of space in an entropic physical reality. In the end, it “dramatizes the sense of context and discontext" . Seeing the physicality of Spiral Jetty on site is much less important than being conscious of the ongoing historical time and unknown future. The viewers set up their own contexts of temporality, stop to arrest the moment that discontinue the ceaseless time flow. As a result, Spiral Jetty as a sign of conscious ongoing temporality ultimately rejects the timelessness in artworks and the world.

Over the decades since the unexpected submersion in 1972, Spiral Jetty has become known through its wide circulation of photographs. While time and space are seen as key in the discussion of modern sculpture, it raises challenges for analyzing Spiral Jetty through photographs as it suggests another temporality and hence different values. It is arguable that the spiral shape on the photographs is a reliable sign and icon of active temporality.

Influenced by Wiener’s system of feedback and entropy, Smithson was aware that the circulation of its photographs would have a tendency to move Spiral Jetty into an empty signifier without signifier. He mentioned in an interview, “If you make a system, you can be sure the system is bound to evade itself, so I see no point in pinning any hope on systems.” New images of Spiral Jetty, or new texts about Spiral Jetty will refresh the current database of Spiral Jetty. They all contribute to the public’s understanding of Spiral Jetty from different backgrounds and circumstances. During and after the completion of the spiral jetty, Gianfranco Gorgoni documented the Spiral Jetty with Smithson. Since 2012, the present owner of the Spiral Jetty Dia Foundation has committed to annual aerial documentation. Whether or not the viewers know the artist's intention of creating Spiral Jetty, it evidently becomes a motif of the vanished Spiral Jetty. To make the earthwork understandable to a layperson, analyses of Spiral Jetty with text or photographs are created by people with different understandings, such as Krauss’s interpretation from the perspective of human and environmental connections expressed in modern sculpture.

However, the entropy does not mean the Spiral Jetty’s connotation is lost. Smithson was confident that “if the work is strong enough and photographed properly, it is fed back into mass distribution.” In other words, if Spiral Jetty is photographed properly, it will reinforce its connotation, which eventually feeds back to mass distribution as an icon of ongoing temporality. Photographs are records of the process by which one reflects on their affects when viewing the Spiral Jetty, whether it is absent or not.

Lunberry’s "dialectical play arises in the process of creating affective awareness", but in a different way. Perhaps what Smithson said about “the inability of seeing" is not only about the disappearance of Spiral Jetty, but is a challenge to the reliability of perception. Studies by Benjamin Libet demonstrated that a half-second is required from the beginning of brain activity to our conscious awareness, such as our sensations and feelings. Most of what we perceive is stored as memories in our abstract unconsciousness to avoid a heavy cognitive load. Perception, which is too often taken for granted, is an unstable complex of seeing. The embedded memories are activated by viewers “active creation of experience, doubling back on its already recursive duration and extractively self-referencing.”

In other words, the photographs did not bring Lunberry back to the affective experience derived from one’s temporal consciousness on site. His affective memories were primarily produced by his own picture of the Spiral Jetty, and an active recall of his past conscious and unconscious memories of seeing the Spiral Jetty years after his last visit. Similar to Krauss, Lunberry’s viewing experience involved an imaginary voyage, except that he is aware of temporality: Spiral Jetty is vanished. If so, he did not enjoy the Spiral Jetty on site, but the process of making those images happened on site. Hence, Lunberry’s “inability to see”, "the effect of a ghost whose mysterious apparitions are explained.

Despite the affective and cognitive experience, the viewer’s physical embodiment on site is appreciated. Smithson realized the instability of fugitivity of one’s surroundings but still required the viewers to apprehend them through their eyes and ears. By focusing on our body sensations in the process of creating interactive experiences on the site with different forms of matter and temporalities, we can interrupt the ceaseless flow of time, as well as human imagination. While Lunberry actively recorded his experience with photographs, he was driven by the desire to see the Spiral Jetty he saw in the photographs on site. He ceases to experience less embodied experience on the site, As Smithson mentioned, “the more information you have, the higher the degree of entropy, so that one piece of information tends to cancel out the other.” Regrettably, Lunberry left too soon after he ran out of films, forgot to actually reflect his affective experience on the site while setting up his context.

The Spiral Jetty in the photographs, as flat as it seems, acts as a sign of dynamic temporality and an icon with multiple referents. They mirror the viewers back to the site itself and direct their minds to be conscious of temporality, though it varies and is contextual-based. This is a dialectical journey between Spiral Jetty’s photographs and Great Salt Lake’s Spiral Jetty, a journey between site and non-site that allows communication with different forms of life through viewers’ sensations and active explorations and revisits between site and non-site.