Entropy

Leaving Wendover in the rain we cross the flats and drive around the Great Salt Lake in one last pilgrimage to view the infamous earthwork by Robert Smithson; Spiral Jetty. Submerged for more than two decades, it has resurfaced for a new generation to see and in doing so has generated a renewed interest in Smithson's work. Before continuing on to Spiral Jetty, we stop in Salt Lake City at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to view the exhibit, "The Smithson Effect," which examines the influence of Smithson's work on contemporary artists. Driving out to the remote site, we pass estuaries populated by strange birds, a rocket factory and the Golden Spike Monument, commemorating the location where the final spike was driven in the railroad that finally linked East to West. Past the monument, we continue on yet another dirt road. Luckily, with the increased traffic to Spiral Jetty after its reemergence, the road has been recently improved, so the risk of another flat is minimal. Nearing the site, we pass another manmade jetty, this one constructed in the 80's for oil exploration and then abandoned.

Finally we round Promontory Point and the spiral appears. With the recent rains, it is only partially above water, but shallow enough that the entire form is visible and Shana, with her trusty rubber boots, is able to walk out on it. In some ways, these iconic artworks are tainted by the memories of the countless images of them that linger in our memories, planted there from art school lectures. This baggage makes it hard for me to see Spiral Jetty on its own terms. I find myself comparing it to what I thought it would look like, rather than seeing it for what it is. But what a picture can never capture is the true grandeur of place, and what seems to me to be the greatest gift these remote works of art give is the fact that they provide a reason to journey to otherwise hidden places. The art becomes the site itself.

We climb the hill on Promontory Point to get a wide view of the earthwork and pass the ruins of a house foundation. One wonders if Smithson chose this site partially because of the ruin, if perhaps this is one of Smithson's entropic sites. Smithson considered progress to be a fallacy, that in fact all matter and energy is degrading to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. As Spiral Jetty vanishes and reappears, each time further eroded, it is acts as a demonstration of this principle. The foundation ruin holds my attention as I compare it to the miniature foundation that we brought with to photograph, and I begin to wonder, at what point do the ghosts depart a site? How far must this foundation erode before all memory of its former inhabitants is lost? Is there anyone alive today who knows the story of this house? Can anyone tell me the name anyone who lived there, or why they chose this remote place? When the story is lost, is there anything besides stones that remain?

Excursion to Sun Tunnels

A 40-mile trip over "good" road (gravel, but not necessarily maintained) led us to Nancy Holt's land art piece "Sun Tunnels." Visiting most earthworks involves some sort of pilgrimage, usually into only vaguely charted territory. Our list of directions required us to keep a close eye on the odometer to be sure we hadn't missed our mark. Signs don't really work here; if they don't blow down in the wind, they are used for target practice and rendered unreadable anyhow. With "Sun Tunnels" especially, I felt that it was important to make the journey via the most remote roads we could navigate; interstate highways don't provide the intimate experience of the landscape that smaller roads do, and I wanted to try to understand why Holt chose this location, what was involved in getting there, and how remote it actually was. It turns out, it's quite remote. The high desert location she chose is flat, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Looking through the cylinders provide a perfectly framed view of the landscape - each a carefully composed painting, but in a circular frame rather than the ubiquitous rectangle. The tunnels are aligned to frame the sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstice of each year, but alas, we not only came on an arbitrary day - it was cloudy. So although we didn't see the work at its most active moment, we did experience a poignancy that is summed up well in this quote from Holt: “I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale…the panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points.” To me, the piece also references a mid-point between earth and sky, two fundamental influences you can't escape from here. Holt's tubes provide shade, shelter from the elements, and so that we don't forget the dome of stars above us at night, the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn cast inside the darkened tunnels via holes neatly cut into the concrete walls.

It was a good visit; a four-hour contemplation resulting in an inspired feeling and, for me, an amazed awareness of the wide-open Utah desert - a seemingly primordial landscape; a fascinating place for artwork of this scale and consequence.

Links:
-A FRIEZE article describing the Tunnels and their intriguing Utah site
-An excerpt from Holt's 1977 ArtForum article about Sun Tunnels

Desert Mysteries

Isolation chamber? Ticket booth? Railroad phone? The abandoned oasis town of Lucin, UT has almost disappeared, except for a few mysterious artifacts: two dark and smelly cellars, a few almost-buried house foundations and this puzzling cylinder. On our way out, we crossed paths with a former resident of the town, but he had no answers for any of our questions. He lived there as a grade-schooler. The memories had almost faded.

Calm Before the Storm

Last night the wind blew so strong we couldn't sleep. The residence building is foundationless, basically a trailer. It tossed around beneath us; I was imagining lift-off. We read the weather report: "a brief period of heavy wind preceding a cold front." It wasn't brief - it lasted at least 4 hours or more, our first wind storm on the Salt Flats.

There's a parallel here to our experience here and the progress of our thought and working process: we spent the first few days relatively calmly, though feeling discombobulated and directionless, work proceeded slowly. Ten days seemed like a really long time to scratch our heads. Once we decided to simply go out and shoot, bringing every prop we could think of, we managed to return with some successful images which gave us a goal and a purpose. Now - with only two days remaining, one of them to be spent on an excursion to Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels", we find ourselves wanting more time. There's a bit of a storm brewing - a slight feeling of panic; we are rushing to get the images we need before time runs out.

Rapture

1. ecstatic joy or delight; joyful ecstasy.
2. Often, raptures. an utterance or expression of ecstatic delight.
3. the carrying of a person to another place or sphere of existence.

The Rapture may not have happened as planned for most, but for us, definition three is eerily accurate.















Our first day of experiments; "sketches" for upcoming on-site land drawings and photo/drawings...playing with perspective and perception:

Wendover

Wendover, Utah. West Wendover, Nevada. A place of extremes and opposites. Dead flat desert valley surrounded by towering mountains. Two hours straight shot from the great Mormon enclave of Salt Lake City, Wendover is an old military and mining town. West Wendover is casino town. We arrive to find the salt flats flooded. This means no driving out on the salt flats, the wet salt is a tan color instead of the bright white canvas we had planned for. In fact, most of our ideas for this residency must now be scrapped as they all centered around this open expanse of whiteness. But its substitute is perhaps equally intriguing. Sky meets sky in seamless expansion.

Scale

Heading West, space opens up. The population of Wyoming is a little more than 500,000. Exits off the Interstate lead to washed-out dirt roads and nowhere. Roads don't seem needed; people don't necessarily need to go everywhere here.

Looking at a map and comparing it with what is around you is very disorienting. 15 miles looks shorter, because you can see that far, but feels endless. The mountain ridges surrounding the flats read as tiny lines on a map, no more than a scratch on Earth's skin, but driving among them, they are epic. Enormous factory complexes look like miniatures; a train - and you can see the entire length of it - seems to be moving excruciatingly slowly.





The Great Salt Lake borders the site in which we are about to spend a week or so. I'm not sure if I'll get to see the Spiral Jetty in person, but entering this landscape reminds me of Smithson's initial writings about the Spiral Jetty site and his fascination with the idea of entropy:

"As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear a quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the
possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications
and categories, there were none."

Forms of Travel

Time travel for us is an alien concept, something out of science fiction; an impossibility. But for architecture, time travel it is the native language. A building exists simultaneously in the past and present. It is compressed time. It is given a window of time, from its construction to its demolition, to navigate through time. Through architecture, we may see into the past and sense the lingering presence of our ancestors who once inhabited it. But to travel though space - something that we humans take for granted - is for a building the strangest sensation, the rarest oddity. In preparation for this trip, we spread out various models from past projects on the workbench and the studio floor. Deciding what to take with, none had the resonance of the farmhouse; our first model. The house is born of the collective memories of our ancestral past, upon the farmlands of the Midwest. Though we leave for other places, it follows us once again. Uprooted from its foundation, no longer tied to the earth, this, our precursor to the mobile home, travels west with us in search of alien landscapes, emptiness, the void. Other items that have hitched a ride include a gallery pedestal, a shovel and rake, two bicycles, 36 4” white cubes, 2 bags of lump charcoal, a couple of costumes and of course, a camera. We begin our travels through the farmlands of Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska, and the model house emits audible creaks from the cargo hold, watching through widows the old farmsteads of the Midwest rolling by, each in its place, still anchored to the soil. The old farmhouse bears witness to its kin for the first and last time.

Planning...but Not Planning

Preparing for this residency, we realize the need to have some sort of plan for the work we want to make, but we also want to leave room for the inevitable evolution that will take place once we reach our destination and explore our surroundings. Below is our original proposal for the residency. Almost a year has passed since it was written, and in that time a lot of work has been made...ideas have already shifted and developed. It's possible - and maybe preferable - that the outcome of this residency will be much different than we initially decided.

"Our past sculptures and site-specific installations have incorporated small-scale Midwestern farm buildings, especially a particular farmhouse that is an amalgam of several remembered houses from our combined rural histories. Parallel to the sculptural work, we began a series of photographic studies of these miniatures exploring the perceptual effects of decontextualizing and recontextualizing them. The camera helps create an ambiguous sense of scale as a result of the proximity of the lens in relation to the miniature, combined with the use of unfamiliar landscapes that juxtapose the Midwestern vernacular of the buildings we have built. Through developing this series, we reveal the shifting nature of context that is a modern reality: it has now become impractical for most people to stay in one place for a lifetime. The result is a loss of what the home once represented: security, comfort, self. Rather, we now think of our houses as temporary dwelling places and investment opportunities. We are re-examining the house as a symbol of self that has become displaced.

While at the Residency, we plan to continue photographing miniatures, engaging the Wendover landscape as a distinctly non-Midwestern, unfamiliar environment. We intend to expand our use of photography to include video and/or film to explore the artifice and illusion of miniatures as film sets. The unusual climate and weather conditions of the region will help us investigate disaster and disorientation – two notions that will also expand concepts of displacement.

We intend for the proposed work to align with the interpretive mission of CLUI in that we are exploring the house as a representation of identity in conflict with our changing relationship to the land as an anchorage point and ancestral territory."

Extremes

Thinking more about where we are headed...a land of extremes.

Preparations...

Follow us to Wendover! Our trip begins May 17 2011!