La Jetee en Spirale: Robert Smithson's Stratigraphic Cinema

摘要

Traveling to Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake, one is confronted with the decrepit remains of abandoned machinery that appears to belong to any time but our own. Perhaps it was these same "incoherent structures" that Robert Smithson saw as "evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes" and to which he built Spiral Jetty as a kind of anti-monument. Persisting, beyond any function, into an incompatible present, these structures do not allow the site to "cohere" into a single time or place. The experience of the Spiral Jettyis constituted by an analogous layering or stratification of time: the present is palpably covered over by sheets of mnemic sedimentation, of read descriptions, seen images, and projected expectations. Smithson's warning concerning his earlier Yucatan Mirror Displacements would seem to apply: "If you visit the sites (a doubtful possibility) you find nothing but memory-traces.... It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found."