26 Days to Go: Diorama, Nesting Boxes, & Even More on "Spiral Jetty"

Hannah and I brainstormed ideas on the diorama. There is a meeting scheduled for Thursday to go over the materials and organize the calendar. Chet and Mary will be helping us create the case (modeled on Joseph Beuys's vitrines and wanting it to be eye level). The goal is to have the outside built and the topography in place before I leave on the 21st June.



I am also investigating the idea of building "nesting boxes" to encase parts of the artwork that I send back. They will have a direct relationship to the form of the diorama.

While flipping through my notebook, I came across something I hadn't seen in a very long time... a tiny photograph of Vik Muniz hovering over his piece Brooklyn, New York, from 1998.





Directions to Spiral Jetty.

I also ran across the highlights from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty text from 1972 that related directly to the landscape I first saw during the 2005 visit. They are below interspersed with some more versions of the artwork.



"As we traveled, the valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscape we had seen...Old piers were left high and dry.... The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory..."



"Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs... Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive air.... The site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mined in abandoned hopes."



"Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jigsaw puzzle that comprises the salt flats.... Size determines an object but scale determines art.... On the slopes of Rozel Point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids.... My movie would end in sunstroke...."