4195.6 feet: Geography of Time
Julie Ault
A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place, but the society continues to cheat the artist out of his “art of looking,” by only valuing “art objects.” The existence of the artist in time is worth as much as the finished product. — Robert Smithson, 1968
Between May 15, 2005, and January 14, 2007, I made sixteen trips to Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot-long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah constructed of rock, mud, salt crystal, and algae. The resulting film maps the Jetty back onto its own thirty- seven-year history – looking at and listening to its reccurring changes. — James Benning, 2007
Had you not read or heard James Benning describe his film casting a glance (2007) prior to watching it, you’d likely assume that the sixteen dates that delimit its chronological structure and herald its constellation of eighty one-minute shots made at Spiral Jetty indicate when they were filmed. Each group of shots is introduced with a date, starting with April 30, 1970, which marks the jetty’s beginning, and ending with May 15, 2007. The fact that the imagery is in fact the result of Benning’s visits between 2005 and 2007 is not apparent in the film. Benning claims it was not his intention to fool people into thinking he had been filming Spiral Jetty for thirty-seven years; he characterizes the conflation of chronologies as “a metaphor for history, a metaphor on time.”1 Nonetheless some viewers find the designated time span confusing or feel hoodwinked when they realize the discrepancy. Others walk away in awe of what they believe to be the filmmaker’s durable commitment to recording the jetty. For those who follow Benning’s work closely, the superimposition of time frames – thirty-seven years, eighteen months, and eighty minutes – is far more artful and complex than a ploy; it is a valuable methodo logical manifestation of his persistent investigation into time, duration, and landscape. The link between the history of Spiral Jetty and Benning’s filming of it is the water level of the Great Salt Lake, which fluctuates dramatically due to climate change and seasonal shifts, and thus determines the jetty’s concealment and/or exposure. The water level rises in spring due to mountain runoff and recedes in summer when extensive sun exposure causes the rate of evaporation to exceed inflow and rainfall. Because of the exceptionally shallow nature of the lake, even modest changes in level can enlarge its area, thereby swallowing the jetty. When Benning visited on May 15, 2005, to begin filming, he coincidently found the water level was at 4195.6 feet, exactly the same as when Smithson made the piece in 1970. While reviewing water level notes from his trips about a year later, he realized he could mimic the conditions of earlier times with matching levels, and decided to superimpose the jetty’s history onto his images.2 Spiral Jetty first went underwater in 1973, the year of Smithson’s death, and it did not reemerge, except sporadically, until 2002. The jetty’s visibility since 2002 is mostly the result of drought. During its period of invisibility Spiral Jetty became well known through aerial images from 1970 picturing it basking in sunshine, fully exposed above water. These photographs were instrumental in transforming the work into an icon, particularly as no documentation of Spiral Jetty in its submerged state circulated. Until the jetty’s resurfacing it was publicly perceived as static, frozen in time, and was inadvertently objectified. Benning regards Spiral Jetty as a vital formation and wants to show how it changes over time as a result of climate, season, weather, daylight, industry, and tourism. Casting a glance shows us Spiral Jetty fully exposed, partially underwater, and completely submerged, and in this way representationally restores its periodic vulnerability and variety. When filming Spiral Jetty, Smithson used multiple vantage points and scale shifts ranging from extreme close-ups to aerial views to photographically portray the earthwork. In his film Spiral Jetty (1970) he used ground-level perspectives to show the sculpture’s construction and helicopter shots when depicting its finished state. Benning’s methods derive from and expand on the artist’s strategy. Except for several overlooking shots made from a twenty-foot ladder, Benning positions his camera exclusively at ground level. He employs a “to-and-fro” method that intersperses shots from various ranges and perspectives, thereby countering the notion of a singular ideal vantage point. Benning believes in the virtues of focused attention and duration, viewing both as active forms of learning integral to his practice. They also reflect the influence of Henry David Thoreau. While living in the cabin he built on Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote: “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?”3 Casting a glance has a personal dimension and interweaves public biography with autobiographic references. At the outset we learn the film is “in memory of Robert Smithson,” and the final shot is accompanied by the sound of a small plane, a reference to Smithson’s death. Four of the sixteen timeline dates that introduce the film’s sections harbor personal associations that point to mortality: January 2, 1971 (Smithson’s birthday, 1938); July 20, 1984 (Smithson’s death, 1973); December 28, 1970 (Benning’s birthday, 1942); and April 11, 2002 (his daughter Sadie Benning’s birthday, 1973).4 Another compelling dimension of casting a glance is its soundtrack, which was mostly recorded on location. We listen to the coactions of wind and water, punctuated by birds, thunder, insects, and the occasional indication of civilization. Soon after we settle into the film’s nearly sublime atmosphere, strange human yelps shatter the sense of solitude. Then we’re confronted with gunshots, a trademark of Benning’s films. Later we hear a fighter jet overhead, dispatched from an Air Force base just west of the jetty. Benning incorporates two extra audio segments that were not captured on- site. About three-quarters through the film, a 1973 recording of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris singing the beautiful and mournful duet “Love Hurts” ruptures the section captioned March 19, 2005. Like Smithson, Parsons died in 1973. He was twenty-six. The volume increases and decreases as the shots transition, suggesting a fluctuating distance to the source – perhaps a tape deck in an off-screen car. The song seems remote, ghostly. Its emotional content is intensified by images of the jetty engulfed in the cool colors of dusk and the warm tones of last light. During his editing process Benning happened to watch Mono Lake, by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, a film that charts a trip they made with Michael Heizer to the hypersaline California Lake in 1968. When Holt edited their footage thirty-six years later, she included two romantic songs by Waylon Jennings, whom the three had seen perform a week before going to Mono Lake. Benning speaks about using music, like Holt, to invoke the psychic pain of witnessing the death of a loved one. He refers to Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, to Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons, and relates through his personal experience of witnessing the death of a close friend in 1979.5 A second inserted acoustic fragment accompanies footage of five people walking on Spiral Jetty. We hear a man’s voice intermingled with ambient sound, but it is muted; his words are indecipherable. Although unidentified, the voice is Smithson’s, which Benning sampled from Mono Lake. Normally a stickler for precise equivalency, the eighty shots that compose casting a glance are only approximately one minute each. Benning has deviated from his usual methods when it comes to each segment’s length, as well as to his customary allegiance to symmetry, by introducing variation in the number of shots that form the film’s sections.6 He is nonchalant about such anomalies: “I somehow didn’t care this time,” and on another occasion jokes, “I’m getting too old to count.”7 While the filmmaker’s transgressing his own logic might be initially destabilizing for some Benning aficio nados, it is striking the way Benning embraces change in his own methodology. Casting a glance, while documenting Spiral Jetty, is a measure of his transformation as artist and filmmaker. Benning obsessively explores what engenders a sense of connection for him here. The film attests to alliance, influence, and veneration. I can’t help but think of casting a glance as an offering – a love letter, essentially – to Smithson, who died without experiencing the full evolution of Spiral Jetty. It is also a dialogue – an unwitting collaboration with the deceased artist. While Benning frames Spiral Jetty through his particular brand of “subjective objectivity” and formal simplicity, the inverse also occurs: he is framed by Smithson and thus comes into focus. Through this we get to experience the quintessential Benning via Spiral Jetty, which we find to be an ideal context for enacting the filmmaker’s philosophies of looking and listening and landscape as a function of time. Smithson’s vision manifest in Spiral Jetty amid the multifaceted splendor of the Great Salt Lake, and Benning’s vision manifest in the conceptual and formal grace of casting a glance, coalesce into an articulation of complementary sensibilities and convictions, particularly in respect to understanding landscape as an infinitely dynamic process. In a recent conversation Benning reflected on that initial day of filming and the coincident measurement of 4195.6 feet. He recalled, “A violent storm blew through later that day and the water rose and dropped two feet. The jetty disappeared and then reappeared allowing me to witness its historical range in just a few hours (maybe eighty minutes); perhaps this was what made me think a year later that I should map my film back across the jetty’s full history.”8 The obvious story told in casting a glance is the life of Spiral Jetty; Benning and Smithson’s communion of methods is an implicit focus, and the overshadowing theme is time. Inquiring of the relationship between chronology and narrative, the film’s timeframe seems illusory, throwing “now” and “then” into question; casting a glance is somehow tenseless.9 Geological time, calendar time, clock time, perceptual time, and cinematic time are concurrently invoked, which makes a compelling methodo logical point of contact with Smithson. In 1996, Jack Flam insightfully hypothesized, “…Smithson takes time itself not only as one of the main themes of his art, but also as one of his most important mediums.”10 This reflection could well extend to Benning and his embrace of temporality in casting a glance. Oh, and did I tell you what a beautiful film it is?
Notes
1 Benning in conversation with Lynne Cooke on the occasion of a screening of his films at Dia:Beacon, September 21, 2008. 2 E-mail to author, April 15, 2009. 3 Thoreau quoted in Benning, “Life is Finite,” Wexner Center website, 2008. Thoreau’s influence on Benning continues: in 2007 he built a copy of the Walden cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains. 4 E-mail to author, April 2, 2007. 5 Benning, Vienna Filmmuseum, November 1, 2007. 6 For example, sixty one-minute shots create One Way Boogie Woogie, 1977; thirty-five two-and-a-half minute shots compose El Valley Centro, 2000; and ten ten-minute shots form Ten Skies, 2004. 7 “Dialogue with James Benning” moderated by Robert Koehler, Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, March 27, 2009. 8 Conversation with the author, June 11, 2009. 9 Physicists and philosophers widely agree that “the flow of time” is a creation of consciousness that we rely on for order. See Dan Falk, In Search of Time; The Science of a Curious Dimension, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). 10 Jack Flam, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).