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 thirtyseven-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 onsite. 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).