Negative Ecology: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty at 50

John Culbert (bio)

Abstract

This essay reassesses the significance of Robert Smithson’s land art for environmental politics in a time of climate crisis. Drawing on analyses of fossil capital and petrocultures, it argues that Smithson’s aesthetics of entropy—particularly as conveyed in the 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty—provide a valuable dialectical methodology for critical theory in the Capitalocene. The essay proposes a “negative ecology” that can challenge logics of resilience and survival shared by ecologists and extractivists alike.

Contretemps (n.): a minor dispute or mischance; from the French contre-temps, “against time.”

Against the Ages

Robert Smithson broke ground on his visionary sculpture Spiral Jetty in April 1970, the month of the first Earth Day demonstrations. A petroglyph in rubble, a gnomic symbol in a desert sea, Smithson’s most celebrated artwork is indelibly linked by that shared date to a formative moment in modern environmentalism. The historical convergence is significant, if somewhat ironic. Like the broader Land Art movement of the 1960s, Smithson’s sculptural work reflects the social ferment and ecological consciousness that would lead, within a few months of the inaugural Earth Day, to the founding of the US Environmental Protection Agency. And yet Smithson’s aesthetic vision was largely at odds with environmentalist discourse. To ecology Smithson opposed the dispiriting concept of entropy; to political activism he advised suspending the will; and, to Earth Day protesters who seized the occasion, Smithson might have suggested dwelling in the “arrested moment” of geological time (“Four” 228). Fifty years after the building of Spiral Jetty, the significance of Smithson’s contretemps with environmentalism has come into focus. At stake, precisely, is the question of time in ecological consciousness.

Like a turn in Smithson’s diminishing, self-consuming spiral in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the returning date of this half centenary brings stark new threats and a powerful urgency to environmentalism. New and newly energized movements in ecology and climate justice (such as the climate strike movement and Extinction Rebellion) have significantly broadened public awareness of global heating even as local policies and international accords fail to stem the frightening growth of so-called “negative externalities,” from rising sea levels and ocean acidification to secular drought and mass extinctions. In the midst of a cataclysmic wildfire season in Australia, a firefighter suggested that the start of the new decade could mark “year zero” for environmental politics (Goldrick). The equivocal phrase neatly captures a paradox of this historical conjuncture, its odd combination of terminal and inaugural time, when public consciousness reaches a peak at the same moment that climate fatalism begins to take hold in liberal and progressive discourse.¹

The grand, purposeless spiral of Smithson’s self-defeating Jetty evokes the contradictions of his time, its heady ambitions and wicked defeats. Yet the sculpture is perhaps an even more apt reflection of today’s calamitous political-ecological moment. Its coiling form conveys no stable system or desirable order but instead a threatening vision of tumult and disintegration, a destructive “whirlpool,” as Smithson suggests (“Four” 227). Importantly, Spiral Jetty inverts a drain’s natural flow, its counterclockwise spin opposing natural order and historical progress alike. Smithson’s earthworks wager with time, though the artist refused any claim to posterity or monumental ideality of form—a vision of destructive temporality best conveyed as retrogression. Like the sculptures he describes in “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Spiral Jetty is a monument “against the ages” (11). Environmentalism would seem to gain little from this negative ecological vision. Smithson’s essay on the Jetty suggests as much: “These fragments of a timeless geology laugh without mirth at the time-filled hopes of ecology,” Smithson mockingly says (“The Spiral Jetty” 13). And yet Smithson’s aesthetic vision of entropic time has a great deal to offer to the challenges we confront in an overheating world, provided we amend the artist’s framing of ecology.

“An epic case of bad timing” is how Naomi Klein describes the fateful irony that the scientific consensus on climate change emerged at the same time as globalized, deregulated capitalism (This 73). The current breakdown of liberal democratic systems and interstate governance adds daunting hurdles to these challenges precisely when a swift and decisive collective intervention in the world economy appears necessary to avert climate collapse and social chaos. On this front, the “economy-killing measures” imposed at the start of the coronavirus pandemic—to quote Bloomberg Businessweek—hardly provide environmentalists reasons for cheer (Robison et al.). To climate activists who have long called for a halt to “business as usual,” the COVID-19 crisis serves as a bitter reminder that governing bodies only act with urgency—however briefly or ineffectually—in the face of immediate, not future, threats. Even the alarming phenomenon of government-sanctioned medical disinformation follows a pattern familiar to environmentalists; top-down science denialism was normalized by energy lobbyists long before the politicization of the new coronavirus. And as the pandemic wreaks disproportionate damage along the fault lines of race, gender, age, and class, current investments in health care and social support continue to widen a morbid generational divide between today’s populations and their unlucky inheritors, rehearsing the “temporal antagonism” we can expect to play out in an overheated future (Taylor).

Many will likely remember the clear skies and birdsong that accompanied the outbreak of COVID-19 as pollution and traffic were swiftly curtailed. But early in the crisis, ostensibly positive reports of declining greenhouse gas emissions were already outweighed by larger trends: a projected seven percent annual drop in CO₂ emissions in 2020—a high estimate, and bought at the cost of extraordinary human suffering—would barely match the amount the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is needed every year of this decade in order to keep global warming within the catastrophic threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (Le Quéré et al. 647). Earth Day’s fiftieth year was celebrated under the threat of this fast-approaching limit, a mere ten years away. Meanwhile, as the anniversary was marked under lockdown, fossil fuel interests can celebrate a milestone in what Naomi Klein calls a “half-century long ideological project” of deregulation; citing the challenge of COVID-19 to the economy, the EPA bowed to industry lobbyists and waived environmental rules for major polluters during the crisis, effectively suspending its role as a regulatory agency (“Care” 99).

“Bad timing” indeed. However, Klein’s observation reflects another fateful contretemps, more fundamental and historically consequential. “Fossil capital,” to adopt Andreas Malm’s expression, is more than a source of increasing power and mobility, the well-known “time-space compression” of industrialized economies; it cleaves modern history with a profound temporal disjunction (240). Climate change is nothing if not the intrusion of another temporality into the timeline of history. The vitality of industrial modernity would be unthinkable without the mute compact energy of past photosynthesis, the unearthed daylight of numberless dead noons. Whence the inordinate force of fossil capital, so too its terrible cost. To the English capitalists who struck upon the notion of exploiting the coal of the smiths for large-scale industry, fossil capital offered a power source that was unbound from the seasons and so appeared to stand “outside of time,” Malm says (42). Likewise, as distinct from energy sources growing on the land, coal’s stored energy was independent of the lived world and existed seemingly “outside of the landscape.” The latter proved a crucial strategic advantage of mobile capital over the laboring class, as Malm’s meticulous history demonstrates (41). Climate change can be seen as the delayed effect of the fundamental disjunctions installed by fossil capital into the historical present, “a now that is non-contemporaneous with itself” (8).

Carbon economies, as a result, inhabit a spatiotemporal conundrum. Timothy Mitchell argues that the energy unlocked from prehistoric petrocarbon has lent modern societies “a peculiar orientation towards the future,” conceived as “a limitless horizon of growth” (142). “Petroknowledge” arises from these circumstances as a phantasmatic political-economic discourse that seemingly triumphs over metabolic space-time; whereas previous ideas of wealth and property “were based upon physical processes that suggested limits to growth,” petro-fueled GDP “could grow without any problem of physical or territorial limits,” Mitchell observes (139). The impression of limitlessness yields a paradoxical object—the “economy”—that “could expand without getting physically bigger.” The current pace and scope of virtual experience, internet connectivity, and electronic stock market trading may have accustomed us to the notion that “practically infinite values are reached in finite time” (129), though this economic condition remains fundamentally disparate from the lived circumstances inhabited by a biophysical organism. This predicament highlights the stakes of environmental art, because the figuration of natural processes must be reclaimed from fundamentally distorting spatiotemporal representations of the given world.

If fossil fuels are the sine qua non of capital accumulation, fossil capital appears not only incompatible with a sustainable biosphere, but radically asynchronous with life. As Rob Nixon argues in Slow Violence, the delayed, microscopic, and incremental nature of much ecological damage eludes the conventions of narrative and representation, based as they are in the parameters of lived experience and the affective gratifications of a sensationalistic mediascape. The discrepancies between lived time and temporalities of ecological disruption increase the need for climate science communication even as the resources of rhetoric, narrative, and the arts are sorely tested by atmospheric data measured in parts per million, temperature variations logged in tenths of a degree, and radioactive half-lives calculated in billions of years. In spite of the increasingly sensational and spectacular evidence of human impact on Earth systems—evidence that would appear to challenge Nixon’s thesis—climate change reflects causal processes occurring at scales that defy conceptual framing and whose delayed or incremental effects pose an ongoing challenge to representation.

During the Cold War, questions of communication on ungraspable time scales were posed in terms of the challenge of relaying threats of nuclear contamination to future generations. “Nuclear semiotics” was born with a Reagan-era task force that drew up guidelines for an information system that could deliver messages to recipients unknown up to 10,000 years in the future. Linguist Thomas Sebeok’s account of this project stands as a cautionary example of the co-optation of scholarship by a military-industrial state apparatus. Working with the construction and engineering behemoth Bechtel Corporation and under the authority of the National Waste Terminal Storage Program, Sebeok proposed a symbolic system that could survive all foreseeable circumstances in order to keep the US’s vast and growing store of radioactive waste safe from tampering yet still available for potential future employ. The fearsome extent of power and authority involved in this project is perhaps no more audacious than the linguist’s reasoned effort to account for all possible future eventualities. Indeed, nuclear power is rivaled by the breathtaking “all” of Sebeok’s totalizing formulations; he excludes all exteriority with the idea of a fully encompassing “context” according to which signification is boxed by a container, much as waste is supposedly confined to storage—”semiosis,” the linguist ingenuously says, “takes place within a context” (452)—, and he summarily discounts the role of difference by confining it to the category of noise. “Differences between input and output,” he asserts, “are due to ‘noise.'” Far from troubling any concept of system, “difference” in this account amounts to a mere variation on self-identity and presence—a metaphysical claim that makes common cause with larger systems of order and control. Like structuralist linguistics, then, Sebeok’s notion of signification “compels a neutralization of time and history,” as Derrida puts it (“Structure” 291). Through his reductive framing, Sebeok feels authorized to invoke the idea of a permanent “natural message” of warning that has “the power to signify the same things at all times and in all places” (453).

Rather than encompassing all of space and time, as Sebeok claims to do, we might instead propose that his work for the National Waste Terminal Storage Program reflects a specific rationale standard in late capitalism. As defined by Eric Cazdyn, the “new chronic” of our present political-economic order is characterized by a stagnant maintenance of ongoing damage and a corresponding recoil from terminality, whether in the management of incurable disease or the perpetuation of broader conditions of economic crisis (6). By placing terminality under embargo, the new chronic disables the transformative prospects of political endings and existential exits. As such, like Sebeok’s plans for “Terminal Storage,” the new chronic mode of symptom management “effectively colonizes the future by naturalizing and eternalizing the brutal logic of the present” (6). The perpetual “meantime” of Cazdyn’s “new chronic” is akin to the delusory futurity of Mitchell’s “petroknowledge”: both extend themselves into the time made available by their own powerful destructiveness. Here, for all its supposed concerns about the welfare of distant generations, Sebeok’s linguistics of “Terminal Storage” appears both deeply ironic and sadly misguided. In working with military contractor Bechtel, Sebeok projects the maintenance of some of capitalism’s deadliest by-products into a near-infinite future even as his collaborators deepen the ruts of petroculture. Notably, Bechtel is the largest US construction company and provides key infrastructure for worldwide petroleum interests. In contrast to the horizonless engineering mentality of Bechtel and Sebeok’s interminable storage, one especially urgent task of a critique of petroknowledge is to foster a sense of desirable terminality, as Cazdyn suggests, while understanding how phenomena on a geologic scale are imbricated in the ordinary maintenance of our fossil-fueled “meantime.” But if petroknowledge articulates a dominant spatiotemporal condition of illimitude, critical ecological theory must confront that horizonlessness as a conceptual and aesthetic obstacle that inhibits viable endings. In the argument that follows, I propose “negative ecology” as a challenge to the reifying conditions of fossil capital by critiquing the spatiotemporal confines of petroknowledge on the near side of its terminal illimitude.

In retrospect, Robert Smithson seems the artist most attuned to these political-ecological predicaments and their emerging threats. With his insistent focus on prehistory, paleontology, and long-term natural processes, Smithson locates cultural production in timeframes and spatial scales indispensable to our understanding of climate change. The artist’s late unrealized projects for art reclamation in large-scale mining sites appear ever more pertinent to ecology conceived on such scales. And in light of the urgency of climate disruption and the merging of aesthetics and activism in environmental art, it seems increasingly fitting that Spiral Jetty should stand as an emblem of Smithson’s work and indeed of Earth art in general. More than any other piece in his body of work, Spiral Jetty is strongly suggestive of a symbol, glyph, or pictograph. Granted, the sculpture’s coiling form hardly presumes to be a “natural message” that could “signify the same things at all times and in all places,” as Sebeok puts it (453), or even aspire to leave “some faint, enduring mark on the universe,” in Alan Weisman’s ambiguous phrase (4). And yet Spiral Jetty belongs as much to the domain of semiotics as it does to sculpture.

This semiotic dimension is underscored by the original reception of Spiral Jetty; photographs of Smithson’s sculpture were first mounted in the summer of 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) conceptual art exhibition, titled “Information.” The show emphasized data, documentation, installations, instructions, protocols, mathematical permutations, and audience-response performance. Like the black asphalt poured down a Roman quarry slope in his 1969 Asphalt Rundown—also mounted at MoMA—Spiral Jetty presents itself as a high-contrast graphical sign in the landscape. Arguably, however, the most enduring piece of graphical “information” from the time of MoMA’s exhibition is the now ubiquitous international recycling symbol. Like Spiral Jetty, the symbol was designed on the occasion of the original Earth Day, and the parallels between these two iconic graphical forms are as illuminating as their differences. Each conveys a vision of natural cycles while deliberately exploiting a sense of paradox. In the case of the recycling symbol, however, this enigmatic dimension has had some inadvertent effects. By evoking a Möbius strip, the recycling emblem implicitly links eco-conscious consumer behavior to a strange topology without real pertinence to actual space, an illogic confirmed by the political-economic reality of post-consumer recycling. A recent Greenpeace investigation of the “recycling exports system”—an expression itself rich in irony—reveals that much waste supposedly recycled by first world consumers instead ends up burned or simply discarded in vulnerable zones of the Global South (Ross). Smithson can hardly be credited with anticipating the flaws of post-consumer waste treatment, of course. And yet the artist’s entropic vision of spiraling disorder proves a vital corrective to any pretense of sustainability under fossil capitalism. There is no viable return in Smithson’s spinning Jetty beyond the troping of entropic recurrence. Smithson’s negative ecological vision—his “geopolitics of primordial return,” as he put it (“The Spiral Jetty” 12)—is based instead on an abiding sense of the untimeliness of petrocultural space-time. This aesthetic sense of geological time impelled the artist to map a “double world” that, he said, could “show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I existed in” (11).

Smithson’s “double world” is more than an attempt to add new material to art history’s stock of subjects or even to present an innovation in artistic form. It suggests nothing less than the “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it (201). Indeed, Smithson strikingly anticipates the onset of the Anthropocene in speaking of “the artist as a geologic agent” (“Four” 217). The phrase is uncannily apt; while the Anthropocene encompasses all human effects on Earth systems, its definition lies specifically in our measurable impact on rock strata (Walters et al. 317), the lasting trace of “man as a geological agent” (Fernàndez-Lozano et al. 2). Such expressions may seem grandiose, and indeed critics have faulted Smithson for a supposed machismo out of keeping with sustainable ecological stewardship. But to make such a critique is to commit an error of scale. If anything, the idea of a “geologic agent” dwarfs any particular human action by framing it within a dissipating process beyond all reckoning. This confounding mismatch between individual acts and their general effects is a central conundrum of environmental politics in an age of global warming. The building of Spiral Jetty is just such a vain act, its momentous gesture less heroic than ironic.

Most importantly, perhaps, Smithson’s site/nonsite dialectic makes Malm’s dual “outsides”—disjunct time and distant space—the essential coordinates of aesthetic experience. While insisting on a given artwork’s site-specificity, Smithson always emphasizes its spatial and temporal dislocation; the gallery object, in Smithson’s terminology, is demoted to a negative “nonsite,” the mere index of an absent site. This dialectic involves no mere exercise in aesthetic estrangement, that familiar topos of twentieth-century art; the primary materials of Smithson’s sculptural nonsites—coal, tar, and asphalt, for instance—confront the viewer with an unassimilable, deeply alien prehistoric substance. If the nonsite’s reference to waste zones and industrial extraction sites seems to illustrate the general “centrifugal movement” of industrial modernity, as Nicolas Bourriaud would have it (ix), Smithson’s dialectics speak to a violent expulsion of art that defies any recuperation.² Fossil capital makes this dislocation the fundamental dialectic of our disrupted present. Accordingly, progressive political ecology in an age of climate change can only be realized by confronting the spatiotemporal conundrums generated by fossil capital. This in turn requires a critical shift from the fuzzy humanist causality of the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene, understood as an epoch of climate disruption midwifed by capital accumulation.

Smithson’s focus on prehistory provides a temporal framework that dwarfs cultural chronologies and undermines the dominion of the present, from capitalist clock time to the latest breathless avant-garde. The disjunctive unmodernity he discerned in modern fossil economies provides a way to visualize other temporalities hidden by the “homogeneous, empty time” of capitalism (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” 395). Indeed, if capitalism’s greatest triumph lies in its seeming homology with the remorseless, unstoppable advance of linear clock time, Smithson’s work testifies instead to fossil capital’s disruptive, entropic temporality. This in turn exposes built-in contradictions and prospects for resistance that can make common cause with sustainable social formations and supposedly atavistic life-rhythms branded “pre-modern” and “archaic” (Chatterjee 4–5). The fiftieth anniversary of Spiral Jetty is an opportunity to consider the environmental promise of Smithson’s aesthetics, its implicit “revolution against history” (Malm 10).

Against Survival

For thirty years Spiral Jetty was largely invisible, the Great Salt Lake’s rising water levels having unexpectedly swallowed the sculpture soon after it was built. Arguably, the Jetty‘s increased remoteness in an already remote place accentuated its dialectical relationship with Smithson’s accompanying film and essay. But if this mediation in text and image reinforced the Jetty‘s conceptual aspect—”dematerializing” the artwork, as Lucy Lippard puts it—the sculpture’s disappearance also added to its mystique (xxi). Biography laid claim to the Jetty. In Gianfranco Gorgoni’s monumental photographs of 1970, the Jetty already seems an artifact frozen in time, a stark, graphic emblem planted in weatherless still waters. Following Smithson’s death in 1973, Gorgoni’s portraits of the artist at the site reinforce a pathos-laden identification of the lone creator with his signature work, an enduring ideal of the Jetty as “the individual vision of a single artist” (Flam, “Biographical” xxvi). Ironically, every look back at Spiral Jetty becomes a memorial to this “individual vision.” At the turn of the millennium the reemergence of the Jetty from the Great Salt Lake prompted the Dia Art Foundation’s publication of a volume on Spiral Jetty. Somewhat misleadingly, photographs by Gorgoni, Nancy Holt, and Smithson, along with more recent images, largely confirm the sculpture’s appearance during the artist’s lifetime. In recent years, however, the Jetty has become fully stranded on the shore. This entropic, wholly useless aspect of the Jetty encourages a renewed view of the sculpture as subject to the impersonal forces of time, weather, and seasonal variation—and the historical processes behind climate change.

James Benning’s 2007 film Casting a Glance highlights the challenges and pitfalls of a retrospective look at Smithson’s work. The feature-length documentary evokes Spiral Jetty‘s history in long, static shots that portray the sculpture in different seasons. Fifteen chapters, each named with a date, span the sculpture’s completion on April 30, 1970 to May 15, 2007. By the film’s fifth chapter, dated March 5, 1971, the viewer sees the Jetty begin to sink. The sculpture’s black basalt rocks stand half submerged in the flat, mirroring waters of the lake under an imposing background of snow-covered mountains. In the chapters dated 1984 and 1988, the jetty has fully disappeared. Likewise for the entire span of the 1990s, as the next chapter jumps another fourteen years to 2002, at which time the first rocks of the jetty have just begun to reemerge from the lake.

Benning’s framing and editing foreground the anonymous natural processes of the vast desert landscape and promote an immersive sense of duration, an insistent feature of the filmmaker’s work. And yet in a film that cedes the initiative to nature, significant narrative features still obtain. On May 24, 1973, as the lake’s waters are swallowing the jetty, only a dotted outline of rocks can be seen; stormy surf beats the stones, and waves race across the sculpture’s concentric bands. An intrepid visitor is seen standing far out at the first bend of the jetty, and a dog tries to join him but the man calls it to go back. The lone man and his companion’s exit from the scene take on meaningful resonance when we realize that the following black frames skip over the year of Smithson’s death, as signaled by the next chapter’s intertitle: July 20, 1984, the eleventh anniversary of the artist’s passing. This gesture is underscored by the film’s concluding shot; before the film cuts to black, we hear the faint ambient noise of a single-engine plane, evocative of the crash that ended Smithson’s life in Amarillo, Texas at the site of his final earthwork.

These narrative elements lend Benning’s film a hagiographic tone not uncommon among Smithson’s commentators. Lynne Cooke goes so far as to guess what Smithson “must have” felt upon completing the Jetty, conflating her own admiring hindsight with a nostalgia she imputes to the artist. “In retrospect,” Cooke proposes, “the moment of the Jetty‘s completion must have seemed golden; it must have been tinged with nostalgia” (64). While anniversaries always involve some retroactive fabrication, the Spiral Jetty, a monument in time, raises the stakes of such historical returns. In celebrating Smithson’s work and commemorating his untimely end, we risk giving narrative meaning and thereby a redemptive significance to a body of work that radically challenges our frameworks for understanding the natural processes in which our lived lives are embedded. Benning’s film is especially interesting in this regard, because the overarching story of the Jetty‘s submergence and reappearance is, in fact, the director’s willful fabrication. Having filmed during a span of time when the Jetty began to reappear, Benning used his footage of this more recent time period to reconstruct the Jetty‘s earlier history, matching the water surface levels from his film footage to the lake’s recorded levels at corresponding months in the past. The chapters relaying the Jetty‘s submergence have thus inverted the arrow of time, for Benning filmed during a period when the opposite process was underway. Accordingly, the chapter dated 1970 corresponds not to the earliest but instead to Benning’s most recent footage of the Jetty.

In this regard, perhaps the most telling narrative moment of Casting a Glance involves no human agent or ambient sound. In the chapter that briefly shows the man and his dog, the Jetty‘s impending submergence is portrayed with images of stormy waves that render the incremental process of slowly rising water as a dramatic event: a flood, perhaps, or even a deluge of biblical scale—an impression reinforced by the film’s long middle sequences of horizonless waters under infinite skies. The return of the Jetty thus carries connotations of supernatural creation and divine redemption, motifs quite alien to Smithson’s aesthetics. Benning’s film ends up an all-too-human homage, ironically confirming Smithson’s damning judgment that “cinema offers an illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution” (“A Tour” 74).

As we have noted, Rob Nixon argues that one of the most pressing tasks of environmental justice is to represent dilatory social and ecological catastrophes whose delayed effects defy conventions of narrative and representation. If this is so, slowness and violence themselves would seem to call for critical reassessment. Gayatri Spivak provides the means for such a critique, arguing that to access “the rhythm of the eco-biome” requires that we not only focus on violations that are “pervasive rather than singular and spectacular” but also question and reevaluate the metaphysical grounding of the notion of violence itself (529, 533). The transcendental and humanist aspects of Benning’s film can be faulted on these counts. Even more significant, however, is the story arc that relates the Jetty‘s long process of submersion and reappearance. While the filmmaker’s recreation of that history is a deliberate artifice, his filmic construct is itself premised on an erroneous perception of natural rhythms. Climate science suggests that from the early twentieth century to the present, the surface level of the Great Salt Lake has been in general decline (Meng 7, 9). If, viewed on this timeline, the average surface level tends progressively lower, this poses a baffling conceptual challenge: we must be able to picture the lake constantly diminishing, its surface level perpetually dropping, even during the decades-long period when rising waters submerged the Jetty.

This kind of long view is characteristic of Smithson’s aesthetic vision, and the artist was well aware that the Great Salt Lake is the remnant of a much larger inland sea that would likely shrink further. Smithson fully anticipated his sculpture’s eventual dissolution, its inevitable “dedifferentiation” (“Four” 207). But today the Jetty‘s fast-shifting elevation cannot help but evoke two related ecological threats quite specific to our age of global heating: sea level rise and the desiccation of desert lakes. As Elizabeth Rush documents in Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, the United States is poorly prepared for the drastic changes already being felt on shrinking shorelines everywhere. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Rush’s book is its challenge to climate-change adaptation, an emerging political and economic dogma that takes the logic of “creative destruction” beyond its terminal limit by capitalizing on future unlivability. In contrast to technocratic plans for the profitable management of catastrophe, Rush suggests avowing “defeat” in the face of indomitable natural forces; she advocates an organized retreat from the shoreline and a shared embrace of “vulnerability” as a lived practice of egalitarian, intersectional, coalition-building politics (249). As with Benning’s film, however, Rising ultimately offers a redemptive vision that undermines Rush’s most important claims. The book closes with descriptions of landscapes in states of decay that evoke Smithson’s entropic art: a “crosshatch of levees,” a disintegrating berm, and walkways leading out into salt ponds, where an art installation of ambiguous purpose leaves Rush baffled (250). But this bafflement does not last; inspired by signs of persistent life in the tidal zone, she settles on an ecological vision of “a living system so complex the sole word to describe it is divine” (251). The author’s metaphysical flourish is worth noting, as her conclusion betrays a number of recuperative moves that allay her message of vulnerability with an implied claim to all-encompassing immunity from physical decay. This could explain why her language swerves from an avowal of “defeat” to a claim of “resiliency” and ultimate “survival” (249)—ideas that arguably undergird all the World Bank’s ominous investments in so-called adaptation. Tellingly, Rush conscripts art too into this project of survival: she appeals to the art installation in the marshland as a supposed conduit of stable “meaning” and clear “purpose” (250), where the cultivation of Smithsonesque irony might serve better.

If the continued use of fossil fuels condemns the world to unlivability, a transition to a post-carbon future is crucial to the world’s survival. But this task would involve extricating “survival” from the extractive economies that have defined the terms of livability. Building on Timothy Mitchell’s influential work, a collective of activist petrocultures scholars offers tools for such a critique by asserting that the influence of fossil fuels extends even into the immaterial realms of our values, affects, and desires. Accordingly, they argue that art can dismantle those deeply embedded traces of the carbon economy and help to envision alternative futures “after oil” (Petrocultures). But in observing that “art can be put to purposes other than corporate interests,” the scholars take art’s purposefulness as a given—a construal of artistic practice that aligns broadly with carbon economy’s instrumental rationality (Petrocultures 47). This framing of art practice suggests that art’s purposeful aims may be complicit in petroculture even in works that engage in ostensible critique, which would ironically confirm the scholars’ own sobering dictum that “life has been limited to life within a petroculture” (47). Here it may be worth recalling Adorno’s evocation of the “purposeless activity” of play, which allows children to defeat the usefulness of things and forestall their capture by market logic (228). In his description of child’s play Adorno evokes trucks, those stalwarts of petroculture, deprived of any practical function by the child’s creative improvisation: “the little trucks travel nowhere,” Adorno says, “and the tiny barrels on them are empty” (228). Smithson employed dump trucks and earth-moving equipment in his major late works, including Asphalt Rundown, Concrete Rundown, and Spiral Jetty. A barrel of viscous glue served as Smithson’s art medium in his Glue Pour of 1970. Childhood play as described by Adorno allows us to glimpse how these seemingly grand gestures of Smithson’s are belittled by the ludic purposelessness of the artist’s entropic sensibility. At stake in each is not simply a difference in size but in disparities of scale; in other words, artistic practice, like play, involves the creative engagement with another order of measurement and correspondingly disparate values. “Size determines an object,” Smithson pointedly observes, “but scale determines art” (“The Spiral Jetty” 9).

This suggests that ecological aesthetics requires a critique of art’s complicity not only in dominant values and interests but in its representational and communicative functions. Far from merely espousing political aims and expressing social engagement, art’s political promise lies in materializing what lies at the bounds of aesthetic and political representation alike. After Oil‘s own examples of activist art, while laudably committed to social justice, tend to reinforce positivist ideals of mimetic representation and full disclosure. In a particularly bald assertion of reductively instrumental logic, artists are enjoined to “make the unconscious conscious” (Petrocultures 48). In a similar way, Adrian Parr’s Hijacking Sustainability calls on an inspiring, if didactic, example of art to illustrate the stakes of anti-capitalist ecology: Spencer Tunick’s photograph of a mass of vulnerable naked people lying huddled on a receding Swiss glacier (162). For all their radical commitments, Parr’s theory of sustainability and the petrocultures scholars’ bid for survival “after oil” largely depend on an idea of art grounded quite safely in a metaphysics of denotative representation.

To argue for Smithson’s relevance to contemporary political ecology is to read against the grain of his pronouncements on environmentalism. Smithson was openly critical of ecologists and considered their vision of natural processes moralizing and sentimental. But the artist’s impatience with environmentalists goes to the heart of ecological illusions of survival. Crucially, this critique implies an entropic theory of language and representation; as a wholly material activity outmatched by processes of erosion and dissolution, signification is inherently self-undermining for Smithson, its claims of enduring presence delusory.³ Ecology, then, cannot evade the question of entropic signification without falsifying the nature it purports to represent. He makes this point quite strikingly in the short and acerbic piece titled “Can Man Survive?” Smithson’s essay savages an exhibit by that name at the American Museum of Natural History, scorning the “superstition” and “religiosity” of the show’s portrayals of nature (367). The show’s all too wondrous visions of calamity betray aesthetic raptures that ultimately fall prey to the familiar recuperative sleight of mind of sublime experience: images of “pretty filth and elegant destruction,” Smithson says, imply “a transcendental state of matter, that is uncanny, grotesque, and terribly attractive” (368). The artist concludes that “Ecology arises from a need for deliverance and a deep distrust of science,” and as such, its “weird faith” (367) offers no viable alternatives to its grim visions of the “apocalypse of ecology.”

The threat of a population explosion looms large in the exhibit “Can Man Survive?” A photograph showing “piles of birth control devices rotting in India” (368) alludes to Paul R. Ehrlich’s alarming prediction in The Population Bomb (1968) that overpopulation would soon lead to global mass starvation events, notably on the Indian subcontinent. One might wish that Smithson had given more than a passing attention to the topic. His scorn at least cuts through the discourse of population control, whose pieties have long given cover to colonial dispossession and free-market rationality, from the Irish Famine to NGO interventionism. This discourse has lately emerged in posthuman environmentalism, where a prominent strand of first-world eco-feminism endorses population control in language that revives the eugenicist strain of ecological demography.⁴ Needless to say, Ehrlich’s predictions ultimately proved wrong, though not for reasons that economists can adequately explain even today. To self-avowed economic “optimist” David Lam, for instance, a look back at fifty years of recent demographic history prompts the cheerfully incurious question “how did we survive?” (10). Citing Ehrlich’s warning of 1968 that “the battle to feed humanity is already lost” (6), the economist points to global statistics that seem to imply the opposite: at the very same time that the world population doubled, per-capita food production increased, commodity prices remained stable, and poverty declined—feats “surely worth marveling at” (10), Lam says. Notably, however, Lam minimizes the role of Cold War geopolitics in these equations; during the period in question, US-funded aid programs promoted large-scale industrialized agribusiness which, touting the virtues of self-sufficiency in developing countries, in fact aimed to undermine local autonomy and stem the tide of socialism. Likewise, ecology gets short shrift in Lam’s account of this history. A more holistic view of agriculture plainly shows that the so-called green revolution has had long-term deleterious effects, chaining emerging economies to the corporate monopolies that provided machinery, petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, and new strains of seeds for large-scale monoculture farming, with well-known negative consequences for food security, sustainability, and biodiversity. This long-term damage is now taking its toll; indeed, even before the global pandemic, the IPCC issued a grim warning that famine is making a comeback, its threats magnified by the multifarious effects of climate change.⁵

The apparent “marvel” of our survival is contradicted by the economist’s own sunny data. In a graph plotting commodity prices from 1960–2010, two major price increases stand out. The first, in 1974, corresponds to the OPEC oil embargo, and the second, in 2008, to the global financial crisis. The parallel is enlightening. We may consider the OPEC embargo as a “true cost” experiment conducted on US Cold War geopolitics and the consumer economy it sustains; oil shortages and general unaffordability provide a rough idea of fossil fuels’ prohibitive price tag once their damage is factored in. As for the second spike in affordability, we might have only survived that crisis in a state of “non-death,” as Colin Crouch puts it, neoliberal dogma having paradoxically outlived the crisis that should by all rights have fully discredited it. Expanding on Crouch’s analysis of the 2008 crisis, we can posit that the OPEC crisis similarly discredited the fundamentals of the fossil economy by exposing its hidden costs. If this is so, a “non-dead” fossil economy renders retrospectively implausible our survival of the population explosion. Like apocalypse, the “extraordinary resilience”⁶ of zombie capitalism seems anchored in an unbudgeable metaphysics of enduring life, though a materialist analysis can trace that delusory claim of survival back to the fossil infrastructures that removed the “natural limits to growth” (Mitchell 141). If we include the delayed consequences of carbon emissions and synthetic pollutants in the green revolution’s cost ledger, we will only have survived the population bomb in a state of fossil-fueled “non-death.”

This predicament implies a temporal paradox: “the new chronic,” as Eric Cazdyn puts it (5), is characterized by the stubborn persistence of late capitalism in a sick ongoingness of constant crisis management. Cazdyn argues that the perpetual denial of capitalism’s end-time converts terminal states into an uncanny suspension of history, a borrowed time in which we are “already dead.” Taken together, Crouch’s and Cazdyn’s analyses suggest a highly paradoxical historical moment in which the not-yet and the already coincide or overlap: a time without the present. As such, fossil capital’s uncanny temporality seems to offer a chance to deconstruct survival’s unhealthy grip on ecological consciousness. Here, Cazdyn with his sense of the “already dead” has perhaps an advantage over Crouch, who frames his sobering analysis of our contemporary “non-death” as an implicit survival guide for “coping,” as he puts it, with the impending end of democracy (2). In contrast, Cazdyn’s critical optic disallows any crisis management that would fudge accounts with negativity, not only in the economic realm—Crouch’s field of study—but in a symbolic general economy. This meshes with a deconstructive theory of representation congruent with Smithson’s materialist aesthetics of “dedifferentiation”: the “always already” of différance requires that we understand survival as inherently self-defeating, life’s persistence in “auto-immunity” being indistinguishable from the material supports that negate it.⁷

Because the “new chronic” perpetuates capitalism in a state of crisis, ordinary activities of coping and triage can be judged as largely complicit in its maintenance. A critique of this low-grade complicity in survival has radical implications for environmentalism, whose primary focus in all areas of conservation involves “saving” species and ecosystems from economic overexploitation, even when they presume nature functions as a “natural resource” or “ecosystem service.” Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction provides a subtle critique of the implicit eschatology of such ark-like preservation efforts, suggesting a need to save ecology from the logic of salvation (10). To cite only one example from the catalogue of failed preservation efforts, a recent study found that insect populations have declined twenty-five percent in the past thirty years (Klink et al.), confirming an earlier report that warned of “catastrophic consequences for the survival of mankind” should those trends continue (Carrington). Notably, insects in nature reserves were not found to be significantly more abundant than in farmland and urbanized areas. The “new chronic” appears here as ecology’s managed diminishment of existence under a general condition of perpetual decline. With such failures in mind, an exit from the “new chronic” might entail a reassertion of history by revolting from the merely endurable and confronting our political-ecological reality as “already dead.” Environmental politics would be converted into negative ecology; to conceive of the environment as “already dead” is to depart from the radical position of having nothing to save, as saving can only preserve within the terms of capitalism’s death-dealing survival.

Survival is to climate change as resilience is to precarity. In the one we may already glimpse the incalculably worse implications of our gradual slide into the other. After all, plans for adaptation to climate change are unfolding in a context that already demands continuous adaptation to ever more precaritizing social and economic conditions—in which an enforced condition of maximal insecurity requires self-maintenance through a paradoxical “self-precaritization” (Lorey 70). Frantz Fanon speaks compellingly of the way colonized populations are subjected to a “continued agony” that degrades and diminishes their culture without definitively ending it (34). Colonialism casts the shadow of this “continued agony” well beyond the present. A preview of general militarized survival under climate collapse may be seen in the colonial security apparatus in occupied Palestine, a uniquely brutal system of “necrocide” in which “unauthorized death is banned,” as China Miéville aptly puts it (302). In this light, one of the major political ramifications of the 2020 protests against racism and police brutality in the United States is the growing recognition of the militarization of policing. Occurring as it did amidst economic calamity and social upheaval, the mass movement to defund the police speaks as much to the urgency of the present as to the prospects of social and environmental justice in an unlivable future. As a resistance movement against enforced survival, negative ecology can help sustain critical focus on the brutalizing control systems that foreclose “unauthorized death.”

At the same time, such a negative ecology would simply reconnect with the scope of environmentalism as defined by Rachel Carson. In Silent Spring, her excoriating critique of synthetic pesticides, Carson insists that ecology involved grasping time measured “not in years but in millennia,” and events “totally outside the limits of biologic experience” (7). Carson strikes an entropic, Smithsonesque tone in saying that damage from pollution already appeared “irrecoverable” and “irreversible” in 1962. Significantly, Carson finished writing her book under the shadow of her own impending death from cancer, though environmentalism has not fully embraced the negative ecological implications of her judgment that “there is no time” in the modern world for ecology (6). From an aesthetic standpoint, neither does Carson herself; the author’s empathic lyricism, so important for the book’s popular reception, nonetheless reinscribes geological time within the familiar biological patter of iambic and dactylic meter, as when she evokes “the heedless pace of man” and “time on the scale that is nature’s” (7). Challenging the dominance of the lyric mode in environmental humanities has emerged as a significant front in recent scholarship as ecocritics turn to experimental poetry to grasp the contours of the climate crisis in subjective apprehensions of the non-human temporalities of the Capitalocene.⁸ Smithson’s work speaks to this challenge to lyrical subjectivity in his deliberately impersonal, paratactic prose style, which eliminates the speaking “I” and renders actions in the passive voice in order to convey the ecological temporality of the “already dead.”⁹

Silent Spring is often credited with galvanizing the movement that led to the founding of the EPA, which in its first year was tasked with setting regulatory standards for pollution under the 1970 Clean Air Act. With its focus on human respiratory health, however, the history of the Clean Air Act’s piecemeal regulations (and their subsequent dismantling) might be seen as fatefully confined within Carson’s “limits of biologic experience.” Fossil capital’s deep imbrication with extractive and despoiling processes imposes the recognition that the necessary objective of climate ecology is not pollution, narrowly defined, but carbon emissions. Accordingly, if the target of climate activism is the fossil economy, then the field of political action requires the kind of leap in scale we see in Smithson’s aesthetics. Such a scalar leap is memorably captured in the poster for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, arguably the most culturally influential ecological statement since Silent Spring. The image shows smoke spewing from smokestacks and curling into the threatening shape of a hurricane’s gargantuan spiral—an “immobile cyclone,” as Smithson might put it (“The Spiral Jetty” 8).

Terminal Dialectics

In times of crisis, spirals are often invoked as emblems of catastrophe, of things spinning downward and out of control; we speak colloquially of death spirals and of spiraling crises and inequality. Symbolically resonant as it may be, particularly in a year of manifold calamities, Spiral Jetty is perhaps above all a formal achievement. The absurd “pointlessness” of an art pilgrim’s trek into the Great Salt Lake is no metaphysical voyage or journey into an allegorical labyrinth.¹⁰ Rather, we should see it as Smithson’s full-scale demonstration of the optical vanity of linear perspective, his “terminal view” of art, as Ann Reynolds puts it (134). The Jetty‘s sinuous curl may be suggestively organic, but Smithson modeled its shape on the geometric spiral formations of inanimate crystalline structures. Likewise, the spiral’s dynamic spin should be considered a “gyrostatic” form, no less threatening for being immobile.¹¹ Viewed this way, the Jetty evokes the formal language of Smithson’s nonsites, which set up a play of dialectical tensions between container and contained, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance. This formal correspondence is brought out most strikingly in comparing the Jetty to Smithson’s crate-shaped sculptural installations: the nonsites’ horizontal slats are mirrored in his Great Salt Lake sculpture’s alternating bands. In the 1968 Non-site (Palisades-Edgewater, N.J.), for instance, a slatted steel box displays a jumble of rocks from a disused trolley line, with an accompanying text that seems to anticipate the Jetty‘s winding itinerary: “what was once a straight track has become a path of rocky crags—the site has lost its system” (Hobbs 110).

In their conceptualist aspect, Smithson’s nonsites undermine the art object by emphasizing distance and disintegration, their displacement in “networks of interconnection” (Baker 107). As non-representational interventions in the pictorial tradition of landscape art, they challenge perspectival vision by undermining the characteristic “fantasizing distance” of the appropriative viewer who claims the admirable scene of nature without belonging to it ecologically (Kelsey 209). Such a distant claiming has an underlying economic rationale: the conventions of modern landscape art, including mapping and optical perspective, arguably came into dominance with a fourteenth-century need to rationalize a world picture for long-distance trade (Baridon 283). In contrast, Smithson’s nonsites are neither here nor visible, as their name implies, and thereby evade the conventional features of landscape art and more broadly of the art object as commodity. In so doing, however, the nonsite captures a crucial aspect of the commodity fetish: its profitable removal from the occluded site of production. The site from which Smithson draws his raw material is typically a postindustrial landscape. By insisting on that place’s connection to the nonsite, Smithson makes its dirty history cling to the gallery object. The nonsite, we might say, becomes the site’s impossible alibi. As such, we can think of the nonsite’s distant reference point as either source or destination in a cycle of economic production: the scene of exploitation, tainted provenance of the gallery object, or site of violent expulsion, a place where the commodity’s cost is measured in waste, ravage, and abandonment.¹² By favoring the remote site over the humble gallery object, Smithson’s spatial dialectics implicitly challenge what Bruce Robbins calls “the tyranny of the close over the distant” (97).

The dialectic of site and nonsite thus resonates significantly with environmental justice work that targets the invisible and distant sites of offloaded waste, outsourced labor, and offshored profits. Indeed, as Nixon frames it in Slow Violence, environmental justice hinges on a Smithsonesque politics of the ecologically distant and unseen; a critique of the “unsightly,” the “out-of-sight,” and the “remote” requires a practice of environmental justice as much aesthetic and representational as it is political (2). Presumably, then, a politics of environmental justice would bring closer what is remote and render visible what is out of sight. Like a nonsite, the first-world consumer’s home should become unsightly and uncanny; to recognize the taintedness of products sourced in places of unregulated exploitation would be to “de-alienate” them and realize their ubiquity in our domestic space.¹³ As with ivory in the days of the Belgian Congo, these commodities are “everywhere at home” (McCarthy 621). Smithson’s nonsites deliberately challenge such a politics of corrective vision. As Smithson insists, the seemingly indexical referentiality of the site/nonsite dialectic is fraught with hazards.¹⁴ The site may be a real referent, but it is prone to disturbance; it endures, but only as a mock eternity. This temporal dimension ultimately undermines the nonsites themselves; as Smithson explains, one of his final nonsites points to no definite place, the referent being lost in measureless time and therefore invisible and unlocatable. Significantly, the contents of Nonsite, Site Uncertain (1968) are fossil fuel: chunks of black cannel coal.¹⁵

This shift from the relatively bipolar and spatially organized structure of the nonsites to Smithson’s later work fulfills the entropic orientation of the artist’s vision. At the extreme point of Smithson’s site/nonsite dialectics, the demise of the nonsite also relates in a concrete way to the impasse of environmentalist consumer ethics in an age of climate crisis. While the discourse of consumer responsibility often invokes simple polarities of source and destination, such an “individuation of responsibility” can only misrepresent the scale and complexity of global production and consumption networks (Monbiot). As outsourcing and subcontracting often involve multiple sites of production, any attempt at pointing to the commodity’s many extraction points would imply innumerable referents—seemingly “faraway sites” that keep exerting their influence on the local object, as Bruno Latour keenly demonstrates (200). Patrick Bond puts the problem succinctly: “capitalism intrinsically externalizes costs” (65). Consumer-choice ethics can be seen, then, as corporate capitalism’s ultimate alibi; customer behavior hardly affects the overriding motive of capital to seek cheaper and more exploitative sources of goods and labor and to hide profit’s collateral damage, its so-called externalities. David Harvey has persuasively shown how capitalism survives its crises by buying time and shifting ground: so many “spatial fixes” and “temporal fixes” to its intractable contradictions.¹⁶ Crucially, however, a political critique of capital’s shifting alibis must pursue the logic of extractivism to the “uncertain” sites where dialectics meet entropy.

“An inferno rages in the soul of the commodity,” writes Walter Benjamin (Arcades 369). Brooding on the deceptive innocence of the commercial object, Benjamin considers its “price tag” akin to allegorical meaning: arbitrary and illusory, a significance far removed from its signifier. His “inferno” challenges such alibis by evoking the monstrous realm of cruelty, suffering, and exploitation hidden behind the commodity—by insisting, in other words, on “how it came into being” (Adorno qtd. in Arcades 669). As such, the metaphor evokes real sites of blazing heat, the blast furnace of a steel factory, perhaps, or the stifling “underground workshops” of coal miners described in Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (95). Here as elsewhere Benjamin insists on framing labor history within the death cycles of what he called “natural history.” And yet, even as he broods over his “indiscriminate mass of dead lore” (Arcades 368), the allegorist likely did not mean his “inferno” to evoke fossilized biomass, the product of chthonic heat and pressure. Nor did he intend to describe that fuel’s profitable destruction in an internal combustion engine. This shift of focus, however, is precisely the target of a political ecology of fossil capital. But as with Smithson’s 1968 nonsite, that target is profoundly elusive; site and nonsite appear “intimately coupled yet strangely disconnected from each other,” as Malm puts it (4), or “widely separated both in space and time,” in Rachel Carson’s words (189), a distance that imposes an ever more imperative dialectics. The commodity as nonsite demands that we grasp it in relation to a site expanded to the dimensions of the globe, a dialectic that bridges the fossil-fueled fetish and its emissions’ incremental contribution to anthropogenic climate change. Crucially, Smithson’s dialectics trouble the commodity’s trajectory from raw material to fetish. In so doing they invert capitalism’s overall “transmutation of processes into entities” (Rose 18). In this sense we might understand the world-girdling implications of the commodity owner’s enmeshment in “the metabolic process of mankind,” as Marx puts it: by assuming the ecological cost of his infernal wares, “the commodity-owner becomes a cosmopolitan” (384).

Benjamin’s infernal commodity aligns with Lukács’s theory of reification, which assumes its most stringent and unforgiving definition in Adorno’s negative dialectics. Reification for Adorno defines the all-encompassing and inescapable condition of a world wholly subjected to the rule of exchange-value. The infernal economy of fossil capital, to borrow Benjamin’s flash of insight, is perhaps the most persuasive confirmation of reification’s total dominion over life. What is hidden by each “price tag” on every commodity is the fossil economy that propels it into circulation and whose carbon emissions add to the atmosphere’s degradation. The contemporary subject is inextricably linked to that pervasive fossil economy, whose material network makes our local self a nonsite of that other, infrastructural body. As Daisy Hildyard puts it in The Second Body, “You are always all over the place” (8).

Smithson’s death spiral in the Great Salt Lake might be seen, then, as an exploded nonsite that materializes the terminal dialectics of fossil capital. “My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state,” Smithson says of his first encounter with the inspiring location at Rozel Point (“The Spiral Jetty” 8). Site and nonsite swirl into oblivion; externalities overwhelm the landscape. To grasp the political implications of this predicament requires envisioning a totality more extensive than globalization and more materially specific than the all-too-human Anthropocene. On the model of Adorno’s unforgiving dialectics, negative ecology describes the grip of fossil capital on the entirety of the biosphere. Decarbonization surely requires “system change,” as many slogans demand, but ecology lies beyond a horizon turned dead end; as an alternative to capitalism it appears only in the negative, from within the scope of structure and system. A crucial advantage of viewing ecology from the perspective of Adorno’s “damaged life” is that it sustains focus on the obstacles we face. Petrocultures scholars are no doubt right in emphasizing that any transition to a post-carbon society is “stalked by the experience of impasse” (Petrocultures 16).¹⁷ Ironically, though, the war on nature waged by fossil capital materializes a collateral knowledge of the ecological in a way that consciousness-raising environmentalists have failed to achieve. Indeed, the all-encompassing condition of climate change may be the ultimate validation of nature as “environment,” even as this predicament indicates our entrapment in the negative ecology of fossil capital’s total reification of life.

Environmental art often engages with this ecological predicament by connecting sensory experience in the here and now to the supersensible processes driving climate change. Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch is perhaps the paradigmatic recent effort to link tactile, visual, and auditory experience to phenomena occurring on geological scales. To coincide with the United Nation’s historic Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, the artist installed twelve massive blocks of glacial ice on a street in the French capital. Evoking both a clock-face and a compass, as Eliasson notes, the circular installation allowed visitors to hear and feel the melting of ice dating back 15,000 years (Zarin). In contrast, Smithson’s approach to such challenges is to question the ability of the sensorium to encompass objects of any kind, and—inverting a hoary dictum of liberal politics—the artist implies that the impersonal is political.¹⁸ Literally uncontainable, Smithson’s museum nonsites evade both the grasp of the senses and the would-be comprehending mind, while his critique of optical perspective discredits the eye’s claim to attain the infinite. This challenge to “the illusion of infinite spaces” perhaps best allows us to gauge the dialectical significance of Smithson’s aesthetics for a politics of fossil capitalism (“Pointless” 358). Two main implications stand out: on the one hand, the illusory limitlessness of carbon democracy’s propulsive futurity must be pared back to its metabolic bounds; on the other, a sense of the illimited is needed to grasp fossil capital’s unaccountable inheritance from geology.

Art historians understand Smithson to have debunked visual perspective as an anthropomorphic optical construct and demoted it to a useless, outdated artifact. In the sculptures Leaning Strata and Pointless Vanishing Point, for instance, Smithson renders what he calls perspective’s “mental artifice” as inert geometrical forms, their converging lines lopped off as if to castrate the scopic gaze (“Pointless” 358). Framed more broadly, we can understand this aesthetic intervention as a critique of masterful knowledge in general, especially with regard to its intimations of infinity. This has inherent political ramifications, given that the democratic notion of freedom itself is fully entangled in carbon democracy’s propulsive futurity. To put this in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a sense of limitlessness is part of what we have in common, and Smithson draws on this horizon to reinscribe finitude at that limit and foster a new aesthetic “distribution of the sensible” (12). Smithson’s critique of the would-be progressivism of the avant-garde then makes sense not merely as a contrarian’s cynicism but as a rigorous attention to what is shared and parceled out at its limits—at the territorial bounds of the horizon and on the vanishing line of fossil capitalism’s evanescent present. This is not to deny the vital role of pessimism to a critique of fossil capital, given that petroknowledge is characterized by its overweening “optimism” (Mitchell 141). Alarmingly enough, as Mitchell pointedly notes, the IPCC may be complicit in this affective posture; the likely impacts of negative feedback loops on the climate “make even the dire warnings from the IPCC look absurdly optimistic,” he says (7). In contrast to the sanguinity of climatologists and the rash positivity of petrocrats, Smithson sees the inheritance of prehistory as implying an insuperable limit to understanding, even as it impels the mind toward the infinite. Smithson only ever offers us visions of excess on the near side of infinity: “quasi-infinities,” as he puts it (“Quasi-Infinities” 34), or images of “infinite contraction,” in Robert Hobbs’s pithy phrase (98). Smithson’s is a claustral sublime, as rendered in his film on the Jetty, where the artist is seen running toward the sculpture’s center while his voiceover intones an identical view of “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water” from every compass-point (Spiral Jetty). This blocked view is a challenge to any claim of metaphysical survival or fossil-fueled inheritance. Rigorously materialist, the view from Spiral Jetty is at the same time a framing of infinitude, without which environmentalism can hardly foster a sense of the “double world” of the geological present.

Contretemps

It was in Vancouver, British Columbia, that Smithson spoke of “the artist as a geologic agent.” During the same three months he visited the area, he also had his most consequential dispute with ecologists. Public controversy over the environmental impact of Smithson’s proposed Island of Broken Glass forced the artist to abandon what would no doubt have been one of his major sculptural works. The inconclusive project for an Island of Broken Glass led Smithson to seek an alternate site at the Great Salt Lake. This episode is more than a detail of biography. As a project born of failure, Spiral Jetty can be seen as the sculptural enactment of a contretemps between environmentalism and negative ecology.

In a particularly striking instance of Klein’s bad timing, Smithson’s stay in Vancouver coincided with the founding of one of the world’s most influential and enduring direct-action environmental organizations. Smithson visited Vancouver between November 1969 and February 1970 to develop the Island project on Miami Islet (a barren rock in the Strait of Georgia), and to participate in Lucy Lippard’s exhibition 955,000 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. After the Ministry of Lands, Forests and Water Resources denied the artist permission to build the Island of Broken Glass, gallerist Douglas Chrismas, Smithson’s local dealer, penned a letter making the case for a revised project at the site. Smithson’s idea for a new island earthwork made various concessions to public concerns and envisioned a welcoming “habitat” for sea birds, though his description of the Island of the Dismantled Building betrays the artist’s characteristic droll irony; as Chrismas says, quoting Smithson, the new work was intended as a “‘monument to ecology'” (Arnold 25). This second project met with a definitive rejection. Chrismas’s ill-fated missive to the Ministry is dated February 13, 1970. Two days later, in an article in the Vancouver Sun, the name Greenpeace appears for the first time in print (Weyler 68).

One can hardly imagine a less propitious moment for Smithson to conceive his island project. The newly formed Vancouver chapter of the Sierra Club was instrumental in stopping the Island of Broken Glass; it was that group’s first environmental campaign. Meanwhile, as reported in the Vancouver Sun, a more radical faction was plotting to sail a boat dubbed Greenpeace to the Alaskan island Amchitka where the US was preparing a nuclear test. To activists fighting the “insane ecological vandalism” of the United States, Smithson’s island project appeared a similar American desecration of nature (Weyler 66). The opinion persists. In Rex Weyler’s account of this history thirty-four years later, the cofounder of Greenpeace still views the episode as an unalloyed triumph for environmentalism. His description of Smithson’s earthwork is shockingly garbled, if not defamatory: according to Weyler, Smithson’s intent was “to pave the islet with toffee-colored glue and shards of broken glass” (60). Aside from its inaccuracy—Weyler conflates Smithson’s seminal Glue Pour with the island project—the ecologist’s version of events betrays a glaring mismatch between environmentalism and geological consciousness. As Dennis Wheeler put it in his conversations with Smithson, the island project would be “making geologic time available” to the viewer with its heaped and jumbled plates of glass, evocations of earth strata shattered out of linear time and scattered into disorganized space (“Four Conversations” 226). The effect would be a “visual overload” that defies the viewer’s grasp (Grant 14), or, as Smithson suggests, a Bataillean “spiral” connoting “irreversible” expenditure (“Four” 230, 200).

In spite of its apparent grandiosity, Smithson conceived the Island of Broken Glass as a highly bounded work concerned with issues of framing and containment, enclosing processes that occur on utterly different scales. As such, it exemplifies what Jack Flam calls “compressed hyperbole,” Smithson’s characteristic trope (“Introduction” xiv). This controlled rhetoric was sorely tested by Smithson’s disappointment in Vancouver. In a text penned after the final rejection of his island project, Smithson forcefully asserts that his vision of entropic loss is incompatible with any environmentalist logic of “salvation”: “The island is not meant to save anything or anybody but to reveal things as they are” (qtd. in Arnold 25). The artist casts himself as the “scapegoat” of environmentalist “cowards” and “hypocrites,” and concludes that “the phony ‘salvation’ put forth in so much ecological propaganda, has less to do with ‘saving the land’ than losing one’s mind” (qtd. in Arnold 25). Smithson may have misjudged the impression of “ecological vandalism” that his Island of Broken Glass would provoke, and his aesthetic intervention on Miami Islet could appear politically antithetical to a major protest action unfolding concurrently on another rocky island on the West Coast: the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, a turning point for Indigenous rights in North America. Yet Smithson’s inexistent island remains strangely evocative for a negative ecology beyond the politics of “rich-nation environmentalists.”¹⁹ In E. Pauline Johnson’s short story “The Lost Island,” the author relates a tale told to her by Sahp-luk (Chief Joseph Capilano), in which a powerful medicine man, “the strongest man on all the North Pacific Coast,” is tormented by a dream that foretells the coming of White settlers to Vancouver and the resulting loss of his people’s lands and traditions (74). When the medicine man dies, he instructs his people to search for a mysterious island on which his powerful spirit will reside forever. In local Vancouver lore, then, an elusive island contains all the hopes of a return to the former lifeways of the Squamish and the restoration of a natural habitat “where the salmon thronged and the deer came down to drink of the mountain-streams” (75). One local author seems to have channeled Smithson’s “lost island” as the unwritten subtext for an insurgent Indigenous counter-history of art activism in Vancouver.²⁰

When Smithson visited the Great Salt Lake in March 1970 to scout locations for an earthwork, he initially pictured building an island in the lake (“The Spiral Jetty” 7). This echo of the Island of Broken Glass suggests that Smithson brought the bitter concept of a “monument to ecology” to Utah’s “dead sea.” By April, the site he chose at Rozel Point had inspired a different project. Intriguingly, the Jetty as originally constructed appears half-formed, as if caught midway between his Vancouver project and the Great Salt Lake: extant photos of his first Jetty show an arc terminating in a small bulbous form, like a tether linking an islet to the mainland.²¹ Smithson was unsatisfied with this solution. He returned the construction crew to the site a few days later to dismantle the island and give the Jetty its present shape.²²

Fifty years on, Miami Islet remains undisturbed. Though it is hard to judge the hypothetical impact of a planned forty tons of broken glass on the site, it would likely have had minimal effects on the surrounding ecosystem. Local preservation efforts, meanwhile, are outpaced by climate change. In the Strait of Georgia, salmon stocks are in steep decline and the resident orcas threaten to vanish. Dungeness crab, a local delicacy, can be found at Miami Islet, but as recently reported in the Vancouver Sun (Shore), their shells are showing developmental damage due to the global phenomenon of ocean acidification.

John Culbert John Culbert is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Paralyses: Literature, Travel and Ethnography in French Modernity (Nebraska 2010). His article “The Well and the Web” appeared in Postmodern Culture 19.2.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Dina Al-Kassim, Dan Katz, Jaleh Mansoor, Kavita Philip, and Madeleine Reddon for reading earlier versions of this essay.

1. See especially Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth”; David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth; Jonathan Franzen, “What If We Stopped Pretending?”; Catherine Ingram, “Facing Extinction.”

2. In his treatise on the role of waste in modern aesthetics, Bourriaud performs a peculiar domestication of Bataille’s theory of excess, proposing instead a recuperative vision of the excluded remainder and casting the role of the modern artist as laboring “to bring those expelled by ideology, deported from symbolic power, back to the centre of life and culture” (172). In this account, nothing resists reassimilation – even if, confusingly enough, art itself reserves the right to “refuse” expulsion: “a realist mode of conceiving art,” Bourriaud asserts, “has refused the existence of the inassimilable.” In contrast, Smithson proposes that the artwork “evades our capacity to find its center,” and this decentering propels the viewer outward without prospect of return. “Where is the central point, axis, pole, dominant interest, fixed position, absolute structure, or decided goal? The mind is always being hurled towards the outer edge into intractable trajectories that lead to vertigo” (Smithson, “A Museum” 94).

3. See especially Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” and “A Sedimentation of the Mind.”

4. See Sophie Lewis, “Cthulhu Plays no Role for Me.”

5. See Natalie Sauer and Chloé Farand, “IPCC: Urgent action needed to tackle hunger alongside climate crisis.”

6. I borrow the phrase from Frank Kermode. “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited,” Kermode asserts. “This is part of its extraordinary resilience” (8). See The Sense of an Ending.

7. For a uniquely personal treatment of this motif so crucial to his thought, see Derrida, Learning to Live Finally.

8. See Lynn Keller, Recomposing Ecopoetics; Margaret Ronda, Remainders.

9. See especially “Strata: A Photogeographic Fiction” and “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.”

10. We could say that Smithson “out-labyrinthed labyrinths,” as he remarks drolly of Frederick Law Olmsted (Smithson, “Frederick” 169).

11. “Gyrostasis” is the name of Smithson’s triangulated spiral sculpture of 1968, which he subsequently described as a “map” to the Spiral Jetty. See Hobbs, editor, Robert Smithson: Sculpture, 95.

12. See Saskia Sassen, Expulsions.

13. On contemporary artistic strategies of “de-alienation,” see Heather Davis.

14. The space between site and nonsite conveys a “new sense of metaphor,” Smithson says, that challenges expressive and realistic representation with a conceptual, analogic, and abstract dialectic (“A Provisional,” 364). Smithson specifies that because the nonsite directs the viewer into unbounded space, the indexicality of the metaphor opens onto no defined reference point: “Although there’s a correspondence, the equalizer is always in a sense the subverted or lost, so it’s a matter of losing your way rather than finding your way” (“Four” 218).

15. As Smithson says, “The last nonsite [Nonsite, Site Uncertain, 1968] actually is one that involves coal and there the site belongs to the Carboniferous Period, so it no longer exists; the site becomes completely buried again. There’s no topographical reference. … That was the last nonsite; you know, that was the end of that. So I wasn’t dealing with the land surfaces at the end” (“Interview,” 296). Though Robert Hobbs points out that this nonsite was not, in fact, Smithson’s last, the artist’s account of his aesthetic trajectory reveals his sense of the nonsites’ conceptual evolution into geological time. See Hobbs 115 and Smithson, “Four,” 223.

16. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, and “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix.'” While “spatial fix” is a focal term in Harvey’s work, its temporal correlative has largely been elaborated by his commentators. See Jessop, “Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes.”

17. In specifying “what blocks us from transitioning to other forms of energy,” the petrocultures scholars seem to draw implicitly on Malm’s sobering analysis of the “obstacles to the transition” (367). “The only historical transition that gives us insight into what is on the horizon (i.e., the scale of infrastructural and social shift) is the transition into the energy and economic system we’re on the brink of exiting” (Petrocultures 15). I have been arguing that any insight into such a horizon would have to pass through the obstructive entropics of Smithson’s terminal sightlines.

18. A signal failure of environmental dialectics is demonstrated by would-be liberal thought leader Robert Reich. “It’s one thing to understand climate change in the abstract,” Reich observes. “It’s another to live inside it.” According to Reich, this supposedly unbridgeable disparity requires that we regain a sense that “the personal is political” in the lived experience of climate-fueled disaster. Such advocacy for a personal, experiential rapport to climate change can only promote a politics of adaptation to changes, which, if large enough to be commonly observed, can hardly be prevented.

19. World Bank president Lawrence Summers notoriously employed the phrase. See Nixon 1; see also Bond 55.

20. Wayde Compton’s short story collection The Outer Harbour relates the unexpected emergence of a volcanic island in Vancouver harbor that is targeted by First Nations militants for native occupation but is subsequently turned into a migrant detention facility. Smithson’s unbuilt island appears to be the tacit intertext between “Pauline Johnson island” and the various insurgent and artistic movements described in Compton’s fictional Vancouver. Indeed, as imagined by Compton, radical political action extends Smithson’s vision for the Island of Broken Glass to all of urban space and no doubt beyond; evoking “the so-called City of Glass” littered with the shards of broken windows, one militant group proposes, “Let those who smash, smash,” urging local residents “to crack every last antiseptic condo tower window, coating the sidewalks with so much shining rime” (Compton 79–80).

21. On the logistics of construction and Smithson’s change of design, see Bob Phillips.

22. Interestingly, the final version of Spiral Jetty may itself bear the traces of Smithson’s failed Vancouver project. When Smithson visited Vancouver in 1969, he may well have seen the large advertising billboards mounted across the city that year by Ben Metcalfe, a founding member of Greenpeace. The billboards featured the word “Ecology” in large letters, and the suggestion: “Look it up! You’re involved.” Notably, the accompanying image was of two large spirals, each nested in the other. See “The Fight to Save Earth.”

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