Category: spiral jetty

Michael Heizer built Double Negative in 1969-70, and in the early days eyewitnesses were sparse. Curator Jan van der Marck told the story of visiting Double Negative and Walter de Maria’s Las Vegas Piece on a Viriginia Dwan-organized junket in early 1970, blazing across the desert with German art volks in the back of Heizer’s truck.

MoMA curator Jennifer Licht seems to have gone with Heizer in November 1971, just before she made the presentation to the trustees on the museum’s acquisitions committee about Double Negative, Las Vegas Piece, and Spiral Jetty that appears in Calvin Tomkins’ 1972 New Yorker feature on earth art.

I say seems because that is the implication of the annotations on these two pieces of Michael Heizer ephemera that just turned up at auction in Los Angeles, from Licht’s collection. One, a loop of dynamite fuse taped to a sheet of paper, is labeled “Dynamite from Double Negative (from Michael Heizer)” and “Overton, Nevada November 1971.” That’s the town at the base of Mormon Mesa where Double Negative is.

The other sheet is a disparate list of items that someone (else) has annotated with, “Heizer work notes, Nevada, November 1971.”

The notes mention Montana several times: “Butte KOA [campground],” “Missoula Dept Engineering,” “Mill Creek [Trail] photos.” Heizer traveled and scouted sites for works in Montana, but the closest thing to a direct work reference is “NESW,” which is also the name of an earth work he planned in 1967, partially executed in the desert with funding from Robert Scull, and then realized in full in 2002 at Dia Beacon; it’s his set of holes in the floor. Except for being annotated as from Nevada, their connection to Double Negative seems unclear to me, especially as work notes for a work that’d been done for almost two years by that point.

[a few minutes later update] greg.org hero Julian Myers notes that Goplen & Yokoyama were Heizer’s engineers in Berkeley, and “NESW blues” could be blueprints, which was calling to get “one copy to me.” Myers also recalls a possible second round of excavation at Double Negative after the initial late 1969 phase. But Tomkins and Virginia Dwan visited it “a year and a half since the piece was finished,” so the summer of 1971, and found erosion and some graffiti. Perhaps after this visit, and after thwarting Dwan’s sale of the work, Heizer (and Licht?) went back to touch it up with some dynamite.

Also, did anyone dare to ask the artist if they are works? They sure are objects, artifacts, ephemera. And if they’re what they appear to be, they are incredible, exceptional, and—until they’re sold—invaluable.

18 Aug 2026 Lot 143, Michael Heizer, Double Negative Working Notes and Blasting Fuse (two works), est. $3-5,000 [lamodern]
Previously, related: A report from the Las Vegas Piece junket
Walter De Maria’s Las Vegas Piece
Backroads Backstory: Walter De Maria on Michael Heizer
Double Double, on Sturtevant’s Heizer Double Negative

In June 1997 Tacita Dean was attending the Sundance Institute, and decided to find the Spiral Jetty, which had begun to resurface intermittently starting in 1994.

In 1998 she made an audio work—an installation and an audio cassette edition—titled, Trying to find the Spiral Jetty, and in 1999 she added a slideshow accompaniment, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1997.

I’ve looked intermittently for years for a cassette edition, and have not heard it, but I do know the cover art: a set of typed directions provided by the Utah Arts Council, which were faxed to Dean at Sundance. [According to Tacita Dean: Selected Writings and Complete Works & Filmography, published by the Royal Academy in 2018, her saved fax is also a work in its own right.]

On a recent search for the cassette, I found a 1999 interview with Dean from Audio Arts, a cassette-based art magazine, which has been preserved by Tate Modern. In it she discusses Disappearance at Sea (1998), a short film for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize, and the Spiral Jetty search and works.

I had always assumed that Trying to find the Spiral Jetty was a field recording, a documentation of the trip made following the directions across increasingly remote and rough dirt roads. But Dean explains the audio is a fabrication, an exercise of memory. She and her companion, an audio engineer named Greg, reconstructed the trip in conversation, and then constructed it anew via Foley sound effects, to augment some ambient recording begun as they approached the lake.

Especially in the earliest, uncertain days of Spiral Jetty‘s re-emergence, and based on her work’s title, it seemed that searching for the Jetty had to be at least as relevant as whether she found it. But I also think that Dean was less concerned with the experienced reality on the ground than the produced reality on the tape. At least that’s how it sounds in her interview.

And of course, the embraced ambiguity worked its way through her practice, and led [as] directly [as possible, via the inspired machinations of Jeremy Millar] to her correspondence with JG Ballard, whose writings inspired Smithson, and to JG, her 2013 anamorphic 35mm film work which circled around Spiral Jetty.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Robert Smithson’s death, and an occasion to revisit Zack Hatfield’s Artforum review of Suzaan Boettger’s biography of the artist, Inside The Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson.

Hatfield reminded me that in addition to Smithson’s almost mystical Catholicist early days, Boettger goes deep on his interest in numerology. And she looks closely at Smithson’s early work, only some of which has been shown before. Which reminded me of a wild group of works sold a few years ago—wow. it was 2008—by the family of George Lester, a diplomat/collector/dealer who invited 23-yo Smithson to stage a show in Rome in 1961.

The Holt/Smithson Foundation helped organize an exhibition at MACRO in Rome of work from this largely unknown period, and noted that Smithson traveled to Italy in 1961. It just closed in May 2023.

The metric dimensions of Buried Angel, the canvas up top with an angel buried in jumbles of numbers and letters, make me think it was painted in Europe. The dimensions of the fantastical collage, Two Frogs Guarding The Palace, meanwhile, could go either way.

In his 1972 AAA interview with Paul Cummings, Smithson described the work from this period as “phantasmagorical drawings of cosmological worlds somewhat between Blake and…oh, a kind of Boschian imagery…They were sort of based on iconic situations…They dealt with explicit images like, the city; they were kind of monstrous as well, you know, like great Moloch figures.”

Point is, I think I really need to read the book.

Mortal Coil: Resurrecting Robert Smithson [artforum]
Buy Suzaan Boettger’s Inside The Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson at Amazon [amazon]
Lots 233-37: From the Archives of the Galeria George Lester, Rome [christies]
Rome is Still Falling: Nov. 22 – May 23 [holtsmithsonfoundation]
So much here, so much not: Oral History interview with Robert Smithson, 1972 [aaa.si.edu]