In 1970, the sculptor Robert Smithson traveled from New York to Rozel Point in Utah, on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake. He found it starkly beautiful, acquired land rights and rearranged it. He hired a contractor to haul several thousand tons of earth and rocks into the lake, shaped into a spiral.
The result was an artwork made famous primarily by people in New York and elsewhere who looked at pictures of it, a work redeemed by its monumental scale and its remoteness. When Utah announced plans to allow oil drilling near Spiral Jetty, art fans and environmentalists said the aesthetic experience of the work would be jeopardized.
We thought of Spiral Jetty the other day when we read about the battle against stone-stacking in national parks. Stacking is just what it sounds like – carefully placing one stone atop another until you have made a tower. Zion National Park calls it “curious but destructive.” Moving stones around this way “can cause erosion, damage animal ecosystems, disrupt river flow and confuse hikers,” Sophie Haigney explains in The New Yorker.
Part of the problem is that the stackers like to photograph their work and post the pictures on Instagram, which seems to inspire more people to do it, and then still more people, until only some rocks are left unturned.
People look at pictures of stacked rocks on their phones the way they looked at photographs of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, ignoring the corporal, the real. The lonely jetty and the weird cairns are orphans.
We saw the stacked stones often last summer at the southern tip of the Durango off-leash Dog Park. They seemed eccentric but harmless, which is to say it is a very Durango thing to do. Or a very Boulder thing to do (Boulder at one point tried to outlaw stone-stacking.)
We also liked to ramble in the dried bed of Lemon Reservoir last summer, when the water was so low it looked like we were walking on Mars. And then we would come across the stacked-stone towers, which felt like someone’s ego intruding. It was a little puzzling that anyone who would make the trip to dried Lemon must have appreciated its untrammeled beauty so much that he or she had to trammel it a little.
All of the trouble in the world begins, said the French essayist Pascal, because a man cannot sit quietly in a room. We wonder if there is a corollary outdoors.
We cut down the trees, we dig in the mountains, we remove entire hilltops to get at the coal. It is who we are. But we do not confuse it with a meditative exercise or an aesthetic experience.
We also long to experience nature untouched by our hands.
Tibetan Buddhists have a tradition of making intricate mandalas from naturally colored sand. Teams of monks build them for days – and then sweep them up. The sand is collected in a jar and dumped in a river. There is something beautiful and satisfying about that.
The deadpan comedian Steven Wright had a line, “I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you’ve seen it.”
We like that aesthetic. It is so minimalist you can hardly tell it is there.
