Spiral Jetty in an age of mechanical reproduction

Most people have seen the iconic photographs of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," a staple of art-history books:

In her recent travelogue-cum-art-criticism book, "Spiral Jetta" (University of Chicago), Erin Hogan, director of publicity for the Art Institute of Chicago and a lapsed art historian feeling at loose ends, sets out in a battered Volkswagen to see "Spiral Jetty" and other classic examples of American environmental art, or Land Art, in the wild.

After an increasingly rural drive into the desert from Salt Lake City--one filled with fears of a ruptured gas tank and visions of strangers finding her dehydrated body on a side road after she makes a wrong turn-- she finds herself face-to-face with Smithson's work. "My first impressions? Much smaller than I expected, and much whiter. A long ways from the water, barely rising from the salty silty surface of the lake bed."

The arty, aerial, unpopulated photographs of the work, Hogan argues, the images art students grow up on, give an utterly misleading account of its character:

In actuality, it's incredibly intimate, dare I say, even tiny. You can walk its spine in just a few minutes; three or four giant steps can cover the ground between the loops.… I walked into the spiral and back out of it. I lay down in the center of it. I crisscrossed its rings. I crouched down and tasted the salt. I looked around, still overwhelmed by the work's nonmonumentality.

Art critics often argue that reproductions are a poor excuse for seeing the actual artworks, yet the gap appears especially unbridgeable when it comes to Land Art--yet, of course, these are also the works that take the most effort to view with one's own eyes. Hogan also makes pilgrimages to Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field," Michael Heizer's "Double Negative," and Nancy Holt's "Sun Tunnels."