“The Sedimentation if the Mind”

     “As you mentioned, Spiral Jetty was made by one driver with two dump trucks and a telephone call by Smithson to a mate in Salt Lake City. This is about the right of an individual to mark a landscape and make it their own. Here is an independent, liberal white man inscribing his idea of what art can be on collective space. Something we might think twice about now. On the one hand works like Smithson's are a reaction against the ownership and commercialization of the New York art scene but on the other are a massive imposition on space in contradiction to the fact that these plains and mesas were known and walked by the First Nations.
     Ironically, the idea of negative space-cutting into and altering the natural landscape in the manner of artists such as Smithson- was already implicit in the Hopi, Navajo and Anasazi idea of the kiva: the underground void in which the tribe can communicate with the great spirit. It is very difficult or impossible to be truly original but it's also a good idea to recognize that any idea of land exists equally in the shared and layered histories of human experience of it as it does in material topography.”