ABSTRACT
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is a work that is quintessentially western. The relationship to the specifics of the space it occupies, the sense of time it elicits, and the abundant traces of prehistoric life it indexes form the complex ground of its aesthetic presentation. The work of earth art is inextricably tied to the vastness of space and (pre)history of the Utah landscape itself. This chapter brings together the themes of art, entropy, and the west, to explore the aesthetic possibilities of thinking genesis out of destruction. As the law of entropy expresses a kind of inevitability toward dissolution, it metaphorically captures the heaviness and anxiety of world disorder. Art is one of the ways to both confront and overcome the pull of nihilism in the face of this tendency. In the spirit of overcoming pessimism, this chapter provides a preliminary overview of the science and metaphorics of entropy, followed by a discussion of Smithson’s unique approach to entropics, concluding with an examination of how the west is a unique site for the artistic reconfiguration of entropy as a force of creation out of destruction.
