spiral jetty film still

"Sun Tunnels" and "Spiral Jetty" films at Kunsthalle Krems

From July 14 through to November 3, 2019, Kunsthalle Krems in Austria presents the group exhibition Land Art, which includes the films Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1978) and Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970).

Curated by Florian Steininger, Land Art explores how artists left conventional exhibition space, making landscape the contextual field of their art practice. Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels are presented as “classics” from the pioneer era of Land Art. These works are juxtaposed with a contemporary Austrian approach to Land Art.

The image above is a still from Spiral Jetty. Smithson made the film on returning to New York after making the eponymous earthwork in Utah. He describes: ‘Back in New York, the urban desert, I contacted Bob Fiore and Barbara Jarvis and asked them to help me put my movie together. The movie began as a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving. And the movie editor, bending over such a chaos of “takes” resembles a palaeontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Film strips hung from the cutter’s rack, bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of footage. Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One is transported by this Archaeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs.’

Quotation from Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty (1972)
Published in Nancy Holt (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, New York University Press, pp.109-113.

Still above from Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)
35 minutes, color, sound, 16 mm film on video
Camera: Robert Fiore, Nancy Holt, Robert Logan, Robert Smithson
Sound: Robert Fiore, Robert Logan
Editing: Barbara Jarris

The Foundation works with Electronic Arts Intermix to distribute films by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.

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four steel pipes extending up from the floor with four viewing pipes pointed at four black painted circles on the wall

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