So are there any other topics you're interested?
Or should I just choose for you?
What was Smithson?
Oh, yay!
You guys are my favorite audience.
My favorite.
OK.
Let me see.
Let me find that.
This is where everyone gets to discover I can't either use
technology or read Chinese.
"Journey."
Robert Smithson on AJ Russell's photo of the Transcontinental.
"This excessiveness of men spilling,
crowding, to mark their X of time and money,
I find lamentable.
The little moment composed of paper and light--
alienated spike, relic, in the hands
of those willing themselves be relics, too.
Nothing so linear as human ego and desire
while the past turns and returns, spirals
like these pelicans journeying over the red waters off Rozel,
streams of purple, sodium; yucca rimed with pustules of dust.
Each one lifts, rises: finds what
only some part of the cells remembers, nests in the wreck
of what we've left, this bulk of ruined train,
its wheel wells turned the rust of flaking blood.
Of course, they trekked the human bodies from the crash
back out.
We care for our own.
We care nothing for our own.
Making our lives material so as to free us
all better to forget.
Who remembers the names behind that photos grasping fingers?
Who recalls the dead the UP ferried from its crash?
The metals they left not as memorial to them,
but because it cost less to leave the evidence than
drag it all back out."
Those images, by the way, are of the ghost towns
along the Transcontinental Railroad.
So those are actually railroad workers' graves
you're looking at.
"Journey."
Robert Smithson, one of the founders
of the influential land art movement,
was best known for his portrait spiral artwork, Spiral Jetty,
built on the Northeastern shore of the Great Salt
Lake near Rozel Point.
Composed of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rock,
the Jetty forms a 1,500-foot long and 15-foot wide
counterclockwise spiral curling from the lake shore.
No one knows exactly why Smithson chose Great Salt Lake
to build the Spiral Jetty, though the most prevalent
theories have to do with the Transcontinental.
Smithson was taken by the violet color of the lake caused
by the Lucin Cutoff, which isolates
the saline heavy waters from freshwater sources.
But Smithson may also been attracted to Rozel Point's
proximity to the Golden Spike National Historic Site
where the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines met,
its x of connection forever stamped on the map.
An x whose shadow lingers too in the visual composition
of AJ Russell's iconic champagne photo, which you saw that
opened the piece.
The golden spike suggests linear completion, the Spiral Jetty
unfurling and return, a rejection of progress,
a revision of history.
It is the act of cycling back through time.
Driving the causeway now, the Lucin Cutoff
takes you past both Rozel and the remains of the Bagley train
wreck in which a mail train plowed
into the back end of a slowing passenger train one December
morning in 1944.
50 people were killed, mostly military personnel.
80 others injured.
About the meaning of this work, Smithson
said he wanted to document the Earth's history.
Entropy and decay obsessed him.
Smithson believed all systems devolve over time
to equilibrium.
One art critic friend admits the Jetty
is less interesting as disordered history, however,
than in how it disrupts the art market.
The Dia Foundation protects it, but no one
can claim to really own it.
From my truck, the horizon salinated haze blurs sky
and water, a flock of birds swims past like fish.
The Bagley train wreck has never been removed from the causeway
because it was too expensive to tow out.
You can drive to it now, walk between the ruined cars.
The rust resembles rock.
The wheels eroded to sand.
Over decades, this train wreck has softened into landscape.
The Jetty crystallized into art.
There's an image in this that actually has
a kind of repetend visually.
So I'll play a poem for you.
And this is it.
"What Day."
"On this seventh day of the seventh month,
magpies bridge in a cluster of black and white.
The sky king crosses to meet his queen, time
tracked by the close-knit wheeling of stars.
I watch.
You come to me tonight, drunk on wine and cards,
nails ridged black with opium to ease the pain of work.
We are all men here.
Any body can be a bridge, little raven,
your eyes squeezed shut, but not from pain.
We are a trestle, a grade we build together.
What matter if you say you'd never choose me,
were there women willing in this desert?
I chose.
I choose the memory we share of rivers, your hair of smoke
and raw, wet leather.
A man in another man's hand makes himself tool or weapon,
says the overseer, as if a man's use to another is only one
of work.
Pleasure is the only chosen future.
You are the home I briefly make, the country I can return to.
Here where the moon wheels its white shoulder in the dark,
and you push me to the earth, slip my whiskered tip of hair
into your mouth."
"What Day."
Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung opens Dirty Laundry:
A History of Heroes with the scene
of a train steward reading a magazine article headlined,
"Canada's Railway, a Symbol Under Threat."
A few shots later, this same steward is locked in an embrace
with a journalist named Roger Kwong who's
traveling across the Canadian Rockies
to research his family's history with the train.
The two men's encounter is interspersed
with historical footage of the train hurtling through tunnels,
the train moving both backward and forward at once, the men's
sex overlaid on the technology Kwong's family helped build.
Is the train in its disruption of time
where we lose or find ourselves?
My father recalls traveling back to Seattle from his East Coast
college on the Transcontinental during which time
he shared a car with a young child and her mother.
One night, he woke to find the child crying, the mother gone.
When he went in search of her, he
found that woman in a darkened corridor, skirt hiked up,
legs wrapped around another passenger.
It changed my picture of women forever,
my father said, disgusted.
I laughed.
Move your hands into the dug out dirt:
you can feel the nestle of bodies,
the soft silt of skin and hair.
Translation of a man into labor.
Translation of a man into need.
And what is that translation?
Humiliation or rage or desire?
We never stop building the railroad.
All right.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]