I’ve been exploring early Conceptual Art lately. As I’ve gone through articles,statements and lectures, I can’t get over the sense that I’m in a lab trying, against all odds, to make entropy decrease. The way these early artists are written about, their opposition to a Greenbergian formalism becomes the be all and end all of their work. The value is not found in 2010 but somewhere in the mid 1960s. This feeling is not limited to conceptual art. Any work, in fact most works, becomes dated at some point. However with the increasing atemporal nature of culture, works that take into account the entropy of their initial artistic impulse have the potential to become a continuum of history, rather than a single point in time.  

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, is well known for its acceptance of entropy. Made in 1970 when The Great Salt Lake’s water level was effected by drought, the work was visible for two years, before being submerged for three decades. The work emerged in 2004 and has been exposed and revealed as the lake level rises and falls, many times throughout the last decade. Originally Black Basalt Rock against ruddy water, the spiral is now largely white against pink due to salt encrustation and lower water levels. The work changes as much as our perception of art does.  It is in one way as primordial as the phallic man cut into the British hill side, and as modern as our knowledge of science. The jetty looking like cilia hair on a paramecium or a solar flare from the surface of the sun. It buts its way into contemporary  energy politics while turning viewers into pilgrims going to see an ancient relic. It gets remixed online and spotted on Google Maps. The work feels like it exists today as much as it did in 1970.