Blame Brexit, and blame Covid, too – this gallery’s departure will leave a gap in the London scene. Its ambitious programme has included a museum-scale show on animals in art, Nan Goldin’s elegiac portraits of New York’s queer bohemia, and the awesome theatrics of Tavares Strachan’s Black history world-building, In Plain Sight. This is also the final show at Marian Goodman’s London gallery, a space off Golden Square in Soho, with a handsome old wooden staircase and skylit upper floor. The final film shows Holt with artists Tony Shafrazi and Richard Serra finishing the gruelling construction of Amarillo Ramp in Smithson’s honour after his death: it’s a moving farewell. Swooping around Spiral Jetty, a helicopter captures the lake turning from pink to pewter in the evening light, the sculpture at last rising like a black whirlpool out of a sheet of silver-white water. Like the earthworks themselves, Holt’s films are slow and repetitive, and the moments of realisation glorious. Our understanding of land requiring protection has shifted since Smithson’s time, no longer just a question of beauty but of biodiversity. Today, Mono Lake is protected as a rare and fragile environment. It’s presented like a cursed planet from one of Smithson’s sci-fi tales. We are told about the living clouds of larval worms hatching at the water’s edge, feeding on algal slime. The mood is often desolate, with the artists travelling great distances to wind up in landscapes that feel quasi-apocalyptic.Īt the saline Mono Lake in California, they take turns walking along the shore, sending up thick eddies of oily black flies as they go. Holt’s films are intrinsic to Smithson’s projects, not only bringing the earthworks into the gallery but also documenting trips to identify sites, the gathering of ideas and materials, and the long, tricky process of construction. Six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth went into Spiral Jetty. In America disillusionment over the war in Vietnam, and the battles for equality on both racial and. He saw the brutality involved in the production of his works, which at their greatest involved the digging, transporting, dumping and forming of vast quantities of local materials. Smithson once compared claw-mouthed digger trucks to “mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin”. The question of beauty, and our understanding of it in the natural world, is interesting in this context. Smithson saw the brutality involved in the production of his works The site was crucial – a caption notes that Smithson and Holt acquired a remote outcrop on which to realise a specific work, only for the artists to decide that it was too picturesque to alter. It’s hard to get any sense of scale, and impossible to understand the context in which Smithson was picturing the works. Some schemes are elegantly serpentine, one resembles the forking branches of fallen trees, another matzo balls in soup. Inspired by stories of ancient Atlantis, sci-fi fantasies and rock-hunting manuals, Smithson planned a variety of sculptural islands, many of which are represented here as pencil sketches. Photograph: ©Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York
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