the real and fake spiral jetty
File under the “even if it’s fake it’s real” category, Jill Dawsey uses Vik Muniz’s Spiral Jetty after Robert Smithson as a jumping off point for a great post about the real Spiral Jetty. “I don’t mean to suggest finally that visiting Spiral Jetty in person provides an experience more authentic or real than the other ways (Nonsites, photographs, stories) one encounters the work. For if Muniz gets Spiral Jetty and its environs slightly wrong, that is also how he gets it right. Spiral Jetty after Robert Smithson is a copy that announces itself as a copy, a photograph twice removed from the famous work it references.”