Robert Smithson, Movie Treatment for Spiral Jetty, Dwan Gallery Poster, 1970

Robert Smithson

Movie Treatment for Spiral Jetty, Dwan Gallery Poster, 1970

Offset lithograph poster

Not signed

38 × 22 inches

Unframed

Rare, historic poster features reproductions of sketches and notes by Smithson comprising a storyboard or movie treatment for Spiral Jetty.
The Dwan Gallery exhibition ran from October 31 to November 25, 1970, and featured a film on Spiral Jetty screened once daily, but not in a continuous loop. The Dwan exhibition consisted primarily of Gianfranco Gorgoni’s large-format photos of the Jetty, eight of which were included in Kynaston McShine’s historic “Information” show at the Museum of Modern Art that summer.
The Dwan Gallery was run by the highly influential dealer, heiress and philanthropist Virginia Dwan, a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks. The National Gallery of Art hosted an exhibition honoring Virginia Dwan's gift to the museum, and it was accompanied by a gorgeous hardback monograph entitled "Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971 Hardcover – Illustrated, November 2, 2016" by curator James Meyer. This Smithson exhibition poster is included in the monograph.

The Cooper Hewitt Museum, which has another example of this scarce poster describes it as follows:
"Poster for a film about Robert Smithson's earthwork sculpture, Spiral Jetty, located in Great Salt Lake, Utah. The poster is advertising the showing of the film in an exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in New York City from October 31–November 25, 1970. The sheet is completely covered with film storyboard sketches for sequencing of the documentary. The top (Part 1) shows shots of dust, road, mountains, and the Hall of Late Dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. The center of the poster shows water shots and the placing of stakes. The bottom (Part 2) shows sketches of aerial views of the Spiral Jetty. Reproductions of handwritten notes accompany the small drawings. Both the notes and images are printed in black against a tan or light brown background."

About Spiral Jetty
Extending into the red waters of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is composed of 1,500 feet of local basalt rock and earth built up into a 15-foot-wide swirling mound. Smithson intentionally situated this work within an unpredictable environment; climate and other ecological changes associated with the lake’s fluctuating water levels—including erosion, and sand and silt deposits—have interacted with the work in various ways over the past decades.
In addition to the Jetty itself, Smithson created a film and text (each also titled Spiral Jetty), that document the sculpture’s construction and completed site. These two drawings chart Robert Smithson's plans for climatic sections of his film: in one he maps out a sequence of images showing the dark maw of a bulldozer moving towards the camera during construction. In the second, a close aerial shot track shows Smithson jogging along the jetty; when he reaches the end, the camera pulls back sharply to reveal the entire, massive spiral form amidst the sun-dappled waters of the Great Salt Lake. In this drawing, Smithson represents himself as the eye-like form in the center of the image, near the notation “Running Figure Keep in Frame.” He wrote: I took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt . . . For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos, meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps.”
-Courtesy of the University of Chicago