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Landscape as Gallery, Nature as Curator: biofilms, biomineralisation, microbiolites and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970)
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Date
2026-05-26
Authors
Whelan, Barney
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
This thesis examines Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) as an environmentally contingent and temporally unfolding work whose materiality is actively shaped by the hydrological, chemical and biological systems of the Great Salt Lake. Its central argument is that the biogeochemical processes operating at Rozel Point, salt accretion and dissolution, microbial pigmentation, fluctuating water levels and long-term hydrological decline, are not incidental forces acting upon a stable sculptural object but constitutive agencies through which the work continuously exists and is encountered. The thesis advances the framework of Landscape as Gallery, Nature as Curator, arguing that the lake exercises material agency over the work through three curatorial functions: selection, organisation and continuous shifts.
The project addresses three research questions: how microbial growth, biomineralisation, halite accretion, water level and fluctuating salinity have reshaped the material and sensory conditions of Spiral Jetty since 1970; how the environmental monitoring data of the Great Salt Lake can be transformed into sonification and what that process reveals about the work's ecological history; and in what ways the resulting sonification solidifies our understanding of nature as curator and what curatorial obligations this creates.
Chapter 1 grounds the argument in the biogeochemical specificity of the Great Salt Lake, examining salinity fluctuation, microbial life, biomineralisation and hydrological change as aesthetic forces that actively shape the work's material condition. Chapter 2 develops environmental sonification as a practice-based methodology, translating six decades of ecological monitoring data, lake elevation, salinity, conductance, temperature, sulphate and chlorophyll-a from Utah Geological Survey stations RD2 and FB2, into structured auditory form through independently normalised pitch mapping, Aeolian scale quantisation and Logic Pro rendering. Chapter 3 establishes listening as a legitimate art-historical method, demonstrating how sonic documentation can register ecological temporality and environmental duration in ways that static visual documentation cannot. Chapter 4 articulates the curatorial implications of nature's agency for institutional responsibility and ecological ethics, developing a framework for distinguishing between constitutive transformation and preventable anthropogenic deterioration.
The thesis proposes sonification as a third archival mode, alongside site encounter and visual documentation, capable of preserving relational environmental change as structured auditory duration. It demonstrates that Spiral Jetty should be understood not as a static monument to Land Art but as a continually evolving index of environmental transformation, and argues that art-historical method must expand its evidentiary range and ethical horizon wherever art and environmental systems are genuinely entangled.
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Keywords
Spiral Jetty , Robert Smithson , Great Salt Lake , Sonification , Site-listening , Nature as curator , Environmental art , Biogeochemistry , Curatorial ethics , Land art and ecological aesthetics
Citation
Whelan, B. 2026. Landscape as Gallery, Nature as Curator: biofilms, biomineralisation, microbiolites and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970). MRes Thesis, University College Cork.