The Material Production of the Spiral Jetty: A Study of Culture in the Making

The objective of this article is to open the ‘black box’ of artistic production in order to describe, in minute detail, culture in the making, that is, the process through which cultural forms grow into being and are materially accomplished. I will do so through the study of the morphogenetic process through which the Spiral Jetty, an earthwork sculpture created by the American artist Robert Smithson, came into being. This study will show that artistic production constitutes an irreducible form of material practice which cannot be adequately understood as an individual activity or as an activity guided or constrained by ‘external’ social factors. As I shall argue, the attention to the material practice of artistic production reveals a much needed insight into the practices, materials and processes through which culture is actually produced and materially accomplished.