Robert Smithson, "Spiral Jetty," 1970

When I first saw that this site’s new Flash Points topic was Art and the Environment, I immediately thought of two artists: Robert Smithson and Eames Demetrios. They are not contemporaries. Smithson, a seminal land art pioneer, died tragically in the height of his career in 1973. Demetrios, a currently active artist and filmmaker, is the namesake of his designer grandparents, Charles and Ray Eames. Demetrios is creating an elaborate global installation called Kcymaerxthaere, a manifestation of what he calls “3-dimensional story telling.” These two artists provide compelling arguments for the value of natural resources precisely because neither deals with the topic directly. Rather, both engage in a form of artistic practice that stretches back to prehistory. By creating monuments to complex mythologies and situating them in both a physical and historical context, the apparent value of these sites is renewed.

Robert Smithson is most famous as an early proponent of the land art movement. His most famous work, Spiral Jetty (1970), is a 1,500 foot curled protrusion into a remote part of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It’s made of truckloads of basalt rock, salt, and earth. It’s easy to mistake Smithson as simply a precursor to someone like Andy Goldsworthy. While Goldsworthy’s earthworks draw attention to the beauty of the site with delicate and sensible interventions, Smithson’s approach was not nearly so tidy. Smithson was fascinated by entropy, the unstoppable loss of energy, and increase of chaos, within natural systems. Far from a zen-like harmony with nature, Smithson’s interactions with the natural world hinted at an apocalyptic tension. For an example of a very un-Goldsworthy Smithson work, check out Glue Pour (Vancouver, 1969).

In the case of Spiral Jetty, Smithson’s intervention in the landscape manages to inspire compassion for the natural world despite his sometimes brutal approach. Smithson selected the site for its pinkish red water. In an essay about the work, he explains, “Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean.”

Smithson was intent on situating Spiral Jetty not only at a specific site in Utah, but also within the epic sweep of geologic time. In a film he made to document the piece, he intercuts a map of the Jurassic Period, about which he said, “I needed a map that would show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I existed in.” This is where I find a clear connection to the recent work of Eames Demetrios. As I mentioned earlier, Demetrios is six years in to a global series of site-specific installations known as Kcymaerxthaere. Kcymaerxthaere consists of a series of sculptural installations and faux historical bronze plaques, each one telling a portion of a story about a fantasy world that parallels our own. It’s a bit like trying to read a Tolkien novel spread out across 63 sites in ten countries, in locations as diverse as the Australian outback and the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Scotland.

Demetrios describes himself as a “geographer at large,” and speaks about the project more in terms of discovery than creation. I had the chance to meet Demetrios when he came to Grand Rapids, MI, to install five permanent Kcymaerxthaere plaques as a part of ArtPrize, an international art event I help manage. As with many artists who have installed works in Grand Rapids, Demetrios’s mythical plaques deal primarily with the Grand River, which divides the city in half. The plaques are sited at two local universities, two city parks, and a bar, and each tell of “Grwosts,” specialized Kcymaerxthaere denizens that act as time guides, leading people over the tremendous temporal rift of the River Lakcenne (what we call the Grand River).

Eames Demetrios, "Kcymaerxthaere," 2003

While touring Demetrios’s plaques is certainly fun, and has value as an act of civic engagement or even a twist on geocaching, the real value lies in the plaques’ ability to impart a sense of importance on a site by tethering it to myth. The plaque in Grand Rapids that does the best job of this is titled “Handfuls of Small Stones.” It is situated on a boardwalk on the east bank of the Grand, literally inches from the water. It tells of a Kcymaerxthaere ritual that takes place on the parallel of that site, in which handfuls of small stones are tossed in the water. Demetrios has provided a box of pebbles so that visitors can participate in this ceremony, where the thrower acts out the creation story of Kcymaerxthaere. The text explains, “the passage of rock into immersion could symbolize the life of an individual, a community, even what we think of as a planet. Even a pebble could be an “anggroav”, a difficult to translate term referring to the tendency of some islands to be their own universe, with their own laws of time and space.”

Both Smithson and Demetrios marry natural sites with epic mythologies. Creation myths have a particular ability to inspire a sense of awe with the natural world. Demetrios does this with a playful and hopelessly complex web of Tolkien-esque story fragments. Smithson, on the other hand, is concerned with the absolute and unforgiving elements of the natural world, rocks, salt, water. Origins lead naturally into destructions, entropy. In regard to the viewer’s relationship to the natural site, however, the effect is the same. These works remind us that nature is ancient, and we are not. They inspire empathy for the planet’s plight not by pandering for sympathy, but by creating a “fear of god” effect, a reminder that we are blips in a cosmic expanse.

Maya Lin’s (Season One) “Ecliptic” in Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Production still from the Art:21 episode, Identity, © Art21, Inc. 2001.)

There’s been a fair bit of talk lately about how the recession is affecting artists, the art market, and art institutions. And with good reason, pocket books are tight everywhere, and most art, no matter its intended relation to market forces, can’t exist without some kind of capital. It’s not a coincidence that this is also the era of the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, and the like are facilitating massive realtime networks that are free (as long as you’re connected). These networks become a conduit of exchange for new kinds of goods, and value is now being measured in new ways. Stock prices still matter, but Google rankings are starting to matter, too. Content is aggregated by algorithms that calculate value from the unconscious input of millions of users.

How does this new method of exchange and valuation affect the art world? If social networks naturally become markets, placing value on instantly exchanged bits of info, what would happen if we gave that value a monetary correlation, apart from a traditional marketplace? I’ve been working to help develop an new art event that seeks to do exactly that. ArtPrize is a radically open art competition. The annual event will run September 23 to October 10 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Hundreds of artists from around the world have created online profiles, which are a cross between an artist bio and an open-ended proposal. Hundreds of property owners, institutions, and public spaces in downtown Grand Rapids have volunteered to open their space to artists. We’ve built ArtPrize.org to enable these artists and venues to connect to one another, without a central curator or jury. If that weren’t unorthodox enough, the winner of the cash prize (currently the world’s largest, at $250,000, with additional prizes for the rest of the top ten) will be decided by public vote. Anyone can come to Grand Rapids, register to vote for free, and rank each entry with either an up or a down vote, online or by text message.

ArtPrize is an experiment that seeks to utilize the connectivity that social networking allows to build an art event from the ground up. We could have made an online art contest, where everyone uploads a .jpg and users click to vote while in their pajamas. We did not want to do that. We believe that the true value of most works of art are experienced during a physical or social encounter. Incentivizing these encounters in the city of Grand Rapids has tremendous civic value. Artists are tuning in to the possibilities inherent with this level of direct engagement with the city and audience. There are exciting projects coming that push the boundaries of how art interacts with social structures, architecture, and an overall sense of place.

Jimmy Kuehnle, ArtPrize participant. Stuffed Full, installation in Kyoto, Japan, 2008.

For those who can’t make it to Grand Rapids this fall, there will still be plenty of ways to track the event online. During the first round of voting, which takes place in the first week, visitors to ArtPrize.org will be able to track which artists are taking the lead. On October first, the top ten from the general vote will be announced, and final the winners will be announced October 8, after the second round of voting. To keep up during the event, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and our blog. It’s important to us that the event is grounded in a physical location, but we’re also eager to see how the discussion spurred by ArtPrize spreads across the web.

The idea of an incentive is central to ArtPrize. The prize and the vote primarily do one thing: they deliver an engaged audience. To many, this is a scary prospect. Who are all these people, and what do they know about art? Who are they to say what’s good and what isn’t? The voting audience will certainly be diverse, ranging from experts to complete novices. The event will likely create a vacuum of critical art knowledge, people may not have the language, or the art-historical context, to process what they’re seeing. The great thing is that this vacuum can be perfectly filled by educators, artists, and critics. Experts work tirelessly to supply cultural capital, we’re looking to create a demand. We’re working to produce educational programming and resources, but we’re really excited to see what pops up on its own. How will artists advocate for their own works? How will critics make an argument for what should get votes and what shouldn’t? What happens when friends go to the bar after looking at art and argue about what they voted for and why?

Kurt Perschke’s RedBall Project, shown above from the June 2009 installation in Toronto, will come to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize. (Photo by Flickr user inastral.)

ArtPrize has been the target of some criticism, and that’s not surprising. Some assume that putting on an art contest without a jury is a referendum against traditional art world practices, or even an affront to the very idea of curation. This is not the intent. Curators, juries, galleries, and other art institutions are playing a large role the formation of the event, each presenting a collection of entries that reflect their own sensibilities and expertise.

There are two interrelated questions that drive much of the thinking behind ArtPrize. One, how do works of art create and maintain value given the current state technological and cultural progress? This is a question Walter Benjamin began to ask with his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. We’re way beyond the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but new versions of the same question keep coming up. And the second question, who decides what that value is? What, or who, is the art world, if such a thing can be concretely defined? And who is the public? How do social media technologies, with their ability to level all users to a single node in a network, affect these distinctions? ArtPrize doesn’t claim to know the answers to these questions, but we are doing everything we can to energize the debate.

Kevin Buist is an artist, freelance writer, and Director of Artist Relations for ArtPrize, he lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI. He received a BFA from Calvin College, and attended the New York Center for Art and Media Studies. He has written about film for SpoutBlog and co-produced FilmCouch, a Webby-nominated podcast. Before helping launch ArtPrize, he ran Calvin College’s 106 Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI. He can be found on the web at kevinbuist.com and on his blog, The Porcupine School of Poetry.