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Helicography
Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’s iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of magnitude, from microscopic molecules to entire galaxies.
Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet.
The result is a narrative laboratory for the “science of imaginary solutions” proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west.
Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet.
The result is a narrative laboratory for the “science of imaginary solutions” proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west.
219 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2022
If only a handful of books published in the 21 century survive the anthropocene, I hope that Dworkin's Helicography will be among them! In other words, I love this rare and world-regenerative book. In depth, potency and joy! it ranks among the best of sources the author was inspired by: Lucretius, Poe, Jarry, Smithson, Blake, Wittgenstein, Bataille, and more. More importantly, each page is a seductive maelstrom of sublime and cosmic poetry.
May 25, 2023
I'm confident this will be my favorite book of 2023.
Of course, I'm primed to shiver my way through anything that's a strange critique of capitalism, an ethnography of a pit mine, a cultural and ecological and labor history of the Great Basin, a lyrical account of a specific location (the earthworks), and a structurally innovative amassment of odd, hyperlatinate, hypetrophically scientific nomenclature.
But as much as I know that I'm drawn to anything described as "hybrid genre" or "experimental" almost every book I encounter is basically *normal*, sacrificing bizarreness for clarity, conforming to progress even when I know the author's perspective is supposedly anti-colonial or whatever. This book absolutely delivers on its promises. I had to prevent myself from speeding through the gorgeously monotonous litany of comparisons (whereby through the magic of international weights and measures and monetary exchange rates) the supposedly objective qualities of amounts and time are equivalenced endlessly. I read about half of it aloud, too, taking pleasure in the oddly flat intonation. It isn't lyrical in a musical sense but rather delicate, intentional. It's difficult to create sentences and paragraphs that don't rise and fall like typical narrative prose but seem to densely insist on distilling as much information as possible. What is information for? What have we preserved in the official archive? How does this contrast with what's preserved in the geologic and geographic archive? Some of hundreds of curious questions I spent time with.
Especially liked the trio of descriptors about the miners, the clock, and the snake which provided the only rests or section-like breaks in an undifferentiated text. Excessive wordplay around homographs like /strike/. So often, those thinkers talented at research and philosophy aren't literary enough to carry off their book-length experiments; then there's super finessed writers that don't seem to be spending enough time in the archives or on road trips. Dworkin's strength lies in being at home in both.
Of course, I'm primed to shiver my way through anything that's a strange critique of capitalism, an ethnography of a pit mine, a cultural and ecological and labor history of the Great Basin, a lyrical account of a specific location (the earthworks), and a structurally innovative amassment of odd, hyperlatinate, hypetrophically scientific nomenclature.
But as much as I know that I'm drawn to anything described as "hybrid genre" or "experimental" almost every book I encounter is basically *normal*, sacrificing bizarreness for clarity, conforming to progress even when I know the author's perspective is supposedly anti-colonial or whatever. This book absolutely delivers on its promises. I had to prevent myself from speeding through the gorgeously monotonous litany of comparisons (whereby through the magic of international weights and measures and monetary exchange rates) the supposedly objective qualities of amounts and time are equivalenced endlessly. I read about half of it aloud, too, taking pleasure in the oddly flat intonation. It isn't lyrical in a musical sense but rather delicate, intentional. It's difficult to create sentences and paragraphs that don't rise and fall like typical narrative prose but seem to densely insist on distilling as much information as possible. What is information for? What have we preserved in the official archive? How does this contrast with what's preserved in the geologic and geographic archive? Some of hundreds of curious questions I spent time with.
Especially liked the trio of descriptors about the miners, the clock, and the snake which provided the only rests or section-like breaks in an undifferentiated text. Excessive wordplay around homographs like /strike/. So often, those thinkers talented at research and philosophy aren't literary enough to carry off their book-length experiments; then there's super finessed writers that don't seem to be spending enough time in the archives or on road trips. Dworkin's strength lies in being at home in both.
April 14, 2023
My full review appeared in The Rupture: https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews