Date: 17-04-2005
Owning Institution: Great Salt Lake
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 20th Century        

In five days’ time it will be Earth Day, so today’s work of art is a so-called “Earthwork” by the American sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson. Entitled Spiral Jetty, it was created in Utah, in the United States, in 1970.

Smithson was born in New Jersey in 1938 and in 1953 won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. In 1956 he studied for a short while at the Brooklyn Museum School and by the late 1950s he was painting in an Abstract Expressionist style. Although he was younger than the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists, he shared their stated ambition to create a form of contemporary art that might yet seem charged with the power of ancient myths and legends. During the 1960s, Smithson became increasingly disenchanted with the world of museums and art galleries, the cycle of production and display, sale and exchange into which art and artists had been so thoroughly absorbed. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that the widespread acceptance of avant-garde art, at just about every level of consumer-capitalist society, had robbed the avant-garde of its energy and purpose. He dreamed of creating a work of art that could not be bought or sold, that would simply exist, and persist, like a modern equivalent to the great ruined monuments of vanished civilisations.

Spiral Jetty was the realisation of that dream, a curving promontory of bulldozed rock and stone projecting about a quarter of a mile into the Great Salt Lake, in the Utah desert – about as close to the middle of nowhere as Smithson could find. The work’s shape flaunts the superb and arrogant uselessness of art. It is a jetty that leads nowhere, a gigantic meander maze that also resembles a vast question mark, shaped from shingle. There is an aura of mystery, and mysticism, about it. Its shape seems calculated to induce a dizzying of the senses. To walk its length would be a giddying experience, in the glare and heat of the desert sun, an act of going nowhere that might, nonetheless, feel pantheistically transporting –  might create the sense, somehow, of getting to the heart of things.

That would seem to have been part of Smithson’s ambition. He was interested in the early Mormon settlers’ belief that the Salt Lake was a marvel of nature, a bottomless inland sea connected to the Pacific Ocean by an enormous subterranean canal which caused giant whirlpools to appear on its surface. Spiral Jetty’s shape was partly inspired by this folk legend, which mirrored the artist’s own strong conviction that there was something primal and essential about the Great Salt Lake. When he was there, he said, he felt as though he were in the presence of eons of geological history. It was a place that seemed to reflect the deepest levels of earth’s development, so he wanted to make a sculpture there that might suggest a secret or hidden structure, miraculously made visible.

The half-scientific, half-mystical spirit in which Smithson created his work is captured in a text that he wrote, not long after it was finished, recalling his first excited encounter with the landscape on the shores of the Great Salt Lake:

“Driving west on Highway 83 late in the afternoon, we passed through Corinne, then went on to Promontory. Just beyond the Golden Spike Monument, which commemorates the meeting of the rails of the first transcontinental railroad, we went down a dirt road in a wide valley. As we travelled, the valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other landscapes we seen. The roads on the map became a net of dashes, while in the far distance the Salt lake existed as an interrupted silver band. Hills took on the appearance of melting solids, and glowed under amber light. We followed roads that glided away into dead ends. Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint violet sheet held captive in a stony matrix, upon which the sun poured down its crushing light. An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediment were countless bits of wreckage. Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud…”

“A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point… About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site. Irregular beds of limestone dip gently eastward, massive deposits of black basalt are broken over the peninsula, giving the region a shattered appearance. It is one of few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. Under shallow pinkish water is a network of mud cracks supporting the jig-saw puzzle that composes the salt flats. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizon only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence… It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still. The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral…”

Three years after creating Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson was killed in a plane crash in Texas. Not long after that, his monumental sculpture was itself reabsorbed by nature, as the water level of the Great Salt lake rose and covered it. But now, it seems, it has begun to reappear. Bonnie Crossen, a park ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site in Box Elder County, Utah, was quoted in a recent American newspaper report saying that “the Spiral Jetty looks like it’s coming back – about a week ago we had a guy stop  by and say it was one third visible.” One day I intend to go and see it. I think it would be worth the pilgrimage.