I’d long wanted to visit Smithson’s remote creation, now under the aegis of the Dia Art Foundation, which protects and preserves some of the United States’s 20th-century land art masterpieces. What questions does a spiral pose? Or, what questions can one ask of a spiral?
SPIRAL JETTY PHOTOS PLUS
Those rocks, plus tons of mud and salt crystals, went into the creation of his Spiral Jetty, which, in aerial photos taken the year it was built, looks like a giant backward-coiling question mark limned by the pink waters of the lake. He was dazzled: “It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still.”Īfter securing a 20-year lease, Smithson returned in April that same year with a team of front loaders to wrest six thousand tons of basketball-sized black basalt rocks from the nearby hills. After fixing a gashed gas tank, the duo then set off for Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake’s northern shore. At another site near Syracuse, Utah, on the eastern side of the lake, they were shooed off by angry ranchers. Smithson and his wife, artist Nancy Holt, scouted Great Salt Lake’s southern shore but, as he later wrote in his 1972 essay “The Spiral Jetty,” the water wasn’t red enough. He wanted a site that would itself inform what he wanted to build. He wanted remote and he wanted vast - few to no markers of human artifice - to fuck with the viewer’s sense of scale. Smithson had specific requirements: he wanted the color red - like the salt lakes he’d read about in Bolivia, their surface tinged in carnelian tones by micro-bacteria in the water. Now he was determined to build an earthwork on a massive scale. Smithson was among a vanguard of artists in the late ’60s moving their work out into the landscape, freeing it from the containment of the gallery. IN 1970, when artist Robert Smithson first set his gaze on the Great Salt Lake's Rozel Point Peninsula, he knew that he’d found the right site.
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