The artwork that has spiralled in the desert for 50 years
It can also make you feel cosmic. Cosmic enough that chaos becomes survivable, steady, mysterious, even beautiful.
Coiling into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was a groundbreaking work of Land Art in 1970. Made with rocks and earth from the desert and changed by the shifting water, the artwork offers a profound perspective on our existence in the cosmos.
Far out in the deserts of the romanticised American West there is some of the saltiest water in the world. With no outlets to the coast, the Great Salt Lake in Utah is “terminal”, at a fatal endpoint. Only rain can replenish the lake, and rain is not so common in the desert. Instead, in the dry heat, water evaporates from the 4,400km² surface, leaving behind minerals that crystallise into shining white rocks. Animal life can hardly survive with the salinity, except for prehistoric brine shrimp and halophilic bacteria. These microbes turn parts of the shallow water pink, a shock of vibrant colour in the muted desert, where the sky is impossibly wide and the empty, arid land stretches for miles.
In the spring of 1970, American artist Robert Smithson saw the lake for the first time. It was a profound moment.
“It reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake,” he wrote of his first time standing on the eastern shore.
Smithson, 32 at the time, was obsessed with the cosmos. He searched for the natural order of all existence, from the atomic to the galactic level. Facing the unbound drama and grandeur of this natural scene, the artist was compelled to create, to make an artwork with and for this specific site.
The Spiral Jetty is almost too simple to describe in much detail. It is candidly itself, a fact exemplified by the title. This is a spiral jetty, just as the Great Salt Lake is a great salt lake.
Sometimes the coil is lapped by the shallow
waves or crusted with huge crystals of white salt. For years it was submerged underwater and was invisible. Now, in a time of drought, it is dry and sandy. But it is there, 50 years later.
The spiral form is immediately familiar, a shape found throughout nature. Seen in a millipede, a conch, a fern, a hurricane, human DNA, the Milky Way and, appropriately, the molecular lattice of salt crystals. Even though the jetty is not a natural formation, it is part of the landscape, a human intervention more humble than hubristic.
The jetty is a pioneering piece of the Land Art movement of the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Alternately known as Earthworks, Earth Art or Environmental Art, the movement is best understood as making work with natural materials or sites. This has antecedents in creations of earlier civilizations such as the Nazca Lines in Peru, and structures such as Stonehenge or Great Zimbabwe, though this movement had a more contemporary motivation as an artistic expression of post-WW2 environmental politics. Americans were realising that capitalist greed and negligence were threatening the natural world. Modern artists looked to the land – and, in Smithson’s case, the water – to engage these politics directly, making art that was untethered from built space, with its human, mercenary burdens.
For artists such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, his wife, who were sick of the metropolis and all its baggage, western states like Utah were a promised land. Sparsely populated and seemingly infinite, the Beehive State was the total opposite of
New York City, a place to make BIG ideas happen.
It needs emphasising that there is a remarkable and historical privilege in this perspective. The US is settled land, once occupied by Native Americans and taken over by centuries of white colonial violence.
Utah is the rightful home of the Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo cultures. While Smithson and other Land Artists had noble intentions to honour the landscape, the creative access they enjoyed is undoubtedly bound up in colonial history. The move to Utah as well as other parts of the US southwest is a striking echo of the pioneer’s westward expansion across the continent to seize gold, land and “Manifest Destiny” in the 19th century.
Unlike the carefully handled and preserved objects in a museum, Spiral Jetty is at the mercy of the elements. It changes as the climate does, disappearing under the surface, deforming with salt crystals, slowly eroding in the stagnant water. The same goes for the surrounding environment from which it was created.
Eventually, at a time too far ahead to think too much about, the jetty will be indistinguishable from the shore, having slowly slid into disarray. Things falling apart are how we can tell time is moving forward.
In this regard, Spiral Jetty is a clock for measuring eons.
The scale and detail of Spiral Jetty are in constant flux, depending on where you are. It can refer to the whole landscape or be as specific as a grain of sand, it’s all up to the visitor and the universe. The artwork can make you feel small, small enough that chaos is inevitable and you have to make peace with it. It can also make you feel cosmic. Cosmic enough that chaos becomes survivable, steady, mysterious, even beautiful.