Spiral Jetty is a work of land art constructed in April 1970 that is considered to be the most important work by American sculptor Robert Smithson. Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture in a 32-minute color film also titled Spiral Jetty. Built on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah entirely of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rocks, Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500-foot-long (460m), 15-foot-wide (4.6m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake.
In 1999, the artwork was donated to the Dia Art Foundation; it is one of 12 locations and sites owned by the foundation. Since its initial construction, those interested in its fate have dealt with questions of proposed changes in land use in the area surrounding the sculpture. In order to preserve the work, Dia asks that visitors not take existing rocks from the artwork, make fire pits, or trample vegetation. There are no facilities at the site, so visitors must carry any waste away with them.
Description
The sculpture is built of mud, precipitated salt crystals, and basalt rocks. It forms a 1,500-foot-long (460m), 15-foot-wide (4.6m) counterclockwise coil originally jutting from the shore of the lake,[1] though due to the drying of the lake, as of 2022 a mile of lakebed separates Spiral Jetty from the shore.[2] Depending upon the water level of the Great Salt Lake, the sculpture is sometimes visible and sometimes submerged.
Construction
Person standing in the middle of Spiral Jetty, viewed from the shore
Smithson reportedly chose the Rozel Point site based on the blood-red color of the water and its connection with the primordial sea. The red hue of the water is due to the presence of salt-tolerant bacteria and algae that thrive in the extreme 27 percent salinity of the lake's north arm, which was isolated from freshwater sources by the building of a causeway by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959.
Smithson was reportedly attracted to the Rozel Point site because of the stark anti-pastoral beauty and industrial remnants from nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, as well as an old pier and a few unused oil rigs.[3] While observing the construction of the piece from a helicopter, Smithson reportedly remarked "et in Utah ego" as a counterpoint to the pastoral Baroque painting et in Arcadia ego by Nicolas Poussin.[4]
To move the rock into the lake, Smithson hired Bob Phillips of nearby Ogden, Utah, who used two dump trucks, a large tractor, and a front end loader to haul the 6,650 tons of rock and earth into the lake. It is reported that Smithson had a difficult time convincing a contractor to accept the unusual proposal. Spiral Jetty was the first of his pieces to require the acquisition of land rights and earthmoving equipment.[5] Phillips often told people that his best-known construction job was "the only thing I ever built that ... was to look at and had no purpose".[6]
Phillips described the use of earth-moving equipment along the lakeside as "tricky", and said of Smithson that "I don't think he had done any geology work or anything on it. He just had in his mind what it should look like.... He just had the eye for it. I assume it was the artist in him."[6] Work began on the jetty in April 1970. The work was constructed twice; the first time requiring six days. After contemplating the result for two days, Smithson called the crew back and had the shape altered to its present configuration, an effort requiring moving 7,000 tons of basalt rock during an additional three days.[7]
Phillips' son appeared on the PBS Antiques Roadshow program in 2017 with a photograph and collection of documents related to the building of the project.[8]
Ownership
The sculpture was financed in part by a $9,000 USD grant from the Virginia Dwan Gallery of New York. In 1999, Spiral Jetty was donated to Dia. As owner and custodian of Spiral Jetty, the foundation maintains the lease from the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire & State Lands of state sovereign lands in Great Salt Lake upon which the artwork is sited.
Smithson died in a plane crash in Texas three years after finishing the Spiral Jetty.[9]
Spiral Jetty from Rozel Point
Dia, along with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, claim ownership of copyright for Spiral Jetty. However, the work itself does not meet the legal standard for copyrightable material, which in the United States includes the stipulation that a work must be "fixed" in a "tangible medium." While Spiral Jetty was created in a tangible medium, its inherent physical composition — piles of dirt, rocks, and salt that are subject to the erosive forces of the Great Salt Lake — means it is not fixed: "This lack of fixed form problematizes the work’s intellectual property protection. The heart of the work — the idea that it presents made manifest through an ephemeral environmental intervention — cannot be protected based on the guidelines provided under the Copyright Act."[10] Dia can and does claim copyright over images of Spiral Jetty created by the foundation. However, due to the physical work's lack of copyright protection, visitors do not need permission to create or publish their own photographs of the sculpture.[11]
Preservation
Approaching the dry Spiral Jetty on June 18, 2018
Preservation efforts for Spiral Jetty face considerable challenges due to the remote location of the site and its vulnerability to natural environmental conditions. These challenges are exacerbated by the impacts of climate change and increased tourism activity.
At the time Dia acquired Spiral Jetty, the work was fully submerged in the lake. Beginning in the early 2000s, however, sustained drought in Utah caused water levels to recede, and Spiral Jetty became visible for the first prolonged period in its history. As a result, the prominence of Spiral Jetty has risen dramatically over the past decade, increasing both the visitorship to the site and the public's interest in the artwork, at the local, national, and international levels.
Dia is committed to maintaining a photographic record of the work and documenting changes to the piece over time. Dia collaborates with two organizations in Utah, the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College (GSLI) and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the University of Utah, who have been deeply involved in the advocacy of Spiral Jetty over the years.
In 2008, plans were announced for exploratory oil drilling approximately five miles from the jetty.[12] This was met with strong resistance from artists, and the state of Utah received more than 3,000 emails about the plan, most of them opposing the drilling.[13]
The year 2009 marked a collaboration between Dia and the Getty Conservation Institute, with the objective of creating a repeat photography system. This system was specifically designed to document the evolving changes taking place at the Spiral Jetty site and to closely monitor it for any conservation requirements.[14]
Starting in late 2016, Dia initiated the practice of sharing aerial photographs of Spiral Jetty, captured twice a year since 2012. These photographs were taken from nearly identical vantage points as part of Dia's dedication to documenting the evolving changes of the artwork over time through photographic records.[15]
The issue of preservation has been complicated by ambiguous statements by Smithson, who expressed an admiration for entropy in that he intended his works to mimic earthly attributes in that they remain in a state of arrested disruption and not be kept from destruction.[7]
Dia's website states that visitors are prohibited from removing rocks from the artwork or from stepping on vegetation that is on the grounds of the artwork. Visitors are also prohibited from constructing fire pits near the artwork or on the parking lot. If caught, visitors will face strict fines. The website also states that visitors are instructed to carry out their waste.[16]
In 1970 during the construction of the jetty, Robert Smithson wrote and directed a 32-minute color film, Spiral Jetty.[19] The film was shot by Smithson and his wife Nancy Holt, and funded by Virginia Dwan and Douglas Christmas.
The film documented the construction process and also formed an ancillary artwork. Smithson combines his interest in geology, paleontology, astronomy, mythology and cinema, stating that he had an interest in documenting "the earth's history".[20] In conjunction with filmed sequences of the jetty, Smithson incorporates footage of dinosaurs in a natural history museum and the ripped pages from a history text. During this scene, Smithson refers to the institutions of history: "the earth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book, each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing".[19] Smithson's narrative supports an alternative view of historical discourse and the art object's placement or production outside of the museum institution. His writings also indicate that the helicopter film sequences over the jetty were a method of "recapitulating the scale of the jetty".[20] By visually disorienting the viewer, Smithson is able to negate a time and place for the materiality of the artwork or create what he calls a "cosmic rupture".[20] Through this state, the viewer is meant to be unable to categorize or classify the site, and will be left in a state free from the dialect of history.
The film has been described as Smithson's attempt to "leave the viewer with a sense that the monumental artwork is connected to a vast mental landscape of meanings and associations".[21]
Legacy
The work was named Utah's official state work of land art in 2017.[22] April 2020 marked the Spiral Jetty's 50th anniversary, which Smithson referred to shortly before his death in 1973 as "the work of the decade".[citation needed] It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.[23]
Criticism
The ephemeral nature of the Spiral Jetty (sometimes visible, sometimes submerged) sparked inquiries[24] into the enduring influence of the artwork and the importance of its various representations, such as photographs, films, and essays. The photographs played a critical role in preserving and promoting the earthwork's growing renown, acting as the primary connection between the object and its state of being forgotten. Smithson's conceptual framework, centered around the concepts of temporality and entropy, emphasized the dynamic and destructive elements at play, often referencing the gradual decline and disintegration of the artwork.[25]:256 Through his essays and interviews, the artist articulated his awareness of these forces at work within his artistic practice. Borrowing from the term entropy, Smithson indicated that the earthworks were "suggestions of sites external to the gallery situation".[26]:293
In his 1970 interview, Smithson mentioned his interest in working on raw materials with abstract geometrical forms.[26]:234 The ephemeral material changes the properties of the artwork over time, which could be regarded as process-oriented art.[27] In the end, it "dramatizes the sense of context and discontext".[28]:203 With spiraling screw dislocation in the crystal formation and the enclosed nature of the Salt Lake, Smithson created a sense of containment and movement.[26]:236 The complexity of matter creates an irrational "surd" area.[28]:199 The idea of a closed space is established through the aesthetic concept of crystalline mapping.[28]:197
Influenced by Wiener's system of feedback and entropy,[29] Smithson was aware that the circulation of its photographs would have a tendency to move Spiral Jetty into an empty signifier without the signified. He mentioned in an interview, "If you make a system, you can be sure the system is bound to evade itself, so I see no point in pinning any hope on systems."[30]:194 Smithson realized the instability of fugitivity of one's surroundings but still required the viewers to apprehend them through their eyes and ears.[31]:147
Over the decades since the unexpected submersion in 1972, Spiral Jetty has become known through its wide circulation of photographs. Scholars such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Henri Bergson frequently debated the issue of timelessness and the fixation of its photographs and multiple referents as signifiers without the signified. Since the 1960s, the notion of life as a multi-formed complexity has challenged the concept of space as a static condition, leading to a reassessment of the notion of temporality. According to Manuel DeLanda, "Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic reality...this single matter-energy expresses itself."[32]
While time and space are seen as key in the discussion of modern sculpture,[33] it raises challenges for analyzing Spiral Jetty through photographs as it suggests another temporality and hence different values.[citation needed]
As Krauss explains:
"In using the form of the spiral to imitate the settlers' mythic whirlpool, Smithson incorporates the existence of the myth into the space of the work. In doing so, he expands on the nature of that external space located at our bodies' centers, which had been part of the Double Negative's image. Smithson creates an image of our psychological response to time and of the way we are determined to control it by the creation of historical fantasies. But the Spiral Jetty attempts to supplant historical formulas with the experience of a moment-to-moment passage through space and time."[33]:282
However, the site experience and the referents are not self-sufficient, as art historian Ann Morris Reynolds says:
Although I acknowledged that these descriptions were partial and distanced from their referent ... I still felt they provided visual and conceptual proxies, images and ideas, that seemed sufficient. September for the very first time, I was deeply aware of the fact that neither my on-site experience nor the descriptions that I was familiar with, both old and new, were self-sufficient or even clearly distinct.[34]
Road sign to Spiral Jetty
As time has passed since the completion of the Spiral Jetty, the photographs have become the most accessible and vivid remnants of the artwork. However, they no longer serve as helpful maps leading to a physical location; instead, they have become signs that direct viewers to an apparitional and chemically vanished object. Lunberry questions the grounding and ontological location of the Spiral Jetty, suggesting that its various manifestations, including photographs, essays, films, and the actual earthwork, refer to each other but do not fully settle on a singular object. He states:
The photographs thus remain as utterly believable substitutes, authentic apparitions, all that has been needed to restore to our eager eyes the vanished earthwork, raise the form once and for all from out of the waters that both reflect and conceal the Spiral Jetty, affirm and deny its place upon the lake.[35]:103
The disappearance of the earthwork raises perplexing questions about the significance and impact of its material absence. The photographs, the essay, and the film become intertwined with the submerged earthwork, but what happens to the object itself when all that remains are these representations? Additionally, the disappearance of thousands of tons of stone and soil raises the challenge of accounting for such a massive fact. Lunberry continues:
Then, looking into our own desiring eyes, we may begin to wonder if the issue of seeing itself - the Spiral Jetty's appearance or disappearance, its ontology as an object or an image - has finally proven itself to be far more intricate and involved than initially imagined. If Henri Bergson is to be believed and "perception is only a true hallucination", then where would we have to go, what would we have to do to locate the precise vanishing point of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, to arrive at the site of our own craving, to see the source of our own hallucination?[35]:105
Lunberry suggested that there is a "dialectical play arises in the process of creating affective awareness"[35]:118 Lunberry's affective memories were primarily produced by his own picture of the Spiral Jetty, and an active recall of his past conscious and unconscious memories of seeing the Spiral Jetty years after his last visit. Similar to Krauss, Lunberry's viewing experience involved an imaginary voyage, except that he is aware of temporality: Spiral Jetty has vanished. Lunberry stated, "the effect of a ghost whose mysterious apparitions[35]:117–118
During and after the completion of the work, Gianfranco Gorgoni documented the Spiral Jetty with Smithson. Since 2012, the present owner of the Spiral Jetty, the Dia Foundation, has committed to annual aerial documentation.[36] Smithson was confident that "if the work is strong enough and photographed properly, it is fed back into mass distribution".[26]:236
Related Research Articles
The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world. It lies in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particularly through lake-effect snow. It is a remnant of Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that covered much of western Utah.
Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty (1970).
Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United States but that also includes examples from many countries. As a trend, "land art" expanded boundaries of art by the materials used and the siting of the works. The materials used were often the materials of the Earth, including the soil, rocks, vegetation, and water found on-site, and the sites of the works were often distant from population centers. Though sometimes fairly inaccessible, photo documentation was commonly brought back to the urban art gallery.
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. Site-specific art is produced both by commercial artists, and independently, and can include some instances of work such as sculpture, stencil graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms. Installations can be in urban areas, remote natural settings, or underwater.
Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration fortune; art dealer Heiner Friedrich, Philippa's husband; and Helen Winkler, a Houston art historian. Dia provides support to projects "whose nature or scale would preclude other funding sources."
Michael Heizer is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.
Tacita Charlotte Dean CBE, RA is a British visual artist who works primarily in film. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Los Angeles, California.
Metaphor: The Tree of Utah, sometimes called the Tree of Life, is an 87-foot-tall (27 m) sculpture that was created by the Swedish artist Karl Momen in the 1980s and dedicated in 1986. It is located in the desolate Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah on the west bound side of Interstate 80, about 25 miles (40 km) east of Wendover and midway between the former railroad communities of Arinosa and Barro. The sculpture, which is constructed mainly of concrete, consists of a squarish 'trunk' holding up six spheres that are coated with natural rock and minerals native to Utah. There are also several hollow sphere segments on the ground around the base. The sculpture currently has a fence surrounding the base to protect people from falling tiles.
Partially Buried Woodshed is a work of land art created by American artist Robert Smithson in January 1970 at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The work consisted of an existing woodshed and earth added by the artist in order to illustrate the concept of entropy. By 2018, only a large mound of dirt and the structure's concrete foundation remain. The remaining elements, along with an informational plaque, are located in a small wooded area immediately behind the Liquid Crystal Institute building on the Kent State University main campus, in the southeastern area of Kent.
Nancy Holt was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt also produced works in other media, including film and photography. Since 2018, her legacy has been cared for by Holt/Smithson Foundation.
Stacy Levy is an American sculptor who works with ecological natural patterns and processes, often using water and water flows as a medium. Many of her works address environmental problems at the same time that they make the functioning of the environment visible. Her studio is based in rural Pennsylvania, but she works on projects around the world.
Patricia Johanson was an American artist. Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife. She designed her functional art projects, created with and in the natural landscape, to solve infrastructure and environmental problems, but also to reconnect city-dwellers with nature and with the history of a place. These project designs dated from 1969, making her a pioneer in the field of ecological-art Johanson's work has also been classified as Land Art, Environmental Art, Site-Specific Art, and Garden Art. Her early paintings and sculptures are part of Minimalism.
Torleif Severin Knaphus was a Norwegian-born artist and sculptor in Utah, primarily known for sculptures for and about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Virginia Dwan was an American art collector, art patron, philanthropist, and founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico. She was the former owner and executive director of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1959–1967) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965–1971), a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of minimalism, conceptualism, and land art.
The Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project, in Utah, was a 1973 site-specific mine reclamation design that artist Robert Smithson submitted to the mine's management company, Kennecott Copper Corporation. The design re-imagined Bingham Canyon Mine, the world's largest open pit mine, as a monumental work of land art.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art is a 2015 American documentary film directed by James Crump. Troublemakers chronicles the history of land art in the 1960s and 1970s, when a group of radical New York artists began producing earthworks on a monumental scale in the desert spaces of the American southwest. The film follows the enigmatic careers of artists who use the earth itself as their primary medium, including Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer.
Jennifer L. Roberts is an American art historian. She serves as Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities and Johnson-Kulukunkdis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focuses on American art from the colonial period to the present.
Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is an earthwork sculpture by the American artist Robert Smithson. It was created for the 1971 Sonsbeek outdoor sculpture exhibition. The piece is located in Emmen, Netherlands.
Gianfranco Gorgoni was an Italian photographer who documented land art and installation art. His work was exhibited in a survey show, Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs, at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2021.
References
1 2 "Spiral Jetty". robertsmithson.com. James Cohan Gallery. Archived from the original on November 25, 2004. Retrieved November 6, 2012.
↑ Smithson, Robert (1979). Holt, Nancy (ed.). The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations. New York NY: New York University Press. ISBN9780814733943.
1 2 3 Smithson, Robert. The Spiral Jetty, 1970, published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Nancy Holt, New York University Press, pp. 109-113
↑ Owens, C. (1980). The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism. October, 12, 67–86. doi:10.2307/778575
↑ Smithson, Robert (1996). Flam, Jack (ed.). The Collected Writings. California: University of California Press. ISBN9780520203853.
1 2 3 4 Toner, Paul; Smithson, Robert (1996). "Interview with Robert Smithson For The Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution". In Flam, Jack (ed.). The Collected Writings. California: University of California Press. ISBN9780520203853.
↑ Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p.5. ISBN9780822328971.
1 2 3 Schmidt, Eva (1996). "Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969-1970)". In Flam, Jack (ed.). The Collected Writings. California: University of California Press. ISBN9780520203853.
↑ Lee, Pamela M. (2004). Chronophobia: on time in the art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p.244. ISBN9780262622035.
↑ Smithson, Robert (1996). "Earth (1969)". In Flam, Jack (ed.). The Collected Writings. California: University of California Press. ISBN9780520203853.
↑ Smithson, Robert (1996). "The Spiral Jetty". In Flam, Jack (ed.). The Collected Writings. California: University of California Press. ISBN9780520203853.
↑ DeLanda, Manuel (1997). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books. p.21. ISBN9780942299922.
1 2 Krauss, Rosalind E. (1977). Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge: Thomas and Hudson. pp.4–5. ISBN9780500232729.
↑ Reynolds, A. (2005). "At the Jetty". In Kelly, Karen J.; Cooke, Lynne (eds.). Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities. p.73. ISBN9780520245549.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
