It sounds like a cocktail or a racehorse, or perhaps an ill-fated American remake of Chris Marker’s time-traveling French flick La Jetée, but the Spiral Jetty is one of the first monumental efforts in environmental art.
Next April will mark the 50th anniversary of the Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s elegant, enigmatic sculpture jutting like an enormous fiddlehead fern curl from the northeastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Created in 1970, the jetty is a 1,500-foot-long and 15-foot-wide curlicue of salt crystals, basalt rocks, and mud that anticipates the work of a later environmental sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy, by at least a decade (Goldsworthy was only 14 when the jetty was constructed).
In its initial incarnation, the Smithson and crew moved 6,650 tons of rock over six days to create the spiral but the artist was unsatisfied with the result. Within a week, he and the team augmented the sculpture to its present form, which required three additional days of arduous labor and moving 7,000 tons of rock. Within a couple of years of the colossal effort, the sculpture became submerged underwater due to an unexpected rise in the lake level.
The work only re-emerged in the 2000s thanks to persistent drought. Unfortunately, Smithson did not live to see it — he died in 1973 in an airplane crash. Now, the spiral jetty looks like a totemic question mark on a landscape in the midst of climate change.
Somehow, Smithson had the wherewithal to document his endeavors on film and produced a 30-minute documentary on the jetty project. The complete film is presently unavailable, however, below is a brief edit available on YouTube.
