Spiral Jetty
A 460-metre spiral of rock reaching out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. For long periods it lies under water, then reappears, white with salt.
The work changes with the water level – time and nature are part of the artwork.
Robert Smithson built Spiral Jetty in April 1970 at Rozel Point on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. He had been looking for a place where the water had an unusual, reddish colour. The project was financed by the dealer Virginia Dwan. Smithson was one of the pioneers of Land Art, in which artists worked directly in the landscape rather than in studios and galleries.
The work is a spiral of black basalt rock and earth that coils anticlockwise out into the lake. The spiral is about 460 metres long and a few metres wide. When the water is high it is wholly or partly submerged, and when the water drops it reappears. The rocks are then often coated white with salt crystals. The water around the spiral can be pink or reddish because of the algae and bacteria that thrive in the salty lake.
The spiral is hard to take in fully from the ground. From the shore you see part of it, and anyone walking out on it follows a path that winds towards the centre. From the air the form stands out clearly. Smithson said that the spiral was inspired by the site itself, among other things by a local legend of a whirlpool in the lake and by the structure of the salt crystals.
The work was built with excavators and lorries that moved thousands of tonnes of rock and earth. It is thus a large-scale feat of engineering rather than traditional craftsmanship. Smithson also made a film of the same name showing the construction and the site, and wrote an essay about the work. The film and the text are an important part of how the work is understood.
Smithson was interested in the concept of entropy, the way order turns into disorder over time. Spiral Jetty was not meant to be unchanging. It was to be affected by water, salt and weather. He wanted the processes of nature to become part of the artwork.
Only a few years after it was built the water level rose and the spiral disappeared beneath the surface. Smithson was killed in a plane crash in 1973 while surveying the site for another project. For almost thirty years Spiral Jetty was mostly invisible. When the lake fell around the turn of the millennium it reappeared, white with salt. Since 1999 the work has been owned by the Dia Art Foundation, following a gift from Smithson’s widow, the artist Nancy Holt.
Spiral Jetty has become a symbol of Land Art. Many visitors make the journey despite the remoteness of the site. The work has also become an example of how art can be affected by climate and environmental change, since the lake’s water level varies and has fallen sharply in recent years.