![]() ![]() Though the essay’s language is not explicitly religious, Smithson comes across as a seeker, a restless spirit whose searching will be met less by finding than by receiving. Chesterton in the essay’s epigram as “the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe…the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.” Smithson’s search for the thin edge of the world took him through several sites (Mono Lake, another lake in Laguna Colorado), several books (one describing the reddish waters of a Bolivian lake), and several rumors (passed on by park officials and other locals), before he investigated the Salt Lake. He says he was seeking “red”-described by G.K. In a 1972 essay, “The Spiral Jetty,” Smithson describes his own search, the one that eventually took form in Spiral Jetty. ![]() The industriousness that might have kept me on the straight and narrow was collapsing. A similar disenchantment had set in with the other work, the hobbies and tasks that had, over the years, provided what the literature on happiness calls “vital engagement”: tending the garden, splitting wood, cooking-little of this was appealing.Ī destitution was growing inside me that put me at odds with my projects. I was trying to write about the life of hope, and my life seemed mired where it was, without much of a future. I was trying to write about happiness, and it wasn’t making me very happy. I had lost a line of thought, several lines of thought, and was wandering around in my head and my notebooks without seeming to advance. I had been on a sabbatical leave from my university and felt that I had little to show for it-fragmentary journal entries, aphoristic notes, but precious few pages of methodical progress toward the book I had thought to write. It had been a long summer at the end of a long year. What it was, I did not have a clear idea. A study of Smithson would fill a significant lacuna in that book and better ground my scholarship in the history of art.īut I was also hoping to find something else. I had recently published a book in which my encounters with earthworks were central to an account of what I called “enchanting secularity.” I meant “secularity” in the sense of turning toward the world, and by “enchanting,” I meant to suggest that such a turn need not mean forgoing awe and wonder. My own interest was academic, to be sure. Major cultural institutions showcased Smithson’s work, and books and catalogues were published. It is still called “the jetty,” though the term seems obsolete-as “the jetty” is now the end of a long road that spirals down to collapse in sand and mud, its reach to the other shore fizzling out in dissipated longing in the shadow of mountains fading away in the hazy distance.Ī burst of academic interest followed its reemergence. The Dia Foundation, which now owns the work, still offers a link to a website where visitors can check water levels so they know what to expect.Īt present, Spiral Jetty is ordinarily about half a mile from water, forsaken and forlorn in an increasingly hot, dry, and growing desert. Going there was like visiting a mad old recluse, a desert hermit who was certain to be there but whose moods were unpredictable-he might not even answer the door when you knocked. Its changes were a sign of life: it was growing. If the jetty aimed at monumental permanence, it was certainly not permanently the same. For a while, Spiral Jetty flickered on the edge of visibility, rising or falling from view as water levels fluctuated, each time emerging other than it had appeared when last seen. The water that had swallowed it gave it back, changed, enriched by the layers of salt and other minerals, continuing the creative process launched by Smithson. This changed shortly before the new millennium when water levels dropped and the work resurfaced. Spiral Jetty is made of over six thousand tons of rock and earth drawn from the site by a local contractor and his crew using dump trucks, a front loader, and a tractor.Ī few years after its completion, above-average snowfall and freak flooding caused the lake to rise, and Spiral Jetty disappeared in the waters. It is a fifteen-hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide spiral path coiling counter-clockwise off the shore of the Great Salt Lake. ![]() What good, then? What good looking for something I had not lost only to lose it after finding it?Ĭompleted in 1970, Spiral Jetty is recognized by most art historians and critics as exemplary of a movement they call “earthworks” or “land art”. Finding it, I would only lose it again, leaving it there in the desert desolation where it remains. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work-one so far out of sight as to be out of mind: most of us don’t even realize we’ve lost it. ![]() IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. ![]()
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