Significant work of art that was intended to change over time? This work of art and Interesting question: what do we do with the Try to do the impossible, which raises a really But here Smithson creates something that time is supposed to change. We lock them away from time, we conserve them andĬreate special conditions to stop time from hurting them. Of how different it is than when Smithson created it in 1970 really makes me think about museums as places where we entrust works of art. Looking at Spiral Jetty and being really aware This work of art fully had I not come out here. And I have to say, I wouldn't feel as if experienced And so, like many works ofĪrt in the 1960s and '70s that were ephemeral, they exist through their documentation. There's a video, there are aerial photographs. And yet this artwork was not conceived ofĪs existing only here. We're really in the middle of a vast, empty space in the American West. So one does have to makeĪn intentional pilgrimage to see this. So can a work like thisĪlso exist in Manhattan? Can it also exist in a gallery? - Well, we did drive two hours from Salt Lake City. Gallery experience and the experience of art in the world.

Smithson was interested in creating a porous relationship between that more controlled Outside of the commercial, of a work that could be bought and sold. Was still a radical idea, the idea of taking art off the wall, bringing it outside, outside By putting art outside in the world it becomes part of the process of nature. Sense of the passage of time that I think was very And as we stand here, we see mountains, we see the basalt that's formed from a volcano. Vast, virgin landscape that was here when Europeans arrived, is a theme throughoutġ9th-century American painting. The growing industrial nature of the United States and the amazingly beautiful, And Earth Dayīeing this time when we reflect on environmental issues, but the relationship between Man was visiting on nature is clearly informing work like this. Important early moment in the environmental movement. 1970 was the year of the first Earth Day, and that signaled an But this is also a sculpture that is rooted in the 20th century, in an industrial culture. So the idea of a spiral or whirlpool is active even in these One of the anecdotes that Smithson was apparently aware of was the centuries-old idea that the Great Salt LakeĬontained a whirlpool that somehow connected That appears in nature, quite frequently. Shape of Spiral Jetty is a form that has shown up in petroglyphs throughout the American West. Known as the Nazca Lines, in Peru, in South America, or the earthworks that come out of the Fort Ancient culture in North America. The Europeans arrived, the geoglyphs, better Of indigenous peoples in the Americas, long before We can go even further back and look at the artwork The Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s. But we could also thinkĪbout the importance of the vastness of the American landscape in 19th-century American painting, or even its importance to One of the themes here, for me, as we stand here. Size and power of nature and the smallness of man, and that's certainly We could go back to artists like Caspar David Friedrich, who thought about the overwhelming This natural landscape, it's an expression of the way in which artists thought about the Interested in the idea of entropy, the idea of the way things break down. Meant to be a work of art that changed, based on natural principles. So, instead of the water filling the spaces in between the spiral, we have sand. In the midst of a drought, the water has receded and is at a great distanceįrom this earthwork. But right now, because the American West is By creating a spiral, Smithson created lots of opportunities where the land and the waterĬould meet one another. Smithson was able to bring a front-loader and dump trucks, a tractor, to help move these basalt stones and sand and some soil into place. With helpįrom the Dawn Gallery, which represented him,

But today as we look outĪt the lake, it's blue. There are a few fish that liveĪt the outlet of some of the freshwater rivers, and- And there are brine shrimp, and algae, in fact there'sĪ particular kind of algae that makes the water turn pinkish-red, and that was true when Of these terminal basins that exist in the world. And especially with salt, very much like the Dead Here from rivers and streams, collects and then simply evaporates. This is a terminal basin, a huge lake that hadīeen largely freshwater, but there is no outlet, so the water, once it flows Smithson first created it, where it was an intersection But we're not seeing this the way that it existed when We're standing right in the middle, at the edge of the Smithson hired several people to help him create Spiral Jetty.

Spiral jetty by robert smithson