It’s not a circle, it’s a spiral.

April 24, 2021

The Spiral Jetty - Robert Smithson

I'm standing on a salty shore of wet sand and lava rock, looking across a landscape that superficially presents as a beach, but reveals itself to be briny mudflat, with crystalline salt formations bedazzling the surface of a matte grey expanse. This is the northern extent of Great Salt Lake, where the water is red. Salty waves lap against a pepper shore. I ride my bike in lazy circles, cruising over the crust, and sinking into the quickness of the mud, dismounting and walking my bike, in slurpy steps, back to someplace stable, only to sink again. In the center of my circular impressions is a spiral, The Spiral Jetty. A monumental artwork of international fame, just laying there, in the mud, in the evening, plain as day.

Lucy Lippard's "Overlay" was my introduction to this work. I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, enrolled in a free-ranging coordinated study program at a west-coast liberal arts college. I remember the cover of this book, "Overlay." It featured an image of the sun, low on the horizon, framed by Nancy Holt's monumental artwork, "Sun Tunnels." This installation is comprised of four gigantic concrete cylinders placed in the desert. On the solstice and equinox, the sun passes through the center of one of the four cylinders. My art, at the time, was a random series of confused drawings and misspent paintings. Her art held the sun. I knew I had to dig deeper.

Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt and The Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, are two iconic examples from the Earth Art Movement. These artists and their comrades felt confined by gallery walls and the 30-day rotation of art exhibitions in Manhattan. Their works demanded a different space and time, so they headed west, way out west, procuring land and installing artwork on a scale and level of sophistication that had not been seen in the past.

I admired these artists, and I wanted to become one. I wanted to engage the land, to make my work accessible for free, to reach audiences that may, or may not, see the work as "art" - that may or may not, ever see the work at all.

Soon after The Spiral Jetty was built, water levels rose in the Great Salt Lake and the entire artwork went underwater. This submergence was not planned, but also not prevented. The Spiral Jetty held its breath below the surface for thirty years, not knowing if it would ever be visible again. In 2002, drought conditions caused the lake to recede and the artwork reemerged. The Spiral Jetty was revealed intact, a little sandier, but still accessible, and still a spiral.

After a night of broken sleep in the parking lot, I woke and walked out along the rocks of the jetty, circling in space, but moving toward the center.

I thought about recent challenges in my work, the scarcity of time with any sort of audience, and long silences between. The Spiral Jetty went underwater, but it never went away. It endured, holding rock-fulls of air until it could rise to the surface and breathe again.

I wonder what is submerged in me, what is hidden but still endures, and what will rise to breathe again.