April 24, 2021
The Spiral Jetty - Robert Smithson
I'm riding my bike in lazy circles over wet sand and lava rock that superficially looks like a beach, but reveals itself to be briny mudflat, with crystalline salt bedazzling the surface. This is the northern extent of Great Salt Lake, where the water runs red. Salty waves lap against a pepper shore. Cruising over the crust, a quickness of the mud grabs the front tire of my mountain bike which sinks to a stop. I dismount and heave the bike over my shoulder, trudging back to someplace stable, only to sink again. In the center of this misadventure is a spiral, The Spiral Jetty. A monumental artwork of international fame, just laying there, in the mud, plain as day.
Lucy Lippard's book, "Overlay," was my introduction to this work. I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, enrolled in a loosely-tethered independent study program at The Evergreen State College. "Overlay" was required reading for incoming freshmen. The cover was emblazoned with 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. On the solstice and equinox, the sun passes through the center of the artwork placed very intentionally in the middle of nowhere to frame this planetary alignment. My art, at the time, was a random series of confused drawings and unfinished paintings. Her art held the sun. I was suddenly called 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 the limitations of white-cube galleries and 30-day standard run for 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. After years of saying to myself, “Someday I will visit,” it seemed fairly certain that I would never, in my lifetime experience this work in person. But then, the climate shifted.
The Spiral Jetty held its breath below the surface of Great Salt Lake for thirty years. 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 giving my bike a good washing, and a night of broken sleep in the parking lot, I woke and walked out along the rocks of the jetty. The path is straight at first, then begins circling in space, and moving toward the center.
Thirty-five years after reading “Overlay and now a mid-career public artist, I thought about recent challenges in my work, the scarcity of time with any sort of audience, and long silences between exhibitions. 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 inspiration is waiting to rise, with great gulps of air, to take the shape it has always been.