I knew this site so well, but I’d never seen the artwork. So when the piece reemerged, “that was the first time I saw it. I would go there, I would sample with students, but it just wasn’t visible,” she says. For several years, “I never saw Spiral Jetty. īaxter, who’s also a biology professor at Westminster College, has been periodically conducting research in the area with students since 1998. (The Great Salt Lake Institute partners with the Dia Foundation and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to oversee the Spiral Jetty.) “Spiral Jetty” in mid-April 2005. “Smithson anticipated that the lake would rise and fall, the residue of salt crystals causing the black rocks to glisten white whenever the water level dropped,” the New York Times Magazine wrote in 2002.Īnd indeed, that very year, regional droughts caused the jetty to reappear “for the first prolonged period in its history,” according to the Dia Foundation, which now owns the sculpture. But by 1972, the water rose again to near-average levels, submerging the artwork. “Water escapes through evaporation, and everything else stays there,” says Jaimi Butler, coordinator of the Great Salt Lake Institute.Īt the time the sculpture was built, the water level of the lake was particularly low. Great Salt Lake is known as a terminal basin, meaning its water has no outlet. Smithson used more than 6,000 tons of black basalt and earth to create his counterclockwise spiral. “There was a period in history when that part of Utah was volcanic,” and basalt forms from lava. Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College, in Salt Lake City, Utah. “He worked with a local construction team to mine the basalt out of the hills and make this spiral,” says Bonnie K. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty,” Smithson would recall in an essay. “This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. Land art was a growing trend among his peers at the time, and Smithson had long been interested in geology, science, and the transformative effects of nature. It was there he would build his monumental piece, the 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide Spiral Jetty, in 1970. He came upon Rozel Point, a remote area in the north arm of Utah’s Great Salt Lake that blooms in pinks and oranges, thanks to an ever-fluctuating community of microbes in the salty waters. When artist Robert Smithson was looking for a location to create his latest earthwork in the late 1960s, he hoped to find a place with red water. ![]() Courtesy of the Great Salt Lake Institute
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