Smithson's Spiral Jetty emerges from Great Salt Lake
From Tuesday, October 15, 2002
New York Times story on Robert Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty'', which is overseen by the Dia Art Foundation*, one of the influential contemporary art institutions in the world.
Smithson, one of the most prominent spokespersons for "Earth art" which "brought 1960's Minimalism out of the art gallery and into the American West, literally, on a scale to match the landscape," died at the young age of 35 in a plane crash but his legacy lives on...although some of it is invisible at times:
The most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh is Robert Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty'': 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rose red from algae.
The sculpture became an icon immediately after Smithson finished it in 1970. He made a film about it, enhancing the myth: trucks and loaders moving rocks like dinosaurs lumbering across a prehistoric panorama; the modern artist as primordial designer.
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. But he miscalculated. ''Spiral Jetty'' was visible for about two years, then became submerged and stayed that way except for a few brief reappearances.
With the drought in the West, however, the water in the lake has dropped to its lowest level in many years, and so the jetty has emerged, a brackish Brigadoon.
*Background on the Dia Art Foundation:
Dia’s permanent holdings include pivotal artworks by major artists who came to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s, including Joseph Beuys, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Andy Warhol. The art of this period represented a radical departure in practice—unlike any witnessed since the birth of modernism. Often large-scale, the work was also occasionally ephemeral or site-specific. The name “Dia,” taken from the Greek word meaning “through,” was chosen to suggest the institution’s role in enabling extraordinary artistic projects that might not otherwise be realized.
Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, who founded Dia in 1974, wished to extend the boundaries of the modern museum in order to respond to the specific requirements of a few of the most ambitious and promising artists of this generation. Today, Dia continues to commission, support, and present site-specific installations and long-term exhibitions of work by artists who first came to recognition during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as by younger artists whose work reflects the achievements of the older generation.