Robert Smithson on the Spiral Jetty:
My concern with salt lakes began with my work in 1968 on the Mono Lake Site-Nonsite in California. Later I read a book called Vanishing Trails of Atacama by William Rudolph which described salt lakes (salars) in Bolivia in all stages of desiccation, and filled with micro bacteria that give the water surface a red color. The pink flamingos that live around the salars match the color of the water. In The Useless Land, John Aarons and Claudio Vita-Finzi describe Laguna Colorada: ‘The basalt (at the shores) is black, the volcanos purple, and their exposed interiors yellow and red. The beach is grey and the lake pink, topped with the icing of iceberg-like masses of salts.’ Because of the remoteness of Bolivia and because Mono Lake lacked a reddish color, I decided to investigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah. [From The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt]
The Spiral Jetty spirals out from the shores of Rozel Point, located on the northeastern side of the Great Salt Lake, on the western side of the Promontory Mountain Range that forms a peninsula there. If you recall your American history, you’ll remember that Promontory was the town where the first transcontinental train passed, linking the west and the east coast, with one Golden Spike. The Spiral Jetty is located within the Golden Spike National Park just outside of Brigham City, Utah (about 65 miles north of Salt Lake City). The jetty shoots out from the bank into the lake, and coils left to right on itself for approximately 1500’ until it forms a spiral. It is roughly 15’ wide and is composed of earth, basalt rocks (deposited from the great Lake Bonneville Flood about 15,000 years ago), salt (from the lake), and the red algae water it sits in. It is stunning. It is also threatened by oil drilling.
In 1999, the Spiral Jetty was given as a gift from Robert Smithson’s estate to the Dia Art Foundation, where it has been under its supervision ever since. Ironically or tragically, depending on how you view it, the Dia is also trying to save another seminal land art work by Walter De Maria, entitled "Lightning Field". Threatened by real estate and industrial developers, the Dia’s goal is to raise 1.1 million dollars to essentially buy off the over-zealous land owner, and insure, according to an April 8, 2008 article in The Art Newspaper, “the right to restrict real estate and industrial development. This would create a three-mile radius around the installation. The restrictions on the property will bind all future landowners and become part of the chain of title for the estate.” If you haven’t guessed by now, and despite whether or not you like art, it too needs to be preserved and protected – maintained – much like any other institution (private or governmental) or someone’s personal property and heritage.
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