Spiral Jetty
Interesting facts
- Because the jetty is loose rock, salt and mud constantly reshaped by the lake, legal scholars argue it is not fixed enough to be protected by US copyright.
- Watching the construction from a helicopter, Smithson reportedly joked "et in Utah ego", a play on Poussin's pastoral painting Et in Arcadia Ego.
- The first version of the spiral used about 6,650 tons of rock and earth, all hauled into the lake by a local contractor's small fleet.
- Builder Bob Phillips liked to say the jetty was the only thing he ever built that existed purely to be looked at, with no practical purpose.
- The project was funded partly by a $9,000 grant from the New York gallery of Virginia Dwan, a leading patron of land art.
- It was the first of Smithson's works that required him to acquire land rights and hire earthmoving equipment.
- Only two years after completion, rising water submerged the spiral in 1972, and for decades it was known mainly through photographs and film.
- When exploratory oil drilling was proposed about five miles away in 2008, Utah received more than 3,000 emails, most of them opposing the plan.
- Since 2012 the jetty has been photographed from the air twice a year from almost identical vantage points to record how it changes.
- Smithson's film of the jetty intercuts the construction with footage of dinosaur skeletons in a natural history museum and torn pages from a history book.
Why it is worth it
A coil of black basalt winds anticlockwise out into the pink-tinged shallows of the Great Salt Lake, 460 metres long and about 4.5 metres wide. Spiral Jetty was built in April 1970 by the American artist Robert Smithson and is usually counted as his most important work and a landmark of land art, which left the gallery to make sculpture out of the earth itself. It lies at Rozel Point on the remote north-eastern shore of the lake, with no buildings in sight.
Smithson chose the place for its strangeness. The northern arm of the lake was cut off from fresh inflows in 1959 by a railway causeway, and its water, with a salinity of around 27 per cent, is coloured red by salt-loving bacteria and algae. Abandoned oil rigs and an old pier lay nearby, a kind of industrial ruin that appealed to an artist fascinated by entropy and decay. A contractor from Ogden, Bob Phillips, moved the material with two dump trucks, a tractor and a front loader. The first version took six days; after looking at it for two days Smithson had the shape reworked, which meant moving another 7,000 tons of rock. He also shot a 32-minute film of the construction, with his wife Nancy Holt, which is regarded as a work in its own right. Three years later he was killed in a plane crash in Texas.
The jetty has never looked the same for long. Its level depends on the lake: when the Dia Art Foundation acquired it in 1999, it lay completely under water. A long drought from the early 2000s brought it into view for the first sustained period in its history, and as the water kept falling the spiral ended up on dry lakebed, by 2022 about a mile from the shoreline. Smithson welcomed this kind of change in his writings, which is why its keepers document the changes with repeat photography rather than trying to freeze the work in one state. Utah named it the state's official work of land art in 2017, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.
Getting there
Spiral Jetty is about 55 km by straight line from Brigham City; the nearest settlement with services on the way is Corinne. The usual route leaves Interstate 15 for Utah State Route 13 and Highway 83, passes the visitor centre at Golden Spike, where the transcontinental railroad was completed,, and continues for about 26 km on gravel roads to a parking area above the jetty. The nearest airport is Ogden-Hinckley (OGD), about 61 km away; Salt Lake City International (SLC) is about 170 km away by road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Spiral Jetty is a work of land art constructed in April 1970 that is considered to be the most important work by American sculptor Robert Smithson. Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture in a 32-minute color film also titled Spiral Jetty. Built on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah entirely of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rocks, Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake.
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