To really see the sculpture you need to stand on the hill above it. The black rocks of the path lead you westward across the dry playa, eventually into a smaller and then smaller circle, but when you are down among the rocks you lose sight of the pattern. These days, the Spiral Jetty is still a spiral but not much of a jetty. This year Spiral Jetty is 50 years old: a middle-aged work of art that has endured after all. Now people from all over the world wanted to come walk its twisty path. There were articles in “The New York Times,” and, later, there were YouTube videos. Then, around the turn of the millennium, the lake began to steadily get lower and smaller - and the beguiling spiral was consistently visible and available again. Most everyone in Utah ignored the jetty, if they knew about it at all. Meanwhile, along the Wasatch Front, the weather got wetter and the Great Salt Lake flooded the spiral, submerging it for the next two decades. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, at age 35, while he was surveying another land art site in Texas.

It took six days, 625 man-hours, 292 truck-hours, $9,000, and 6,500 tons of basalt, limestone and mud to construct the sculpture that April. It took only a few years after that for stunning aerial photos to show up in art history textbooks, which heralded Smithsons’s spiral as an icon of the new land art movement.īut by then, sure enough, a universe hell-bent on entropy had taken its toll. He was, as he often said, a fan of entropy. It would be a monument to impermanence, if he were the kind of man who believed in monuments. And might just as easily fall apart as last forever. It would be a sculpture, but one that didn’t need a museum or even an audience. What he imagined was a curving line of rocks and earth that would lead from the shoreline of the lake into the water.

I like to imagine Smithson beaming as he drives north on I-15 towards Rozel Point. On that spring day in Utah, he was just some guy from New Jersey with a crazy idea about making something - a spiral, did he say? - out at the Great Salt Lake. It’s easy to imagine the clerks rolling their eyes. In certain circles, as far away as Italy, Smithson was already a celebrated artist.

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