It was larger than I thought it would be - and smaller at the same time. Despite having lived in Utah for most of my life, I had never been before. I recently decided to visit those grounds by taking the nearly two hour road trip from Salt Lake City to see the Spiral Jetty for myself. Largely without the water that Smithson listed as one of the materials that made up the Jetty, the artwork and how visitors interact with it is now negotiated on different (literal) grounds than it was nearly 50 years ago. Jayswal quotes Lisa Le Feuvre, the head of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, who refers to Smithson’s work as “a barometer for the ways in which we are operating in a climate emergency.” The irony, however, is that just 50 years later the problem of the Spiral Jetty remaining covered by water is nonexistent.Īs Palak Jayswal writes in the Salt Lake Tribune, the Spiral Jetty has in recent years become a “symbol of the lake’s health.”Įssentially, the more visible the Spiral Jetty is, the lower water levels are due to drought. He certainly knew that the rising and falling water levels would impact how visitors could interact with the piece: When he was asked what he would do if the water level did not recede and the Spiral Jetty remained covered by water, Smithson responded that he would simply build the structure up higher, Loe documents in “The Spiral Jetty Encyclo.” What early church leaders said about the Great Salt LakeĬhurch makes largest-ever donation of water shares to benefit Great Salt Lake His untimely death the next year, however, meant that he wouldn’t be able to witness how entropy would affect his earthwork.

“The Spiral Jetty is physical enough to be able to withstand all these climate changes, yet it’s intimately involved with those climate changes and natural disturbances,” Smithson stated in 1972. Smithson was fascinated with the concept of entropy and how the environment, including the rising and falling water levels of the lake, would affect the artwork. “And the changes that have been taking place out there, a lot of them are because of human action.” “From the moment Spiral Jetty was completed, it’s been changing,” Loe says. The Jetty remained underwater from 1972 to 1996 and then was once again submerged in 1996 before reappearing in 2002, according to a history of the Spiral Jetty published in the Deseret News on the artwork’s 50th anniversary.ĭroughts have kept the Spiral Jetty above water and largely visible to visitors since its reappearance in 2002. The environment Smithson chose was so dynamic, in fact, that for long periods of time, the Jetty was completely submerged underwater. New analysis says Great Salt Lake can be saved, and here are the six recommendations to do it Hikmet Sidney Loe, author of “ The Spiral Jetty Encyclo,” and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told me that Smithson was looking specifically for a “dynamic environment to build his monumental work.” Smithson was well aware that building the Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake would mean the artwork, like the environment around it, would be constantly changing. Over half a century later, the water that Smithson used as a key material in his earthwork could be gone in as soon as five years, begging the question, what is the Spiral Jetty without the Great Salt Lake? A watery history

Spiral jetty great salt lake