Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson was part of a generation of Land Artists in the 1960s and 1970s which rejected the confines of urban art galleries, moving into the natural world to create monumental sculptural works. The primary artistic medium was often an element of the land itself. Smithson created this film to record the construction of his work Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1600-foot-long coil of basalt rock jutting into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Smithson chose the location due to the blood-red color of the water, which hid and revealed his sculpture with changes in the water level. In recent years, the Great Salt Lake has shrunk considerably due to extractive water use and rising temperatures. Spiral Jetty is now beached on the exposed lakebed, hundreds of feet from the water’s edge.