Site Report No. 11: Spiral Jetty, UT

Fifty miles west of the Sun Tunnels past a quarry, a manufacturer of rockets, Golden Spike National Historic Site (where the last spike of the transcontinental railroad was placed), 15 miles further of dirt road, over cattle guards we see mountains and the deep violet hue of a lake.  It is a hue I have never seen before.  At Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake partially under the surface of the water there is a pre-historic creature, coiled.  It feels like it is a growing, living thing but there is not much alive in the saltiest, deadliest lake in America.  Instead it is the Earthwork of Robert Smithson called Spiral Jetty.  (Sun Tunnels artist Nancy Holt was his wife).  The water is tinged red (Smithson looked for water the color of tomato soup).  Bacteria gives the lake this constant color.  Red algae and brilliant red brine shrimp also thrive here.  I climb down to shore over the black basalt rocks.  As I get close to water it is blush pink and filled with tiny red shrimp.  The sand is fossilized brine shrimp.  Hundreds of small sand flies are also on the shore.  It is altogether a weird and other worldly landscape. 

When Smithson created the work in 1970 the waters were unnaturally low in the lake.  By 1976 the jetty was submerged for decades.  It resurfaced in 2002 but the water levels vary from year to year and season to season.  The lake levels have been high the past few months so I could not walk out on it as I would a pier.  In photographs when it does reveal itself, the black rocks are glistening white by a heavy deposit of salt.  Smithson had a “fascination with the coming and going of things.”  He knew the jetty would be covered for long periods of time.  Interestingly, the sculpture seems like a riff, a parody on a nearby now abandoned industrial oil rig jetty.  But after reading so much about and looking at photos of the sculpture, the surrounding landscape does not appear as bleak as I imagined.  I thought there would be industrial ruins.  I found it vividly beautiful.

Interesting artist facts:  Smithson was born in Passaic, NJ.  His baby doctor was the poet William Carlos Williams.

 (Additional photos: Smithson was inspired by Eyes in the Heat, 1946, by Jackson Pollock/www.guggenheim.org; Stone Age tomb, New Grange, Ireland/www.en.wikipedia.org; The Lost World book jacket by Arthur Conan Doyle/ www.en.wikipedia.org)