Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty made of rock and salt in the Great Salt Lake photographed from the air.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Tom Martinelli

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty photographed from the air.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Tom Martinelli

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Charles Uibel/Great Salt Lake Photography

Drone photo of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 meters) long and 15 ft. (4.6 meters) wide

Collection of Dia Art Foundation

Photograph: Charles Uibel/Great Salt Lake Photography

Robert Smithson at the site of Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Photograph: Nancy Holt

Man standing on the left side of the frame gesturing toward a jetty of land and a truck on the water

Robert Smithson at the site of Spiral Jetty (1970)

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Photograph: Nancy Holt

1969—1970

Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson

1970

Great Salt Lake, Utah

Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water

1,500 ft. (457.2 m) long and 15 ft. (4.6 m) wide

Dia Art Foundation

Built at the mouth of a terminal basin rich in minerals and nearly devoid of life, Spiral Jetty is a testament to Smithson’s fascination with entropy. Its precarious location lends itself to the structure’s inevitable disintegration, yet its impressive size and deliberate shape command the surrounding landscape. Constructed from 6,650 tons of rock and earth, the spiral continuously changes form as nature, industry, and time take effect.

In 1999 Nancy Holt and the Estate of Robert Smithson donated the earthwork to Dia Art Foundation, who continue as stewards.

Click here for details on visiting Spiral Jetty.

Writing

Scholarly Text

Spiral Jetty

Gary Shapiro

Robert Smithson designed and directed the construction of his iconic work the Spiral Jetty in April 1970. The Jetty is a site-specific work, meant to interact with changing conditions of the surrounding water, land, and atmosphere. While located in a relatively barren, unpopulated place, Smithson chose the site not only because of the vast surrounding landscape, but with reference to nearby abandoned oil rigs and the Golden Spike monument marking the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railway. He understood these as industrial ruins, or entropic residues.1 The artist's essay "The Spiral Jetty" and the eponymous film he made with Nancy Holt, can be considered as coordinate "non-site" aspects of the artwork.

Writing by the Artist

The Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson

My concern with salt lakes began with my work in 1968 on the Mono Lake Site-Nonsite in California. Later I read a book called Vanishing Trails of Atacama by William Rudolph which described salt lakes (salars) in Bolivia in all stages of desiccation and filled with micro bacteria that give the water surface a red color. The pink flamingos that live around the salars match the color of the water. In The Useless Land, John Aarons and Claudio Vita-Finzi describe Laguna Colorada: “The basalt (at the shores) is black, the volcanos purple, and their exposed interiors yellow and red. The beach is grey and the lake pink, topped with the icing of iceberg-like masses of salts.” Because of the remoteness of Bolivia and because Mono Lake lacked a reddish color, I decided to investigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it.

Robert Smithson

"The Spiral Jetty." Arts of the Environment, edited by Gyorgy Kepes, 1972.

Spiral Jetty

Writing

Spiral Jetty

The Spiral Jetty

Related Info

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