Robert Smithson

Spiral Jetty, 1970

The 1960s was a turbulent time. In America disillusionment over the war in Vietnam, and the battles for equality on both racial and gender lines had people rethinking their roles in society. There was a growing distrust for institutions spawning the hippies and other subcultures to reject many social norms and seek to break away starting communes and or returning to nature and living off the land.

On the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the astronaut William Anders snapped a photograph of the earth rising over the moon. For the first time people could see the world not for the vast expanse surrounding them, but see the far greater vastness surrounding the world. Suddenly the earth was smaller. People could see the earth as a tiny blue marble, a fragile little oasis floating in a vast and desolate space. It quite literally gave everyone a whole new perspective of our world. It was in this context of enormous upheaval of the social fabric and new perspective of our world, the universe and our place within it that artists started to rethink their role and their relationships with galleries and other institutions. Many were disillusioned with the commercial aspects of the art world and wanted to find a way to not only put art out into the world free of the gatekeepers of critics and curators. Many young artists actually sought to make art out of the earth. This is of course nothing new. The earliest forms of art were made of natural materials- ash and ocre spread across the stone face of cave walls. Glyphs have been etched into stone or miles long stretches of desert as in the case of the Nazca lines which I covered in a previous mini episode.

Robert Smithson decided to make monumental sculptures using perhaps the world’s oldest material, the earth itself, but he used modern tools to shape it in a way and on a scale rarely seen. Spiral Jetty is as the name would suggest, a spiral. Part of what makes it special is the enormousness of it. On the peninsula at Rozel Point on Utah’s Great Salt Lake, Smithson created his most famous monumental sculpture using over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth from the site. The spiral forms a path out onto the lake. It is intended to be not only witnessed, but experienced. Walking the spiral would be an almost meditative act similar to circumambulating or walking around a Hindu temple. The spiral allows people to walk out onto the lake. A small speck on a vast lake witnessing the entropy of nature as the water erodes the foundation. The gigantic piece built from thousands of tons of stone has been decaying from the moment it was built. It was a giant monument to nature demonstrating the concept of entropy. It was born out of a time of social upheaval and changing norms leaving in which people were rethinking the ways they related to both nature and the constructed environment which now that I’m saying it out loud could just as easily be a description of pretty much any time period as the only true constant is change.