Late American sculptor Robert Smithson’s best known creation, “Spiral Jetty” (1970), has been added to the United States National Register of Historic Places. Situated at Rozel Point along the northeast shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the enormous Land Art work embodies the continuous changes of its surrounding environment, probing notions of permanence and ephemerality.
Entropy was the driving force for Smithson’s monumental endeavor, as the artist was intrigued by the unusual microbe- and mineral-rich basin that gave the brine its reddish-pink hue at the time and by the lake’s salinity, which allows for very few species to survive. When Smithson surveyed the area, the arid surroundings were marked with defunct industrial features such as an old pier, some shacks, and a couple of rusted oil rigs. He paid $100 (renewed annually over 20 years) to start leasing 10 acres of land at the basin and got to work.
Financed in part by a $9,000 grant from the Virginia Dwan Gallery in New York, “Spiral Jetty” is comprised of 6,650 tons of black basalt rocks that were transported by dump trucks, a tractor, and front-end loaders, as well as earth dug up from the site. It juts 1,500 feet into the lake, and the coil itself has a 15-foot (~4.6 m) diameter — requiring an enormous effort and multiple assistants over the course of a week. Smithson initially planned for a J shape, but after it was executed, he opted to re-structure the jetty for a counterclockwise spiral appearance days later.
Smithson believed that the water levels would rise and fall, letting salt deposits crystallize and shimmer on the jetty at times of recession. Entropy struck again, as the work became fully submerged from 1972 through 2002. The artist died in a plane crash only three years after “Spiral Jetty” was completed, never witnessing how climate change and a drought pulled his earth work back from the shallow water.
The late artist Nancy Holt, Smithson’s widow, donated “Spiral Jetty” to the Dia Art Foundation, which has overseen its preservation and documentation as the site becomes increasingly vulnerable to environmental conditions.
It has since become a coveted remote tourism destination with designated restrictions to mitigate its evolution through human intervention (such as no foot access, taking rocks, building fire pits, or littering), and Utah moved to formally adopt “Spiral Jetty” as the official state artwork in 2017.
Now that the work has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, the foundation believes that the new status will aid its long-term preservation, especially after plans for oil drilling around the site repeatedly emerged in the 2000s.
“Beloved in Utah and far beyond, this artwork has come to mean many things to many people, and we are proud to continue our work caring and advocating for ‘Spiral Jetty’ to preserve it for generations to come,” Dia Art Foundation Director Jessica Morgan said in a statement.
