1970
Jetty,
Robert Smithson
Spiral
Box Elder County Utah
Dia Art Foundation
Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point
Spiral Jetty
535 West 22nd Street New York City www.diaart.org
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~ Cf) 6] t- (j) ~a -. "§ ~ ' 41 N A 2' left 11 them. lJfAH · .... to a fork ,.,, "" c .... c road Spiral Jetty) _,,_~ means not painting H A IDA'!(? this ---UT Spiral Jetty. ·- ·- · CELL RECEPTION. are small white signs directing Including this one, you cross . Utah Geological Survey - to cattle guard #4 and an y ·· • 113 - 0 5 10 15 20 ~KM *LAST . ·· .. *There . ., ~ guard #3. Courtes guard #2. guard #1 ends at a cul-de-sac parking lot directly in the 1980s. . cattle 6 miles west on the main gravel . cattle cattle and is not always visible above the water line. south-southwest just ended 5 hours trace," by carrying out anything they bring with . 2 no that Spiral Jetty 365), lake's levels vary several feet from year to year and from 65 miles to *LAST Spiral Jetty The GAS STATION . guard. Call this 7.7 miles up the exit (exit explorations of Promontory Pass to miles south to a second fork in the road. Turn right onto the southwest curves turning north *LAST proceed 1 . 7 proceed miles to . 1 cattle is approximately Spiral Jetty. approximately 1.3 side and continue road leave the natural environment exactly as you found it; in Corinne. north Corinne. is the Corinne Highway 83. Continue west west of Brigham City, Utah. Exit and turn right onto Route 13 to Golden Spike National Historic Site (GSNHS) Visitor Center. BATHROOMS are at the Visitor Center. east for 17.7 miles. Follow signs to Golden Spike National Historic Site Visitor Center. and in the road. Continue left, heading west. asks that visitors "leave next to iron-pipe gate. you the entire way to four cattle guards before you reach Rozel Point and fork, see the north arm of Great Salt Lake and an old oil jetty (not by drilling 1. From Salt Lake City take 1-15 Directions to Spiral Jetty Spiral Jetty 2. Past Corinne, the road becomes from Salt Lake City 3. Turn left onto Golden Spike Road Dia Tips for your visit Please Guests are advised to bring water, food, and waterproof boots, along with weather rocks, leaving black fire pits, or stamping on vegetation. 7. Continue southeast 1.2 miles to appropriate clothing. season to season, so 5. Cross a 4. From the Visitor Center, drive 5 6. Drive 10. The 8. Continue straight 2.8 miles 9. Drive south for another 7 miles 2. around the east side of Rozel Point. You will artwork and at cultural the Fire located. is Spiral Jetty on environmental Lake Institute Dia was founded in Spiral Jetty's of Forestry, Dia Spiral Jetty Spiral Jetty. where Spiral Jetty. as an important state resource. missions and expertise, they Utah Division to ensure that Lake Dia Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the bythe 15 feet wide the American West, and Germany to the water , Spiral Jetty respective Utah Foundation and to promote the exceptional significance of Arts works with Art in preserving and maintaining the artwork, as well as building Fine Dia and approximately locally salt crystals, earth, Dia long (FFSL). FFSL recognizes feet is leased to Lands Utah Museum of State of Utah owns the bed of Great Salt 1974 to help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, 1970 Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Black basalt rock, Dia Art Foundation Dia Art Foundation Coil 1500 Dia Art Foundation is the owner and custodian of because of scale or scope. Today, Dia is a constellation of sites, from site-specific artworks and installations in New York PARTNERSHIPS Dia collaborates with two organizations in Utah, the Great Salt University of Utah, who have been deeply involved in the advocacy of galleries of Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York. over the years. Through the partners' collectively assist local awareness and sustaining the integrity of the artwork. Westminster College (GSLI) and the Great Salt Lake Institute, Westminster College Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College works with issues, site maintenance, and accessibility pertaining to Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah reputation is upheld www.greatsaltlakeinstitute.org Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands within Utah. www.umfa.utah.edu The State AFFILIATION The The land www.ffsl.utah.gov Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, 1970 Beginning in the 1960s , a number of American artists, including Walter De Maria, well as how salt deposits crystallized on the black basalt rocks, formed from Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson, chose to depart from the molten lava of nearby extinct volcanoes, that were scattered along the peninsula. confines of gallery and museum spaces to create artworks directly in the land The fractured rocky landscape and fluctuating water levels of Great Salt Lake scape. Drawn to desolate and remote locations, from abandoned industrial sites also appealed to the artist's long-standing preoccupation with entropy. Smithson's to uncultivated deserts and mountains, these artists created often colossal distinct definition of entropy, drawn from popular science and science fiction sculptural interventions in nature, inaugurating the movement of Land art. alike, fixated on the chance operations of nature that lead to a state of transformation. Created at a time when water levels were particularly low, One of the most remarkable examples is Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, located the artwork was submerged from 1972 onward, and was only known through at Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake. With documentation. However, regional droughts thirty years later caused the lake the assistance of a team operating dump trucks, a tractor, and a front loader, to recede such that by 2002, a salt-encrusted Spiral Jetty reappeared for the Smithson created the sculpture in three weeks in April 1970. Over six thousand first prolonged period in its history. Robert Smithson, 1970. Photo: Gianfranco Gargani. tons of black basalt rocks and earth were formed into a coil 1,500 feet long and fifteen feet wide that winds counterclockwise off the shore into the water . In Smithson often asserted that by responding to the landscape, rather than impos Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, on January 2, 1938. In 1999, through the generosity of the artist Nancy Holt, Smithson's widow, and ing itself upon it, Spiral Jetty is a site to actively walk on rather than a sculpture 1953, as a high-school student, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League the Estate of Robert Smithson, the artwork was donated to Dia Art Foundation. to behold. The act of traversing the artwork was enacted in Smithson's 1970 of New York, where he studied in the evenings for the next two years, also ( film of the same title, which was made in the months following the completion taking classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1956. Smithson's first Before creating Spiral Jetty, Smithson had established a remarkably diverse of the sculpture. Alongside aerial footage of Spiral Jetty is a poetic sequence solo exhibition was in 1959, at the Artists Gallery, New York. In 1964, he began artistic practice. He began his career as a painter but in the mid-1960s started to produce what he considered his first mature works of writing and sculpture. of the artist running along the spiral to rest at its innermost coil. In an interview to experiment in different media, including sculpture, writing, drawing, film, and In 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash in Amarillo, Texas, while working on from 1971, Smithson explained how the visitor's experience of space shifts as eventually, earthworks. Deeply informed by his interest in geology, crystallography, the earthwork Amarillo Ramp. Major retrospectives of his work have been orga one walks through the work: a "constriction or concentration exists within the and science in its popularized forms (such as science fiction literature and cinema, nized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New inner coils ... whereas on the outer edge you're kind of thrown out, you're encyclopedic collections, even natural history museums), Smithson's practice York (1980); the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (1999); and the aware of the horizons and how they echo through the Jetty." 2 focused on processes of accumulation and displacement in order to reveal the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004). Recent solo exhibitions on his work include RobertSmithson in Texasat the Dallas Museum of Art (2013-14) contradictions in our visible world. In the late 1960s, his work increasingly revolved Immediately following its completion, Spiral Jetty was deemed a momentous and Robert Smithson: New JerseyEart hworks at the Montclair Art Museum, around the relationship between art and place. Smithson's Leaning Mirror (1969), achievement in specialized art magazines, the popular press, as well as among New Jersey (2014). for instance, is a seminal indoor earthwork that consists of two six-foot-square Smithson's peers, and more than forty years later, it continues to be recognized mirrors embedded at a precise angle in a mound of reddish sand from an out as an iconic artwork. Disappearing and reemerging, bound to site and circulated bibliography Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Exh.cat. Editedby RobertHobbs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell door site. In other instances, Smithson worked directly in the peripheral spaces in documentation, the work exists in a state of permanent flux. "One apprehends UniversityPress, 1981. that inspired him. Sometimes the results were fleeting documentations, as with what is around one's eyes and ears," wrote Smithson, "no matter how unstable Smithson,Robert. The Collected Writings.Edited by Jack Flam.Berkeley: 3 the illustrated travel-essay "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" or fugitive." Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1996. (1967); other times permanent, large-scale sculptural interventions, as Smithson,Robert. Spiral Jetty, 1970. 16 mm film (color,sound); 32 minutes. notes in the case of Spiral Jetty. Robert Smithson. Exh.cat. Editedby EugenieTsai. Los Angeles:Museum of RobertSmithson, 'Conversation in Salt Lake City ( 1972)," in Robert Smithson: Collected ContemporaryArt, 2004. 1 "I like landscapes that suggest prehistory," said Smithson. The artist chose to Writings,ed . Jack Flam(Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996), p. 298. Roberts,Jennifer. Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History.New Haven:Yale create Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake due in part to the lake's unusual physical 2 KennethBaker, 'Talking with RobertSmithson," in Robert Smithson: SpiralJetty, ed. Lynne UniversityPress, 2004. Cooke,Karen Kelly,et al. (Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress; New York: Dia Art qualities, including the reddish coloration of the water caused by microbes, as Foundation,2005), p. 158. Robert Smithson: SpiralJetty. Editedby LynneCooke, Karen Kelly,et al. Berkeley: 3 RobertSmithson, 'The SpiralJetty," in Robert Smithson: SpiralJetty, p. 9. Universityof CaliforniaPress; New York: Dia Art Foundation,2005.