What does spiral jetty represent

What he imagined was a curving line of rocks and earth that would lead from the shoreline of the lake into the water.

And might just as easily fall apart as last forever. It would be a monument to impermanence, if he were the kind of man who believed in monuments. He was, as he often said, a fan of entropy. But by then, sure enough, a universe hell-bent on entropy had taken its toll. Smithson died in a plane crash in , at age 35, while he was surveying another land art site in Texas. Meanwhile, along the Wasatch Front, the weather got wetter and the Great Salt Lake flooded the spiral, submerging it for the next two decades.

Most everyone in Utah ignored the jetty, if they knew about it at all. Then, around the turn of the millennium, the lake began to steadily get lower and smaller — and the beguiling spiral was consistently visible and available again. Now people from all over the world wanted to come walk its twisty path.

This year Spiral Jetty is 50 years old: a middle-aged work of art that has endured after all. Color details from the landscape surrounding the Spiral Jetty. These days, the Spiral Jetty is still a spiral but not much of a jetty.

The black rocks of the path lead you westward across the dry playa, eventually into a smaller and then smaller circle, but when you are down among the rocks you lose sight of the pattern. To really see the sculpture you need to stand on the hill above it. Even then, if you are a lover of the iconic photos, you may be expecting something bigger and more dramatic.

What I like are lakes surrounded by trees, green hills dotted with daisies, bonus points for a little white farmhouse off in the distance. The Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point — stark, still and muted on a partly cloudy spring morning — is nothing like that. It feels like a desert masquerading as a body of water. The hope is that the existence of salt and gypsum on Mars — which once also had water — might mean there are salt-loving microbes still tucked inside the crystals there.

Jerome triptych. Unit 0 Series Overview. Unit 1 Converging Cultures. Unit 2 Dreams and Visions. Unit 3 History and Memory. Unit 4 Ceremony and Society. Unit 5 Cosmology and Belief. Unit 6 Death. Unit 7 Domestic Life. Unit 8 Writing.

Unit 9 Portraits. Unit 10 The Natural World. Unit 11 The Urban Experience. However, the spectator walks around it in an anti-clockwise direction, and is thereby prompted not just to consider cosmology but also to move backwards through geological time.

Intrigued to learn more about this and other works? Then allow our editor, Rosie Pickles to introduce you to the title. You can also browse through a selection of images, here , or simply buy a copy of the book, from the people who made it, here. Books New. Signed Editions. The idea of an island at the center of the spiral was to be maintained throughout the many revisions the project underwent until nearly the end. However, the spiral was always the main plan.

Before the start of construction, Smithson spent a few weeks in Utah exploring the ideal site to construct his Earthwork. Part of the letter read:. This project will resemble a jetty in the shape of a spiral.

The structure will be made of rock and gravel. The purpose of placing the rock on the mudflat area will be to induce salt crystals on the rock and gravel as incrustations that will develop over a period of time.

This will contrast with the red color of the water. Its purpose is purely aesthetic, and it can be viewed from an airplane or the road. The artists occasionally supervised the construction of the project from a helicopter, at which he was quoted saying et in Utah ego , which a counterpoint to the pastoral Baroque painting by Nicolas Poussin titled et in Arcadia ego. The rock used in constructing the piece was moved into the lake by Bob Phillips from nearby Ogden, Utah, who utilized two dump trucks, a huge tractor, alongside a front-end loader.

The stones weighed about 6, tons. The constructor almost turned down this unusual proposal from Robert Smithson, and he had to be convinced thoroughly by the artist. Smithson also had to acquire land rights and earthmoving equipment, which he never did with his previous pieces.

The construction of Spiral Jetty started in April The first phase took six days, where the project was like a draft. After contemplating the result for another two days, the artist directed the crew to reshape it into its final and present configuration. The second and last phase of the project involved moving around 7, tons of basalt rock and took an additional three days. The contractor documented the entire construction process. His son even appeared in the PBS Antiques Roadshow program with images and a collection of files related to the creation of the project.