This time we’re talking about a work whose scale exceeds the exhibition capabilities of most world museums. Find out what it is below the image.
For almost 30 years, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was covered by the waters of the Great Salt Lake in the US state of Utah. Since 1999, when a drought reduced the water level, this famous American sculpture has slowly been coming to the surface. Initially the structure was surrounded by shallow pink water, coloured by the presence of beta-carotene created by halophilic Dunaliella salina algae. Today, the sculpture – fully revealed – lies surrounded by a salt desert that recalls a shimmering expanse of snow, and the rocks it was made of have been covered with white snow crystals.
Smithson built his sculpture in 1970. Supported by a team of labourers and heavy machinery operators, he moved almost 7000 tonnes of black basalt and soil from the nearby shore, creating a spiral dike 450 metres long and about 4.5 metres wide. The structure was erected when the water level was exceptionally low; it sank beneath the surface of the Great Salt Lake only in 1972. From then until 1999, this monumental sculpture appeared above the surface of the lake only sporadically.
The piece, inspired by the Serpent Mound (piled up by pre-Columbian Native Americans almost 1000 years ago) was created in the new genre of land art, a movement that started in the US at the end of the 1960s, in response to the excessive commercialization of art, as well as the strengthening trends of environmentalism. The founders of the movement, repulsed by the opportunism and superficiality of the art world, wanted people to come out of the museums, returning to nature. Smithson, initially deeply involved in the cultural revolution of the 1960s that advocated hedonism and personal freedom, quickly found within himself a love of nature, becoming a leading representative of the movement. He believed that “a work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”
In building his spiral, Smithson gave a nod to prehistoric art forms scattered around the world: from the mysterious megaliths of Avebury and nearby Stonehenge in the UK, through the Nazca and Pampa Palpa works in the highlands of Peru. His works blazed a trail for art that draws on these ancient forms, clearing a path for contemporary artists including Olafur Eliasson, and James Turrell with his Roden Crater astral observatory in Arizona.
Translated from the Polish by Nathaniel Espino
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