Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson, 1970 · Gallery 411 · Floor 4

Most art fits in a truck. You buy it, crate it, hang it. Robert Smithson needed the trucks to make his. It's 1970. Smithson's in New York, looking for a lake. Preferably a red one. He calls a parks official in Utah about the Great Salt Lake. The guy says the water up at the north end is the color of tomato soup. Smithson says good enough, and goes. He finds his spot out past some dead oil rigs. Several contractors turn him down. Then he gets this guy Bob Phillips, out of Ogden. Phillips keeps telling him he needs engineers, surveys, rules. Smithson's out in the water in hip waders, saying he knows what he's doing. Right at the start, the dump trucks sink into the mud. After six days, they've built a big hook. Smithson thinks it's finished. Two days later, he wants to change it. With most artists, this is where you get out an eraser. Phillips has to run the trucks again. Three more days. Fifteen hundred feet of black rock, coiling counterclockwise into red water. A Spiral Jetty. He's one of the first to make art you have to drive out to, and he's making a film, too. That's what's playing here. On the ground, you can walk all fifteen hundred feet. To see the whole spiral at once, it helps to get off the ground. So he has himself filmed from a helicopter. That little figure running along the rocks toward the middle? That's him. Phillips said Smithson kept using a word he didn't understand. Entropy. Figured if he could get that one word, he might get the guy. In an interview, Smithson gave his own definition. Humpty Dumpty. Basically, he falls off the wall and breaks. You can pick up all the pieces. You're still not getting your egg back. So, there's your answer. Anyway, the lake was low the year he built it. Two years later, the water came up over it. He saw that. He talked about adding rock. Most of the next thirty years, underwater. Back up in 2002, crusted white with salt. He didn't see that part. July 1973. A couple of months after that interview, he's in a small plane over a Texas ranch, looking down at the site of the next one. The plane goes down. He was thirty-five.

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