Smithson was seeking a canvas where the water was naturally colored red. “Museums are tombs,” Smithson wrote in a 1967 essay, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums,” implying that artwork went to museums to die. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt - who created the art installation Sun Tunnels in the Utah west desert in Box Elder County - were among the leaders of what was called the “land art” movement, aimed at imposing large-scale artistic vision onto the natural world.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) People explore the Spiral Jetty, just south of the Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore, March 25, 2022. “But he wasn’t, ‘In 50 years, here’s what people are going to think about my work.’” “He wanted a very dynamic environment, so the salt crystals would form, dissipate, the colors would change and the water would rise and fall,” Loe said. In her book, Loe - who now teaches at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas - references a quote from Smithson, where he essentially says, “If the Spiral Jetty goes under the water, I’ll just build it up another 15 feet.”
Smithson never intended Spiral Jetty to be a barometer of anything, said Hikmet Sidney Loe, a former professor at Westminster College who wrote “The Spiral Jetty Encyclo” (University of Utah Press, 2017), a comprehensive book about Smithson and his most famous work. “Now, it’s very unlikely that the waters will ever reach Spiral Jetty because of the protracted droughts in the Great Basin Desert.” The jetty “is a barometer for the ways in which we are operating in a climate emergency,” said Lisa Le Feuvre, the head of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which oversees the creative legacies of Smithson and his wife, Nancy Holt. “Now, if I stood in that same place, there’s not a chance I could ever throw a rock and hit the lake,” she said.
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