Robert Smithson’s iconic ‘Spiral Jetty’ is suffering from the drought affecting Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Photo: Soren.harward/wikipedia commons
The Great Salt Lake in Utah, which hosts Robert Smithson’s iconic piece of land art, Spiral Jetty, is facing the worst drought in history. Hundreds of square miles of lakebed are exposed. Salinity is rising. And the water level is hitting a new low, shattering the record set just 50 years ago, reports The Salt Lake Tribune.
Spiral Jetty was constructed by Smithson in 1970 during a drought when the water levels were similarly low. For decades after, the 1,5000-foot work was either partially or fully submerged by the lake. As a pioneer of land art – a movement swapping the canvas for the natural world – Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was the crusade’s emblematic work, the pièce de résistance. But the work appears to be facing the perilous fate of many other earth works as the landscape begins to change.
In the last 10 years, the Great Salt Lake has suffered immensely from the drought afflicting California and other regions of the western United States. The radius of 75 miles long and 35 wide has been steadily shrinking at alarming rates. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that lake levels have dropped an average of one-and-a-half feet annually in the last three years – those rates are staggering when you consider that the deepest point of the lake is only 35 feet.
Smithson died just three years after the completion of Spiral Jetty, leaving the artist in the dark about the work’s enduring influence through the 21st century. But as the work decays with its natural world canvas, the general consensus in the art community is to refrain from protection attempts. Intervention would forsake the initial motivation behind the work. Like Smithson’s short time on earth (he tragically died in a plane crash), a primary tenant of the land art movement was to show the ephemeral and ever-changing character of the natural world as a reminder of our own transience.
