Spiral Jetty (1970) is Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A 1,500-foot coil of basalt rock, mud, and salt crystals, it disappears and reappears with the lake’s shifting tides. Neither sculpture nor landscape, it is a work in perpetual flux: submerged, eroded, crystallized, remade by the elements.
Smithson described the Jetty as an “entropic” gesture, art that does not resist decay but collaborates with it. In doing so, he redirected attention away from the gallery and into the dynamics of geology, time, and ecological change. The work unsettles the idea of permanence. It is at once iconic and unstable, a form that points as much to its own dissolution as to its creation.
See also: Sun Tunnels and Star Axis
Images from Holt/Smithson Foundation.
