The Environmental Entropy of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

Emerging in the late 1960s, Robert Smithson became a defining artist in the Land Art movement. Riding a wave of environmentalism while simultaneously seeking spaces outside New York City’s increasingly commercialised galleries, he and artists like Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria looked west for a new creative paradigm.

Smithson found it in the vast arid deserts of Utah. No longer confined by the walls of a sterile gallery – or “​​mausoleums for art” as he described them – the earth would become both his canvas and paint. Here, Smithson would create Spiral Jetty – one of three transcendent Land Art works produced before his unexpected death aged 35.

Constructed in 1970 along the edge of the Great Salt Lake, he chose the location with his wife and fellow Land Art pioneer Nancy Holt. While striking in its desolate beauty, this sparse setting was and remains a cornerstone for Utah’s industrial economy, with mineral extraction operations drawing potassium sulphate, magnesium chloride and common salt from its waters.

Twenty kilometres from Spiral Jetty, a booming railroad causeway still divides the lake, resulting in long-standing ecological disruption. According to recent reports, these industrial endeavours, alongside enduring droughts, have contributed to a six-metre drop in water levels, leading to growing concerns about arsenic-laced dust rising from the exposed lakebed.

Besides the presence of these human-led interventions, the Great Salt Lake’s otherworldly colours fascinated Smithson. As algae thrive in its extreme saline conditions, species like Dunaliella salina give the water a reddish-purple hue. Meanwhile, Spiral Jetty’s specific location, Rozel Point, resonates with even deeper pigments, as the causeway isolates it from freshwater.

“It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral,” Smithson wrote, recalling his first encounter with the Great Salt Lake.

This celestial description was no coincidence. The appearance of spirals in ancient cave paintings, throughout the cosmos and even in the human ear had long intrigued Smithson. Science fiction authors like J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss also heavily influenced him through dystopian novels exploring a future dictated by environmental entropy.

Supported by Virginia Dwan – an art collector pivotal to the early Land Art movement – Spiral Jetty was designed and built in a month using basalt rock, salt crystals and mud from the lakefront. In creating his 450-metre-long, five-metre-wide work, Smithson imagined a day when Earth's immense, ceaseless forces would return it to the soil.

Reflecting the minute scale of our existence against the natural realm, the sheer size of Spiral Jetty, surrounded by seemingly endless desert, causes the viewer to grapple with their profound smallness. Spiral Jetty also exists through the impulses of the earth, with the work spending a considerable part of the last 50 years submerged by the lake.

Resurfacing in 2002, encrusted with dazzling white salt, Spiral Jetty is a modern-day monolith akin to the world's ancient wonders. Formed by human ingenuity yet organically fading away, Smithson’s temporal work mirrors our reliance on the environment through a lens that distorts our past, present and future.