On first glimpsing the jetty from the crest of a hill, I was thrilled by its unexpected delicacy, its absolute prettiness. Smithson’s work is situated in the north arm of the largest inland body of salt water in the western hemisphere, many miles removed from the nearest occupied building and unencumbered by visitor centres, gift shops or signs. I visited Spiral Jetty in 2013, as part of the Land Art trip run by Gerson Zevi to take artists around those canonical examples of the movement located in the deserts of the American southwest. The fear now is that a new and more extreme water shortage means that the pinkish salt bed that surrounds the jetty is too exposed, changing the character of the work. Constructed during a previous drought in 1970, the work was submerged by restored water levels and only emerged again a decade ago.
The fact that it is endemic drought that threatens the Great Salt Lake in Utah, home to Smithson’s beautiful, coiled extension of land into water, is darkly ironic: one human alteration to the landscape negatively impacted by another. In that context the recent debate over whether direct action should be taken to protect Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, perhaps the quintessential work of post-war American Land Art, seems rather like a throwback to the old days.
The vogue is to consider how we might remedy or rein in our inclination to reconstruct the physical landscape of the world to serve our purposes, be they practical or aesthetic. Deliberations over whether we now live in the Anthropocene era – a new period defined by man’s irreversible impact on the geological record – and theoretical movements such as speculative realism – which seeks to consider the world from perspectives other than the human – all reflect the broad consensus that our species has made, and continues to make, considerably too great an intervention into the natural environment. Human intervention into the natural landscape is a hot topic in contemporary art.
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