![]() “That’s the interesting thing about land art, is that its meaning changes as the world changes around it,” Coolidge said. It would decay and change, just as its surroundings would decay and change.Īccording to Smithson’s writings, though, that was kind of the point. ![]() ![]() He knew a piece like “Spiral Jetty” wouldn’t stay pristine. Smithson wished to explore that duality in his work. According to Matthew Coolidge, president of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Smithson fundamentally understood the dual relationship between construction and destruction - “sides of the same coin, and you couldn’t have one without the other,” Coolidge told the Deseret News. Smithson was also fascinated by entropy - a concept about decay that gained increased prominence during the middle part of the 20th century. Interacting with such a huge piece requires a shift in perception, which then shifts how one experiences the entire world that surrounds it. In an artistic context - and especially with a work like “Spiral Jetty” - phenomenology is about interacting with art works much larger than one’s own body, and having one’s senses heightened because of it. Robert Smithson was becoming increasingly well known in the New York art world during the 1960s when he conceptualized “Spiral Jetty.” Smithson wanted to make art that wasn’t confined to a normal gallery space - an extension of the “phenomenology” concept that previous artists like Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne had explored. Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York “I think it was just unimaginable to so many artists that had been working in their studios and creating works that you hang on a wall, or smaller sculptures.” “Just the amount of work, and how can that many tons of basalt and earth be pushed and shaped along a shore? How can an artist do such a thing these days?” she said. And the piece’s sheer magnitude inspired numerous artists who got sucked into its orbit. Its construction, Kivland said, was an enormous feat. “The magnitude of the effort, I think, was also part of (‘Spiral Jetty’ creator Robert Smithson’s) legacy,” said Kelly Kivland, a curator at the Dia Art Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit that oversees care for “Spiral Jetty” and numerous “land art” pieces around the world. It’s a strange piece of art, with an equally strange history that continues to evolve. The Deseret News spoke with a few experts on the enormous landmark. ![]() That piece of art is the “Spiral Jetty” - a swirling, 7,000-ton landmark off Rozel Point in northern Utah, built of salt crystal, mud and basalt rocks, that stretches more than 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. There’s something underworld about this particular spiral.” SALT LAKE CITY - The New York Times called it “the most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh.” The artist who designed it said it was “the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence.” And the woman who financed it said it was “very primal, almost a kind of Luciferian sort of art. ![]()
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