How Utah’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ Is Drawing Attention to the Climate Crisis | Travel

This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News.

In 1972, just two years after it was completed, “Spiral Jetty” all but disappeared from view. Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork was created at a time when the water levels of Utah’s Great Salt Lake were unusually low, making it easy to discern the sculpture’s vortex-like coil of black basalt rocks. But when heavy rain battered the area, the lake swelled and engulfed the spiral. It was the start of a three-decade-long period during which “Spiral Jetty” was largely submerged, save for a few brief reappearances; the waters at one point covered the rocks by 16 feet.

Smithson knew the Great Salt Lake and the surrounding desert was a precarious, if not altogether hostile, environment for his ambitious art project. Located on the lake’s northeastern shore, “Spiral Jetty” is set amid a barren landscape bifurcated by railway tracks and littered with abandoned oil rigs.

But what Smithson, who died in 1973, could not have anticipated was that the Great Salt Lake, amid record drought, would shrink by two-thirds. Since 2002, the spiral has been bone-dry, its 6,650-ton mass of rock situated atop cracked, sun-scorched earth.

“This is an earthwork that changes as the world around it changes,” said Lisa Le Feuvre, the executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which is named for Smithson and his wife, the artist Nancy Holt. “It has consistently and persistently inspired artists of other generations.”

Now, arts organizations around the world are leveraging the “Spiral Jetty” and other landmarks to help people connect climate change to places they hold dear. The World Weather Network, an alliance between the Holt/Smithson Foundation and 27 other institutions, has set up “weather stations”—artworks, landmarks, regions or actual weather stations—to serve as jumping-off points for exploring changing weather patterns.

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