Admission is free, but you will need a full tank of gas and four-wheel drive.
In the most famous pictures of Robert Smithson ’s massive earthwork “ Spiral Jetty”,the hilly coil of black basalt and limestone protrudes through the surface of theGreat Salt Lake . In many of these photos , the lake takes on a recondite crimson hue thanks to the local plankton . In others , it look more like a cloud - over mirror after a hot shower . I ’d seen both version during slideshows in undergraduate art history classes , and that ’s how I ’d pictured it ever since .
park at anI-80rest stop , I did a quick Google search for precise directions and incidentally discovered my mental image of the waterlogged study were no longer accurate . patently , " Spiral Jetty " had dried out , left to bake on the shore as extend drought forced the lake to recede . But I did n’t worry . After years of shouldering my way through the museums of the world , guide an elbow to the ribs in front of Manet ’s " Olympia " and an accidental uppercut at theSistine Chapel , I was in search of , if not artistic purdah , then at least an art experience marginally more contemplative than Wrestlemania . If that take drive hundreds of stat mi to and through the salt flatbed of northwestUtahin the midsummer oestrus , then so be it .
First some backstory : Beginning in the sixties , a mathematical group of primarily American artists cross with the mercantilism , stagnation , and insularism of the graphics mankind adjudicate to make artworks in and of the innate landscape . The campaign was ring Land art , and among its proponents were a couple key out Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt , who were first introduced while the former wastripping on peyote .
“Spiral Jetty” as seen from above.|Denney Fifield/Shutterstock
After marry in 1963 , the twosome journey extensively through the American West scouting website where Smithson — who once compare museum drift to“asylums and jails”—could create freely . A 1968 trip through the Nevada desert was revelatory for Holt , who later call back it as “ an overwhelming experience of my inner landscape painting and the knocked out landscape painting being identical . ” The two were creative partners from the start . Together they parody bicoastal fine art world attitudes in little films andpurchased a tiny island off the seashore of Maine purely for art ’s sake . Holt helped document the construction of " Spiral Jetty " in April 1970 , capturing lighter moment ( like Smithson step in a tar seep ) amidst the otherwise heady esthetic process ; Smithson wasby Holt ’s sideas she made her own nature - centric artworks in rural Montana and the woods ofDartmoor National Park in England .
And then , while reconnoitre a site for a new earthwork in July 1973 , Smithson was killed in a plane crash over Amarillo , Texas . The grieving Holt completed his planned — and unwittingly final — earthwork , then threw herself into the project that would become " Sun Tunnels . "
She cross Arizona and New Mexico in search of the perfect location , only to eventually find the idealistic site back in northwest Utah , just 100 miles west of " Spiral Jetty . "
The artists in question.|this is tomorrow
Taken together , " Sun Tunnels " and " Spiral Jetty " constitute a love story . And find out them might be the least commercial art experience in the US . There are no gift shop , no unveiling fees , no parking structures , and no nearby attractions . As it turned out , the remote location is itself an uttermost if effective var. of bunch ascendency . It practically forces you to contemplate the artworks , but also the planet , the sun , geological clip , and yourself .
Smithson and Holt empathise the business leader not just of a huge landscape painting but of this especial stretchiness of Brobdingnagian landscape in Utah . I visualise that whatever they regard in it was improbable to have been swept aside by recede water levels alone . Undeterred by my early Googling , I forge on to see for myself .
Nothing delineate the two - lane route to " Spiral Jetty " cry eminent art . There are fields of solar panel and a semi - obscured industrial plant with a signaling gasconade it as a NASA equipment supplier . Turning off the independent road , I passed a lodge with two locomotive locomotive engine parked out back , built to commemorate the nearby pass completion of the transcontinental railway line in 1869 . Here the route turned to gravel , and 15 mile later it absolutely - terminate into a shit fate . Down a rocky incline at the lot ’s edge : the stem of a 1,500 - foot coil , bone juiceless as promised .
The area around “Spiral Jetty” seems borderline apocalyptic and acutely uninhabitable to the author.|Photo by Elle Carroll
A bloodless tone arm truck roll in behind me , out of which come out a man and charwoman . They walk down the slope and over the dry bank to the water ’s boundary , then turn around , got back into their motortruck , and leave behind . I wondered if I had just been privy to a creative if slightly ill - advised date . Despite the sure role Holt and Smithson ’s creatively prolific marriage played in his planning and construction of the earthwork , absolutely nothing about " Spiral Jetty " or the surrounding landscape suggests romance .
It does , however , feel borderline apocalyptical and acutely uninhabitable . In the rut , the mountains on the opposite shore appear to tremble and hover slightly over the lake ’s surface . There is no impertinent water , no shelter , and precious few signs of life . A few clean snort attend on the wind overhead . Underfoot , the occasional dead moth , sugarcoat over with salt and embedded in the mawkish pink shoreline .
I walked along the edge of the spiral , which has a meditative outcome but not a ease one . When Smithson ’s sometimes gallerist ( and heiress to the 3 M portion ) Virginia Dwan visited the employment , she called it “ infernal , ” and she was right : thereissomething sinister about the size and place setting of " Jetty . " Its late desertification only heightens this impression . Smithson intended " Spiral Jetty " to meld with the lake and the landscape painting , and for several years it was completely submerge . Its exposure serve as an unconventional barometer of climate change and factory farm ’s catastrophic outcome on the lake , whichhit a record humiliated water level in 2022 and will fall three feet this summertime alone . One Utah lawmaker call in its on-going depletion “ an environmental nuclear bomb . ”
“Wendover Will” greets the author as she prepares to rest between seeing the two artworks.|Photo by Elle Carroll
Rather than endeavor to see both earthworks in one day , I made my way to a motel in Wendover , a lowly Utah town ( population : 1,135 ) situated on the Nevada border . It ’s easy to tell where Utah end and Nevada begin , what with the front door of multiple casinos sitting spitting distance from the state line . And if that is n’t indicant enough , there ’s also “ Wendover Will , ” the 63 - foot tall atomic number 10 cowhand who winks while welcoming you to the town of which he ’s a namesake .
Rather than mislay my gas money at a twenty-one table , I filled my storage tank on the Utah side and took the I-80 exit for theBonneville Salt Flats Speedway . I follow the unpaved track of TL Bar Ranch Road for the better part of two - and - a - half hour , inching onward for the sake of the car ’s shocks , the birds leap out of the bushes unnervingly cheeseparing to the windshield , and the rabbits and mice flit across the dirt road . An abandoned cherry railroad car at the wayside had clearly been used as target practice by rowdier caravan . A tumbleweed bounce lazily nearby , completing the picture . When I finally arrived at Holt ’s 40 - acre plot in the Great Basin Desert , I regain what I ’d searched for : total artwork - adjacent solitude .
Consisting of four 22 - ton , 18 - foot - long concrete tunnels set in an ‘ X ’ shaping and aligned with the sunrise and sunset on the solstices , " Sun Tunnels " carry three years , a full expression crew , two engineers , an astrophysicist , and an stargazer to complete . It ’s famously breathless when adjust with the first light and sunset of the solstice , but beautiful anytime the sun shines through the tunnel ends and the hole cut into the sides . luminousness and shadow changes bod in tandem with the turning earth , bringing into focus the fundamentally primordial connection between clock time and light .
“Sun Tunnels” makes visitors aware of the connection between time and light.|Photo by Elle Carroll
But with the afternoon sliding into dusk , I was taken by other component : the abject hum from the wind fellate through the tubes , how the work frame the circumvent quite a little and desert , and the unexpectedly pleasant shelter it put up .. It actually seemed antithetical to " Spiral Jetty , " which entrust me feeling ego - consciously deadly and exposed . Standing at the axis of the four tunnels anchored me physically and mentally . It matte up like being alone with the root word elements of life on earth : clock time , clean , air , and blank space . Holt think of for this to happen : “ The center of the work becomes the center of the world , ” she write inthe accompanying essayfor the April 1977 issue ofARTFORUM . On the way out , I meet a single Union Pacific hand truck , and rive over to get it happen . The driver double - tap his brake lights in thanks .
By the time I made it back to Wendover , swarthiness had long since fall and any local restaurant not located inside a casino had closed . I laid in bed and peruse the " Sun Tunnels " geotag on Instagram , scrolling through photos of the gatherings that take place on the solstice , of people posing together in and on the tunnels , and of nighttime shadow - put excursions using colored flashlights . Here was grounds that other hoi polloi had made this same pilgrim’s journey before me , and done it in groups , on dirtbikes , or with an acoustic guitar in towage . And even I , who ’d particularly savour my solitude there in an art - flavored binge of misanthropy , had to let in receive this artwork together look like a nice time .
