![]() Our ambition is to become the hub of all things Holt and Smithson. Holt/Smithson Foundation was willed into being by Nancy Holt in 2014. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops their distinctive creative legacies. Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973) transformed the world of art and ideas, recalibrating the limits of art. In June 2023 the last dispatch from this station of the World Weather Network will be a commissioned poem responding to these ever-changing conditions. The first image dispatch will be of Spiral Jetty at dawn on June 21, 2022. In its half-century lifetime, Spiral Jetty’s visibility and relationship to the site has changed as the waters of the lake have dried.įor the World Weather Network Holt/Smithson Foundation will send dispatches from Spiral Jetty, sharing unseen film footage from its construction, as well as images of the earthwork immersed under water, of its reappearance in 2002 covered with salt crystals, and of the situation today. The current water level of the lake is at the lowest it has ever been since records began, following years of sustained drought and water diversion. Smithson’s earthwork is located at Rozel Point, on the north arm of Great Salt Lake, the eighth largest terminal lake in the world. In 2022, fifty-two years after it was created, Spiral Jetty is a barometer for the climate emergency. Constructed from 6,650 tons of rock and earth, the spiral continuously changes form as nature, industry, and time take their effect. In June 2023 the last dispatch from this station of the World Weather Network will be a commissioned poem responding to these ever-changing conditions.īuilt at the mouth of a terminal basin rich in minerals and nearly devoid of life, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is a testament to Smithson’s fascination with entropy. (The red hue was due the presence of the salt-tolerant bacteria and algae that thrive in the extreme salinity of the lake’s north arm, which was isolated from fresh water sources by the building of a causeway by the railways in 1959.) In his 32-minute film-portrait of the Jetty, Smithson reveals the work’s evolution.For the World Weather Network Holt/Smithson Foundation will send dispatches from Spiral Jetty, sharing unseen film footage from its construction, as well as images of the earthwork immersed under water, of its reappearance in 2002 covered with salt crystals, and of the situation today. Smithson reportedly chose the Rozel Point site because of the blood-red color of the waters and its connection with the primordial sea. It forms a 1500-foot long, fifteen-foot wide, counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.-Robert Smithson.Ĭommonly regarded as American sculptor Robert Smithson’s greatest work, Spiral Jetty (1970) is an earthwork built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. ![]() From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. ![]() This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. ![]() A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear a quake. ![]()
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