Spiral Jetty as a Witness to Change
On the occasion of Spiral Jetty's fiftieth anniversary, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts invited several brilliant Utahns to share their perspectives. The following is a contribution by Jaimi K. Butler and Bonnie K. Baxter from the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
The Great Salt Lake tells a story about change over time. A salty lake such as this modern one has existed in the bottom of the Bonneville basin for the better part of a million years. Occasionally waters rose, contained by glaciers such as the enormous Lake Bonneville during the last Ice Age. But when the earth became warmer, only a shallow salty puddle remained: the Great Salt Lake. The modern lake has experienced the interventions of humans on its shores, damming and segmenting its brine for their purposes. One human, Robert Smithson, intervened by creating an artwork on the lake bed to inspire others. His Spiral Jetty, likewise, comments on change over time.
Smithson used scientific and mathematical language when he planned and executed Spiral Jetty, built into the pink water of the Great Salt Lake. Equation. Coordinates. Desiccation. Variable. Entropy. Bacteria. Matrix. Cubic. Scale. In fact, he had researched physical parameters of the site in thinking about aesthetics. Inspiration came from science, but how much did he understand about this analytical system of knowing? Did he know that terminal lakes vacillate in elevation? Was he aware that rivers feeding the lake bring small amounts of minerals that concentrate in the terminal lake over time? Did he comprehend the coloration of the water would change seasonally as the microorganisms were affected by temperature and salinity? Could he have predicted the impacts of humans in the form of climatic change and water diversions? Perhaps his artwork understands the answers to these questions in a way that the artist could not through its experiences of the Great Salt Lake over fifty years.
We would love to ask Spiral Jetty about its observations of environmental change. For example, it is perplexing that Smithson never commented on a frequent occurrence, noted by today’s visitors to the artwork, of American White Pelicans soaring in the skies above. These birds migrate to Utah from their overwintering grounds in Mexico to breed on the nearby, remote, and solitary Gunnison Island. Although Smithson never wrote about these majestic birds while working on his earthwork in April 1970, the pelicans of recent years arrive in March to begin their annual breeding. We wonder if the pelicans now arrive earlier in the season, a signature of climate change.
Over the last fifty years, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty has witnessed dramatic changes to the lake landscape as an increasing human population began draining the watershed. While the Land artwork hid beneath the flooded brine in the 1980s, reemerging almost twenty years later, the next fifty years will likely hold something very different. Climate studies on the southwestern United States suggest that Spiral Jetty will see an increase in temperature that will impact our water supply. Coupled with projected increases in population, the Great Salt Lake has little hope of recovery. As the lake shrinks and more shorelines are exposed, extensive dust will affect the air quality. Spiral Jetty will sit on a dry lake bed and serve as a reminder when water used to lap the whirling basalt.
The pelicans are victims of this change. The downward trajectory of this shallow lake has connected the island to land, resulting in the encroachment of predators to what was a safe haven. Water availability has also decreased in nearby feeding grounds, making fish scarce. The pelicans’ demise is obvious at the site of the artwork, where you may find carcasses of baby pelicans that cannot fly far enough to catch food for themselves. Smithson noted that Spiral Jetty was “intimately involved with those climate changes and natural disturbances.”[1]
As climate change progresses and science suggests interventions, we should be moved to activism. Once art advocates did what scientists alone could not; in 2008, through an initiative taken up by Smithson’s widow, Nancy Holt, thousands of Spiral Jetty admirers wrote letters to the state of Utah to prevent an oil drilling operation at the Great Salt Lake. Perhaps this work of Land art can once again call forward stewards of the landscape who can advocate for climate change solutions for the human residents of the valley, the pelicans of Gunnison Island, and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.
PELIcam Image courtesy Great Salt Lake Institute at
Westminster College and the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
Visit UMFA’s blog to learn more. For the complete 50 Years Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty publication, click here.
Dia Art Foundation is proud to be the owner and steward of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Dia partners with the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College, Holt/Smithson Foundation, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah to further advocate for Spiral Jetty. The Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands within the State of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources oversees the lake bed where Spiral Jetty is located.
Bonnie Baxter is director of the Great Salt Lake Institute and professor of biology at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she studies photobiology of halophiles (salt-tolerant bacteria) and microbial diversity of Great Salt Lake. She is interested in the astrobiology applications of extremely hypersaline ecosystems, particularly the resistance to ultraviolet light and desiccation by halophiles. Baxter is also dedicated to integration of research in undergraduate science education and to outreach efforts that inspire learning and stewardship. She obtained her PhD in genetics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and completed her postdoctoral research in the department of biochemistry and biophysics at Washington State University in Pullman.
Jaimi Butler is coordinator at Great Salt Lake Institute in Salt Lake City, where she organizes all activities, develops outreach efforts, mentors students, and designs research projects. She studied Great Salt Lake ecology while an undergraduate student in wildlife biology at Utah State University, and graduated with a fisheries and wildlife degree in 1999. As a professional, she worked for a brine shrimp harvest company before joining the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’ Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program. Butler assists many of the faculty projects at Great Salt Lake Institute, aiding in lake sample collection, boat access, and field trip resources.
[1] Robert Smithson, “Conversation in Salt Lake City” (1972), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 298.
