Ian Matteson Photo

Summer is always a good time to go on an adventure with your friends and find places or explore places you have never been. From just a park down the street that you have never wandered through to taking a trip to on of the earths greatest monuments.  This time we all decided to go out to Spiral Jetty, a Robert Smithson art installation piece located on the northern part of the Great Salt Lake. After learning about it for the last few years in Art History and having it in our backyard of Utah made this even more satisfying to see in real life.

” Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is located on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Using black basalt rocks and earth from the site, the artist created a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that stretches out counter-clockwise into the translucent red water.Spiral Jetty was acquired by Dia Art Foundation as a gift from the Estate of the artist in 1999 ” (http://www.spiraljetty.org/).

It was a long haul to get there as well as one treacherous road, regardless it was an amazing day to be out on the waterfront hanging out with your best friends. My take on this art piece after seeing it is that the earth work that he did makes a point to have art in anything even if its just the land we walk on but this place was truly unbelievable. The location is a place no one would ever travel to unless it had a reason to be a destination, the Salt Lake no longer seems a lake it’s an ocean with massive mountains erupting out of water. The water and mountains go for miles until the only thing you can see is the curve of the earth, this is why I think Robert Smithson chose this location and the amazing design of the Spiral Jetty.

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