They arrive at my Salt Lake City apartment in the middle of the afternoon on the tenth of September, 2016, and we’re on the road within minutes. Dani and Sheilah, both art professors in Ohio, are working on their film, Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, and they are in Utah to shoot footage at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Sheilah’s six-year-old daughter, Rose, is with them. I sit up front with Dani while she drives. I met Sheilah at art school in the 1990s, in Nova Scotia, where she and Dani will later wed. We pass through the northern end of the oceanic wash of suburbs that flood the Wasatch front, subdivisions studded with sparkling white temples, stinking oil refineries, horses at pasture, and fast-food outlets. I talk about living in Salt Lake City, which, in 2016—before the wave of true-crime podcasts and the debuts of our Real Housewives spin-off and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—still holds a whiff of the exotic and mysterious.
As we approach Brigham City, I speak about the peculiarities of Mormon conservatism, exemplified in 2016 by the community’s avowed distaste for Trump (which, by the time of the 2024 election, might as well have never existed). That year, my life was shaped largely by the rise of MAGA and its pink-hatted opponents, by climate change and the related shrinking of the Great Salt Lake. I am hopeful, mostly because of my students, who are curious and open-minded and smart. I imagine that they represent, in part, the future of this complicated, troubled nation. I believe that things are getting better, and I frame Utah in these terms as I try to explain this place to my visitors.
The monumental work of land art they are here to see was created by a man from New Jersey. It exists in history as a location in or extension of the late twentieth-century New York art world, where Smithson lived and worked, and which is emphatically not in Utah. It is here, and here is not empty. I do not want to make Spiral Jetty into one of those old landscape paintings that offered up the vastness of the Americas to settlers as if the land were empty, as if there were not already people here. In 2016, Smithson’s Jetty was evidence of the capacity for art and place to be many things at once, even contradictory things. It was more a thing of the future than my art history courses ever suggested it could be. In 2016, this future was a hopeful place, and in the years to come I would remember this trip to the Jetty with Sheilah and Dani and Rose with a baffled sort of awe at the clarity it brought. The day’s weirdness and delights would come to represent the possibility that unexpected—even unwanted—encounters might yield startling beauty. From the vantage of 2025, when those in power have deemed complexity and contradiction unpatriotic, I look back at this hopeful version of the future with longing. After pandemic lockdowns, the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, an insurrection at the US Capitol, Trump’s return to the White House, and the subsequent gutting of democratic norms and institutions, looking forward begins to feel like looking back into authoritarianism’s dark history.
Dani and Sheilah discuss their shoot as our vehicle crawls along the dirt road toward Rozel Point, a plume of dust rising behind us. Dani suggests perhaps peeing on the Jetty, but she is afraid that instead of pushing back against the machismo of the earthwork, it would seem P-O-R-N-Y, which she spells out to spare little ears.
“I’d like to dig up a rock,” Sheila says. “Dig up a rock from the Jetty and walk away with it.”
“Yeah,” Dani says. “I’d like to put it on your back and shoot it like that.”
“OK, but I want to get footage of me digging it up and walking away.”
I want to tell them that planning is futile before we see what’s there, but I don’t know their process well enough to intervene so directly.
“Maybe it would be helpful to talk about why we’re doing this,” Dani says. “What is the Jetty? What do we think about it?”
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 2021. Photo by Ian Burnley.
One of us calls it a “seminal work,” and I can’t remember in retrospect if it was meant as a joke. We talk about visiting it as a sort of pilgrimage and discuss the idea of the earthwork as a sacred site for art people. In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” German philosopher Walter Benjamin simultaneously mourns and celebrates the fact that in the age of the camera, the original artwork loses its power, the so-called aura that draws the faithful into its singular presence. Why drag oneself to the thing itself, when its image can be found in a library, on a postcard, on one’s phone? A work that submits only a fraction of its presence to the camera, however—a work like Spiral Jetty—has the power to compel people to seek the specificity of its place; we are drawn by its very inaccessibility.
The commonly told story goes something like this: These artists—Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria et al.—wanted, in marginally different ways, to escape the limitations and corruption of the New York art scene, to connect with the earth, with something real. They worked at the intersections of humanity, industry, and the natural world, and for the most part they avoided romanticizing nature or treating it as a thing entirely separate from history. Sheilah, Dani, and I discuss the gendered sense of domination associated with the act of transforming a landscape, and Dani uses the phrase “raping the earth” a couple of times, but without commitment—there are quotation marks around it. This is a critique I have heard from my students, minus the quotation marks; they are concerned about the environmental damage caused by land art.
This “raping the earth” interpretation is, at least in part, a product of the fact that, except for Holt, these artists were what performance artist Andrea Fraser has called “boys who drove backhoes out into the desert,” men whose cowboy boots and prop planes have become caricatures. “Can we, nonetheless,” someone asks, “read the work as a love affair with the earth, rather than a violation?” We consider the arrogance of turning the earth into your canvas, the ambition of it, the sublimity.
Michael Heizer’s Double Negative. Photo by Elisabeth Nicula.
In later years, I show my students photographs of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) next to images of its huge neighbor in the Nevada desert—the Hoover Dam—to try to help them understand how small these artworks are compared to the transformations of landscape undertaken in the name of the national interest. Spiral Jetty is a scattering of pebbles; it is a toy next to the massive wound of the Kennecott Copper Mine—the biggest hole ever dug by humans—which lies on the opposite side of the Great Salt Lake. In 2016, I don’t know how to say this; I have not yet collected my evidence.
I speak anyway: “You might be surprised. It isn’t the same in person as it is in photographs.”
“Yeah, I understand it has really changed over time,” Dani replies.
“Isn’t that what Smithson intended?” Sheilah asks.
Looking out the dust-covered window at rolling yellow hills, the cows that watch us go by, and the distant glimmer of the lake, I say, “It has changed over time, along with the lake itself, but that’s not what I mean. It’s the landscape. It doesn’t really fit into the photographs.” I feel like I’m telling a secret. Like I’m interfering with the hero’s quest.
As we come within view of the Great Salt Lake, Sheilah says, “It’s like the end of the world.”
It is. The lake has a quality of being “the ends of the earth” in both its remoteness and the apocalyptic strangeness of its landscape, but it also speaks, quite literally, to worlds ending. This was once an ocean teeming with life, but for millennia it has been shrinking, concentrating, thickening, until everything but brine shrimp and nematodes choke on its toxic soup. It is the end of the world because it is the end of life, a distillation into the spectacular simplicity of an ecosystem limited to tiny crustaceans and the seabirds that eat them. This place looks like how I think everything will eventually look when we’ve done all the damage we can, and all the rest of life is left to start anew without us.
When we come around Rozel Point and finally glimpse the Jetty, there is something peculiar about it. I see a flock of tall white birds standing upon it at regular intervals. Moments later I realize that they are not birds but people. This isn’t the handful of visitors I’m accustomed to encountering here, but scores. They range in age from small children to teenagers, and all wear white.
Ahead of us a long line of SUVs occupies the side of the road. We park; opening our doors, we are hit by an unexpected wall of music.
You and I, you and I
We’re like diamonds in the sky
You’re a shooting star I see
A vision of ecstasy…
There is no font in any size capable of communicating the volume that emanates from the massive speakers positioned near the Jetty. The song should vanish into the great expanse of air but does not, reverberating off the basalt-speckled hillside that faces the lake. Instead of Rihanna’s sexy mezzo-soprano, the voices are multiple and high-pitched, bringing to mind animated chipmunks. Cabanas have been erected on the sand between the hillside and the Jetty, where the overheated bodies of parents lounge in canvas folding chairs. The hot air reeks, as usual, of rotting eggs and dead things.
On the shore of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 2021. Photo by Ian Burnley.
A man and woman climb the steep path toward us. He is in front, out of breath, sweat glistening on his forehead.
“What is this?” I ask.
“It’s a music video,” he answers without stopping. The woman stays to talk.
“Is this a religious thing?” Sheilah asks.
“Oh, no, no it’s not. It’s not religious,” the woman replies. Later, my research assistant, Cecilia, would draw my attention to a behind-the-scenes video in which a young girl tells us that “God has formed many diamonds, but he only made one of me and one of you.” Cecilia’s discovery confirmed the deeply Christian vibe of the whole affair, though I’ll only ever guess at the reasons for the woman’s demurral.
“Why here?” I ask.
“Oh, well, because of the song!”
We pause as the piercing lyrics fill the air around us.
Shine bright like a diamond
Shine bright like a diamond
Shining bright like a diamond
We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky.
The whole thing brings to mind a scene from a bleak and beautiful 2014 film Girlhood, about teenagers in the suburbs of Paris: Black girls born into immigrant families, hemmed in by a world bent on whittling the joy out of them before they reach adulthood. There is a scene in which they are gathered in a hotel room, dancing to “Diamonds.” They dance for no audience but one another. At first, they only mouth the lyrics; the only sounds are the beat and the rasping richness of Rihanna’s voice. By the end, the girls’ voices burst out, and they sing joyously into imaginary microphones. When I watched the film, I replayed that scene over and over, lost in its oceanic pleasure. I love pop music for this, the easy and communal joy it evokes—a joy available to anyone willing to sing along.
“You know, ‘Diamonds,’” the woman smiles. “With the water glittering behind them, and the salt, it’s perfect.”
“But why the Spiral Jetty?” I ask. “Does it have any significance?”
The scene from Girlhood occupies my mind, pressing me. On the one hand, the memory of that scene, mentally superimposed over all the pretty white-clad children upon the Jetty, reminds me that art is for everyone. On the other hand, something about the prim, suburban churchiness of the ensemble that has occupied the Jetty prompts my internal censor to shout, “But not for you!” The white clothing, the children arrayed in glimmering water all evoke rites of baptism, which, staged at Spiral Jetty—icon of an aggressively secular art world—seems to me like sacrilege.
“Not really?” The woman’s voice slides up an octave. “It’s just really cool, you know?” (In the behind-the-scenes video, a trio of children introduces Spiral Jetty as an “incredible but almost unknown Utah land structure.”)
The woman continues: “Well, anyways, they’ll be taking a break soon, and so you can go down and see it then.”
I do not thank her for this permission. I am possessive. I consider this more my place than hers, though the territorial battle taking place in my head is over a mere slice of the ancestral homelands of the Goshute and Shoshone peoples. Taking art into the desert was supposed to rescue it from the controlling possession of the institution, and yet I’ve brought my own museum with me, and I want to charge these people admission.
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 2015. Photo by Aaron Brewer
Smithson liked to use the term entropy to talk about the disorderly and uncontrollable qualities of art in nature. Scientists, and the self-consciously scientifically informed, have pointed out that Robert Smithson didn’t really understand entropy—that he was talking about a change in the positions of things (such as, say, the washing away of rocks piled up to create a sculptural object)—rather than about thermodynamics and energy conservation. But in 1970, entropy was a popular way to think about things other than thermodynamics. In his book Expanded Cinema, published that same year, media theorist Gene Youngblood uses the idea of entropy to explain the danger of looking back upon the past with too much fondness. If we try to prevent change, he argues, if we are too stuck on the old meanings of things, we lock ourselves into a closed system, and we fail to adapt to the inevitable changes to the world around us—resulting in increased entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is at its highest in a closed system, one without adequate feedback and adjustment.
In his 1967 essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Smithson sought to explain his own understanding of entropy by using what he called “a jejune experiment.” The exercise involves imagining a sandbox with “black sand on one side and white sand on the other.” He went on:
We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.
This story never taught me much about either entropy or Smithson’s work—the sand is, in the end, still sand in a box. Yet I can’t help thinking of all the photographs in art history textbooks and on the internet that continue to show us Spiral Jetty as it was when Smithson created it. Are these elements of a closed system, in which all the potential energy and meaning of the work is forced into a state of inevitable decay? I think also of my own sense of what is right in relation to the Jetty. I am, certainly, rejecting change and encouraging entropic decay if I seek to police the use of the earthwork, to fence in its meaning, just as much as any museum or educator that clings to the ideal, early images. I went to art school; I am not a scientifically informed person, but I have the sense that Youngblood’s version of entropy is, if not more accurate than Smithson’s, then surely more relevant to Spiral Jetty, around which culture and environment have transformed in ways that cannot be explained through the parable of the sandbox.
I’ve never seen the water so far from the Jetty as it is on this day in 2016, though it has been creeping away year by year, for as long as I’ve been here. It must be at least a half mile distant. The first time I came, in 2011, with a painter from Berlin and an editor from New York, the water was so high and pinkly opaque with salt and dead shrimp that only the tops of the largest rocks were visible. I grew dizzy as we tottered around on their tips. In 2014, when I went with a sculptor from Los Angeles, it was picture perfect. The water was so still and the horizon so blurred by distant mist that the Jetty seemed to be floating in endless blue nothing. If it had not kept changing like this, I would not have kept returning.
As we walk through the clusters of cabanas, we pass a boy a bit older than Rose who draws our attention to a shape in the sand. It is a spiral, about three feet across, constructed of a single line of stones.
“Oh, wow! You made your own Spiral Jetty!” I say. Rose watches, and he replies to her more than to me.
“This is the real one,” he says, pointing first to his construction and then Smithson’s, “and that one is the copy.” Rose frowns. I lean down and whisper to her, as we walk past, “He’s making a joke.”
From the Jetty’s tail we watch the choir wrap up after its final take. Sheilah and Rose are holding hands in the sandy trough that, in the absence of water, acts as the negative space defining the Jetty. They walk slowly into the center of the spiral as the children rush past them toward the distant lakeshore. Sheilah, long-limbed and sharp in form and feature, wears a narrow denim skirt and a black T-shirt. Rose wears a flowered dress. Their attire distinguishes them from the white-clad bodies buzzing around them, as does their pace and the direction in which they move. It is like watching two film strips of the same location at different times playing atop one another.
Eventually, we follow in the choir’s wake, moving toward the lake in fits and starts, our group of four pulling apart and coming together. As we approach the distant water, Rose kicks at the salt forms that rise out of the sand; they crumble easily. As we progress, they grow larger, swell, and burst—splitting into glittering crevices of salt-white teeth.
Like a shooting star I see
A vision of ecstasy . . .
These crystalline jaws give way to substantial fissures, as chunks and sheets of hard salt push up out of the ground. We find fist-size clusters of white crystals, and Rose delights in bashing them against the ground, testing their solidity. She lifts a fragment to her mouth, tastes it, and grimaces: “It’s too strong!” She clutches it in her hand as we walk. The further we go, the harder these fragments become, the more actively they separate from the sand.
On the shore of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 2016. Photo by Sarah Hollenberg.
Eventually, thick white sheets of salt replace the sand entirely. We turn back to look at the Jetty and see what a small thing it is, this structure, which, installed in a museum, would be mammoth in both scale and significance. It looks like a mote out here, a gesture not of creative power but of impotence in the face of geologic time.
As we come within a few dozen yards of the water, the salt changes form once again. It piles up in flaky white banks shaped by lapping water. It should look like snow but does not. The way it reflects the light is literally dazzling—I can’t quite focus my eyes when I look at it. It has a shimmer and sparkle that I had thought only possible by using special effects. The One Voice Children’s Choir is far off in the distance, along with its retinues and my irritation. It has taken only as long as the walk from the Jetty to the water for the weirdness of the choir’s presence to become something delightful, a fascinating—if invasive—species.
Later, our backs to the water, Sheilah and Dani and I face the Jetty with the hillside rising behind it. Rose squats among the black stones of the earthwork’s outermost spiral, scraping sand into a pile. She picks up a rock, a smooth black oblong, larger than an adult fist. Standing, she raises the rock above her head and drops it down into the sand-pile. She does this repeatedly, the first few times tentatively lowering the rock from above her head to waist height before letting go, then growing more confident, lifting and throwing it down with increasing force. As she does this, she says: “Look, I made this . . . A machine made this. This is a machine . . .” She is holding the rock aloft. “A machine is doing it. My body is the machine!” She hurls the rock down with all her strength.
Rose is a quick, pink machine of destruction, simultaneously fragile and all-powerful in her small transformations of the landscape. She reminds me of the great clanking bulldozers and dump trucks Smithson used to create the Jetty—of the way that their noises are juxtaposed against the soft splash of water in his film Spiral Jetty (1970). In this moment, her small form seems to embody all the contradictory things that art can be if we let it do its thing. Much later, I remember the dinosaurs the film frequently references. Did they have the chance to adapt to the transformations that took them? Were they looking too lovingly at the past to see the awful future hurtling toward them? Or did they watch it come, paralyzed and hopeful that the storm would pass?
Walking back through the mass of awnings and chairs, I pause by the little Jetty. I notice that one of the stones used is a sort of boomerang shape and constitutes a full third of one of the spiral’s curves. I am pleased by this. The little boy, who is still there, repeats the only words we’ve heard him say: “This is the real one, and that is the model.”
“You are joking,” Rose tells him.
The author would like to thank the ReStacks, Rose, and Cecilia Root for their contributions to this story.
