Spiral Jetty
April 2005
Color Photograph
36" x 24"

Minimum Bid: $500

Jason Edward Kaufman

Bio: Jason Edward Kaufman is the longtime Chief US Correspondent for The Art Newspaper, the art world’s most prestigious news journal. His numerous articles and critical essays address a wide range of issues associated with the culture sector. He also is a photographer who has recorded art and architecture during his extensive travel throughout the world.

Artist Statement: This photograph depicts artist Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Constructed in 1970, Spiral Jetty is the most emblematic work of the 1960s Land Art movement that took art out of commercial galleries and into the vast expanses of the American landscape. The piece is a 15-foot-wide, 1,500-foot-long counterclockwise coil of rocks that curls out from the remote shoreline of Roselle Point into water-tinged red by algae. Its archetypal spiral form relates to seashells, ferns, runic symbols, and galaxies. The piece is also a living record of geologic time that embodies the fragility of the built environment. By the 1980s, rain and snowmelt had submerged the Spiral Jetty under 20 feet of water, making it visible only from the air. From time to time the waters would recede enough for the work to become visible just below the surface, but only in the past decade has a drought led to its re-emergence from beneath the lake. This photograph, taken from a helicopter during a visit to the site in April 2005, records the recently re-emerged earthwork, whose constituent rocks have become encrusted with salt crystals. Spiral Jetty’s presence transforms the visitor’s experience of the immense Western landscape, underlining the humility of human endeavor, the grandeur of the earth, and the enigma of existence.