Secluded Sculptures

Building sand castles is one of the best parts of a visit to the beach. With just a shovel and a pail, you become a sculptor and an architect, carving fortresses in the sand. Just imagine the sandcastles you could build using real construction equipment instead of a small shovel. You could probably even reshape an entire landscape.

We usually think of sculptors molding clay, carving stone, or casting metal. But some artists use the earth itself as a medium. American artist Robert Smithson described sculptures of this kind as earthworks. But like a sand castle, which can wash away with a change of the tide, earthworks usually don’t look the same for very long.

Earth science fascinated Smithson when he was growing up in New Jersey. As a kid, he collected fossils and seashells, proudly displaying them in a “museum” in his basement. This early interest in nature stayed with Smithson, inspiring him to use organic forms in his art.

Smithson’s best-known sculpture, called Spiral Jetty, above, is an enormous spiral that juts into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Created in 1970, it consists of rock, mud, and salt. The monumental coil is 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. The artist chose to create a spiral because it is one of nature’s basic shapes and suggests a galaxy or a seashell. Viewers can experience this earthwork by walking on top of it or boating around it.

Spiral Jetty still exists today, but it has changed over time. In the 1970s, the water level rose, completely submerging the sculpture. When it re-emerged during a dry spell 30 years later, salt residue had stained the rocks white.

Few people visit Spiral Jetty, which is located in a remote part of Utah. Many of Goldsworthy’s works are in inaccessible places as well. For example, Goldsworthy used blocks of snow to build the circular structures on the right in the North Pole. Even a slight disturbance or rise in temperature would cause them to collapse.

So how do viewers enjoy these remote and temporary artworks? Smithson hoped that people would visit Spiral Jetty, but he knew that photographs of it would reach a wider audience. Since Goldsworthy’s work is ephemeral, the photos he takes are as important as the sculptures themselves. In both cases, documentation is a key part of the artists’ process.