Kathleen Merrill Campanolo quotes Smithson’s 1972 footnote about the Spiral Jetty “the land or ground from the site is placed in the art, rather than the art placed on the ground.” Spiral Jetty was created by Robert Smithson in 1970. This earthwork is located at Rozel Point, on the Great Salt Lake. There have been many who argue that earthworks are not art, they are destructive to the land. In this paper I plan to argue the polar opposite, sure in some cases other earthworks have caused destruction, however, the focus in this essay is the Spiral Jetty a beautiful ephemeral work of art that Smithson built as his own memorial. Paraphrasing Clark Lunberry, Spiral Jetty is compiled of rocks in various sizes that are carefully constructed to create a large spiral quite long, and flattened enough to create a path, winding its way out into the lake. Due to the location of this earthwork, it is most often experienced through photography. Lunberry continues on by quoting Roland Barthes, the Spiral Jetty is “a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination”. This work does a fantastical job at fascinating the mind, from the way reflections of light on …show more content…
All throughout arts history there has been much discussion of what each element to an art work means. Not only what means to the work as a whole, but each component individually means as well. In this case, it is not so much the subject matter itself, but the reflecting view, the meaning behind it, “the perpetual movement, drift, and decay of all things in time.” Art in and of itself serves the purpose of documenting history through display emotion provoking images, often a remembrance of the