Smithson’s Spiral and other Salty Sites

Built along the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, Spiral Jetty (1970) stands as American artist Robert Smithson’s signature work and perhaps the most famous earthwork ever assembled. The Jetty was inspired, in part, by a visit Smithson made in 1969 to the salt flats of South America’s Atacama Desert, and he lists salt, along with mud, rocks, and water, as a primary medium of the work. Yet salt was the only substance of the four that Smithson did not directly integrate into the work; crystals added themselves only later, via evaporation and the passage of time. Salt is also a prime mover in the two works Smithson completed to accompany the earthwork, a short essay and 16-mm film. And Spiral Jetty was only the latest instance of the artist’s ongoing fascination with the ancient crystalline substance; salt appears in his writings and drawings as early as 1967, and he completed several “Salt/Mirror” pieces from 1969 until his death in 1973, one of which is currently on display at Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst.

What was it about salt, one of the most ubiquitous and seemingly banal substances on the planet, that so inspired Smithson? And what lessons might his salty engagements offer to contemporary debates on planetary-scale computation and logistical capitalism? This talk addresses such questions via Spiral Jetty’s engagements with histories of place and technics specific to Utah, and explores the earthwork as a case study in how “elemental” media open broader vistas on technics and time. 

Bio

Liam Cole Young is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and the author of List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed(Amsterdam University Press, 2017). He is Visiting Professor for Fall 2022 at Aarhus University's Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, where he is finishing a book on media and cultural histories of salt.