Hailed by critics, examined by students and sought by art lovers, Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" is featured in all of the art history textbooks, right alongside the Manets and Monets, the van Goghs and van Eycks.
It is, in its own right, a masterpiece.And it is on display in Utah.
But if you do decide to view this piece, take the advice of ranch-hand-turned-art-lover Vern Jenson, who works not too far from where it's on permanent exhibition: "Watch out for rattlesnakes."
"Spiral Jetty," the late Smithson's crowning artistic achievement, isn't on display in the climate-controlled, security-patrolled art gallery of some bustling metropolis. Rather, it sits in a remote corner of the Great Salt Lake, doing what everything else near the lake is doing.
Collecting salt.
"Spiral Jetty" is a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide artwork made of 6,650 tons of black rock. It is built into the north arm of the Great Salt Lake some 15 miles southwest of the Golden Spike National Historic Site.
The left-handed spiral, which turns in on itself twice, has been on display in this vast alkaline gallery since the spring of 1970, the year Smithson hired an Ogden construction company to build it.
However, within two years of the creation of "Spiral Jetty," the rising lake waters covered it, making the artwork invisible (except from aerial views) for the better part of the past 26 years. Many in the art world assumed it had been washed away.
It has only been since 1993, after 10 years of receding water levels, that visitors could see the jetty from the shore, and its re-emergence has brought renewed interest.
"Spiral Jetty" emerged from the Earth art movement of the 1960s, when artists were rebelling against the traditional views of art and taking their works out of the galleries, moving them into the landscape where they were more accessible.
Smithson's widow, artist Nancy Holt (who created "Sun Tunnels" near the Utah-Nevada border), said this public art she, her husband and others were creating went out into the world.
"It's a very open kind of thing," she said. "Traditional art is done for the art system, it's more exclusive."
In her essay "The Immobile Cyclone: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty," Weber State University art historian Angelika Pagel writes: "The Spiral Jetty, built in 1970, has been canonized as the `icon of land art . . . the earthwork par excellence, the quintessential heroic gesture in the landscape.' "
Art historian Hikmet Dogu says the jetty is a seminal piece in the whole Earth art movement, partly because it was so well-docu-mented. Smithson and other artists recorded much of the process, and when it was completed, Smithson produced an essay and a film on the work.
"It's a construction of American art on a level removed from painting," Dogu said. "It's looking at American art and making it big. And using the land."
Yet, as famous as the piece has become in art circles, here in Utah, the piece remains largely unheard of. Even in Corrine, the town closest to this artistic wonder, the reaction is bewilderment more than any-thing else.
"Never heard of it," says a convenience store clerk.
"The Spiral what?"
"You're kidding, right?"
The jetty is no joke to Dogu, who is also a librarian at the Davis County Library's Layton branch. Dogu recently completed her 225-page master's thesis on "An Intermittent Illusion: Local Reaction to Robert Smithson's `Spiral Jetty.' "
After spending a year conducting interviews, collecting photographs, writing and rewriting her thesis, Dogu made her first pilgrimage to the jetty this past March.
"It changed my whole perception of the piece, to actually be in the landscape," she explained. "You can read about things until you drop dead, but when you actually experience it, that makes all the difference."
It was color that first attracted New Yorker Smithson to the Great Salt Lake. Holt said her husband had read about lakes in Bolivia that were reddish in color. When Smithson heard the Great Salt Lake turned red from the algae growing in it, he had to see for himself. After scouting several locations on the lake, Smithson picked the area just off Rozel Point for Spiral Jetty.
Today, Holt lives near Santa Fe, N.M., and visits the jetty on occasion.
"It's a pretty incredible lake in the middle of a desert," she said. "When the sun sets, it's breathtakingly beautiful - you feel like you're on another planet."