Robert Smithson: the epic life of an American enigma

His masterpiece Spiral Jetty took psychedelia back to nature, but Smithson was once a city boy dazzling New York with his porn pastiches. A new show revisits a legend’s unlikely beginnings

Robert Smithson is one of the most enigmatic artists of the late 20th century. In 1970 he created Spiral Jetty, a snail-like coil of heaped stones that extends far out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This modern monument in the middle of nowhere (for years it vanished under the lake, only to resurface in recent decades; to actually see it is an epic quest) is one of the very few artworks of our age that most people would instantly and unerringly call a masterpiece.

When Smithson built Spiral Jetty, he reinvented the stone age. Its mysterious marking of the landscape deliberately resembles the prehistoric architecture of neolithic Britain, the banks of Avebury and sarsens of Stonehenge. It also has forebears in the Americas, from the Nazca lines of Peru to Ohio’s Serpent Mound. This neo-primitivism lives on in art, from James Turrell’s continuing bid to turn Roden Crater in Arizona into an astral observatory (or temple) to Olafur Eliasson’s current efforts to place 12 huge lumps of Arctic ice in the heart of Paris.

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