Massive sculptures are fascinating and Robert Smithson‘s Spiral Jetty walks the fine line between nature and the artificial. In 1970, he built a 1500-foot long, 15 foot-wide counterclockwise coil out of mud, salt crystals and rocks at the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Like most land art, the Spiral Jetty is a part of its landscape and its affected by the elements: It exists to eventually erode under natural conditions. Since its creation, the jetty has been completely covered and uncovered by water several times, being dependent on fluctuating water levels.

When Smithson set out to build ”Spiral Jetty” in 1970, he hired a contractor and another worker who used two dump trucks, a tractor and a large front-loader to move 6,650 tons of rock and earth from the shore into the water. At 1,500 feet long, the giant spiral is large enough to be seen in photographs taken from space.

Smithson had a precise vision for the project and supervised every step, making sure individual rocks fell in the right spots. ”He would raise each rock up and roll it around, then he would move this one, change that one until it looked exactly right..He wanted it to look like it was a growing, living thing, coming out of the center of the earth.”

The Tate ETC has a great article chronicling a visit to the Spiral Jetty and feelings that it evokes:

Whenever the water of the lake recedes, it leaves salt in its wake. After the recent long drought, it now encrusts almost every inch of the work and a salt bed has risen and hardened within its 1,500ft-long spiral. It appears inevitable that after a few more cycles of high water and drought – probably a matter of decades – the Jetty will disappear completely within a matrix of impacted salt: an art conservation problem for the ages.

 

We visitors could see the process underway. The deep water lay far out in the lake bed, a roseate sea rippling away for miles, its surface torn into whitecaps by the wind. Between the Jetty and the water’s edge were scudding, tumbleweed-like plumes and quivering masses of salt foam, the latter in various stages of coalescence into the hard white ground, still tinged with rosy algae, on which we walked and stood.

Despite the facts, I kept imagining the lake bed and the work as being ice-bound rather than salt-bound, so white has the setting become. Spiral Jetty was not even 35 years old when I saw it, yet the mind could easily accept the thought of it as 3,500 or 35,000 years old. Only a nearby derelict oil rig, the ruins of a speculator’s failed scheme, provides some anchorage in time for the disorientated visitor. That, and the presence of other visitors.

Seeing the work from the nearby ridge, dotted with 30 or 40 people, created a slightly sickening sense both of humankind’s unstoppable dispersal across the planet and of the planet’s, and the larger universe’s, utter obliviousness.

In writings and conversation, its creator emphasised the difficulty of getting a fix on the scale of the Jetty. Now I knew how literally he meant it. From up on the ridge, the sculpture looks gargantuan in its prehensile hold on the lake bed. But set foot on it, and it turns almost intimate, a mere filigree of earth-moving within a desert immensity that lacks all familiar cues to the sizes and distances of things…

Smithson himself did a film on the Spiral Jetty, which you can view on his website (quicktime). A voice-over by Smithson reveals the evolution of the Spiral Jetty and sequences filmed in a natural history museum are integrated into the film featuring prehistoric relics that illustrate themes central to Smithson’s work. Here’s a short Youtube sample:

If you’re planning on visiting it, here are directions to the jetty.

One of the most impressive prehistoric monuments in Britain, the Castlerigg Stone Circle is located in Cumbria, a shire county in the extreme North West of England. While not as well known as the Stonehenge, the Castlerigg circle is a remarkable artifact from the past that was constructed around 3000 BC, making it one of the earliest stone circles in Britain (and maybe Europe).

It’s hard to tell from the pictures but the 38 stones in the circle are quite large. The heaviest stone is around 16 tons and the tallest is approximately 2.3m high. The diameter for the circle is approximately 30m (100ft). A collection of 10 smaller stones are arranged in a rectangle on the south-east side of the ring (something not present in other stone circles).

So why were the stones placed there? What was their purpose? Researchers are generally divided into two camps: The ones that believe that builders of the past were skilled astronomers/mathematicians who carefully designed these circles. And the ones who believe that any geometry or astronomical alignments found are purely accidental, since the stone builders were primitive humans.

There are many different theories about Castlerigg, but much of it is speculation:

2. It’s an astronomical observatory. The tallest stone is in line with Samhain sunrise in early November. Samhain is the cross quarter of the astronomical year, half way between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

    

3. It was a marketplace for the Neolithic stone axe industry. The mountains and stone axes found at the site support this theory.

    

4. It was a gathering point used for religious ceremonies and tribal gathering.

On a more mysterious level, the circle has been the focus of one well-recorded sighting of strange light phenomena:

In 1919 a man called T. Singleton and his friend watched as white light-balls moved slowly over the stones. Strange lights seem to be a recurring theme at ancient sites throughout the world, they may have been one of the reasons ancient man built monuments at specific sites such as this one. There has been a lot of speculation as to their nature and it’s most probable they are part of some natural phenomena.

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Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy album cover really left an impression on me the first time I saw it many years ago. It shows a group of children sprawled out on stone steps, reaching towards the horizon (see above). It has an other-worldly vibe and it was only many years after when I realized that the background in the picture was something that actually existed. I thought it was a painting. But it’s not.

The album cover featured the Giant’s Causeway, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. It’s area is made up of 40,000 interlocking basalt columns… the steps you see are the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. Discovered in 1692 and announced to the world, it became a popular tourist attraction ever since the 19th century.

Legend actually has it that an Irish giant built the causeway to fight a Scottish giant:

Long ago, an Irish giant named Finn MacCool roamed the north coast, where he could look across the narrow sea of Moyle to Scotland. A Scottish giant, Benandonner, was Finn’s greatest rival, challenging his strength and reputation.

 

As the two giants had never met, Finn decided to invite Benandonner to Ireland, to engage in a decisive battle. There was no boat large enough to carry giants, so Finn built a causeway of huge stones across the water so that the Scottish giant could travel on dry land; thus he would have no excuse to avoid the confrontation.

However, as big Ben approached, Finn realised to his horror that his opponent was a larger and more fearsome rival than he anticipated. He fled to his home in the nearby hills, and like any sensible man, asked his wife for advice. Oonagh, a practical woman, disguised Finn as a baby, complete with large nightgown and bonnet. She placed him in a huge, hastily made cradle, telling him to keep quiet and pretend to sleep, as Benandonner’s great shadow darkened the door.

Oonagh brought the Scottish giant in for tea, pleading with him not to waken Finn’s child, Looking at the massive ‘baby’ lying in the cradle, Benandonner took fright, saying that if this was the child, he had no wish to meet the father. He fled back to Scotland, ripping up the Causeway behind him, terrified that the awful Finn might follow him home.

Basalt columns are actually a common volcanic feature and you can see it in many other places like Armenia, New Zealand, Russia and California. I’ve seen a few of them but the Giant’s causeway seems to be most impressive. Here are some pictures of them. Definitely a place to visit in Ireland.

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