Suzaan Boettger notes at the end of her book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson that her bond with Robert Smithson (1938–1973) had always included a series of “coincidences” that benefited her career-long research project. As I began reading the monograph, it seemed coincidental that an article on the environmental challenges at the location of his renowned Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake, landed on my desk. In reference to the perils threatening the lake’s survival, this piece offered a nice parallel to Boettger’s study, mentioning that Smithson’s work has a physicality that goes far beyond what is seen on museum and gallery walls, and summarizing the Spiral Jetty as “a place of pilgrimage, a path to walk in a landscape of mirages” [1].
Inside the Spiral explains how this place of pilgrimage was born and uses the project as a metaphor to probe how...