Where I began was in thinking about monumentality, how in the '60s and '70s you had these monumental works of art — not the public works, but Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" work in Salt Lake and Walter De Maria's "The Lightning Field".
He said: "They ranged in costs from £5,000 to £20,000, they've been things like surfacing the Herm jetty, some work at Saints Bay, some temporary work at Vazon".
True, there are piers in Scotland and Northern Ireland, yet these are very much working jetties for ships, ferries and trawlers, not people taking their leisure.
The fact that Smithson died young, and not long after completing the Jetty, gives the work and the place a haunted quality, though in an otherworldly rather than morbid sense. .
Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities.
And with the creation of his greatest work — "Spiral Jetty," the huge counterclockwise curlicue of black basalt rock that juts into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah — he certainly put that conviction to the test.
This work, titled Spiral Jetty, can still be seen periodically, depending on the water level.
Last fall, the artist Tacita Dean showed a film entitled "JG" at the Firth Gallery, in London, inspired by her correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard, regarding connections between Ballard's work and "Spiral Jetty".
Later that year, Artforum featured another monumental work, Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," an "immobile cyclone" of boulders jutting out from a desolate coast of Utah's Great Salt Lake.
But here is an artist who magicked, djinn-like, a cheap bed into the Saatchi Gallery, whose strength of damaged will turns notes about her gran, snapshots of her uncle, condoms, blue, remembered jetties and snatches of sexual abuse into works of art.
