"We know the jetties work".
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".
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. .
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.
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.
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.
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".
"We have people come in all the time and ask where the 'Spiral Jetty' is," said Noel Christensen, who works at the nearest gas station, 30 miles away, and took her four children there to show them Rozel Point one day late last summer.
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.
