Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," a 30-year-old piece of so-called "earth art" has re-emerged from the bed of Utah's Great Salt Lake due to the drought being experienced in much of the Western United States.

Here is an excerpt from Robert Smithson's essay 'Sedimentation of the Mind:'

The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into descrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other - one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I call 'abstract geology.' One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason...
Slump, debris, slides, avalanches all take place within the cracking limits of the brain. The entire body is pulled into the cerebral sediment, where particles and fragments make themselves known as solid consciousness. A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched.