#Spiral jetty 2016 full

The first took six days of work, using heavy equipment, but two days later, Smithson had Phillips' team redo it - moving 7,000 tons of basalt rock in three days to create the spiral shape that remains today. Smithson actually had Phillips' crew build the jetty twice. He just had in his mind what it should look like. 'I don't think he had done any geology work or anything on it. 'When we got out there, he just took over,' Phillips said.

#Spiral jetty 2016 full

Smithson, in hip-wader boots, was in full command on the site, though. 'There's lots of backhoes buried out there.' 'It's tricky working out on that lake,' Phillips said. Phillips was uneasy about using earth-moving equipment in the muck around Rozel Point, where Smithson wanted to create the jetty. … He just kept saying he knew what he was doing.' 'I kept trying to convince him that he had to follow contracting rules with engineers and surveying and all that kind of stuff. 'I didn't understand what he was trying to do,' Phillips told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2011.

Smithson approached Phillips to hire him to build something in the Great Salt Lake, after other contractors had turned him down. 'The magic of that collaboration is that Bob said yes in the first place.'

'He and Robert Smithson were about the same age, but they really did come from very different worlds,' said Gretchen Dietrich, executive director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. In 1970, the burly Utah contractor, then 30, met the 31-year-old Smithson, a New York-based artist and one of the founders of the 'land art' movement, which took the ideas of artists out of galleries and into the wild. He was known as an expert at construction materials and techniques, and being able to size up how much a job would cost and which company could provide the best source materials. Phillips worked for 40 years in construction, including stints as a bid estimator for Parson Construction and Whitaker Construction.