Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty.(Brief Article)(Book Review)

Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty EDITED BY LYNNE COOKE AND KAREN KELLY. Univ. of California/Dia, $39.95 (208p) ISBN 0-520-24554-7

Robert Smithson's monumental Spiral Jetty (1970) is a 1,500-foot-long coil of earth and basalt that extends into the water from the northern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. As if that massive construction were not enough, Smithson's project also includes a poem-like essay and an avant-garde short film. In other words, like many iconic works associated with the Minimalist art movement, its simplicity is deceptive; there's a lot of theory under all those rocks. Cooke and Kelly's beautiful and exhaustively compiled book does an admirable job of …