THE CLOCK OF THE LONG DROUGHT

 Conceptual art hit the American scene with considerable éclat on Earth Day 1970, as Robert Smithson deployed the last of 6,600 tons of black basalt in the Great Salt Lake to create Spiral Jetty 

 The basalt causeway to nowhere wound out 1,500 feet widdershis out from the shore, through shoals of brine shrimp so dense they did the landlocked lake incarnadine:

Massive as Stonehenge and enigmatic as the Sphinx, Spiral Jetty  was hailed as a work for the ages. 

 But a millennium isn't what it used to be.

Just after the term 'Anthropocene' was coined, the Spiral Jetty waterscape began to change:

Smithson's great earthwork now lies far inland, stranded by a drought climatologists reckon the worst in twelve centuries. It grows more cthonic day by day, sticking out of the arid salt-scape like the broken mainspring of The Geological Clock of the Long Year.  

Though the hour has yet to strike, Spiral Jetty has become a second hand  pointing to how fast climate change is already taking its toll on art.