Salt covered basalt rock & algae red water


In 1999, the Spiral Jetty was given as a gift from Robert Smithson’s estate to the Dia Art Foundation, where it has been under its supervision ever since. Ironically or tragically, depending on how you view it, the Dia is also trying to save another seminal land art work by Walter De Maria, entitled "Lightning Field". Threatened by real estate and industrial developers, the Dia’s goal is to raise 1.1 million dollars to essentially buy off the over-zealous land owner, and insure, according to an April 8, 2008 article in The Art Newspaper, “the right to restrict real estate and industrial development. This would create a three-mile radius around the installation. The restrictions on the property will bind all future landowners and become part of the chain of title for the estate.” If you haven’t guessed by now, and despite whether or not you like art, it too needs to be preserved and protected – maintained – much like any other institution (private or governmental) or someone’s personal property and heritage.

It is very difficult to argue aesthetics over financial gain, but it needs to be done and needs to be put into a proper perspective. It isn’t a matter of comparing apples and oranges, but a matter of one industry threatening the livelihood of one artist. The Spiral Jetty, if anything, is an important reminder of the power of art in the right context. The need to create for an artist, any artist, is as strong and as powerful as any entrepreneurial adventure. Art is the intangible vs. the tangible; food for the soul and mind vs. cold hard cash; a beautiful sunset, the smell of your lover’s perfume vs. entropy – it is all this and much more – passion, creativity, ideas, expression, your individuality, and your essence as a human being. Art is not a game of chance, it is not haphazard, it is not play time, but it is real, well planned, and generally very good. Bad art is none of these things. It all comes back to the ideas and the source of their inspiration. Art is there to create something you’ve never seen before. It is a Muse you bring to life. This is what Smithson had to say about Rozel Point when he first glanced upon it:

As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty.” And this: “My dialectics of site and non-site whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still. The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. [From The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt]

But, there are sceptics. Those include the owners of 50,000 acres or so of open leased land ripe for oil exploration and development within the Great Salt Lake region, and one company in particular, Pearl Montana Exploration and Production, LTD who has allegedly filed a permit to do just that, five miles from Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. This would of course, interrupt the aesthetics and viewing line of “the lake [that] became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence.” It would be the death of poetry as we know it. You might say to yourself, “Who cares, it’s just an oil rig, and besides, it takes an eternity to travel the fifteen miles of dirt and gravel road, avoiding potholes and basalt rocks, nobody is going to make the effort!” You might be right, but yet the Spiral Jetty exists in all its beauty and is now an integral part of the lake’s Pleistocene history.

The biggest difference however, between Smithson’s jetty and oil exploration is the level of harmful intervention and disruption it causes to its surrounding environment. Not to mention its cost. I have no data on how much Smithson spent in 1970 to build the Spiral Jetty. I can only imagine that it is infinitely less than what Pearl Montana will be spending to get the “heavy oil” out of the ground. From the Friends of Great Salt Lake website:

The type of oil in the West Rozel field is commonly referred to as a “heavy oil” and the oil is tar-like in viscosity and contains a great deal of impurities, including over 12 percent sulfur. Because this oil is so thick, it is often lumped into the same category as tar sands for discussion purposes and, like tar sands, is difficult and expensive to extract from the ground. In-situ pumping of tar sands typically involves either the injection of super-heated steam or dilution of the oil through chemicals in order to facilitate pumping to the surface. With heavy oil, however, most producers attempt to extract the oil using “cold production” which calls for pumping the oil at ground temperature. John Chen, Heavy Oils, SIAM News, Vol. 39, No. 3, April 2006. Using this technique, only a small percentage of the total oil reserves, about 5 percent, is typically extracted. Amoco’s discovery well, for instance, only produced from two to five barrels of oil per hour during production testing and through 1993 a total of only 33,028 barrels of oil have been produced from the West Rozel wells.

This is certainly, hardly enough to alleviate the current oil shortage and high prices at the pump.

The Friends of Great Salt Lake, Utah Waterfowl Association, National Audubon Society, Audubon Council of Utah, including the four local societies of Bridgerland Audubon Society, Great Salt Lake Audubon Society, Red Cliffs Audubon Society and Wasatch Audubon Society, and Utah Airboat Association all agree that "there are conflicts and risks associated with development of these oil and gas leases, including leaking wells, visual impacts and recreational and wildlife conflicts."

Outside of environmental impacts, the “visual impacts” are much tougher to justify as valid reasons to not drill for oil. Not everything should be sacrificed for art obviously, but neither should our future be sacrificed for oil, when there are several renewable energies to be developed. Which, potentially, might be more cost effective and energy fruitful than trying to get 33,000 plus barrels out of the ground in this one particular spot. It has also been reported that the US is already sitting on 68 million acres of leased land that may not be fully exploited for exploration and drilling – so why look for more? All things being equal, I can only imagine that there are other sites beyond the Great Salt Lake that might have resources that are much cheaper to get and refine and could have a lower impact on the environment. I’m making it sound simple, but it would behoove us to work in areas of already leased land that have a higher priority of success and output. But this still doesn’t address the aesthetics of art and the fate of the Spiral Jetty.



The Spiral Jetty


The story broke earlier this year of potential drilling near the jetty, alerting art constituents everywhere to sound the alarm, and broadcasted on several art blogs such as Art Fag City, Modern Art Notes, boingboing, and many like them, including a passionate letter from sculptor Nancy Holt (who was married to Smithson), but there has since been some debate about whether or not Smithson would be outraged by big oil troubling the waters once again. For the most part, the debate centers around and cites his ideas about entropy. Some argue simply that the jetty wasn’t built to last, and that Smithson knew and somehow desired the process of entropy to overtake his chef d’oeuvre.



Center stage


One particular point of view that epitomizes the discussion comes from David Eubank and his blog, david eubank on art. He says,

I have followed the blogs and news stories and have read about Smithson’s ideas about entropy, the natural system of decay, of systems running down. And I am not the only one who is now asking the question, is saving the Spiral Jetty what Smithson would have wanted? His ideas evolved around the thesis that all systems eventually run down, they waste more energy that is useful in sustaining them, and they decay. Should we then interrupt this premise to save, preserve or restore the Spiral Jetty for our own interests? If the intention of the work was to decay back into nature, which it is, shouldn’t we just leave it alone? Shouldn’t we let nature take its own course?

No we shouldn’t. I believe there are a few simple facts that are being overlooked in regards to Smithson’s intentions for the jetty. The first is that he secured a 20-year lease on that outcropping of land. Had he intended the jetty to dissolve into the lake in a much shorter time, there would have been no reason to prolong the experiment. Besides, the thick coating of salt crystals that line both the inside and outside perimeters of the jetty is, I believe, certainly enough cement to hold it together for many decades to come. Second, the conditions and site, the non-site, was already in his head; he produced this in a 16mm color documentary film (shown in a gallery) combining footage of the actual jetty and films taken in a natural history museum, that linked the two togeher – both “sites” were carefully chosen and interdependant on one another. Thirdly, language, which Smithson viewed very much as sculpture allowed him to construct the jetty in his mind and in actuality, using the building blocks of words, to define, clarify, and probe his relationship to the environment. Language also helped him define his sculptural process and working methadology.



The End


The jetty’s force and energy contained in a spinning counter motion may have been Smithson’s way of reversing the pull of entropy, in some heroic tipping of the balance in favor of life and longevity. Erosion is normal, hundreds even thousands of years; Smithson understood this and used the materials at his disposal, natural materials, pushed up from the Earth – not created by Man. The Spiral Jetty is not a closed system, it was never meant to be shut down; its magnetic draw and beauty will turn forever and ever for the good. An oil rig was never Smithson’s idea of a sculpture.

Nor is it mine. I drove the 15 miles of dirt road – a very short journey considering I had departed earlier that morning from Springdale, Utah (Zion Canyon) – by passing through Golden Spike National Park, and down to the dilapidated oil jetty near the lake’s shore that many mistake for Smithson’s jetty, then promptly turn around and come back, wondering if that was all there was to see (so says the Park Ranger). Verging to the right, and slightly elevated on a small bluff seasoned generously with basalt boulders baking in the afternoon sun, I stop, and gingerly climb down the embankment, joyfully playing “hot lava” with my two children, leaping from one boulder to the next. I then proceeded to walk the jetty’s 1500 foot long coil – faint ghost-like traces of the dumpster’s wheel tracks that had jettisoned their many loads, have fossilized and trace the way like two fingers dragged through dust.

Finally, I stop. I find myself at the center, and while standing in that epicenter, in that vortex, time stops as well. Silence. Only glaring white light now, frozen salt, blackened boulders, a 360° panoramic view of the hillside, Cub and Dolphin Islands, the horizon, lake meeting sky, blue sky, red sea, white pelicans, and the faint outline of the northwestern shore of the Great Salt Lake. What I see and felt was, what Smithson saw from the center of his dream, from his own private Idaho:

"North – Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
North by East – Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Northeast by North - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Northeast by East - Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
East by North – Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
East – Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water…” [From The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt]



Icebergs


So what is left to do? According to the Dia Foundation website, the public comment period for Pearl Montana’s alleged drilling application was February 13, 2008: “By that date, the State of Utah received over 3,100 emails and letters, as well as 300 phone calls, from concerned parties in the United States and abroad.” Not what I would call a massive public outcry, but significant enough I suppose, for the art world’s rather individualistic and preservationist attitude. In large part, the Spiral Jetty suffers from a lack of understanding and knowledge on one hand, and a new found interest on the other (due to this current affair), that up until now had waned due to its iconic yet unknown status. The same dilemma that the Statue of Liberty must suffer I’m sure, which most of us probably believe, will always be there until we finally get around to visiting it.

Smithson wanted to get his work outside of the gallery and museum walls and as far away from any “cultural confinement” that he felt could force artists into “fraudulent categories.” He didn’t, as a friend told me recently, “ask for anyone’s permission.” No, he did not, and this is the sort of bravado the art world needs more of today. The fact that the arts intelligentsia wants to bring a renewed interest to the Spiral Jetty for reasons outside of Smithson’s and for the moment, for reasons out of everyone’s control, may not be exactly the kind of unbiased attention he was hoping for. What it does do is bring back the discussion on the importance of art in our lives and the preservation of the precious natural resources we still have available to us, not to deplete them, but to learn, explore, and derive inspiration from them – and I don’t mean using them to fill up your car’s tank.

Here are two suggestions that will help insure that this process of art and life “becomes the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence” and that it continues in good faith and good will: One, go visit the Spiral Jetty. A detailed map of how to get there is available on the Dia website. And two, even though the comment period has officially ended, please continue to write or send an email to the Utah Governor’s office, voicing your opinion. The battle may have started, but the fight still needs to be fought. You can contact Jonathan Jemming, Director of the Resource Developement Coordinating Committee at 801.537.9023 or by email or visit the committee's web page.



Hot lava