![]() ![]() The jetty’s re-emergence played a part in pushing back against an effort to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake in 2008, Loe recalled. The jetty was visible from 1993 to 1997, and was submerged again until 2002 - and has been above the water, and sometimes far away from the water, ever since. The jetty reappeared briefly in 1980, then was covered by water until 1993 at its highest, in 1987, the water rose 16 feet above the rocks. “I often say that art is not there to provide solutions - design provides solutions,” she said.įor many years, starting in 1972, the lake’s water hid the jetty from view. Rather than looking at Spiral Jetty as an object, as one might point to a painting, Le Feuvre suggested the jetty be seen as a field of information. It demands we stop, we think and with that we take account for our interactions with the world.” … I feel that when an artwork is released out into the world, when it leaves the artist’s hands and studio, it then takes on a life of its own.”Īrt, Le Feuvre said, “can encourage us to raise questions. Le Feuvre added, “Smithson’s concern was really about asking questions about how we find our place on the surface of the planet. Smithson, Le Feuvre said, was “always aware that any work he might make, any work anyone might make that sits within the landscape, will change over time.” One of Smithson’s key concepts with Spiral Jetty was the idea of entropy - a scientific term that refers to the “gradual decline into disorder.”Īccording to the Dia Art Foundation, which owns the Spiral Jetty, “Smithson envisioned an artwork in a state of constant transformation whose form is never fixed and undergoes decay from the moment of its creation.” (Rachel Rydalch | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Spiral Jetty shows off as it is exposed from the receding waterline at the Great Salt Lake on Friday, March 25, 2022. Smithson died on July 20, 1973, in a small-plane crash near Amarillo, Texas, where he was scouting a location for a new installation. It was a conversation Smithson never got to finish. … Art can help to provide the needed dialectic between them.” Loe pointed to another Smithson essay, published in 1971, where he wrote: “Art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist. … It’s interesting because is a beacon for climate change, but that doesn’t mean Smithson anticipated that. Smithson, Loe said, “wasn’t an out-and-out environmentalist. In December, President Richard Nixon signed the bill creating the Environmental Protection Agency. The first Earth Day was staged in April of that year. The year 1970 was a significant one in the history of the environmental movement. Smithson hired contractor Bob Phillips and a crew to place 6,000 tons of black basalt rock in a line, 15 feet wide, which emerged from Rozel Point and then into the water in a counterclockwise formation. In the application, he stated the design intent of the jetty: “Its purpose is purely esthetic and it can be viewed from airplane or from the road.” He found it in the Great Salt Lake, and submitted a special use lease application to the Utah Department of Natural Resources. Smithson was seeking a canvas where the water was naturally colored red. “Museums are tombs,” Smithson wrote in a 1967 essay, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums,” implying that artwork went to museums to die. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt - who created the art installation Sun Tunnels in the Utah west desert in Box Elder County - were among the leaders of what was called the “land art” movement, aimed at imposing large-scale artistic vision onto the natural world. (Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) People explore the Spiral Jetty, just south of the Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore, March 25, 2022. “But he wasn’t, ‘In 50 years, here’s what people are going to think about my work.’” “He wanted a very dynamic environment, so the salt crystals would form, dissipate, the colors would change and the water would rise and fall,” Loe said. In her book, Loe - who now teaches at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas - references a quote from Smithson, where he essentially says, “If the Spiral Jetty goes under the water, I’ll just build it up another 15 feet.” Smithson never intended Spiral Jetty to be a barometer of anything, said Hikmet Sidney Loe, a former professor at Westminster College who wrote “The Spiral Jetty Encyclo” (University of Utah Press, 2017), a comprehensive book about Smithson and his most famous work. “Now, it’s very unlikely that the waters will ever reach Spiral Jetty because of the protracted droughts in the Great Basin Desert.” The jetty “is a barometer for the ways in which we are operating in a climate emergency,” said Lisa Le Feuvre, the head of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which oversees the creative legacies of Smithson and his wife, Nancy Holt. “Now, if I stood in that same place, there’s not a chance I could ever throw a rock and hit the lake,” she said. ![]()
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