![]() In the distance, looming from the salty shore we saw rotted wooden piers, abandoned shacks, junked components of discarded oil rigs. I recalled Smithson’s gashed gas tank.Īfter nine more painful miles, we were rewarded with a heavenly view: what Smithson called “an uncanny immensity” filled the oval of the front window. All three of us prayed, in our secular ways, that the Prius’s low chassis wouldn’t snag in a rut or puncture a tire. After correcting course, Judith piloted the car on the heavily washboarded road (we’d feel it in our bones for days) at the pace of an oxen-drawn covered wagon - appropriate homage to her pioneer Mormon ancestors. It was the young guide at the Golden Spike National Monument (where Laurie left her wallet, we later realized) who kindly sketched out a little map (“Bear right at the fork … about 7 miles…”), which didn’t prevent us from managing a wrong turn onto a bumpy road that dead-ended at a barbed-wire fence festooned with “No Trespassing” warnings. It was here, four years after the Civil War ended, that two locomotives came together for a ceremony marking completion of the country’s first transcontinental railroad, boosting one way of life (white settlers heading west) and continuing to destroy the land and livelihood of the indigenous Plains inhabitants. We passed through Promontory, Utah - hardly a town. The United States was then - and still is - a country at war. Vietnam was raging when Smithson built the jetty. We passed the Thiokol Propulsion Plant, where in the ’60s and ’70s, workers turned out LGM-30 Minutemen intercontinental nuclear missiles. It was the sixth day of our trip when we turned onto Utah Highway 83 to find Spiral Jetty. We stopped in Ely, Nevada, where ear hustling the tired women shopping for baby clothes at the thrift store revealed that the town’s inhabitants were beaten down by more than just the unrelenting wind. A rickety wooden fence surrounds the lonely site, and some of the graves are bounded by their own low fences - perhaps an attempt to claim some space at human scale in the vastness of the surrounding desert. Tin plaques hammered with their birth and death dates are affixed to simple knee-high wooden crosses. The historic cemetery at the edge of town is populated with the graves of 17 men who perished in a 1911 mine fire. Our route took us through Tonopah, a Nevada casino town, once one of the richest silver booms in the West. We switched drivers, listened to Sam Cooke’s greatest hits and sang along with the score from Oklahoma as the road rose and dipped through the vistas of the Great Basin and Range. So much of the United States, unpopulated by humans. We drove through the rural West for hundreds of miles - unmarred by billboards, graced by hoodoos. I’d memorably visited another site maintained by Dia in New Mexico years earlier - Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field - and, late this spring, on a road trip with two pals, Judith and Laurie, I finally got my chance to visit Spiral Jetty. I’d long wanted to visit Smithson’s remote creation, now under the aegis of the Dia Art Foundation, which protects and preserves some of the United States’s 20th-century land art masterpieces. What questions does a spiral pose? Or, what questions can one ask of a spiral? Those rocks, plus tons of mud and salt crystals, went into the creation of his Spiral Jetty, which, in aerial photos taken the year it was built, looks like a giant backward-coiling question mark limned by the pink waters of the lake. He was dazzled: “It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still.”Īfter securing a 20-year lease, Smithson returned in April that same year with a team of front loaders to wrest six thousand tons of basketball-sized black basalt rocks from the nearby hills. After fixing a gashed gas tank, the duo then set off for Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake’s northern shore. At another site near Syracuse, Utah, on the eastern side of the lake, they were shooed off by angry ranchers. ![]() Smithson and his wife, artist Nancy Holt, scouted Great Salt Lake’s southern shore but, as he later wrote in his 1972 essay “The Spiral Jetty,” the water wasn’t red enough. He wanted a site that would itself inform what he wanted to build. He wanted remote and he wanted vast - few to no markers of human artifice - to fuck with the viewer’s sense of scale. Smithson had specific requirements: he wanted the color red - like the salt lakes he’d read about in Bolivia, their surface tinged in carnelian tones by micro-bacteria in the water. Now he was determined to build an earthwork on a massive scale. Smithson was among a vanguard of artists in the late ’60s moving their work out into the landscape, freeing it from the containment of the gallery. IN 1970, when artist Robert Smithson first set his gaze on the Great Salt Lake's Rozel Point Peninsula, he knew that he’d found the right site.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |