Comments on: Spiral Jetty

By: Tina Anderson

Tina Anderson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:00:18 +0000

I don’t think the fact that the Spiral Jetty will be gone one day anyway justifies it being destroyed for oil-drilling interests right now. Smithson’s work should be left alone until nature wears away at it, but I hope this protest is successful.

By: albert geiser

albert geiser — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:54:54 +0000

I guess that’s because I’ve been a fan of Smithson my entire adult life, 27 years. I hadn’t heard of the Spiral Jetty protest, and this topic just left me animated.

By: jd

jd — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:08:13 +0000

Albert, you say more boldly what I took as one half of my thesis / antithesis in the post. I think we agree that Smithson’s art calls our usual ideas about preservation and conservation into question. That was the point I was after.

By: albert geiser

albert geiser — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:44:16 +0000

I’ve just been looking at essays by and on Smithson that I’ve been able to find online. I’ll bet anything that Smithson intended his film of the making of the jetty to be the art, and the jetty itself to fall apart eventually under natural and human impacts. His entire life’s work was about disintegration, decay, and entropy. To protest oil drilling in general on or around The Great Salt Lake makes perfect sense to me, but not centered on trying to save the jetty. For natives of New Jersey, as I am, and other heavily worked and industrially developed landscapes beauty has to be found defying the usual assumptions about what beauty is. I recall looking out a train window in New Jersey when I was young with my father, uncle, and cousin at a huge orange pile of industrial sulfur while were on our way to Yankee stadium. It was a beautiful sight. According to my father the Meadowlands, which still is home to wildlife, especially birds,had mostly still defied development when he was a boy, and his father, my grandfather, said to him as they drove across it on their way to Manhattan, “Son, one day this will all be developed.” I think if Smithson had been around to see the stadium going up he would have observed it and might have incorporated it into an essay or film. The City of Salt Lake has grown and been developed exponentially since Smithson did the jetty. The area around the Great Salt Lake is going to be developed because it’s one of our major city sites. It’s not a place that should be expected to all be preserved as a national park would be. The health and well being of the people must be considered, and beauty is a part of that, so there is good reason to protest oil industry activity in the middle of a residential area.

By: albert geiser

albert geiser — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:39:57 +0000

Smithson’s work through most of his short life was on how the earth is reshaped by industrial work. He was a native of New Jersey and his ideas came from the earth of New Jersey. So, what he would do with the oil drilling would be to turn that into his art. Also, Smithson intended his work to be impermanent. His last work was creating islands in the Caribbean by starting with mangrove plants. So I think it’s likely Smithson would have said goodbye to his spiral jetty and then filmed the effect on the site of the oil drilling and after that set to figure out a way for art to take back the site.