She travels to Spiral Jetty several times a year with tour groups, donors, and visiting artists looking to check the site off their art bucket lists. “ Spiral Jetty is the most iconic, the most essential earthwork or land art piece in existence, period,” explains Whitney Tassie, senior curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at Salt Lake City’s Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The sculpture re-emerged in 2002 and has been visible ever since, though water levels are always in flux, making the appearance and experience of the work different every time. The lake’s fluctuating levels seem to be a natural illustration of entropy Spiral Jetty was completely submerged in 1972 and stayed under water for 30 years before droughts caused the lake to recede. These elements help convey the artist’s fascination with entropy-a constant state of transformation, decay, and renewal in nature and culture that Smithson frequently examined in his writings and art. Smithson chose Spiral Jetty’s location for its red water, salt-crystal deposits with their characteristic spiral molecular structure, and the stark landscape. As sculpture, it is huge, yet it is dwarfed by the surrounding land and inland sea. Encountering Spiral Jetty-viewing it from various angles, walking on and around it, often with saltwater sloshing around your feet-is a lesson in scale. Located at isolated Rozel Point, about 16 miles west of Golden Spike National Historic Site, the sculpture extends into a counterclockwise coil from the shore, reaching 1,500 feet in length. Jutting out into the red-tinted water of the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Spiral Jetty comprises 6,000 tons of black basalt, earth, and salt crystals. Each offers its own, awe-inspiring experience that has made Utah an unexpected mecca for contemporary art lovers. The most famous land art pieces, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Holt’s Sun Tunnels, are located within driving distance of Park City. Within a decade, Holt and Smithson would create artworks that would eventually become icons of a new genre known as land art, which redefined art outside of traditional galleries and institutions by focusing on site-specificity and incorporating elements of the landscape where they are placed. Holt and Smithson hailed from Massachusetts and New Jersey, respectively, and the sheer vastness of the terrain they found themselves exploring during their Western tour would leave an indelible mark on their lives. For Nancy Holt, the road trip with her husband, Robert Smithson (known to her as Bob), and their friend Michael Heizer was so mind-boggling that she was unable to sleep for days. Image: Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYīack in the summer of 1968, three young, ambitious artists went looking for inspiration in the American West.
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