OCR Text |
Show 30 BDDSQSSnV sand wo&ink I MBidleB0 Dak SQDfl'ffa lv l)aitl L. Beck Tribune Staff Writer MOST famous UTAH'S work of art lies under about three feet of bright red water in the (treat Sail Lake. It is Robert Smithsons Spiral .Telly," built in RI70 and seen since then by very few, mostly museum men and critics from around the country, a few of Smithson's friends, some National lark Son ice rangers, probably a few construction workers, a Brigham City motel keeper and his wife immediate family and friends, so to speak. This, despite a wealtli of publicity in the national press, photographs in every major art periodical, in recent surveys of .Dili century art. and in magazines of more general circulation most notably a two page color shot in Esquire a couple of years ago and a rather strange article in The New Yorker. City, turn left on the road to Corrinne and left again at the folk in the road then straight on to where the Golden Spike sign says Monument and points left. When you get to the monument keep on going down what is now a dirt road; at the first folk you veer left, at the second, right. You are now on a Crank Sanguinetti. director of the Utah Fine Arts Museum, say.s Smithson was in Utah for months, studying the geology and history and pre history of the place, before he began to build, and in all that time nobody in the Utah art world knew what was up. (Sanguinetti himself, a knowledgeable man. didn't learn about the Jetty until he saw a Smith-sodisplay at a gallery in New Voik ) ANOTIIF.lt It MASON is its inaccessibility. To get there you drive to .Brigham n you. Once you got there you walk down the shoreline maybe 2(10 yards, climb as of the hill to your right as you care to. and there it is . . that brown much . smear One of the reasons for its relative' obscurity, no doubt, was himself. Smithson well-wor- trail that leads to the lake, to an old sunken pier where for 50 years or so (until recently) men took asphalt from beneath the bed of the lake, and to the Jetty. You are also on private property, so if you come to any closed gates, you might have a care to close them again behind in the water. Smithson once said there are three ways of looking at his Jetty: from the air (airplane or helicopter); from the land (the hillside): or by walking on it. For the time being, though, there is really only one. WHEN SMITHSON built the Jetty in the summer of 1070, the lake was at 4.1071.20 feet above sea level the north end. and the jetty stood about IS inches above the surface. Today the lake is about feet higher, and you can baiely make out the shape of the spiral from the hill. oil Aerial photograph, taken by Tim Kelly, Tribune Staff photographer, shows spiral jetty ami surrounding area. Reactions to it vary. Mr. Sanguinetti admits his first sight of it, from the land, was a little disappointing. Vaughn Nielsen, a ranger at the Golden Spike Monument, liked it: The first year it was real pretty . . . all coveted with salt. You could see grasshoppers encased in the crystals.- Lafe Jensen, who owns the Golden Spike Motel in Riigham - City, where Smithson stayed, has seen it about nine times, both during and after construction: 1 guess its all right for them that wants to spend their money that way. One of the most common reactions, though, is puzzlement: "What is it supposed to be?" SMITHSON, a New Jersey native, is one of a school of what have come to be called earth artists." II is confreres have drawn lines and circles in tiic Nevada desert, blasted canyons in the Virgin River Mesa, and dropped curtains over objects as various as a museum in Chicago and a canyon near Rifle, Colorado. Smithson himself has created a I'.roken Circle a kind of interrupted dike in a water filled quarry in Holland waders, he marked out the course. Then the bulldozers and dump trucks moved in. (He finally found a Brigham City man, Grant L. Busenbark, to do the work.) When it was finished, the Jetty stretched 1,500 feet from the shore. The film' ends with Smithson running the length of the jetty, and chanting (on the sound a spiral mounwhich is just what it sounds like, and other earth tain," sculptures. What he has been doing, essentially, is building natural forms in a natural setting, artificially. In his film about the Jetty, he suggests that the spiral is a basic form in nature, both great the huge bursts of flame spiraling upward from the sun and small the salt crystals themselves. He also mentions a legend about a giant whirlpool in the Great Salt Lake at the entrance to a supposed subterranean channel to the sea. There is at least a suggestion that what he has clone is to build that whirl- track): pool. Wherever the idea came Mr. Sanquinctti from says Smithson would never say whether lie had the idea before he came here wliat lie did, once he got the idea, was this: HF SIFNT two months finding a site for the Jetty, and when he found it he took a lease on what is called Rozel loint, just down the beach from another, less harmonious, jetty. Tying a string to a stake cm the beach, and stomping through the red waters in man-mad- e From the center of the mud, salt jetty, north w ater. rocks, crystals, North by cast mud, salt and so on, crystals . . through every point of the compass. FART OF its chaim is that, once built, it too is part of the natural landscape, subject to the forces of nature. Just now it is under water, and though indications are the runoff has peaked and the lake will rise no more this year, there is no telling (says Gerald Williams, a National Weather Service hydrol ogist) when the lake will fall enough to make the Jetty dry land once more, lerhaps in the autumn, perhaps not this year. But when it does, the Jetty will be white with salt, white against the incredibly red water and the inceredibly blue sky. Even tually it will rain, the salt will wash off and the jetty will be black again. Smith-soseeing it during and after one of these cycles, told an interviewer: Its mass was intact because its almost 80 percent solid rock, so that it held its shape. Yet at the same time it was affected by ttie contingencies. The effectiveness." says Mr. Sanguinetti, "depends on the relationship of the lake color . . . what it does to the rocks. He calls it. a "gentle" work. "I THINK the trouble with people appreciating art o I this kind is that they come to it with preconderived ceived notions" from Art Appreciation classes and museum tours, he says. Nevertheless art, all art, does have a sort of function, expanding certain human faculties, sharpening it gives them awareness perceptions they don't ordinarily have. In that sense, (the Jetty) operates in the same sense as Michelangelos 1ieta." But people distrust the modem. he says, particularly if it purports to be art." Actually, the The Salt Lake Sunday, August 01 4 o -- 1 Ci best; approach is a simple one: you go out there and look at the thing." ) |