{"id":225,"date":"2008-03-28T03:05:16","date_gmt":"2008-03-28T10:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/03\/save-spiral-jetty\/"},"modified":"2008-03-28T01:06:06","modified_gmt":"2008-03-28T08:06:06","slug":"save-spiral-jetty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/28\/save-spiral-jetty\/","title":{"rendered":"Save Spiral Jetty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0from the\u00a0<\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

ROZEL POINT JOURNAL<\/nyt_kicker><\/p>\n

Plans to Mix Oil Drilling and Art Clash in Utah<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

\"Spiral\u00a0<\/p>\n

ROZEL POINT,\u00a0Utah<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 Will McMillin and Liz Wing walked more than three miles of rutted, muddy road on a recent afternoon carrying a bicycle wheel, a wooden stool and a golf club.<\/p>\n

Following directions they had gleaned from art Web sites and small road signs, they arrived here at a remote spot on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe felt like we had to go, and that this was the time to do it,\u201d Mr. McMillin said.<\/p>\n

Their goal (more later on what they did with their props; think about the Dadaist\/Surrealist artist\u00a0Marcel Duchamp<\/a>) was \u201cSpiral Jetty,\u201d a 1,500-foot curved construction of rock and earth by the artist Robert Smithson that juts into the lake.<\/p>\n

A fierce debate, with equal parts art, environmentalism and economics, has erupted over a plan by the state to allow oil drilling about five miles across the lake….\u00a0The face-off reflects a profound shift in attitudes about the Western landscape since Mr. Smithson, an earthwork artist, came here with an artistic vision and a dump truck in 1970. Then, these desolate, salt-soaked shores were loved or visited by almost nobody.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Aerial\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now the soaring price of oil, a new environmental appreciation of the lake\u2019s ecological niche and a tourist boom in bird-watching on the vast wetland fringe have coalesced into a fabric that Mr. Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, never knew.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike everywhere in the West, the lake is being discovered and people want to protect it and people want to use it,\u201d said John Harja, director of the Governor\u2019s Public Lands Policy Coordination Office.<\/p>\n

What Mr. Smithson might have thought about the drilling plan is among the issues in dispute. State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson\u2019s own writing about the \u201cSpiral Jetty,\u201d and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebirth, rot and permanence.<\/p>\n

\"Robert\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,\u201d said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. \u201cHe didn\u2019t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.\u201d<\/p>\n

State officials say that Rozel Point has always offered a fine tableau of the despoiled and the natural. A natural seep of oil sludge is right down the beach from the \u201cJetty,\u201d harvested since pioneer days. And oil drilling was also under way, they say, in view of the \u201cJetty\u201d in 1970, though it proved economically unviable. The new drill rigs, they say, are much farther away than the ones Mr. Smithson knew, and that can be glimpsed briefly in his movie.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things we\u2019re having a hard time figuring is what the impacts will be,\u201d said Dick Buehler, the director of the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands.<\/p>\n

\u00a0[ click to view full article at New York Times<\/span><\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0from the\u00a0New York Times ROZEL POINT JOURNAL Plans to Mix Oil Drilling and Art Clash in Utah \u00a0 ROZEL POINT,\u00a0Utah\u00a0\u2014 Will McMillin and Liz Wing walked more than three miles of rutted, muddy road on a recent afternoon carrying a bicycle wheel, a wooden stool and a golf club. Following directions they had gleaned from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}