From our April issue: Kriston Capps looks at the renewed interest in drilling for oil in Utah's Great Salt Lake, home of Spiral Jetty, the iconic piece of Earth art which was built, coincidentally, amongst the debris of abandoned crude oil prospecting equipment:
Today, as oil costs rise, even difficult extraction missions become potentially lucrative projects. Unconventional sources -- be they shale oil in Canada or crude tar under a briny lake in Utah -- previously considered too inhospitable, expensive, or politically untenable are being given a second look. In a development that has alarmed art followers around the world, oil developers are returning to the Great Salt Lake, mere miles from Jetty. Even in a remote corner of Utah, the commercial world caught up with Smithson. This is all sadly ironic, given that Spiral Jetty is arguably the world's foremost example of land art (also known as earth art or earthworks), a genre that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a fierce critique of the commercialization of art and nature. Defying the commodification of art objects, earth artists intervened in the landscape itself, trading brushes for excavators. At a time when gallery and museum spaces were facing unprecedented scrutiny as structures that shaped the way viewers understood art as well as the course of art's development, earth artists like Smithson transformed natural spaces into the work itself. Land art married site-specific installation, minimalist aesthetics, and institutional critique with a nascent environmentalist movement.
First they came for ANWR, now Jetty. Read the rest and comment here.
--The Editors
