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Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired
group of oil rigs. A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like
asphalt occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more years people
have tried to get oil out of this natural tar pool. Pumps coated with
black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on
pilings could have been the habitation of “the missing link.” A great
pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. This site
gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned
hopes. About one mile north of the oil seeps I selected my site. —Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” 1972  | | Northeastern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake with remnants of past oil exploration, Rozel Point, 2003. Photo: Serge Paul.
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ON JANUARY 29, 2008,
an e-mail began making the rounds of the art world. Originally sent by
artist Nancy Holt to a small group of friends and colleagues, and
rapidly forwarded on, the message contained an urgent appeal: Holt had
been alerted, just the day before, to the existence of plans to drill
for oil in the Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,
1970, and she was asking people to contact the Utah state government to
express their opposition before a rapidly approaching deadline for
public comment. The drilling in question (a “wildcat,” or speculative,
operation) calls for a series of exploratory wells to be sunk, using
equipment on floating barges, some 3,000 feet into the lake bed of an
area called the West Rozel Field Prospect—a parcel in the North Arm of
the Great Salt Lake leased in 2003 from the state of Utah by Pearl
Montana Exploration and Production, a Canadian oil and gas company. The
site lies approximately five miles southwest of Rozel Point—roughly
halfway between Gunnison Island, a wildlife sanctuary that is home to
one of the world’s largest breeding populations of American white
pelicans, and Spiral Jetty, the 1,500-foot-long coil of basalt and earth that is Smithson’s most famous, and Land art’s most celebrated, artwork. Within
days, Utah officials were inundated with calls and e-mails from those
who had received the alert. Environmentalists and land-use activists
were part of the opposition from the beginning, charging that the
drilling plan, as submitted, failed to fully assess potential
ecological damage to the delicate chemistry of the lake and nearby bird
habitat; they also argued that the process had neglected mandated
notification requirements that would have given interested parties time
to respond. Further, they said, the project as a whole violated terms
set in the state’s own legislation requiring that proposed uses of its
sovereign lands not “compromise public trust obligations” to protect
its “navigation, fish and wildlife habitat, aquatic beauty, public
recreation, and water quality.” (In this spirit, various environmental
organizations and the state of Utah had agreed in 2006 to prohibit oil
and gas development in the bulk of the North Arm; the projected
drilling site, however, is located within a more than 55,000-acre
portion of the lake that was specifically exempted.) Lynn de Freitas,
executive director of the advocacy and public policy group Friends of
Great Salt Lake—who informed Holt of the threat after a colleague at an
environmental watchdog organization happened across the permit
application on a state website—acknowledges that changing socioeconomic
conditions are “forcing the state to think in terms of how they can
generate economic livelihood for Utah,” including resource extraction.
Yet, she said, “This is one of many examples of what we consider to be
poor decisions on behalf of a hemispherically important ecosystem. So
whether this was, as it is, in proximity of Jetty or not, we would still be alarmed and standing up and protesting.” In
the face of the widespread public protest, the state, which had
originally fast-tracked review of the drilling permits, extended the
required public comment period by an additional two weeks. By
mid-February, when the new comment period was concluded and the
internal review had begun in earnest, the state had received more than
3,500 complaints—including those from a list of high-profile
organizations ranging from de Freitas’s group and the National Audubon
Society to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Dia Art
Foundation, which acquired Spiral Jetty from Smithson’s estate in 1999. Newspapers from the Salt Lake Tribune to the New York Times, meanwhile, have published editorials against the plan. The
fate of the drilling project now lies in the hands of officials in
Utah’s Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, who are conducting their review
under unprecedented public and press scrutiny and in a very different
context from the one in which they would have were it not for the
last-minute intervention of Holt and others. The situation is, in one
sense, a remarkably successful example of cultural activism and
participatory democracy—that rare case where the momentum of an
essentially fait accompli bureaucratic process is arrested, at least
momentarily, by the sheer scale of public outcry against it. (Full
disclosure: Prior to my writing on this situation for Artforum, I was forwarded Holt’s message and sent my own e-mail to Utah officials urging them to reconsider the drilling plan.) Yet
much remains unresolved. It seems clear that the state, at the very
least, mishandled the notification procedure, and that its failure to
provide timely and complete information on the nature of the drilling
proposal has exacerbated what was already bound to be a contentious
process. At the same time, no one disputes that Pearl Montana did
apparently enter into a good-faith agreement for the leases it holds.
(If the drilling permit is approved, the Pearl Montana wells would be
the only currently active oil operation in the exempted zone, but other
portions of the lake and its shoreline have long been host to a variety
of industrial mining and salt-extraction operations.) According to a
press release posted in late February on a special Great Salt Lake
Drilling Update website created by the state of Utah, the attempt to
balance the many competing claims was expected to take “30 to 45”
further days to complete. And as all parties await what will likely be
a mid-April decision, no one to whom I spoke—from Holt and the
environmental groups to state officials (a spokeswoman for Pearl
Montana did not respond to repeated requests for comment)—seemed
confident of what the final outcome will be. From
the standpoint of ongoing tensions everywhere between energy resource
development and environmentalism, much of this back-and-forth is par
for the course. Of course, the difference here—and likely the reason
you’re reading about what is, at its base, a complex land-use debate—is
the presence of Smithson’s work. And yet, despite all the discussion,
it is difficult to get a clear picture of what specific impact this
project might have on Spiral Jetty, either in terms of ecology
or ambience. Even if the permit is approved and the exploration goes
forward, it is far from certain that oil will be found or, if it is,
that it will be usable and cost-effective to extract. (Amoco drilled
thirteen wells in this same area of the lake in the late 1970s, but the
oil found there was of such low quality that the company eventually
decided to abandon the wells; now capped beneath the water’s surface,
they are invisible from the shore.) In response to concerns about the
viewshed around the work, state officials have asserted that whatever
equipment is necessary to pump the oil would be underwater, creating,
they say, no issues outside of what is expected to be a two-week period
during the initial exploration. The equipment and materials for the
drilling and extraction will purportedly be transported well away from
the entry point for visitors to the Jetty, and the location of
the onshore storage facilities for whatever is removed would lie
fifteen miles from the work. (Meanwhile, the abandoned structures and
equipment to which Smithson referred in his Spiral Jetty
travelogue, left over from a 1920s attempt by the Lakeside Oil Company
to get usable oil out of the seeps at Rozel Point, were removed from
the site by Utah state officials during a 2005 cleanup.) And while a
spill is a terrible possibility, it is obviously by no means a
certainty, and the state has attempted to allay concerns by promising
that any drilling in the Great Salt Lake—one of the American West’s
most treasured natural sites—would be governed by special safeguards.  | | Satellite map of the northeastern portion of Utah’s Great Salt Lake showing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and proposed oil drilling sites by Pearl Montana Exploration and Production. Photo: Digital Globe/Google. |
But just as the presence of Spiral Jetty
has invigorated the debate over environmental issues in the Great Salt
Lake, so too has the environmental dispute provided a timely
opportunity to reconsider the unique status of it and other signal
works of Land art as they age into their third and fourth decades.
Originally intended as a dramatic break from what Michael Heizer
famously referred to as the “sagging” floors of traditional art-world
institutions in favor of the “real space” of the natural landscape,
many of these works now rely on institutional support and stewardship
to survive; situated, for practical and conceptual reasons, in what
were once remote, isolated areas, they increasingly face threats from
the inexorable encroachments of modern civilization. Heizer has spent
years fighting plans for a railway line, designed to carry radioactive
waste to the controversial Yucca Mountain Repository, that is slated to
pass within a mile or so of his ongoing City complex, 1972, in the remote Garden Valley area of central Nevada. The same week the Spiral Jetty
drilling story broke, senior officials from Dia were in the midst of
negotiations to purchase a conservation easement on land to the south
of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, 1977, in west-central New
Mexico, to extend a buffer zone preserving important line-of-sight
vistas surrounding it. And Holt’s own most famous work has recently
been affected by local land speculation. Sun Tunnels,
1973–76—an X-shaped arrangement of four large concrete tubes, oriented
toward the position of the sun at the winter and summer solstices and
bearing holes that correspond to different constellations—is located in
an extremely desolate area of northwestern Utah, more than two bumpy
hours’ worth of dirt-road driving north of the Bonneville Salt Flats.
As recently as last year, however, parcels of land adjacent to Holt’s
plot were offered as part of a US Bureau of Land Management auction.
Though the leases were not purchased at the time, development—and, in
particular, the ever more intensive search for natural
resources—remains a potential threat to the unique character of this
and other such sites. Interestingly, in the
weeks after the Pearl Montana drilling plan became public, another
viewpoint started to percolate up from the art community and
blogosphere: Would the whole scenario—somebody floating a bunch of
modern industrial equipment out into the Great Salt Lake in order to
dig down through layers of space and time to find something produced by
the entropic action of geologic forces on organic matter from eons
ago—really have bothered Smithson? Might he not, in fact, even have
appreciated it? It’s a fair enough question. After all, this is an
artist who not only tolerated but in fact courted ruin and decay; who
teased ecologists as “people [who] want to stop eating [because] they
are afraid the lettuce they are eating has feelings”; who once
described his preferred work zone as “that area of terror between man
and land”; and who, of a failed desalination plan for the Salton Sea,
once said, “Here we have an example of a kind of domino effect where
one mistake begets another mistake, yet these mistakes are all
curiously exciting to me on a certain kind of level—I don’t find them
depressing.” Holt, Smithson’s widow and
frequent collaborator, is obviously in a tricky situation with all
this. There are very real practical concerns related to the
conservation and protection of works such as Spiral Jetty, and
she, along with organizations like Dia, has a dual, and perhaps
occasionally conflicting, obligation to both preserve the physical work
and be true to the wishes of the artist, which in this case can only be
guessed at. Yet few people are better equipped than she to make such a
guess, and she told me that despite her husband’s general theoretical
interest in decay, Spiral Jetty is, and was from the beginning, a special case. “Within Bob’s own body of work, works like Partially Buried Woodshed
[1970] were obviously meant to decay,” she said. “The life span on that
was not too long—it did decay in stages; someone tried to burn down
part of it. So that was actually kind of built into the piece itself,
its own entropy. With Spiral Jetty it wasn’t like that. Bob
really wanted that to last a long, long time. He wanted to build
something, and he talked about that, so strong and so solid that it
would go through all kinds of natural changes, like be underwater and
then come out, and be present for the ages. So that’s a whole other
sense of time. When we talk about entropy and Bob, we have to think
about the two extremes. He was totally open to Spiral Jetty
having all kinds of changes, and it does. Every time I’ve been out
there it looks different—the water color changes, the amount of salt on
it changes, how much is visible changes.” The current situation with Spiral Jetty
is not the first, and is unlikely to be the last, set of potential
“changes” faced by a mode of work that is, by its very nature, designed
to operate in a matrix of real-world cause and effect. Isolation may
be, as Walter De Maria once famously observed, “the essence of Land
art,” but even the most profound isolation is always relative and
relational. If the implicit critique of the antiseptic environment of
the modernist white cube made by Smithson and his peers was more than a
rhetorical one, these works must not only endure the potential impact
of alterations to their chosen settings, they must also in some sense
embrace such change. This is not an argument for cavalierly abandoning
the masterpieces of Land art to their entropic fates, be they
creepingly natural or abruptly industrial. It is rather a contention
that the fact that they face such fates should be less lamented as a
sign of their physical vulnerability than celebrated as a sign of their
conceptual strength; that in fulfilling the richness of meaning they
promise, these works are not only inevitably but also desirably bound
to the world around them—vivid, actual, full of all the great pleasure,
and the abandoned hopes, of the “real space” they chose to engage. Jeffrey Kastner is a frequent contributer to Artforum. |
