spiral jetty great salt lake

[huckelberry]

Huckelberry meanders.
I notice I misspelled spiral on the title though I and everybody else continued correctly ignoring the error.

I am going to express my prejudices about earth art which may or may not interest anybody.

There has been a bit of fad in my area of people stacking river rocks into riverside towers or towns of towers.These are amusing and like sand castles transitory. They do mark a spot as having some significance. Perhaps not a large one though. Checking the internet for earth art I find a contemporary fellow Andy Godsworthy who assembles natural structure out in natural environments. They are intentionally lovely and transitory. They are much developed expansions of those little rock towers beside the creek.

In my art history class in 1971 we studied the new movement of earth art. I was at first at best ambivalent. I was concerned about trashing up the natural world and the possibility of art folks from NY running about the west digging holes and trenches and junk in our big natural spaces was alarming in a negative way. I first heard of Michael Heizer's double negative as dug in the grand canyon. My horror was somewhat mollified with the clarification that it was near the Grand Canyon but is dug in some other poor unprotected natural space. Do we have any need for these and more grand egotistical displays messing up the land?

I came to like spiral jetty. It sits well in my imagination. It has a balanced relationship to the land and water. And thank God there are not dozens and dozens of them popping up around the west. We have been saved from a glut of dragged rocks, funny holes, trenches etc. Whitman College has a series of sizeable granite stones elevated on progressively higher polished steel rectangular pillars a piece of somewhat domesticated earth art. I find these dull but they are not messing up natural spaces.

But I am thinking of the absurd side of this instead of the beautiful side as seen in the spiral jetty.

Perhaps as summary here is a bit from my1971 version of "American art of the 20th Century"
"Jack Burnham argued that new art expressions were transional to the new cultural forms of a utopian society in the making and that strange and unfamiliar art represented the passing to a new form of civilization .He argued that sculpture would progressively abandon individual objects and tradionalist preoccupations with physical works,volume, mass, presence or expressiveness until it became dematerialized entirely and evolved into yet unknown form closer to the informational systems and patterns of organization that control our automated lives in a irreversibly technological society.''

I remember the time as being too too long on this sort of hype. "Its a whole brave new world" hypes the salesman.
I do not think that our using machines, even electronic ones give us an automated life. But at that time I worked summer in harvest with its close relationship to dirt, weather, plants, and a natural environment to get the stuff we eat. fifty years later with huge computer advances our food is still obtained that way.

[Morley]

Huckelberry meanders.

<snip>

Well put, Huck.

My thoughts would pretty much echo yours. It's taken me a while to come around, but I'm a huge fan of the ephemeral work produced by Goldsworthy and I've come to agree that the Jetty is a masterpiece. A friend of mine works with this kind of material, and she's changed how I look at these things.

Though I try to work with it, I admit that I usually start with huge, inborn reservations about much of conceptual art (see, for example, Bruce Nauman or your Michael Heizer).

Anyway, thank you for your meander.

[Morley]

Doc I do not understand your concern about the air quality in the city tied to lake levels. How might that work?

Well. These are the heavy metals that are present all over the dried portions of the GSL:

Google says: arsenic, cobalt, antimony, lithium, manganese, vanadium and zirconium, copper and lanthanum. High concentrations of these and other metals occurred in areas associated with discharges connected with industry, wastewater treatment, and agriculture.

From various articles and a few papers I read it’s this:

Water cover da ground. Wind blow. No dust.

Water dry up. Wind blow. So much da dust.

So much da dust. In da lung. On da snow.

Lung go cough cough, snow go bye bye.

More da cough cough, more da people die. More da snow go, less da water. Lake go bye bye. More da dust. More da cough cough.

Now da people fight, remember long ago times, in da past when times were good. Now gone. Only bad man roam in trucks. More da fight and da cry. Times are bad. One day a man come. He drive mustang, have dog, and have boom stick. He take us to da water. Da good water far from here.

- Doc

You're right, Cam. This has gained national interest. There was an article on the implications of The Great Salt Lake desiccation on today's CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/17/us/great ... index.html
.