Utah's famous 'Spiral Jetty' at risk from oil development

Kriston Capps at The American Prospect:

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson rejected the gleaming white gallery spaces and "canonical" minimalism of the New York art scene in search of an entirely different setting for his sculpture. After several exploratory trips, he selected a spot more than 2,000 miles from the Big Apple: Utah's Great Salt Lake. Rozel Point, on the northeast end of the lake's Gunnison Bay, would become the home of his most important piece of sculpture: Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide, 6,650-ton coil of black basalt rock and mounded earth extending counterclockwise into the pinkish water of the lake. The site was remote but not virgin territory. Oil seeped from the ground, and scattered around the lake were the derelict instruments from prior efforts to extract that oil. [...]

[Nancy] Holt, Smithson's widow, first got word that Spiral Jetty was in danger from Lynn DeFreitas, executive director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, an organization primarily charged with safeguarding the lake's watershed. On Jan. 7, 2008, Pearl Exploration and Production Ltd., a Canadian oil and gas company, applied for permission to establish two exploratory wells on its land leases in Gunnison Bay, some five miles southwest from Rozel Point's shore.

[...] Smithson's writings, even when he was at his most mercurial, don't suggest that he would have appreciated the return of industry to the lake under a general embrace of entropy. Spiral Jetty is arguably the world's most important piece of earth art and, without question, Utah's most important artwork. It won't remain the same if its context changes. The sculpture was always meant to be a foil to the Great Salt Lake: pitting art against nature, in a sense, and tracking the latter's effects on the former. Smithson may have seen it as poetic justice for the commercial devastation of the environment to be followed by the commercial devastation of art, but it is too high a price to pay for fleeting crude oil reserves.