![]() Jaimi Butler and Bonnie Baxter, co-founders of the Institute, like to call themselves Salty Sirens, because they aim to lure people to take a closer look at the threatened briny expanse that Utah’s capital city is named after. The hope is that the existence of salt and gypsum on Mars - which once also had water - might mean there are salt-loving microbes still tucked inside the crystals there. It is, in fact, an analog for Mars, which is why NASA is partnering with the Great Salt Lake Institute, housed at Westminster College, to take an infrared look at the lake’s salt and gypsum. It feels like a desert masquerading as a body of water. The Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point - stark, still and muted on a partly cloudy spring morning - is nothing like that. What I like are lakes surrounded by trees, green hills dotted with daisies, bonus points for a little white farmhouse off in the distance. Truthfully, the Great Salt Lake isn’t my go-to landscape. ( Visitors should be mindful that l ow water levels at the Great Salt Lake have increased the natural presence of tar around the Spiral Jetty shoreline. And then you’ll see the quirky earthwork itself, looking a little forlorn and marooned down below. To visit Spiral Jetty is a decision and a detour: An hour heading west from a freeway, on a gravel road, then dirt, flanked sometimes by cattle, out on the open range, definitely out of cell range, until, finally, there’s the lake in the distance. Even then, if you are a lover of the iconic photos, you may be expecting something bigger and more dramatic. To really see the sculpture you need to stand on the hill above it. The black rocks of the path lead you westward across the dry playa, eventually into a smaller and then smaller circle, but when you are down among the rocks you lose sight of the pattern. These days, the Spiral Jetty is still a spiral but not much of a jetty. ![]() This year Spiral Jetty is 50 years old: a middle-aged work of art that has endured after all. Now people from all over the world wanted to come walk its twisty path. There were articles in “The New York Times,” and, later, there were YouTube videos. Then, around the turn of the millennium, the lake began to steadily get lower and smaller - and the beguiling spiral was consistently visible and available again. ![]() Most everyone in Utah ignored the jetty, if they knew about it at all. Meanwhile, along the Wasatch Front, the weather got wetter and the Great Salt Lake flooded the spiral, submerging it for the next two decades. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, at age 35, while he was surveying another land art site in Texas. It took six days, 625 man-hours, 292 truck-hours, $9,000, and 6,500 tons of basalt, limestone and mud to construct the sculpture that April. It took only a few years after that for stunning aerial photos to show up in art history textbooks, which heralded Smithsons’s spiral as an icon of the new land art movement.īut by then, sure enough, a universe hell-bent on entropy had taken its toll. He was, as he often said, a fan of entropy. It would be a monument to impermanence, if he were the kind of man who believed in monuments. And might just as easily fall apart as last forever. It would be a sculpture, but one that didn’t need a museum or even an audience. What he imagined was a curving line of rocks and earth that would lead from the shoreline of the lake into the water. I like to imagine Smithson beaming as he drives north on I-15 towards Rozel Point. On that spring day in Utah, he was just some guy from New Jersey with a crazy idea about making something - a spiral, did he say? - out at the Great Salt Lake. It’s easy to imagine the clerks rolling their eyes. ![]() PREMIUM PACKAGING: This compact neon spiral kit comes in a sturdy box with magnetic closure, perfect for storing and organizing your supplies.In certain circles, as far away as Italy, Smithson was already a celebrated artist.TONS OF FUN SUPPLIES: The super spiral-making tools make it easy to create amazing neon art with the colorful gel pens and paper included.MAKE GREAT ART WITH 14 TWISTED PROJECTS: Create bright doodles and cartoons, and even an origami giraffe with crazy neon spots!.Make super spiral art! You can use the spiral-making tools in the kit to make cool neon drawings and doodles with the bright loops and swirls you create! Check out the project ideas in the book and be inspired to come up with your own dazzling spiral art! ![]()
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