When I was younger, I remember my parents taking me out to the grapevine to visit an art installation by Christo & Jeanne-Claude of yellow umbrellas. My parents weren’t really the artist-types, but I do remember trips of this nature often. You could see the umbrellas from far away, the little specks of yellow growing larger and larger the closer we got. I remember reading about one of the umbrellas killing someone. I think a gust of wind caused one to come out of the ground. I suppose that’s beside the point.
In the 60’s, artists began a movement away from the museums and galleries and started creating art in the landscape itself. Spiral Jetty was created by Robert Smithson 1970, using over six thousand tons of black basalt rocks and earth from the site to form the coil that is 15,000 feet long and 15 feet wide. “Created at a time when water levels were particularly low, the artwork was submerged from 1972 onward, and was only known through documentation. However, regional droughts thirty years later caused the lake to recede such that by 2002, a salt-encrusted Spiral Jetty reappeared for the first prolonged period in its history. Smithson often asserted that by responding to the landscape, rather than imposing itself upon it, Spiral Jetty is a site to actively walk on rather than a sculpture to behold.” I love the idea of not imposing oneself upon it; I like to think of myself as a photographer in the same sense — not imposing, but rather using what is real and before me. Makes it more indestructible, I suppose. I find that really beautiful.
I hope my boys care about art and have enough interest in the matter to search things like this out. And, at the same time, I don’t want them to be anyone other than who they are. But, at the same same time, I hope the things I expose them to leave some sort of impression on them. Much love to my girl Janet for the introduction. And with that, my images from Utah are complete. But if you wanna take a moment to discuss Van’s oversized mittens, I’m game.
