Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

A couple notable blog posts on last week’s (eternal) Spiral Jetty series here on MAN:

• Greg Allen, who has ties to Utah and who has written extensively about Spiral Jetty, raises additional questions about the Jetty and stewardship;
• Kriston Capps, who has written about the Jetty for The American Prospect, asks whether groups working on Jetty preservation are as focused on land as they are on water.

MAN’s series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What’s happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia’s ‘buffer’ approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

I hadn’t planned on including this post in this week’s series on the future of Spiral Jetty. However during the week enough emailers asked me about federal protection that I thought I’d add it as a postscript. Non-Jetty content resumes Monday.

When I asked Friends of Great Salt Lake director Lynn de Freitas if she thought there was any kind of federal monument protection that would be help preserve Spiral Jetty, I could practically hear her wrinkle her nose at me.

“There is this funny, knee-jerk thing about Utah and the feds,” she said. “There’s this belief that we don’t need to talk to the feds.”

de Freitas remembered Utah’s reaction in 1996 when the Clinton administration effectively unilaterally created the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. The state didn’t like that the governor and the state’s congressional delegation were told about the new monument only 24 hours before it was created. To make matters worse, President Clinton announced the monument from Arizona.

With the exception of that kind of presidential edict, only Congress can create a new national monument. Given Utah’s experience with Grand Staircase, experts such as de Freitas and National Trust for Historic Preservation mountains/plains director Barbara Pahl aren’t enthused about that as a viable option. Besides, even you if conservationists were to push through some type of Spiral Jetty National Monument, there would be other issues. Just because an area is designated a monument doesn’t mean it’s necessarily closed to industry.

“Even if you get a bill, you’d have to [pass] a bill that has a stipulation that talks about protection,” Pahl said.

Another kind of federal recognition, placement on the National Register of Historic Places, provides virtually no protection.

All of which leaves Jetty preservationists with one clear option: Work with each other and with the state government.

MAN’s series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What’s happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia’s ‘buffer’ approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

In September, at an early meeting of Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s just-appointed Great Salt Lake Advisory Council, an official from the Utah Department of Natural Resources made a surprising admission: The reason that Utah, the state with the most industry-permissive extraction policies in the West, had convened a major new effort to consider how to best utilize the lake was that thousands of people from around the world had raised a stink when an oil company tried to drill near Spiral Jetty. Instead of taking a pinprick approach to conservation, the state decided to take a comprehensive approach. [Photo]

The advisory council, which includes environmental advocates such as Friends of Great Salt Lake, industry groups such as Great Salt Lake Minerals, and a range of local administrators and elected officials, is charged with ensuring the long-term viability of GSL and its  ecosystem. Conspicuous by its absence on the panel is the Dia Art Foundation, which owns Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Dia is based in New York, all of the other groups are at least nominally Utah-based. (For example, Great Salt Lake Minerals is a subsidiary of a Kansas-based company.)

“The makeup of the commission was intended to represent a broad
collection of stakeholders while maintaining an effective body,” Huntsman spokesperson Lisa Roskelley told me. “Yes,
all of the representatives live in the state, though certainly anyone
from Dia who is interested would be more than welcome to attend any of
the meetings or be part of the technical committees that will be
providing information to educate and aid the process.”

(Dia said that it looks forward to making a presentation to the group.)

The council’s focus poses two challenges to Dia: First, the state of Utah is taking a holistic approach to lake management and so far this year Dia has focused on the Jetty itself but not on broader issues in the ecosystem. Next, if Dia becomes more broadly interested in working on issues relating to the GSL ecosystem, how can a New York-based non-profit, a group with responsibilities, projects and close relationships in Texas, New Mexico, and all over New York state, be effective in Utah?

One way is for Dia to be involved with state officials. For example, Dia took the lead in making sure the governor
trekked out to see Spiral Jetty. Dia officials say they will continue to work with the governor and with the Utah Department of Natural Resources.

But Dia could also be effective from a distance by forming coalitions with interested groups, a more rigorous version of its ad hoc relationship with FOGSL. Dia says that it is counting on FOGSL to help keep an eye on the Jetty through the advisory council process, but Dia has no formal connection to FOGSL. It provides FOGSL with no funding for Jetty-specific work or advocacy.

“We haven’t, to be honest with you, considered re-granting to them,” Dia deputy director Laura Raicovich told me. “That’s
not really what Dia does.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” added Dia director Philippe Vergne. “But we haven’t thought about it.”

And why should it? Dia has has little experience in participating in broad-based coalitions that work on mutual interests. (For example, FOGSL was unaware of Dia’s ‘buffer plan’ until I asked FOGSL about it.) Meanwhile environmental groups are accustomed to working in coalition with a range of allies — associations of hunters, fishermen, philanthropy, scientists and so on.

Dia’s approach isn’t surprising: Art organizations, especially art museums, typically don’t work in coalitions with other groups on issues such as this because there’s rarely a reason to. (Is there an art museum equivalent to an entire ecosystem?)

To make matters even more difficult, there is little or no philanthropy leadership around conservation issues at the Great Salt Lake, nothing remotely like the coalition-driving philanthropic partnerships that have built up around other ecosystems, such as the Hudson River. Dozens of organizations work on issues that impact the health of the Hudson. Down the Atlantic seaboard, the largest non-profit that works on Chesapeake Bay issues, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, spends $20 million a year. FOGSL’s operating expenses last year were $57,000.

And therein lies an organizational challenge for groups with an interest in the GSL, and specifically for people with an interest in Spiral Jetty: It’s hard to blame Dia for not partnering with a non-existent coalition. It’s hard to expect FOGSL to have morphed into the Chesapeake Bay Foundation when GSL conservation issues are relatively new. It’s hard to know who would organize philanthropy around GSL issues, the kind of issues that are important to brine shrimpers, hunters and art lovers. There is an opportunity for leadership.

Vergne has been at Dia for less than two weeks, but it sounds like that’s where he wants to go.

“We are taking a very holistic view of what responsibility means,” he said. “As you know and due to the nature of the piece in both cases, Spiral Jetty and also for the Lightning Field, when we talk about the enviornment we’re talking about miles away from the piece…[The] work needs to be secure and protected so of course it’s the road and the physical nature of the Jetty but it’s also preserving the experience of the work and the experience of the work includes the way you access the work the way you experience the work on site.”

MAN’s series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What’s happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia’s ‘buffer’ approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

Over the spring and summer, as Dia formulated what to do to preserve Spiral Jetty, it looked back to what it had done with other earthworks in its care, notably Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field. For decades — practically since the creation of the work — Dia has pursued a ‘buffer’ strategy by which it bought up ranchland (or conservation easements) around Lightning Field. [Photo of aerial view of Rozel Point.]

Informed by that experience, in March Dia officials approached the state of Utah with a similar plan in mind. “The first step that we asked that the state to take was that it conduct a viewshed analysis on the actual area,” Dia deputy director Laura Raicovich told me. “They’re working on that, and we should have the results of that literally any moment. Once we have that in hand, we can do an analysis on our part of both the viewshed impact and possible geophysical impact on the Jetty from oil drilling. This proposed [Pearl Montana] test-drilling sites are only, in all likelihood, the first of other attempts. It’s not just about defeating this set of proposals, but dealing with the future.”

Several potential Dia allies think it’s an idea with potential. Barbara Pahl, the mountains/plains director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation says that NTHP has worked with industry to donate leases to conservation groups. In 2002 the Anschutz Corporation donated some Montana drilling leases to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, effectively saving a canyon important to American Indians.

I asked Lynn de Freitas, the executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, if she thought creating a buffer around the Jetty, perhaps by Dia controlling oil leases, was an effective approach.

“Yes, it could create a precedent of sorts, if indeed [the state allows] that precedent to be created at all,” de Freitas said. “It’s a great idea. Those are the kinds of leveraging measures that can put the conservation community’s playing cards in the game. If the state really is looking for some sort of economic livelihood, and for the sake of protecting something that is really for the greater good, then why wouldn’t they take a smaller value in return for the lease potential. You’ve got a player, you’ve got an interested party that can pay and isn’t that great because it’s really a win-win.” [Photo of Great Salt Lake Minerals Co. evaporation ponds in Clyman Bay. GSLM has proposed doubling the size of these ponds. The expansion would be roughly north and east of the existing ponds.]

But would the approach go far enough toward preserving the Jetty? Buying up leases would address one issue — drilling, rigs and potential oil leaks or spills — but it doesn’t seem to address other Great Salt Lake issues that could potentially impact the Jetty, such as the GSL’s mercury level or the impact evaporation ponds could have on the ecology of Clyman Bay.

“I think that’s absolutely right,” de Freitas said. “The interesting kind of conundrum here for Dia, as I see it, is the integration of the ecosystem into the preservation plan for Spiral Jetty.”

Tomorrow: How the Pearl Montana proposal and how it might impact Spiral Jetty changed everything in the Great Salt Lake, and what that means for the future.