Thursday, July 23, 2009

ART 21 on Conservation and Spiral Jetty



Check out this article.

Of particular interest is Francesca Esmay explaining how contemporary documentary photographs are made to monitor the Jetty: "To photo-document Spiral Jetty, we used a tethered helium balloon about 8-10 feet in diameter, attached to a digital camera that would take an image every few seconds until the camera’s memory card filled up. Each of us let out string from a spool and sent the balloon up anywhere from 50 to 600 meters, depending on what we were trying to capture and other factors such as wind and amount of helium to give lift."

Here is one image with more available to see on the link above.




Esmay also explains that horrendous roped off area we were wondering about during our visit:

"There have been unfortunate examples of visitors being insensitive. We recently had a college art professor who invited their students to make an interpretive artwork at the site. They cast a concrete pad and erected a viewing station with a didactic sign pointing towards the Jetty. It is sort of unimaginable to me that someone could be so insensitive, but we do not have oversight on location, so it is impossible to supervise visitors while they are there."

Tyler Green posts new information on the threats to Spiral Jetty this week as well.

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