“If there’s a problem, we won’t sign until the problem is solved,” says Brad Hill, permit manager for the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining. The state must honor mineral rights, although it still determines drilling terms and conditions. Yet drilling, if it’s approved, could begin this year. “Any incursion on the open landscape, including the proposed drilling, would significantly compromise this important work of art.” “The expansive natural setting is integral to Smithson’s artwork, providing an essential frame for experiencing the Spiral Jetty,” Jeffrey Weiss, foundation director, said in a statement. Considered to be Smithson’s masterpiece, the sculpture embodies his exploration of entropy-a theme shared by James Wines and other deconstructionist architects during the 1970s-and has been known to generations of architecture and art history students mostly through photographs and a film produced by the artist himself.

That same year the New York-based Dia Art Foundation acquired Spiral Jetty as a gift from the late artist’s estate. Although rising lake water levels submerged the sculpture during the 1980s, it reemerged following a drought in 1999. It was built using heavy machinery and 6,650 tons of basalt and earth. Smithson’s 15-foot-wide counterclockwise curlicue is located at the remote Rozel Point in Box Elder County. The pact covered 116,000 acres, but left out 55,000 acres the lake’s Little Valley Harbor, five miles southwest of the Spiral Jetty, falls within the exempted acreage. In May 2006, preservation groups including Western Resource Advocates, the Sierra Club’s Utah chapter, Friends of Great Salt Lake, and Great Salt Lake Audubon reached an agreement with the state that pulled back oil and gas leases in the northwest arm of the lake. The 1,500-foot-long mud, salt crystal, and rock Spiral Jetty was supposedly safeguarded under a 19-month-old settlement. The move caught artists and conservationists off guard. Pearl submitted a state application on January 11 to drill two wells from floating barges anchored to the lakebed. Robert Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty, a long-term installation in Rozel Point, Box Elder County, Utah.

Kaysville to spiral jetty