Authoritative Salt Lake City newspapers are reporting the exciting news that there is a push to make a famous work of landscape art the state of Utah's "official work of art". The work is (pictured, photographed from the air) Robert Smithson's wonderful Spiral Jetty.
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This column is always toey about matters of ACT public art and of course the news from Utah causes the lively ACT mind to leap to ask some parochial questions.
One of them is "If we were to choose an official ACT work of art which work of art would it be?"
Readers, send us your nominations.
Another question, especially for miserabilists , might be 'Well it's all very well for Utah, with its terrific Spiral Jetty, but does the ACT have yet a work of art worth taking to our bosom in such a way?"
To which we answer "Yes of course it does! Why do you always have to be so negative?"
We have some nominations up our sleeve, for another day. but it is time now to nourish today's item with some facts.
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was constructed in 1970 using earthworks supporting rocks taken from a nearby hillside. It is a kind of causeway and if stretched out in a straight line it would protrude almost 500 metres out into the Great Salt Lake (about 145 kilometres north of Salt Lake City). But of course it doesn't go in a straight line but goes into a counterclockwise swirl, ending at a point in the middle of the spiral more than 100 metres from shore.
The folk of Utah are said to be very fond of it. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the USA or for that matter in the world. But, for all that it is made of rocks it has a kind of rugged fragility and does need some looking after. Depending on the state of the Great Salt Lake the artwork is often submerged.There has been some natural erosion and it is also subject to the occasional greedy, clodhopping, sensitive-folks-horrifying proposal that drilling for oil should be allowed right next to it.
Now, in spite of being a Republican, Representative Becky Edwards of North Salt Lake, has introduced a bill to the Utah House of Representatives seeking to make Spiral Jetty her state's official work of art.
"We really are unique in the sense that we are the only state that has the Jetty," Edwards trills.
"Having an official declaration gives the place more attention and gravity [and protection] as a place of importance. And it's an opportunity for us to brag as a state. It's an opportunity for us to highlight something that really is unique."
On Tuesday, Utah's Art Day, her bill will be voted on in the the Utah House of Representatives.
Only a few US states have an official work of art but Utah may have an appetite for official things because one of the Salt Lake City papers tantalisingly mentions in passing that Utah has an official state fossil.
Another reason this news has caused your columnist to prick up his ears is because Smithson's great posed-in-a-lake work has always struck me as something that should be an inspiration to Canberra. It should inspire us to do something artistic with some parts of disappointing Lake Burley Griffin. To the lively-minded those vast expanses of featureless waters are a watery waste of space crying out for some life, for something to go "Gosh!" at.
While on sculptures and water, the only Floriades I ever found bearable were two (methinks in 1992 and 1996) at which in the Park the tyranny of the tulips, the horror of the hyacinths was broken up by various exciting new sculptures. The most memorable of them were works that made artful uses of the Park's spacious Nerang Pool..
One of the best of them (can any readers identify it and its creator from my description of it?) was a witty, surreal bridge so positioned in the middle of the park's Nerang Pool that it wasn't a bridge at all, really. It didn't bridge anything or go to and from anywhere but arose in the pond and then descended into it. It was only accessible by dinghy. It was a visual oxymoron that played with the mind. Something like it by the same artist if he is still a'sculpting, sited somewhere in Lake Burley Griffin, would break up the lake's glassy monotony and would give joy to all who see it.
And so would a version of the four very popular, painted and beflagged windmills that decorated Nerang Pool during the Floriade of 1992. Like the aforementioned zany bridge they could only be reached by boat and in one of our two windmill pictures the windmills' creators Fiona Hooton (with paddles) and Catrina Vignando are setting off across Nerang Pool's duck-infested waters.
Our other windmill picture, a work of art in its own right by this paper's Andrew Campbell, was taken on the stormy last day of the Floriade of 1992. In the foreground we see silhouetted the intrepid Gunn family.
