With the Spiral Jetty currently above water, there
have been several CLUI-led visits to the site, which is four hours
from the CLUI interpretive center in Wendover -in the neighborhood,
by Great Salt Lake standards. (Park Service staff at the Golden
Spike National Historic Site, which most people stop at on their
way to the Jetty, say that Jetty visitation peaked a few months
ago at fifty people a day). In April, Matthew Coolidge led a group
from the University of Utah on an excursion to some unusual sites
on the eastern side of the Great Salt Lake, including the Westinghouse
Zirconium Plant, the Little Mountain Test Annex, and Trestlewood,
on the tip of Promontory Point, where the wooden piles from the
railway's defunct part of the Lucin Cutoff are being salvaged
for use as a construction material. Then it was out to the Spiral
Jetty, to begin a project examining the history of the objects
that surround the Jetty, such as the abandoned oil jetty, the
old wrecked trailer, and the immobile amphibious vehicle. Due
to the increased visitation and heightened attention of the visitors
to the Jetty, these once functional objects are becoming iconic
cultural artifacts as well. This is an example of a perceptual
phenomenon we call the “land art spill-over effect.”
It's been another busy spring at the Center’s compound
in Wendover, with residents coming by from near and far. Cathy
Ward and Eric Wright, artists from England, visited for a few
weeks, and retraced some of the Donner-Reed party’s trek
across the flats, as part of their study of folklore and American
mythology. Elizabeth Withstandley and Patrick Ford worked on a
film in the area, and Vicky Sambunaris, a photographer from New
York, spent a few weeks photographing. Other visitors and users
of the facility this summer include Christian Stayner, a graduate
student from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, William
Wylie, from the University of Virginia, Paula Poole and Brett
Stalbaum from UC San Diego, and an inventive German group known
as e-team, which works on Utah land it buys off of eBay.
This Fall will be busy too, with classes and more residents
visiting Wendover, straight through until the beginning of November.
The Land Arts of the American West class will be stopping by for
a week long visit, as they did last year. This remarkable field
session takes students in art and design from the University of
Texas and University of New Mexico on a semester- long field trip,
looking at art and cultural sites in the landscape. They use the
CLUI facilities at Wendover as a base to look at sites of note
in the region, and to work on individual interpretive projects.
A graduate class from the California College of the Arts will
use Wendover as a base for a week in September, as part of a course
on landscape curating being taught by CLUI Program Director Matthew
Coolidge. |
Upcoming Events at Wendover:
There will be an open
house for CLUI Wendover, scheduled for Saturday September
18th, the same day as the always entertaining Wendover Airfield
Airshow. Look for new exhibits by CLUI Wendover Residence Program
alumni Wayne Barrar, Jessica Sowles, and Catherine Harris, as
well as several permanent installations and ongoing projects,
like the Wendover Airbase Autotour, Deborah Stratman’s radio
tower, and Simparch’s
Clean Livin' project at Southbase.
In early October, the CLUI will be leading a public bus tour
called A Tour of
the Monuments of the Great American Void, which will look
at the Great Salt Lake Desert as phantasmagoric miasma, inspiring
things like Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, and radioactive waste burying.
The tour is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’
retrospective about Robert Smithson, opening in September. Tickets
will go on sale in September through the MOCA box office.
In conjunction with these is a new
exhibit about Wendover at the CLUI - Los Angeles. |
