Sarah Gilman

Assistant Editor

Have you ever stood on the edge of a strip mine, stared into the kelly-green waste water pooled at the bottom, the bright mineral colors of eroding earth and tailings, and thought to yourself: “God, that’s beautiful”? Then there are the lit towers — strange gothic cities — of coal mines and refineries at night; the eery, soundless sweep of oil derricks pumping in a greening field; the twisting arcs of sprawling suburb streets seen from the air.

If you’re like me, you find yourself struck dumb by such scenes. There is something of the sublime in them. They have the power to entice and repel, and challenge us with the idea that development, industry, even poison, have their own strange, terrible loveliness.

This was a concept that fascinated earthworks artist Robert Smithson, who poured glue and asphalt down hillsides and built structures of earth and rock in the middle of Western nowhere. Ironically, one of Smithson’s better known pieces — a 1,500-foot curving rock structure called the “Spiral Jetty” that juts into Utah’s Great Salt Lake — is now at the center of a fight over drilling for oil, reports the New York Times.

A fierce debate, with equal parts art, environmentalism and economics, has erupted over a plan by the state to allow oil drilling about five miles across the lake. The owner of “Spiral Jetty,” the Dia Art Foundation in New York, in an alliance with a conservation group called Friends of Great Salt Lake, says the oil rigs would harm the work’s aesthetic experience. Led by their drumbeat of protest, more than 3,000 e-mail messages, mostly against the drilling plan, were received by the state during a public comment period last month.

But as the Times reports, Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, “reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebirth, rot and permanence.” So would the experience of the Jetty be less powerful with drill rigs on the horizon?

I’m not so sure.

As Smithson was well aware, we leave our marks on the landscape we inhabit. They can be ugly or beautiful, light or long lasting. There is a bald honesty in his work, a refusal to deny the environmental externalities of our everyday lives. I’m all for responsible development. But if I found myself standing on the graceful sweep of the Spiral Jetty, I think I would find a vista of distant wells and pipelines on the horizon appropriate to the piece — the churned earth and the muscle of machinery both compelling and disturbing.