It looked, he said in an interview, “like a kind of archipelago of white islands because of the heavy salt concentrations.” Jettyperiodically disappears underwater and resurfaces today it is completely visible because of severe drought in the area. Smithson lived long enough to see Spiral Jetty completely submerged and to witness its reemergence a few weeks later. He wanted people to be able to walk on top of the rocks as if on a pier. Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, chose a site on the lake’s northeast shore, because he was drawn to the dark rose color of the water, which comes from the bacteria and algae living in it. Perhaps the best-known Earthwork is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, completed in three weeks in 1970, an immense coil composed of 6,650 tons of black basalt rock and earth jutting into the shallows of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. All are epic in scale, and all have found a patron and champion in the Dia Foundation, a New York–based nonprofit organization devoted to art created since the 1960s. Two others, Turrell’s Roden Crater and Heizer’s City, are still under construction. Two of these projects, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and De Maria’s The Lightning Field, have been accessible for more than a quarter century and continue to draw visitors on a regular basis. Their example taught younger artists that it was possible to work in far-flung outposts, at a distance from the commercial end of art making. In moving beyond the confines of museums and galleries, the creators of Earthworks expanded the way we look at and think about art. They all came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when political and social rebellion in the larger world was matched by noisy chafing against the constraints of museums and galleries in the smaller cosmos of the art world. The major artists include Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, James Turrell, and Michael Heizer. The projects they produced-and in some cases are still producing-are known variously as Earthworks, Land Art, or Earth Art. Like the solitary prophets of biblical times or the early American pioneers, these men (they were mostly men) went off to remote and often inaccessible spots to build imposing gestures to a new artistic faith. In this way, the painting suggests that “Marilyn Monroe,” a manufactured star with a made-up name, is merely a one-dimensional (sex) symbol-perhaps not the most appropriate object of our almost religious devotion.They rank among the greatest artworks of the last generation, according to some, monuments conceived on a grand scale by visionaries who were undaunted by size, site, or the sheer mechanics of displacing huge quantities of obdurate matter. Through these choices, Warhol transforms the literal flatness of the paper-thin publicity photo into an emotional “flatness,” and the actress into a kind of automaton. By screening broad planes of unmodulated color, the artist removes the gradual shading that creates a sense of three-dimensional volume, and suspends the actress in an abstract void. Warhol’s use of the silkscreen technique further “flattens” the star’s face. 2015True to form, the actress looks at us seductively from under heavy-lidded eyes and with parted lips but her expression is also a bit inscrutable, and the repetition remakes her face into an eerie, inanimate mask. Publicity still for the film Niagara, 1953 left center and right, details from: Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, acrylic on canvas, 2054 x 1448 mm (Tate) © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
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