IN THE FIELD

Codex Gunnison
Art Practice as Material Science in the Great Salt Lake

By Hans Baumann, guest contributor

Codex Gunnison is a mediative engagement with a unique and understudied ecological condition. It is also an effort to reimagine artistic practice as a speculative and vibrantly humanistic material science capable of interacting with and enriching conventional modes of objective inquiry. It does so by reframing representation as a process of critical engagement with the methodological frameworks employed by scientists with the artist manipulating the scope, aims, and outcomes of formal research. 

Gunnison Bay. The water’s pink color is due to the massive populations of an extremophilic phytoplankton - one of the only organisms that can survive in this environment. Photograph provided by Michael Vanden Berg, Utah Geological Survey.

These large mounds are microbialites - ancient organisms that are part bacteria, part geology. Photograph provided by Michael Vanden Berg, Utah Geological Survey.

The artist conducts fieldwork at the edge of Gunnison Bay.

​The Great Salt Lake is shrinking.  As I write this, the lake has reached its lowest level in recorded history. The reasons for this are many, but a changing climate and increased human demand for the water that feeds into the lake are foremost among them. This trend may portend an ecological catastrophe on scale with the disappearance of the Aral Sea, but, for now, the lake remains.  

An anomalous, cauliflower-like salt accretion found in Gunnison Bay. The water here is some of the saltiest on Earth and it is not uncommon to come across bizarre concentrations of materials such as this.

Expanses of ancient microbialites line the desiccated lake bottom of Gunnison Bay in the Great Salt Lake. The Great Salt Lake recently reached it’s lowest level in recorded history.

These circular forms are the remains of collapsed and dead microbialites.

Historical aerial photographs of the lake reveal that its shoreline has always fluctuated dramatically. In the 1980s the Great Salt Lake was expanding so rapidly that the State of Utah constructed a $60 million pumping station to protect nearby manufacturing plants, Interstate 80, and Salt Lake City International Airport from the threat of flooding. Today the station sits some 13 miles away from the edge of the Great Salt Lake[i]. As the lake level changes, objects are submerged, artifacts are uncovered and materials accumulate in great concentrations - phenomena that led both Robert Smithson and the Morton Salt Company to this place.

[i] No author, “Great Salt Lake Pumping Station, Utah” Center for Land Use Interpretation, Accessed January 18, 2017, http://clui.org/ludb/site/great-salt-lake-pumping-station.

Material accumulation 1. Gunnison Bay, Utah.

Material accumulation 2. Gunnison Bay, Utah.

Codex Gunnison in situ at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah.

Aerial imagery of the far northern reaches of the Great Salt Lake - known as Gunnison Bay - reveals Smithson’s iconic spiral landform and water of an otherworldly pink hue. Gunnison Bay was formed in the mid-20th century by the construction of a railroad causeway that effectively bisected the Great Salt Lake, thus cutting off the northern arm of the lake from any fresh water inputs. Due to evaporation, the salinity in this portion of the lake has steadily increased over time (it is currently almost ten times saltier than ocean water), and the water appears pink due to massive populations of an extremophilic phytoplankton - one of the only organisms that can survive in this environment[i]. 

[i] M.R. Lindsay et al., “Microbialite response to an anthropogenic salinity gradient in Great Salt Lake, Utah,” Geobiology 15, no. 1 (2016): 1.

Image of large microbialite structure from Codex Gunnison project manual.

Salt-encrusted pelican feathers collected at Gunnison Bay.

Various salt accumulations found during project fieldwork.

​With its broad horizons and flat expanses, Gunnison Bay appears so profoundly abiotic that it marginalizes not only human lifeforms, but essentially any member of the Kingdom Animalia that encounters it. It feels fitting that the Donner Party crossed through this area before they came to their infamous and gruesome end. Yet, according to the scientists that study Gunnison Bay, its anthropogenically induced ecosystem is valuable because it acts as a refugia for rare geobiological organisms that are likely the ancestor to every known life form on this planet.  Known as “microbialites,” these entities are essentially living stones and appear to the untrained eye as large boulders in the lakebed. Part biology, part geology, microbialites inhabit the liminal space between organism and inanimate matter and implicitly undermine the supposedly binary relationship between these phenomena (i.e. life vs. matter).  Microbialites reorganize our understanding of the biotic/abiotic divide and suggest that the biosphere – humans included – is less a collection of discrete organisms and more an interpenetrating flow of life forces between diverse material conditions.

The pink water of Gunnison Bay.

Variations in microbialite forms and colors.

Codex Gunnison operates not as an authoritative singular endpoint, but as a process of accumulating information, experimental outcomes, and direct sensory experience into an intellectually coherent but materially diverse whole; an aspatial “nonsite” for endless cognitive excavation. If Smithson issued a call to “provide a concrete consciousness for the present as it really exists”[i], this is one method for achieving this end. The formulation of knowledge and documentation of the unknown are radically creative acts that require no embellishment or abstraction.

[i] Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University, 1979), 221.

Surface patina taken from ancient microbialite structures.

Small specimen microbialite structure on display at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah. Approximately 2’ in diameter.

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner. His work primarily addresses the interface between ecology and technology and is informed by his extensive research in natural systems, evolutionary dynamics and digital technologies. His intimate knowledge of these subjects has led to an interest in artificial nature, and he has lectured on this topic at a number of universities and other venues.
 
Hans holds a graduate degree from Harvard University and is the recipient of the Winifred G. White Travel Fellowship from Harvard University, two Site-Specific Arts Grants from the Seattle-based arts organization 4Culture and was the 2016 Artist in Residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).
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