Robert Smithson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by
"homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines" (Kimmelman
2005), science fiction, and early Pop Art. He primarily identified
himself as a painter during this time, but after a three year rest
from the art world, Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of the
then-fashionable minimalism. His new work abandoned the preoccupation
with the body that had been common in his earlier work. Instead he
began to use glass sheet and neon lighting tubes to explore visual
refraction and mirroring, in particular the sculpture Enantiomorphic
Chambers. Crystalline structures and the concept of entropy became of
particular interest to him, and informed a number of sculptures
completed during this period, including Alogon 2. Smithson became
affiliated with artists who were identified with the minimalist or
Primary Structures movement, such as Nancy Holt (whom he married),
Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt. As a writer, Smithson was interested in
applying mathematical impersonality to art that he outlined in essays
and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum and for a period was better
known as a critic than as an artist. Some of Smithson's later writings
recovered 18th- and 19th-century conceptions of landscape architecture
which influenced the pivotal earthwork explorations which
characterized his later work. He eventually joined the Dwan Gallery,
whose owner Virginia Dwan was an enthusiastic supporter of his work.
In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey
and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of
earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the
monuments of antiquity. This resulted in the series of 'non-sites' in
which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in
the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass. In
September 1968, Smithson published the essay "A Sedimentation of the
Mind: Earth Projects" in Artforum that promoted the work of the first
wave of land art artist and in 1969 he began producing land art pieces
to further explore concepts gained from his readings of William S.
Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and George Kubler.
As well as works of art, Smithson produced a good deal of theoretical
and critical writing, including the 2D paper work A Heap of Language,
which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. In his essay
"Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" (Smithson 1969), Smithson
documents a series of temporary sculptures made with mirrors at
particular locations around the Yucatan peninsula. Part travelogue,
part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern
with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work.
Smithson's interest in the temporal is explored in his writings in
part through the recovery of the ideas of the picturesque. His essay
"Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape" was written in
1973 after Smithson had seen an exhibition curated by Elizabeth Barlow
Rogers at the Whitney Museum entitled “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New
York” as the cultural and temporal context for the creation of his
late-19th-century design for Central Park. In examining the
photographs of the land set aside to become Central Park, Smithson saw
the barren landscape that had been degraded by humans before Olmsted
constructed the complex ‘naturalistic’ landscape that was viscerally
apparent to New Yorkers in the 1970s. Smithson was interested in
challenging the prevalent conception of Central Park as an outdated
19th-century Picturesque aesthetic in landscape architecture that had
a static relationship within the continuously evolving urban fabric of
New York City. In studying the writings of 18th- and 19th-century
Picturesque treatise writers Gilpin, Price, Knight and Whately,
Smithson recovers issues of site specificity and human intervention as
dialectic landscape layers, experiential multiplicity, and the value
of deformations manifest in the Picturesque landscape.
Smithson further implies in this essay that what distinguishes the
Picturesque is that it is based on real land (Smithson 1996, p. 160).
For Smithson, a park exists as “a process of ongoing relationships
existing in a physical region” (Smithson 1996, p. 160). Smithson was
interested in Central Park as a landscape which by the 1970s had
weathered and grown as Olmsted’s creation, but was layered with new
evidence of human intervention.
Now the Ramble has grown up into an urban jungle, and lurking in its
thickets are “hoods, hobos, hustlers, and homosexuals,” and other
estranged creatures of the city…. Walking east, I passed graffiti on
boulders… On the base of the Obelisk along with the hieroglyphs there
are also graffiti. …In the spillway that pours out of the Wollman
Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket
half-submerged in the water. Further down, the spillway becomes a
brook choked with mud and tin cans. The mud then spews under the
Gapstow Bridge to become a muddy slough that inundates a good part of
The Pond, leaving the rest of The Pond aswirl with oil slicks, sludge,
and Dixie cups” (Smithson 1996, pp. 169–170).
While Smithson did not find “beauty” in the evidence of abuse and
neglect, he did see the state of things as demonstrative of the
continually transforming relationships between man and landscape. In
his proposal to make process art out of the dredging of The Pond,
Smithson sought to insert himself into the dynamic evolution of the
park (Smithson 1996, p. 170).
Smithson became particularly interested in the notion of deformities
within the spectrum of anti-aesthetic dynamic relationships which he
saw present in the Picturesque landscape. He claimed, “the best sites
for ‘earth art’ are sites that have been disrupted by industry,
reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation” (Flam 165). While
in earlier 18th-century formal characterizations of the pastoral and
the sublime, something like a “gash in the ground” if encountered by a
“leveling improver”, as described by Price, would have been smoothed
over and the whole composition returned to a more aesthetically
pleasing contour (Smithson 1996, p. 159). For Smithson, however, it
was not necessary that the deformation become a visual aspect of a
landscape; by his anti-formalist logic, more important was the
temporal scar worked over by natural or human intervention. He saw
parallels to Olmsted's Central Park as a “sylvan” green overlay on the
depleted landscape that preceded his Central Park (Smithson 1996, p.
158). Defending himself against allegations that he and other earth
artists “cut and gouge the land like Army engineers”, Smithson, in his
own essay, charges that one of such opinions “failed to recognize the
possibility of a direct organic manipulation of the land..” and would
“turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscapes”
(Smithson 1996, p. 163).
In revisiting the 18th- and early 19th-century treatises of the
Picturesque, which Olmsted interpreted in his practice, Smithson
exposes threads of an anti-aesthetic anti-formalist logic and a
theoretical framework of the Picturesque that addressed the dialectic
between the physical landscape and its temporal context. By
re-interpreting and re-valuing these treatises, Smithson was able to
broaden the temporal and intellectual context for his own work, and to
offer renewed meaning for Central Park as an important work of modern
art and landscape architecture.
Other theoretical writings explore the relationship of a piece of art
to its environment, from which he developed his concept of sites and
non-sites. A site was a work located in a specific outdoor location,
while a non-site was a work which could be displayed in any suitable
space, such as an art gallery. Spiral Jetty is an example of a sited
work, while Smithson's non-site pieces frequently consist of
photographs of a particular location, often exhibited alongside some
material (such as stones or soil) removed from that location.
The journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist,
and his non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a
particular location, as well as the geological artifacts displaced
from those sites. In 1970 at Kent State University, Smithson created
Partially Buried Woodshed to illustrate geological time consuming
human history. His most famous work is Spiral Jetty (1970), a
1500-foot long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake
in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, and salt. It was entirely
submerged by rising lake waters for several years, but has since
re-emerged. The lake waters may be pinkish due to high concentrations
of β-carotene in the halophyte green alga Dunaliella salina.
On July 20, 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash, while surveying
sites for his work Amarillo Ramp in Texas. Despite his early death,
and relatively few surviving major works, Smithson has a cult
following amongst many contemporary artists. In recent years, Tacita
Dean, Sam Durant, Lee Ranaldo, Vik Muniz and Mike Nelson have all made
homages to Smithson's works.
