Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 - July 20, 1973) was an American artist famous for his land art.
Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League. His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines" (New York Times 06.24.05), 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 Enantiamorphic 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. 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. 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 of entropy gained from his readings of William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard.
Writing remained a critical aspect of Smithson's artwork as well, best exemplified by the essay, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan", published in Artforum in September 1969. The text 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.
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 geographical time consuming human history. His most famous work is Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1500-feet long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, salt and red algae. It was entirely submerged by rising lake waters for several years, but has since re-emerged.
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. His more theoretical writing is concerned with the relationship of a piece of art to its environment, 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.
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, Vik Muniz and Mike Nelson have all made homages to Smithson's works.
External links
- www.robertsmithson.com
- Pictures of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
- Smithson Sightings Short essay on Smithson by Timothy Don of 3 Quarks Daily .