thumb|Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty in 2004, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah.|300px|right

Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty (1970).

Early life and education

Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and spent his childhood in Rutherford until he was nine. In Rutherford, the poet and physician William Carlos Williams was Smithson's pediatrician. When Smithson was nine, his family moved to the Allwood section of Clifton. He studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York from 1954 to 1956 and then briefly at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

Career

Early work

He primarily identified as a painter during this time, and his early exhibited artworks had a wide range of influences, including science fiction, Catholic art and Pop art. He produced drawings and collage works that incorporated images from natural history, science fiction films, classical art, religious iconography, and pornography including "homoerotic clippings from beefcake magazines". Paintings from 1959 to 1962 explored "mythical religious archetypes" and were also based on Dante's Divine Comedy such as the paintings from 1959 Wall of Dis and The Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, that correspond to the Divine Comedys three-part structure. His new work abandoned the preoccupation with the body that had been common in his earlier work, and he began to use glass sheet and neon lighting tubes to explore visual refraction and mirroring. 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 artists, 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. Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work.

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.

As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying the Dialectical method and 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 the late 1960s Smithson's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication which experimented with language and meaning-making.

Frederick Law Olmsted's influence

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. For Smithson, a park exists as "a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region".

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. Smithson became particularly interested in the notion of industrial decay within the spectrum of anti-aesthetic dynamic relationships which he saw present in the picturesque landscape. In his proposal to make process art out of the dredging of The Pond in Central Park, Smithson sought to insert himself into the dynamic evolution of the park. While in earlier 18th-century formal characterizations of the pastoral and the sublime, something like a "gash in the ground" or pile of rocks, if encountered by a "leveling improver", as described by Price, would have been smoothed over and the area terraformed into a more aesthetically pleasing contour. For Smithson, it was not necessary that the disruption 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 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".

Significant works

Spiral Jetty

thumb|Spiral Jetty in June 2013

Spiral Jetty (1970) is a work of land art in the form of a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise spiral of local basalt rocks and mud, forming a jetty that juts from the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. Over the years it has accumulated a patina of salt crystals when the level of the lake is low. Some art historians consider the Spiral Jetty to be the most important work by Smithson. He documented the construction of the sculpture in a 32-minute color film also titled Spiral Jetty.

Partially Buried Woodshed

Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) is an earthwork created at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The work consisted of a derelict woodshed on campus that he covered with earth until the central beam broke, illustrating the concept of entropy. By 2018, only a mound of dirt and the structure's concrete foundation remain. An informational plaque is located in a small wooded area immediately behind the Liquid Crystal Institute building on the Kent State University main campus.

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill

thumb|300px|right|Robert Smithson, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, Emmen, the Netherlands

In 1971 Smithson created Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in Emmen, the Netherlands as part of the Sonsbeek art festival. The subject of the 1971 Sonsbeek exhibition was Beyond Lawn and Order (Dutch: Buiten de perken). The Broken Circle earthwork was built in a quarry lake 10-to-15 feet deep. It was 140 feet in diameter, with the canal 12 feet wide, and built of white and yellow sand. The accompanying Spiral Hill is made of earth, black topsoil, and white sand, and is 75 feet in diameter at its base. The work is still being maintained and occasionally opened for visitors.

Unrealized projects

thumb|Bingham Copper Mine, Bingham, Utah

During his lifetime, Smithson created several proposals for projects that were unrealized, either due to their visionary nature, lack of support or their impracticality. Between 1966 and 1967 he produced Proposals for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport as concepts for "aerial art", monumental-scaled earthworks to be seen by air travelers. In 1973 he designed the Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project, a visionary proposal for the copper pit mine in Utah owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The mining company responded negatively to the proposal and it was never built. the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. The work was subsequently completed by Smithson's widow Nancy Holt, Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi. It was originally built to rise from a shallow artificial lake, but the lake later dried up, and the earthwork has become overgrown and eroded.

Smithson has a following among many contemporary artists. Artists Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Renée Green, Lee Ranaldo, Vik Muniz, Mike Nelson, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation have all made homages to Smithson's works.

In 2017 the Holt/Smithson Foundation was founded to preserve, through public service, the investigative spirit of the two artists who "developed innovative methods of exploring our relationship with the planet, and expanded the limits of artistic practice." The goal of the foundation is to "increase awareness of both artists' creative legacies".

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Image:Emmen Smithson Broken Circle.JPG|Broken Circle, Emmen, The Netherlands

Image:Emmen Smithson Spiral Hill.JPG|Spiral Hill, Emmen, The Netherlands

Image:Spiral-jetty-from-rozel-point.png|Spiral Jetty, Utah, US

Image:Partially Buried Woodshed Plaque.jpg|Partially Buried Woodshed plaque, Kent, OH, US

Image:Partially Buried Woodshed Remains.jpg|Partially Buried Woodshed remains, Kent, OH, US

</gallery>

References

Bibliography

  • . Retrieved June 2, 2007.
  • Ingrid Commandeur and Trudy van Riemsdijk-Zandee: Robert Smithson: Art in Continual Movement. Alauda Publications, Amsterdam (2012),
  • The Estate of Robert Smithson
  • Holt/Smithson Foundation