Smithson, Robert

Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the poster child for the antiformalist Earth Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A coil of earth, salt, and stone that Smithson built into Great Salt Lake, Utah, the piece is a tribute to the movement's scale and engineering as well as to its visionary union of art and nature. Smithson's questioning of the conventional attitudes of art and culture did not stop with the creation of objects and images; he was committed to exploring of attitudes and ideas as a critical component of his work. A revised and expanded version of The Writings of Robert Smithson, this book is a charged combination of articles and images in which the author demystifies the distinction between theory and practice.

Since the 1979 publication of The Writings of Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson's significance as a spokesman for a generation of artists has been widely acknowledged and the importance of his thinking to contemporary artists and art critics continues to grow. In addition to a new introduction by Jack Flam, The Collected Writings includes previously unpublished essays by Smithson and gathers hard-to-find articles, interviews, and photographs. Together these provide a full picture of his wide-ranging views on art and culture.

Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty-a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake-is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century. Less well known is the connection between the Jetty and the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, location of the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. The link between these two monuments is but one facet of an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithson's work. Mirror-Travels encompasses the full span of Smithson's career, offering a close analysis of the artist's working model of history and featuring comprehensive case studies of three of his most influential works: "The Monuments of Passaic," "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," and the Spiral Jetty. Incorporating abundant new material from Smithson's personal papers and library, Jennifer Roberts offers surprising new interpretations about the artist and his responses to the social, ideological, and material contradictions of his time.

The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations

Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson's working life—magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library—from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time.

A central focus of Reynolds's analysis is Smithson's fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again—alone and with fellow artists—to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture.

Robert Smithson: Sculpture

On Location: Siting Robert Smithson and His Contemporaries

In debates over the transition from modernism to postmodernism much is made of the shift from the autonomous art object to site-specific work. On Location: Siting Robert Smithson and his Contemporaries revives these debates by exploring the relationship between the site and the gallery space evident in the work of Robert Smithson and his peers. In the 1960s, artists began to work directly with the exhibition space, creating temporary installations or challenging the physical limits of the gallery by transforming its architecture. Others moved beyond the gallery to work on city streets or in the countryside, whilst others still explored the mechanisms of the art world itself, investigating the publications and reproductions that frequently replaced the direct experience of individual works. Robert Smithson engaged with all of these practices in different ways and, as a result, plays a pivotal role in these debates. Published in conjunction with the On Location exhibition at University of East Anglia's Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, On Location: Siting Robert Smithson and his Contemporaries is a timely exploration of the relationship between the art-object, the site and the exhibition space, presenting a robust contribution to one of the most important debates current in contemporary art.

Robert Smithson / Bernd & Hilla Becher: Field Trips

In December 1968, the American artist Robert Smithson embarked on a field trip to the huge industrial complex in the Ruhr district of Germany. His local guides were the Dsseldorf-based artist duo of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Konrad Fischer, in whose Dsseldorf gallery Smithson was scheduled to exhibit. The Bechers had begun their own project of photographing the vernacular industrial architecture of Northern Europe in the early 1960s, and had already spent several months photographing at Oberhausen as well as at adjacent industrial sites. The different series of photographs made by Smithson and the Bechers of the same site foreground their respective preoccupations with the industrial landscape and the process of production and entropy, with systems and their inevitable dissolution. Their contrasting bodies of work embody alternate perspectives on time: the Bechers' sense of historical time and Smithson's of the geological. Though formally divergent, each artist's work comprises a radical rethinking of classical notions of beauty and landscape. Neither the Bechers' typologies nor Smithson's projects were possible without prospecting in neglected parts of the landscape, whose distressed state refuted the relationship between history and progress.

Robert Smithson: Slideworks

Artwork by Robert Smithson. Text by Vicki Goldberg, Carlo Frua.

Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty

In 1970 Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most innovative and provocative artists of the twentieth century, created the landmark earthwork Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point on Utah's Great Salt Lake. This dramatic and highly influential work forms a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide and stretches out counterclockwise into the lake's translucent red water. Composed of black basalt rocks and earth, the sculpture comprises the materials of its location: mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.
The contributors to this comprehensive publication consider the sculpture in relation to its eponymous companions--a text work and a film. These essays situate this renowned series of works alongside Smithson's critical writings, proposals, drawings, sources, and models. Amply illustrated with archival and new photographs of the Jetty and many comparative illustrations, this book makes evident why Smithson's art and writings have had such a powerful impact on art and art theory for over thirty years.

Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel

The death of Robert Smithson in 1973 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s anticipated contemporary concerns with environmentalism and the site-specific character of artistic production. His interrogation of authorship, the linear historiography of high modernism, and the limitations of the museum prefigures key themes in postmodern criticism while underscoring the uniqueness of Smithson's own work as an artist, filmmaker, and writer.
Gary Shapiro's elegant and incisive study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity. Ranging from Smithson's best known works such as Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed to his photographs, films, and theoretical readings and writings, Shapiro's masterful book analyzes Smithson's art in relation to the legacy of American art of the 1960s and central philosophical themes in its contemporary reception.