Robert Smithson

Publisher Description

An examination of the interplay between cultural context and artistic practice in the work of Robert Smithson. 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, who achieved cult status in the international art scene during the 1960s and 1970s, continues to generate great interest among artists and curators to this day. This book brings together a complete selection of archival material related to the work - ranging from photographs, film scripts and drawings to original manuscripts and letters - spread over different archives in the Netherlands and the US.

"There have been other exhibitions of his works, but Robert Smithson: Photo Works is the first to examine his use of the camera and to present the way he saw the unique landscapes in which he traveled and located his art. As demonstrated by curator of photography Robert A. Sobieszek, the photographic image was central to Smithson's art, whether in collages, montages, sequences, films, or alone. Smithson's final projects attempted a collaboration art and industry. He believed artists could assist in reclaiming such devastated areas as open-face strip mines. Our expanding presence in and impact upon the land may have become so pervasive that the boundaries between nature and culture have been all but obliterated. Now two decades after his death, Robert Smithson's lessons are all the more vital and significant."-from preface.

This innovative study of two of the most important artists of the twentieth century links the art practices of Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in their attempts to test the limits of art--both what it is and where it is. Ursprung provides a sophisticated yet accessible analysis, placing the two artists firmly in the art world of the 1960s as well as in the art historical discourse of the following decades. Although their practices were quite different, they both extended the studio and gallery into desert landscapes, abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, train stations, and other spaces. Ursprung bolsters his argument with substantial archival research and sociological and economic models of expansion and limits.

This book is devoted to the masterpiece earthwork of Robert Smithson.

The untimely death of Robert Smithson in 1973 at age 34 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks and installations of the 1960s and '70s anticipated concerns with environmentalism and site-specific artistic production. Gary Shapiro's insightful study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity.