Land Art

The legacy of Robert Smithson

Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is the only truth!
¡Ha!
— the language is worn out

William Carlos Williams: “Paterson”

Robert Smithson: “Spiral Jetty”, 1971 ·· Walter de Maria: “The Lightning Field”, 1977. Photo by Retis, license C.C. 2.0

After completing his studies at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York in the late 1950s, the young Robert Smithson (1938-1973) was a typical case of a young artist who had not yet found his artistic identity. Until the mid-1960s, his work took strange swings between religious painting and a more or less explicit eroticism, briefly trying the Pop Art that was beginning to dominate the American art scene. Like so many other artists/creators of the “beat generation”, he made several hitchhiking trips through the United States and Mexico, one of them in 1957, the year Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was published. However, Smithson’s great literary influence was not Kerouac, but the poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who had been his pediatrician as a child, and with whom he resumed contact in 1958, after concluding his travels. “Paterson,” Williams’ epic and complex book-poem, with its underlying idea of man in communion with the place he inhabits, seems central to the development of Smithson’s mature work, who “provocatively described parts of Williams’s Paterson as ‘proto-conceptual art,’ while recalling his own connections to the region, his boyhood explorations of abandoned mining sites: ‘I guess the Paterson area is where I had a lot of my contact with quarries and I think that is somewhat embedded in my psyche.'” (Clark Lunberry: “So Much Depends: Printed Matter, Dying Words, and the Entropic Poem,” 2004)

But before reaching the works of his (sadly short) maturity, in the mid-1960s another of Smithson’s major influences would appear: Minimalism, a movement in which the artist felt interested to the point of creating some works that could be classified within that style. Smithson’s relationship with Minimalism was complex. The artist was attracted to the Minimalist negation of classical space and time, writing in 1966 that “instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future (…) [Dan] Flavin makes “instant monuments”, (…) Flavin turns gallery-space into gallery time (…) A million years is contained in a second, yet we tend to forget the second as soon as it happens. Flavin’s destruction of classical time and space is based on an entirely new notion of the structure of matter.” (Robert Smithson: “Entropy and the New Monuments”, 1966). However, he quickly began to reject the classical conception of the work of art as an autonomous object, also present in Minimalism. “Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void,” he wrotein 1967. “Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.”

In this sense, Smithson’s critique of museums (describing them as “tombs”) does not seem innovative at first sight, since already in 1909 Tommaso Marinetti‘s Futurist Manifesto described them as “cemeteries”. But Smithson’s critique is not so much focused on the type of work on display, or its temporal scope, but on the very nature of the museum, as a set of decontextualized works of art. Beginning in 1967 he explores this idea in his “Non-sites,” in which elements (stones, earth) from a specific area are installed in a museum as an autonomous work of art. “The Nonsite (an indoor earthwork) is a three-dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (…) It is by this three-dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—thus The Nonsite” (Robert Smithson: “A Provisional Theory of Nonsites”, 1968), and the following year he publishes the essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”, where, as a result of Smithson’s artistic evolution, the idea of Land Art appears explicitly.

Alan Sonfist: “Circles of Time”, 1986-89. Photo by Alan Sonfist, license C.C. 4.0 ·· Richard Long: “Full moon circle”. Photo by Mikenorton, license C.C. 4.0

That same year, the Dwan Gallery in New York presented “Earthworks“, where several works by Smithson were documented, along with artists such as Walter de Maria (1935-2013), Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) or Richard Long (b.1945). These same artists would exhibit together again the following year, in the exhibition “Earth Art” organized by the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art. In these two years -1968 and 1969- there was a rapid popularization of Land Art, whose attack on the traditional conception of the autonomous work of art was applauded by artists and admirers of Conceptual Art, and its approach to the natural environment was well received at a time when environmentalism was increasingly accepted. Smithson, however, was at times critical of the environmental movement, which he accused of “holding what he thought to be a naive aesthetics that sought to preserve and mantain what was fundamentally a humanized nature, constructed according to a particular conception of beauty” (Gary Shapiro: “Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel”, 1995).

In the spring of 1970, Smithson created what is probably the best known work of Land Art, and in which its key characteristics can be summarized. “Spiral Jetty” is a colossal spiral 460 meters long, created from local materials (basalt, salt crystals, earth), whose appearance varies with the passage of time, sometimes becoming completely submerged under water, to reappear in times of drought. After “Spiral Jetty” and “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” (a work somewhat similar to “Spiral Jetty” made in the Netherlands in 1971), Smithson undertook his most ambitious project, the “Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project” (1973), in which he intended to turn the world’s largest open-pit mine into a colossal site-specific installation. That same year, Smithson died in a plane crash in Texas.

Smithson was the great figure of Land Art, but there were many others who contributed to the movement, among them the aforementioned Walter de Maria (1935-2013), author of the colossal “The Lightning Field” in New Mexico. Alan Sonfist (b.1946), sometimes considered a precursor of Land Art for his urban installations in New York, has created site-specific installations from the 1970s well into the 21st century, such as his 2004 “Lost Falcon.” Also active for decades, Richard Long‘s (b.1945) style can be considered halfway between Land Art and Minimalism.

G. Fernández · theartwolf.com