Robert Smithson was interested in the natural environment as an alternative site to the interior, decontextualized space of commercial galleries and museums. He produced this earthwork study as a document of one moment in the continual process of environmental flux. The drawing depicts a detail view of a wall-like cinder-block structure collapsing under the force of a concrete flow as it runs over a precipice. The appearance of the disintegrating edifice imbues the event with a catastrophic quality, conveying Smithson’s perception of entropy as a primeval or elementary component of the natural landscape.
In 1968 Smithson visits the American West for the first time with Nancy Holt and Michael Heizer — to Virginia City, Nevada, and Lone Pine, California. Such journeys become central to his practice: his non-sites often include maps and aerial photographs of a place along with geological artifacts displaced from it.
September 1968
Essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”
In September 1968 Smithson publishes in Artforum an essay promoting the work of the first wave of land artists. He writes a great deal in general — theoretical and critical texts for Arts Magazine and Artforum, visual-text works such as “A Heap of Language”, and in the late 1960s his work also appears in the avant-garde magazine “0 to 9”; for a period he is better known as a critic than as an artist.
1969
Begins making land art
In 1969 Smithson starts producing land art pieces, developing concepts gained from his reading of William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard and George Kubler.
1969
Mirror travel in the Yucatán
In 1969 Smithson sets up a series of temporary mirror sculptures at various places on the Yucatán Peninsula; the photographs of “Mirror Displacements” illustrate his essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” — part travelogue, part critical rumination, in which his interest in time as a cornerstone of his work is plain.
1970
Proposal “Floating Island” around Manhattan
In 1970 Smithson makes a series of drawings for “Floating Island: To Travel around Manhattan Island”: a barge containing broken concrete or glass is to be pulled by a tugboat; in other versions the barge is filled with earth and planted with trees and other vegetation. The project remained unrealised.
