Robert Smithson

Formation · 1954–1956 · New York City

Studies at the Art Students League of New York

From 1954 to 1956 Smithson studies painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York, and then briefly at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

Œuvre · 1959–1962

Paintings after Dante’s “Divine Comedy”

In 1959–1962 Smithson, who thinks of himself above all as a painter, makes paintings exploring mythical religious archetypes and based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy” — among them “Wall of Dis” and “The Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise” (1959), which correspond to the poem’s three-part structure. In his early drawings and collages he combines images from natural history, science-fiction films, classical art, religious iconography and pornography, including homoerotic clippings from magazines.

Carrière

Returns to art as a Minimalist

After a break from the art world, Smithson reemerges in 1964 as a proponent of minimalism: his new work abandons the earlier preoccupation with the body, and he uses glass sheet and neon tubes to explore visual refraction and mirroring — as in the wall-mounted sculpture “Enantiomorphic Chambers”, of steel and mirrors, which produces the optical effect of a pointless vanishing point. He becomes affiliated with artists of minimalism and Primary Structures — Nancy Holt (whom he marries), Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt — and later joins the Dwan Gallery, whose owner Virginia Dwan is an enthusiastic supporter of his work.

Œuvre · c. 1964 – 1966

An interest in entropy and crystalline structures

Crystalline structures and the concept of entropy become a major interest for Smithson and inform a number of sculptures of this period, among them “Alogon 2” (1966), composed of ten units — the title refers to the Greek word for an unnamable, irrational number. He writes about a future in which the universe burns out into an all-encompassing sameness, and applies the idea of entropy to culture: the suburban sprawl of the post-war boom he calls “slurbs”.

Événement · 1966–1967

Proposals for the Dallas–Fort Worth airport

In 1966–1967 Smithson produces proposals for the Dallas–Fort Worth Regional Airport as concepts for “aerial art” — monumental-scale earthworks to be seen by air travellers. They were never realised.

Carrière

Explores the industrial areas of New Jersey

In 1967 Smithson begins exploring industrial areas around New Jersey: dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock fascinate him, and in an essay he describes them as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This gives rise to the series of “non-sites” — earth and rocks collected from a specific place are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass; he considers the best sites for “earth art” to be those disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization or nature’s own devastation.

Voyage · Virginia City

First trip to the American West

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.

Carrière

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.

Voyage · Yucatan

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.

Œuvre · Yuta

Creates “Spiral Jetty”

“Spiral Jetty” is a land art work in the form of a counterclockwise spiral of local basalt rock and mud, 1,500 feet (460 m) long and 15 feet (4.6 m) wide, jutting from the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. Smithson deliberately chose the site for its proximity to a derelict oil jetty and recorded the construction in a 32-minute colour film of the same title; some art historians consider the jetty his most important work.

Œuvre

“Spiral Jetty”

Œuvre

“Partially Buried Woodshed” at Kent State University

On the campus of Kent State University in Ohio Smithson covers a derelict woodshed with earth until its central beam breaks, illustrating the concept of entropy.

Événement

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.

Œuvre

“Broken Circle” and “Spiral Hill” in Emmen

In 1971 at the Sonsbeek art festival (the year’s theme was “Beyond Lawn and Order”) Smithson creates “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” in Emmen, the Netherlands. “Broken Circle” is built in a quarry lake 10 to 15 feet deep, of white and yellow sand: 140 feet (about 43 m) in diameter, with a canal 12 feet (about 3.7 m) wide; “Spiral Hill”, of earth, black topsoil and white sand, is 75 feet (about 23 m) in diameter at its base.

Événement

Drawing “Cinema Cavern” for spelunkers

In 1971 Smithson draws “Towards the Development of a ‘Cinema Cavern’” — a design for a theatre to be built inside a cave, with spelunkers as the intended audience. Like his other proposals, it remained unrealised.

Exposition · 30 juin 1972 – 8 octobre 1972

Documenta 5

Publication · New York City

Essay on Olmsted and the dialectical landscape

In 1973, having seen the exhibition “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York” at the Whitney Museum (curated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers), Smithson writes the essay “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”: in photographs of the land set aside for Central Park he sees a wasteland degraded by humans before Olmsted, and he challenges the view of the park as an outdated nineteenth-century picturesque. His proposal to make process art out of the dredging of The Pond in Central Park belongs to the same ideas.

Événement · Yuta

Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project

In 1973 Smithson designs the Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project, a visionary proposal for the three-mile-wide (4.8 km) copper pit mine in Utah owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The mining company responded negatively and the project was never built.

Décès · 20 July 1973

Amarillo

On 20 July 1973 Smithson dies, along with a photographer and the pilot, in the crash of a light aircraft, a Beechcraft Baron E55, while inspecting the site of “Amarillo Ramp” on the ranch of Stanley Marsh 3 near Amarillo, Texas; the National Transportation Safety Board attributed the accident to the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed, with distraction a contributing factor. The work was later completed by his widow Nancy Holt, Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi.