Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson (born Jan. 2, 1938, Passaic, N.J., U.S.—died July 20, 1973, Amarillo, Texas) was an American sculptor and writer associated with the Land Art movement. His large-scale sculptures, called Earthworks, engaged directly with nature and were created by moving and constructing with vast amounts of soil and rocks.

Smithson preferred to work with ruined or exhausted sites in nature. Using the earth as his palette, he created archetypal forms: spirals, circles, and mounds. Although, like other land artists of the late 1960s and early ’70s—including Walter De Maria, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, and Carl Andre—Smithson chose to make his major work outside what he and his colleagues considered a compromised gallery system, he nevertheless also created smaller objects, which he called “nonsites,” for museum and gallery settings. These nonsite pieces employed topographic maps of an area juxtaposed with minimalist displays of materials taken from the actual sites as a form of pseudoarchaeological evidence that made reference to the “real” outdoor work. He also documented his work extensively with photographs and film.

Smithson was largely self-taught. He earned a two-year scholarship to the Art Students League in New York City, and he studied briefly at the Brooklyn Museum School in 1956. His initial artwork was in the form of painting in the manner of the Abstract Expressionists. After a trip to Rome in 1961, he brought mythological and religious subjects into this work. After marrying the American sculptor Nancy Holt in 1963, he started making painted metal sculptures. As he did so, he began to question the role of the autonomous object in the museum context. He proceeded to make a number of minimalist sculptures, using industrial materials such as glass and mirrors. As he became increasingly preoccupied with the context for works of art, he began to work outside in natural sites ruined by industrial waste or mining. In 1971, for one of a growing number of outdoor projects, he took a 20-year lease on 10 acres (4 hectares) of lakefront land at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and, using hired contractors, he made a huge spiral extending 1,500 feet (460 metres) into the lake. This work, titled Spiral Jetty, can still be seen periodically, depending on the water level.

In this and all of his other Earthworks, Smithson was interested in evoking geologic time through scale and the use of ancient rocks and dirt. He investigated many prehistoric sites, such as Stonehenge in England, and felt that his work was directly associated with such locations. Smithson was also interested in concepts of entropy—how energy gets dispersed in nature from the orderly to the disorderly over time—and he saw that as a metaphor for a philosophical orientation to life. He was a highly romantic artist whose most sublime and spiritual thoughts appear in his numerous writings, collected in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996), edited by Jack Flam. Smithson died in a plane crash at age 35 while inspecting a site in West Texas for an Earthwork to be titled Amarillo Ramp. This piece was finished posthumously (1973) by Holt, Tony Shafrazi, and Richard Serra.