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Robert
Smithson
Conceptual Framework: Artist
Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973) was an American artist famous for his land
art.
Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing
in New York City at the Art Students League. Smithson emerged in 1964 as
a proponent of the then-fashionable minimalism. In 1967 Smithson began exploring
industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dumper
trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as
the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in the series
of 'non-sites' in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are
installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass.
In September 1968 Smithson published the essay A Sedimentation of the
Mind: Earth Projects in Artforum that promoted the work of the first
wave of land art artist. In 1969 he began producing land art pieces. The
journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist, and his
non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a particular
location, as well as the geological artifacts displaced from those sites.
His most famous work is Spiral Jetty.
Conceptual Framework: Artwork
Spiral Jetty, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah
April 1970
mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water coil
1500' long and 15' wide
Spiral Jetty was constructed by Robert Smithson in 1970. It was
his largest and most ambitious piece of earth art. Earth Art was the name
given to works that involve changing the land with heavy equipment in order
to create a sculptural form. The artist Robert Smithson first used the term
to describe his works. Shortly after completion, it was submerged by the
rising waters of the Great Salt Lake. In 1973 Smithson died in an airplane
crash in Texas while surveying a site for another piece of earth art. Only
recently, with the decline in the level of the lake, has Spiral Jetty
resurfaced. It is 1,500 feet long, and is located at Rozel Point on the
western side of Promontory Point.
Artmaking Practice: Ideas
Spiral Jetty belongs to a form of art from the 1960’s and
1970’s called Land Art. This style was characterised by artworks where
the land itself was used by artists as both the material for their sculptures
as well as the subject matter. The interest was based on the artists’
needs to interact with the land but not always in a harmonious manner. Land
Art was a form of late Modernism. Land artists were interested in the way
the land could look after they had manipulated it in some way i.e. they
were interested in its formal properties, not in the spiritual or symbolic
aspects of the land. Spiral Jetty has no social dimension; it was
constructed before postmodern concerns with humankind’s interaction
with nature and before environmental and conservation concerns had been
articulated or accepted as common currency. Because Smithson was interested
in the land itself as his subject matter, his will as an artist, as a male
artist, was to dominate the site in a way which was not sympathetic to the
existing landforms, to manipulate, using heavy earth moving equipment. He
set out to change the site irrevocably.
Artmaking Practice: Actions
Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is located
on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Using black basalt rocks and earth from
the site, the artist created a coil that stretches out counterclockwise
into the translucent red water. Spiral Jetty was constructed in
a lonely, almost inaccessible site and it took many months and much use
of heavy earth-moving equipment to construct the huge spiral of stones in
the shallow water of the salt lake. The spiral is of monumental proportions,
hundreds of metres in length and wide enough for several trucks to pass
each other.
Conceptual Framework: Audience
The only audience who could view this site-specific land sculpture were
those intrepid travelers with much time and four-wheel drive vehicles, but
they were not able to view it as Smithson meant for it to be viewed. The
artist designed Spiral Jetty so that it could only be fully seen
from an aerial perspective i.e. from a plane: as there were no commercial
flights over this area, one would need to hire a private plane to see the
artwork. Consequently, very few people ever saw Spiral Jetty. Smithson
documented the gigantic land sculpture photographically and it is these
photographs reprinted in art books which make it known to an audience.
Analysis using the Postmodern Frame:
Although Smithson’s interest was in manipulating the formal elements,
not in the symbolic or spiritual, the site itself is so large, so empty,
so isolated, so inaccessible that , even only in photographic reproduction,
it has the capacity to impress the audience with a sense of awe at the grandeur
of nature. The form Smithson used, is the spiral; so evocative of archetypal
life forms, so out of place, almost out of time, so alien in this site,
that it shocks and provokes the audience, even only in photographic reproduction.
Despite the egotistical modernism of the artist’s intent the postmodern
audience now sees and interprets this spiral form, heroic in size, symbolic
of life, within its pristine, primeval landscape site, as a numinous sign,
a tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit. The site, which on first
reading, appears to have been violated by the hand of humankind, in another
reading has been enhanced by the presence within it of this mysterious spiral
form. An irony for the postmodern contemporary audience is that the sculpture
itself has since disappeared as the salt lake has silted up so that time
and nature have obliterated what the artist meant to create as a permanent.
monumental land art sculpture.
www.robertsmithson.com