Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the poster child for the antiformalist Earth Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A coil of earth, salt, and stone that Smithson built into Great Salt Lake, Utah, the piece is a tribute to the movement's scale and engineering as well as to its visionary union of art and nature. Smithson's questioning of the conventional attitudes of art and culture did not stop with the creation of objects and images; he was committed to exploring of attitudes and ideas as a critical component of his work. A revised and expanded version of The Writings of Robert Smithson, this book is a charged combination of articles and images in which the author demystifies the distinction between theory and practice.
Robert Smithson FROM THE PUBLISHER
This fully illustrated 280-page book accompanies the first comprehensive American retrospective of Robert Smithson's (1938-1973) complex and highly influential body of work. Perhaps best known as the creator of Spiral Jetty, a fifteen-hundred-foot rock coil dramatically situated in Utah's Great Salt Lake, Smithson also broke new ground with his films, photographs, writings, drawings, sculptures, and collages. His oeuvre defied convention, utilizing nontraditional art materials such as mirrors, maps, concrete, earth, and asphalt - in addition to language, as both a written and visual medium. Smithson's revolutionary ideas moved art beyond the walls of the museum into the landscape itself.
FROM THE CRITICS
Christopher Benfey - The New York Times
An autodidact who never went to college, Smithson -- expertly discussed in Robert Smithson -- drew on his prodigious reading, from his pediatrician (the doctor-poet William Carlos Williams) to visionary artists such as William Blake and William Butler Yeats. His early paintings were incendiary celebrations of Dante's inferno and Roman Catholicism. Moving, as Eugenie Tsai, a critic and an editor of this exhibition catalog, says, ''from theology to geology,'' Smithson became a modern-day mound builder in both earthworks and words. Richard Sieburth aptly describes Smithson's handwritten work ''A Heap of Language'' as a ''verbal tumulus'' of synonyms for language, ''built not from the bottom up but from the top down.''
Art & Photography
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