The career of Robert Smithson resists categorization. Although he is arguably best known for Spiral Jetty (1970), his writings, photography, drawings, architectural work, and other earthworks have each played an important role in art history, particularly since his 1973 death in an airplane crash while photographing his earthwork Amarillo Ramp. The inability to easily define and understand the work of Robert Smithson extends, on a smaller scale, to the complexities of some of his individual works, especially those he called “Nonsites” (see photo reference). These gallery installations, of which Smithson completed at least ten, almost exclusively in 1968, involve the relocation of rocks (usually sedimentary rocks, such as sand in A Nonsite,
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In this paper, I strive to understand Robert Smithson’s Nonsites in seven parts: scientific investigation, land art/earthwork, process art/performance art/interactive art, architecture, minimalist sculpture/feminism, photography, and institutional critique. As convenient as it is to divide the various approaches to this work so neatly, it should be noted that these divisions serve as both an insult to, and celebration of, Smithson’s own desires for his art to subvert easy categorization: to cleanly fit no category becomes equivalent to, in this case, uncomfortably fitting every category. It must be mentioned, then, that this entire paper is in some sense contrary to Smithson’s artistic ideologies, as he declared in 1968 “Criticism is self-centered and forces value onto the art or takes it away.” (Smithson …show more content…
It's important because it's an abyss between the abstraction and the site; a kind of oblivion. You could go there on a highway, but a highway to the site is really an abstraction because you don't really have contact with the earth. A trail is more of a physical thing. These are all variables, indeterminate elements which will attempt to determine the route from the museum to the mine. I'll designate points on a line and stabilize the chaos between the two points. Like stepping stones. If I take somebody on a tour of the site, I just show them where I removed things. Not didactic, but dialectic. (Smithson
In this paper, I strive to understand Robert Smithson’s Nonsites in seven parts: scientific investigation, land art/earthwork, process art/performance art/interactive art, architecture, minimalist sculpture/feminism, photography, and institutional critique. As convenient as it is to divide the various approaches to this work so neatly, it should be noted that these divisions serve as both an insult to, and celebration of, Smithson’s own desires for his art to subvert easy categorization: to cleanly fit no category becomes equivalent to, in this case, uncomfortably fitting every category. It must be mentioned, then, that this entire paper is in some sense contrary to Smithson’s artistic ideologies, as he declared in 1968 “Criticism is self-centered and forces value onto the art or takes it away.” (Smithson …show more content…
It's important because it's an abyss between the abstraction and the site; a kind of oblivion. You could go there on a highway, but a highway to the site is really an abstraction because you don't really have contact with the earth. A trail is more of a physical thing. These are all variables, indeterminate elements which will attempt to determine the route from the museum to the mine. I'll designate points on a line and stabilize the chaos between the two points. Like stepping stones. If I take somebody on a tour of the site, I just show them where I removed things. Not didactic, but dialectic. (Smithson