Book Description

In 1970 Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most innovative and provocative artists of the twentieth century, created the landmark earthwork Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point on Utah's Great Salt Lake. This dramatic and highly influential work forms a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide and stretches out counterclockwise into the lake's translucent red water. Composed of black basalt rocks and earth, the sculpture comprises the materials of its location: mud, salt crystals, rocks, water.
The contributors to this comprehensive publication consider the sculpture in relation to its eponymous companions--a text work and a film. These essays situate this renowned series of works alongside Smithson's critical writings, proposals, drawings, sources, and models. Amply illustrated with archival and new photographs of the Jetty and many comparative illustrations, this book makes evident why Smithson's art and writings have had such a powerful impact on art and art theory for over thirty years. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the poster child forthe antiformalist Earth Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A coil ofearth, salt, and stone that Smithson built into Great Salt Lake, Utah,the piece is a tribute to the movement's scale and engineering as wellas to its visionary union of art and nature. Smithson's questioning ofthe conventional attitudes of art and culture did not stop with thecreation of objects and images; he was committed to exploring ofattitudes and ideas as a critical component of his work. A revised andexpanded version of The Writings of Robert Smithson, this bookis a charged combination of articles and images in which the authordemystifies the distinction between theory and practice. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

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The interviews are what stand out more than anything. The conversation between Smithson and Kaprow is really worth checking out. Anyone who will be having a show of their own should at the very least flip through this book. Also sheds some light into Smithson's early work (some text based things and a few paintings and so forth). Who would have thought that it would be a fun read too?
This is the kind of collection you can return to again and again.

His writings printed on archival paper!
Bought this book for research, a lot to read, all photos are black and white. ... Read more

Book Description

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty-a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake-is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century. Less well known is the connection between the Jetty and the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, location of the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. The link between these two monuments is but one facet of an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithson's work. Mirror-Travels encompasses the full span of Smithson's career, offering a close analysis of the artist's working model of history and featuring comprehensive case studies of three of his most influential works: "The Monuments of Passaic," "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," and the Spiral Jetty. Incorporating abundant new material from Smithson's personal papers and library, Jennifer Roberts offers surprising new interpretations about the artist and his responses to the social, ideological, and material contradictions of his time. ... Read more

Book Description

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson's working life--magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library--from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time.

A central focus of Reynolds's analysis is Smithson's fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again--alone and with fellow artists--to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture. ... Read more

Book Description

The death of Robert Smithson in 1973 robbed postwarAmerican art ofan unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneeringearthworksof the 1960s and 1970s anticipated contemporary concerns withenvironmentalismand the site-specific character of artistic production. Hisinterrogation ofauthorship, the linear historiography of high modernism, and thelimitations ofthe museum prefigures key themes in postmodern criticism whileunderscoring theuniqueness of Smithson's own work as an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Gary Shapiro's elegant and incisive study of Smithson's career is thefirst bookto address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity. RangingfromSmithson's best known works such as Spiral Jetty and Partially BuriedWoodshedto his photographs, films, and theoretical readings and writings,Shapiro'smasterful book analyzes Smithson's art in relation to the legacy ofAmerican artof the 1960s and central philosophical themes in its contemporaryreception. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson, precurser of land art and author of the "Spiral Jetty", is one of the major artists of our century. "Earthwards..." offers a great insight into Smithson's opus and contains wonderful illustrations of his works. ... Read more

Book Description

In December 1968, the American artist Robert Smithson embarked on a field trip to the huge industrial complex in the Ruhr district of Germany. His local guides were the Düsseldorf-based artist duo of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Konrad Fischer, in whose Düsseldorf gallery Smithson was scheduled to exhibit. The Bechers had begun their own project of photographing the vernacular industrial architecture of Northern Europe in the early 1960s, and had already spent several months photographing at Oberhausen as well as at adjacent industrial sites. The different series of photographs made by Smithson and the Bechers of the same site foreground their respective preoccupations with the industrial landscape and the process of production and entropy, with systems and their inevitable dissolution. Their contrasting bodies of work embody alternate perspectives on time: the Bechers' sense of historical time and Smithson's of the geological. Though formally divergent, each artist's work comprises a radical rethinking of classical notions of beauty and landscape. Neither the Bechers' typologies nor Smithson's projects were possible without prospecting in neglected parts of the landscape, whose distressed state refuted the relationship between history and progress.

Essay by James Lingwood.
Introduction by Vicente Todolí.

Hardcover, 168 pages, 53 color and 105 b&w images. ... Read more

Book Description

This volume comprises a social history of Robert Smithson's earthworks and their critical reception. In his analysis of the artist's personal writings and art works, Ron Graziani demonstrates how the earthworks were part of an aesthetic and civic fault line that ruptured in the 1960s. Moreover, Graziani reveals how Smithson's earthworks formed part of the "new conservationism" in the late 1960s and how it gave material form to the contradictions of a sociological issue, inseparable from its economic legacy. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Intriguing Book
Robert Smithson conceptual impact carries through in this book.

His perceptions regarding the use of nature as an art element are captured by his lucid use of mirrors and simple on-site constructions.

The short and concise quotations add an additional layer of meaning to the photographs. ... Read more

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Discourse (Detroit, MI), published by Wayne State University Press on March 22, 2002. The length of the article is 14999 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Quiet catastrophe: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, vanished.
Author: Clark Lunberry
Publication: Discourse (Detroit, MI) (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2002
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Volume: 24Issue: 2Page: 86(35)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description

This digital document is an article from C: International Contemporary Art, published by C The Visual Arts Foundation on September 22, 2004. The length of the article is 567 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Euan Macdonald: Eclipse + Other Chance Experiences Robert Smithson: the Spiral Jetty.
Publication: C: International Contemporary Art (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2004
Publisher: C The Visual Arts Foundation
Issue: 83Page: 42(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, published by Parachute Contemporary Art on October 1, 2001. The length of the article is 2496 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Revisiting Robert Smithson in Ohio: Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Renee Green.
Author: Alex Coles
Publication: Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2001
Publisher: Parachute Contemporary Art
Volume: 104Issue: 10-12Page: 128-38

Distributed by Thompson Gale ... Read more

Book Description

A seminal figure in late 20th-century art, Robert Smithson created a dialogue between traditional sculpture ("non-site") and its context ("site"). For him, the relationship between the material that makes up the work and the material's origin was a crucial component of the work of art itself. Smithson was fascinated by science fiction and ecological and geological processes; by the "non-space" of movie houses, suburbia, abandoned industrial areas, and strip-mined land; and, most importantly, by the concept of entropy. This monograph presents a comprehensive collection of Smithson's writings between the years 1965 and 1973. From his origins as a New York School painter in the early 1960s to his work in Post-Minimalist sculpture in the mid-1960s and his role as a leading and defining member of the Land Art movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the importance and influence of Smithson has been widely acknowledged. Also included are a critical essay on Smithson's career and a wide selection of his artwork. Essay by Alexander Alberro. Hardcover, 8.5 x 10.25 in. / 304 pgs / 138 color and 22 b&w. ... Read more