Product Description

This fully illustrated 248-page book accompanies the first comprehensive American retrospective of Robert Smithson's (1938-1973) complex and highly influential career. Straddling the movements of minimalism and land art, Smithson, who died in a plane crash at the age of 35, had a profound impact on the cultural landscape that resonates to this day. Robert Smithson presents essays by top Smithson scholars alongside both archival imagery and specially commissioned photography of the artist's works; it considers the interrelationship of Smithson's complete artistic output, from the earliest figurative work up to his famed earthworks. Smithson's revolutionary ideas positioned art as existing beyond the walls of the museum in media such as writing and film, and even in the landscape itself. This volume and the exhibition it accompanies explore Smithson's work within the context of the artistic climate of the late 1960s as well as ensuing decades.
Perhaps most renowned as the creator of Spiral Jetty (1970), a fifteen-hundred-foot rock coil dramatically situated in the Great Salt Lake, Smithson also broke new ground with his films, photographs, writing, drawings, and collages. Eugenie Tsai provides a curatorial overview of the exhibition, which includes early writings, drawings, and other work with religious, erotic, and pop culture motifs that deepen our understanding of Smithson's diverse practice. Other contributions to the volume are a previously unpublished interview with Smithson by Moira Roth; a substantive historical and critical essay by Thomas Crow; an essay by MOCA curator Cornelia Butler discussing Smithson's lineage and his influence on contemporary artists; and a series of texts focusing on key works from Smithson's oeuvre, including Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan by Suzaan Boettger, Enantiomorphic Chambers by Ann Reynolds, Airport Terminal Project by Mark Linder, Spiral Jetty by Jennifer Roberts, Heap of Language by Richard Sieburth, Proposal for Monument at Antartica [sic] by Robert Sobieszek. The book also features the complete Library List--a posthumously compiled list of publications in Smithson's personal library--with an introduction by Alexander Alberro, as well as an exhibition checklist and annotated exhibition chronology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #822787 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

Review
"When a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing. This all-engulfing sense provides the mental ground for the object, so that is ceases being a mere object and becomes art." - Robert Smithson"

From the Inside Flap
"An argument could be made that Robert Smithson is at least as important as a thinker and critic as he is as an artist, and in the art history of the Seventies, his words are certain to be returned to and returned to. He is one of those figures whose thought at once defines and transcends his own time."--Arthur C. Danto, author of Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe

Customer Reviews

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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.