Smithson Retrospective at MOCA

by Sharon B. Robinson

Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty, 1970
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red algae, water
3 x 15 x 1500 feet
Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Best known for his colossal earthworks, Robert Smithson was a significant voice in the art world of postwar America. His contributions, however, are not easily positioned within one genre. In the first comprehensive American retrospective of Smithson's career, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles attempts to convey the vastness and complexity of his work through his drawings, paintings, sculpture, films, writings, and, of course, earthworks and land art.

Ruin of Map Hipparchus (100 B.C.) in Oswego Lake Quadrangle (1954-55), 1967
Map collage, 13 x 18 inches
Collection of Patricia and Morris Orden, New York
Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York
Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Smithson's work focuses on four specific themes: landscape, language, the monument, and the site. Each theme develops over time in the artist's career. Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Shed , earthworks from 1970, along with Smithson's poetry from the 1960s, explore ideas of landscape and entropy, the disintegration and chaos of nature, and the loss of structure over natural, not man-made, time.

Language was an important compositional and textual cornerstone for Smithson's work in the 1960s. He published essays dealing with the layering, unfixing, and identity of language, which was echoed in his abstract, minimalist sculptures. His initial foray into sculpture in 1964 produced repetitive, geometric shapes derived from crystalline formations and constructed of materials such as mirrored glass, neon tubing, plastic, and steel.

Untitled [Permian Parapoid], 1961-63
Collage, gouache, and crayon, 24 x 15 in.
Private collection, Cambridge
Photo: Greg Heins
Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed
by VAGA, New York, NY

Smithson uses topographical maps in his early figurative sketches from 1966—part of small, tightly focused body of work that was instigated by his writing, Entropy and the New Monuments. This text dealt with the concepts surrounding monuments, from airports to art institutions and museums, and their contemporary meanings. Inevitably, the mapping and remapping of familiar locations, whether his home town of Passaic, New Jersey or the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport, led to the questioning of location, the ideas of "here" and "there," site and non-site, center and periphery. His documentary style films, usually shot on site, demonstrate the sheer manpower needed to construct the earthworks and the usually remote and peripheral location of his chosen work.

Mirror Displacement: Cayuga Salt Mine Project, 1969
Rock salt and mirrors
Eight mirrors, 24 x 24 in; 11 x 360 x 30 in. overall (variable)
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
SMK Foto
Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed
by VAGA, New York, NY

Themes of displacement and chaos are not limited to Smithson's literary and philosophical rhetoric. His wood block prints and the expressionistic, thickly impastoed paintings of the late 1950s seem out of place and strangely positioned within the context of minimalist sculpture and heroic compositions and photography of earthworks from the 1970s. The prints, reminiscent of the rough, expressive style of Kathe Kollwitz, are juxtaposed with smooth, slick geometric wall sculptures. The paintings, in a palette of red, white, and black, evoking religious themes of persecution and spiritual transcendence, appear unpolished and amateur when compared to the similarly styled German Expressionist Emile Nolde's Candle Dancers or even the primal drawings of woman-ness by Ana Mendieta, Smithson's contemporary. These paintings executed early in Smithson's career thankfully led him to explore other avenues in his art. One interesting aspect of his paintings is the reoccurring motif of the spiral, or cosmic whirl. Repetition of this form in his early work of the 1950s provides a visual link to the later circular studies of Spiral Jetty and Broken Circle from 1970.

Minimalist artworks typically need room to breathe in a gallery or museum space. Smithson's minimalist sculptures are situated on the tipping point, between claustrophobia and navigable space. Plotting a course to study each work is a task. Some works located on the ground have fallen victim to misguided boots or kleptomaniacal fingers. But withstanding the drifting sand, rock, or dented board, the work is luminous. Mirrors, sandwiched between sand and rock, reflect light in soft washes against the gallery walls, much like a Morris Lewis "veil" of color.

The exhibit does a remarkable job of weaving together Smithson's entire career into a comprehensive study of his artistic output. Thanks in part to the curatorial guidance of independent curator Eugenie Tsai and MOCA curator Connie Butler, Smithson's artistic process is highly visible and easily traceable, even with the inevitable sidetracks he followed.

publication date: November 2004