Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), American artist and writer, a pioneer of the earthworks movement in the 1960s. This movement also included American artists Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria (see Sculpture: Earthworks). Smithson’s art and writings reveal his deep interest in nature, geological time, prehistoric monuments and landscapes, and entropy (disorder that occurs over time).

Smithson is best known for his monumental work Spiral Jetty (1970), which consists of a wide coil of black basalt rock edged with crystallized salt. The spiral extends about 460 m (about 500 yd) into Utah’s Great Salt Lake and has a diameter of about 50 m (about 55 yd). This work is frequently submerged by natural flooding, but it is well documented in photographs, in a film made by Smithson, and in his poetic writings about the project.

Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and studied at the Art Students League in New York City from 1955 to 1956. Some of his early work explored reflection and mirror images. From the mid-1960s on, his art investigated concepts of repetition, mathematical progression, and perspective, linking him to the minimal art movement. His sculpture Plunge (1966, Denver Art Museum, Colorado) consists of ten modular units of decreasing size, each one 12.7 mm (0.5 in) smaller than the previous unit. They are arranged in intervals to give a telescoping effect, suggesting infinite extension in time and space.

Smithson also was interested in the distinction between objects exhibited in art galleries and matter in its original state; in 1966 he began visiting industrial wastelands and abandoned quarries in New Jersey. This led in 1968 to a series of Non-Sites, gallery installations in which Smithson displayed photographs and maps of sites next to metal containers heaped with rocks, gravel, sand, shells, and earth from the sites. He later moved away from gallery spaces altogether. In 1969 he poured asphalt down a hillside to create Asphalt Rundown in a quarry near Rome, Italy, and in 1970 he executed Partially Buried Woodshed in Kent, Ohio, by dumping earth on top of a woodshed until the center beam cracked. In 1968 and 1969 Smithson used mirrors in his land pieces, notably in a series called Mirror Displacements in Mexico, where various outdoor arrangements of small mirrors literally reflected nature. Spiral Jetty is one of several monumental earthworks that Smithson created involving ramps built in shallow water. He died in a plane crash while photographing a work of this type in Texas, called Amarillo Ramp (1973).