Robert Smithson
Pioneer of land art.
Robert Smithson moved art out into the landscape and was fascinated by decay and entropy. He was killed in a plane crash while surveying the site of a work.
Robert Smithson was born in 1938 in Passaic, New Jersey, an industrial town that later became one of his subjects. He studied at the Art Students League in New York, among other places, but was largely self-taught. He started out as a painter, but in the mid-1960s he moved towards Minimalism with crystalline sculptures of metal and mirror glass.
Smithson was also a sharp writer. In essays in Artforum, such as “The Monuments of Passaic” of 1967, he described run-down suburbs and industrial sites as modern monuments. He borrowed the concept of entropy from physics: the idea that everything eventually dissolves into disorder. That idea runs through his entire body of work.
From 1968 he made what he called non-sites. These were containers of rock and earth from a particular place, placed in the gallery together with maps and photographs. The gallery became a kind of pointer to a site somewhere else. The step out into the landscape was a short one. In April 1970 he built Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a spiral of basalt rock and earth just over 450 metres long that runs out into the reddish, salty water. The work lay underwater for much of three decades and has since become visible again as the lake level has fallen. It is now owned by the Dia Art Foundation. That same year he had earth tipped over a shed at Kent State University until the roof beam cracked: Partially Buried Woodshed.
Smithson was married to the artist Nancy Holt, who also worked with the landscape. On 20 July 1973, aged 35, he was killed when a small plane crashed in Texas while he was photographing the site of the work Amarillo Ramp. Holt completed the work together with Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi.
Despite his short career, Smithson became one of the most influential artists of his generation. He is one of the leading names in land art, and his ideas about site, time and decay have influenced both site-specific art and later art about climate and the environment. His writings are still read as key documents of the art of the 1960s and 70s.