Robert Smithson's Environmental History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11169540 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Menard (0000-0003-1226-337X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 285-304 |
| Publication date | 2014-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Oxford Art Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0142-6540 • E-ISSN: 1741-7287 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oxartj/kcu018 |
| OpenAlex | W2329242507 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
Like all the other artists credited with inventing American land art – among them Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Robert Morris, and Dennis Oppenheim – Robert Smithson initially sought a latitude beyond the New York gallery system. Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg had earlier claimed to be working in the gap between art and life, but their ready-mades and assemblages were basically a half-measure that could never be perceived as art outside the gallery or museum. When Smithson crossed the Hudson River to explore the abandoned air-strips, quarries, and ‘manmade geological networks’ of suburban New Jersey, eventually heading even farther west to design The Spiral Jetty (1970), he sought to create beauty and meaning in a space which had traditionally been considered exterior to the sphere of art altogether – a non-space, so to speak, or a ‘low-profile’ space, that also negated the conventional art object.1 Brian Wallis has noted that the effort to dismantle or move beyond the gallery system resulted in ‘a whole host of practices designed to break down the object’ – including ‘negation (cuts, holes, removals); duration (space as a factor of time); decay (decomposition of organic and inorganic materials); replacement (transfer of materials from one context to another)’; and ‘dispersion (patterns produced by gravity in the form of spills, pours, slides, etc.)’.2The Spiral Jetty was a perfect example of the displaced object. It was located on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, it was constructed by transferring tons of rock from one place to another, and it deliberately linked space to time by allowing for both the temporary submersion of the jetty and the possibility that it might sooner or later be completely encrusted by salt crystals.3
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art gallery · Art history · Beauty · Cartography · Context (archaeology) · Exhibition · Geography · Jetty · Object (grammar) · Visual arts · American Environmental and Regional History · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Geology · History
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |