Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts.
23 Facts About Robert Smithson
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Robert Smithson's work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections.
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Robert Smithson was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty.
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When Robert Smithson was nine, his family moved to the Allwood section of Clifton.
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Robert Smithson studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York from 1954 to 1956 and then briefly at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
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Robert Smithson primarily identified as a painter during this time, and his early exhibited artworks had a wide range of influences, including science fiction, Catholic art and Pop art.
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Robert Smithson produced drawings and collage works that incorporated images from natural history, science fiction films, classical art, religious iconography, and pornography including "homoerotic clippings from beefcake magazines".
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Robert Smithson's wall-mounted sculpture Enantiomorphic Chambers was made of steel and mirrors and created the optical effect of a "pointless vanishing-point".
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In 1967 Robert Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity.
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In September 1968, Smithson published the essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" in Artforum that promoted the work of the first wave of land art artists, and in 1969 he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts gained from his readings of William S Burroughs, J G Ballard, and George Kubler.
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Robert Smithson produced theoretical and critical writing in addition to visual art.
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Robert Smithson eventually joined the Dwan Gallery, whose owner Virginia Dwan was an enthusiastic supporter of his work.
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In examining the photographs of the land set aside to become Central Park, Robert Smithson saw the barren landscape that had been degraded by humans before Olmsted constructed the complex 'naturalistic' landscape that was viscerally apparent to New Yorkers in the 1970s.
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Robert Smithson was interested in challenging the prevalent conception of Central Park as an outdated 19th-century picturesque aesthetic in landscape architecture that had a static relationship within the continuously evolving urban fabric of New York City.
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In studying the writings of 18th- and 19th-century picturesque treatise writers Gilpin, Price, Knight and Whately, Robert Smithson recovers issues of site specificity and human intervention as dialectic landscape layers, experiential multiplicity, and the value of deformations manifest in the picturesque landscape.
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Robert Smithson further implies in this essay that what distinguishes the picturesque is that it is based on real land.
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Robert Smithson was interested in Central Park as a landscape which by the 1970s had weathered and grown as Olmsted's creation, and was layered with new evidence of human intervention.
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In revisiting the 18th- and early 19th-century treatises of the picturesque, which Olmsted interpreted in his practice, Robert Smithson exposes threads of an anti-aesthetic anti-formalist logic and a theoretical framework of the picturesque that addressed the dialectic between the physical landscape and its temporal context.
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For Robert Smithson, it was not necessary that the disruption become a visual aspect of a landscape; by his anti-formalist logic, more important was the temporal scar worked over by natural or human intervention.
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Robert Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture in a 32-minute color film titled Spiral Jetty.
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Robert Smithson wrote that he deliberately chose the site due to its proximity to a derelict oil jetty.
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In 1970 Robert Smithson created a series of drawings for Floating Island: To Travel around Manhattan Island.
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The work of Robert Smithson is held in numerous public collections around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.