Robert Smithson (1938)
United States
Biography :
"Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973), spent his formative years in New Jersey. In 1963, Smithson married Nancy Holt (1938–2014).
Childhood interest in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science fiction, popular culture and language inspired his art across all media as he matured. In 1954 Smithson received a two-year scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York City. Post war abstract expressionism influenced the young Smithson, and the late fifties and early sixties found him immersed in the vitality and experimentation of the burgeoning downtown New York art scene.
Smithson is best known for his earthworks Spiral Jetty (1970), Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), and Amarillo Ramp (1973). At age thirty-five, while photographing Amarillo Ramp, Smithson died in a small airplane accident, along with pilot Gale Ray Rogers and photographer Robert E. Curtin. Nancy Holt, Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi completed Amarillo Ramp one month after his passing. Prior to this earthwork trilogy, Smithson created performative entropic landworks, made to have a finite life rather than transform over long periods of time. The ephemeral earthworks Asphalt Rundown (1969, Rome), Glue Pour (1969, Vancouver), Concrete Pour (1969, Chicago), and Partially Buried Woodshed (1970, Kent State) speak poignantly to issues of time and the human condition.
Smithson’s first solo exhibition, with emphasis on ‘expressionistic work’, took place in 1957 at Allan Brilliant’s gallery in New York. The artist’s peripatetic life took him to Rome in 1961, when George Lester offered him his first solo international exhibition at Galleria George Lester, where he explored quasi-religious subject matter. His early paintings, drawings and sculptures made between 1961 and 1963 were imbued with references to concrete poetry, popular culture, and science fiction. Influenced by minimalism, in 1964 Smithson declared his quasi-minimal sculptures made from industrial materials of metal and mirrored Plexiglas as his ‘mature’ works, distancing himself from his early expressionistic paintings and drawings. In 1965 he exhibited these works at the American Express Pavilion, New York World’s Fair.
Smithson changed notions of contemporary art by taking it out of the gallery and into the uncultivated landscape. A provocateur and autodidact, Smithson was fascinated by concepts of duality and entropy. Attracted to industrial wastelands, rock quarries and fringe landscapes, his works of the late 1960s broke with conventional notions of sculpture. His ‘nonsites’ were made from treks into non-urban environments. Incorporating maps, bins or mirrors with organic materials, such as rocks and earth, the nonsites create a dialectic between outdoors and indoors, ruminating on time, site, sight, nature and culture. Smithson defined the area from which organic materials were collected as the ‘site’, while the indoor placement of the materials is the ‘nonsite’. The first was A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey (1968), which premiered in his solo exhibition at Dwan Gallery, New York City in 1968. Following an introduction by the artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) in 1966, Virginia Dwan became Smithson’s gallerist and supported the creation of Spiral Jetty.
Smithson’s writings on art, western culture, graphic texts, and interviews, are published in The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt (1979, New York University Press, with an expanded version edited by Jack Flam published in 1998).
His works are in numerous museum collections, including Chicago Art Institute, Dia Art Foundation, Museum of Modern Art New York, National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art." (Source, website, Holt/Smithson Foundation)