Vleic of the Robert Smithson exhibition, 2005, showing the gallery devoted to his Nonsites, 1968-69; at the Whitneg Museum of American Art, New York.

A Heap of SmithsonBY CARTER RATCLIFF

I n 1974, a year after Robert Smithson's death in the crash of a smallplane, the New York Cultural Center presented an extensive survey of

the artist's drawings. Smithson had been flying over a ranch in Texas togain an aerial view of the site where he planned to build an earthworkcalled Amarillo Ramp; artists Nancy Holt (who was married to Smithson)and Richard Serra, along with dealer Tony Shafrazi, brought AmarilloRamp to completion according to the original schedule. In 1980, RobertHobbs organized "Robert Smithson: Sculpture" for the Herbert F. JohnsonMuseum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, N. Y. This was the first stopon a nation-wide tour that ended at the Whitney Museum of AmericanArt in New York. Two years later, the United States pavilion at the VeniceBiennale honored Smithson with "A Retrospective View," Since thenthere have heen retrospectives in Madrid (1993) and Oslo (1999); thelatest one opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, last

September, then traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art, and is now on viewattheWhitney[toOct. 16].

Organized by Eugenie "Rai, with the assistance of Cornelia Butler, thisexhibition brings together crucial works from every stage of Smithson'sabbreviated career, and the curators have struck a judicious balancebetween one stage and the next. Tsai and Butler's selections give you afeeling of the pace, insistent but deliberate, at which Smithson workedthrough his possibilities, mining the past for kindred spirits, trying outstyles, discarding old mediums and inventing new ones. Smithson, whohad his first solo show in 1959, at the age of 21, made his last paintings in1964; a series of hard edge zigzags and Lichtenstein-Iike "explosions" onmonochrome fields. The zigzag—or lightning bolt—migrated from thesecanvases to the red neon tubing of Tfie Eliminator (1964). Besides neon,this freestanding floor piece employs sheet steel and mirrored glass.

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A traveling retrospective and a number of recent scholarty studies have brought renewedattention to Earthwork pioneer Robert Smithson. Some three decades after the artist'suntimely death, his visionary work continues to challenge viewers and critics alike.

Smithson was now a sculptor, a fabricator of metaland plastic works. Their shapes are geometric, and theirhues are wild: hot pinks and iridescent blues. In anuntitled piece from 1965, a triangular bin made of blue-painted metal opens onto a vortex—or an abyss—ofgreen mirrored glass, Suddenly, Smithson switched tothe matte black surfaces and serial structures of Plunge(1966) and the "Alogon" sculptures (1966). Works fromthis period earned him a place in "Primary Structures,"196fi, the exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum thatsignaled the ascendance of stripped-down geometricform (of Minimalist and non-Minimalist varieties). Yethe had no patience with the idea of a stable sculpturalobject. By 1968 his three-dimensional works in metalhad evolved into what Smithson called "Nonsites."

The metal bins of Smithson's Nonsites are enclosureswithin the enclosure of the gallery. But here is theoften noted twist: the shapes of these containers referto shapes inscribed on maps mounted on nearby wails,and the maps refer to the sites where the contents ofthe bins—rocks or gravel—had been gathered by theartist and bis friends. These displays of ordinary matterhave a look of glum inertia. Yet, because they refer todistant places, their function parallels that of tradi-tional landscape images. So, a Nonsite makes sense asart only if we subject a familiar idea to drastic revision:no longer enclosed by a frame or limited to a sculpturalsurface, a single work of art can be scattered to widelyseparated points, or even located inthe links between its far-flung ele-ments, Smitbson boped that his Non-sites would persuade us to share hisimpatience with the idea that a workof art is, by definition, a self-enclosed

image or object, the unity of which needs to be reinforcedby the pristine precincts of gallery space.

The Nonsites required travel, often just a jaunt fromManhattan to New Jersey In 1969, Smithson journeyedto the Yucatan peninsula to execute the tirst of his MirrorDisplacements: a temporary array of mirrored glass thatintroduced fragments of sky or landscape into otherwisecoherent terrain. By now, travel was integral to his art,which sometimes makes it difficult to say where a workof art i s^or was. Did the Mirror Displacements vanishwhen they were disassembled? Or do they survive in thephotographs that document their brief existences? Thelatter possibility was complicated when Smithson accom-panied photographs with a text, as he did in "Incidentsof Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," an illustrated essay thatappeared in a 1969 issue oiArtfomm. Nearly all of Smith-son's major works are hybrids of image and text or objectand text. In tbe case of Spiral Jetty, Smithson's best-known theme appears as a film, as a text with picturesand as an earthwork. Because these various mediums arerelated in complex ways, no literal answer to the questionof location can be given. Each of Smithson's works guidesthe imagination to a nonplace—an "atopia," to use one ofhis favorite words.

This is not as strange as it may sound. Most commentators from Plato tothe formalists of the 20th century have said or implied that a work of artis not to be identified absolutely with a palpable object that shares ordi-nary space with us. We are to find it, rather, in a realm of thought or feel-ing to which we gain entry by making sense of a representational imageor grasping the significance of a form. With his Mirror Displacements andNonsites, Smithson revamped the unlocatability of the artwork for a timewhen Minimalism had undermined familiar kinds of representation andConceptualism was questioning the need for the artist to produce anyobject more substantial tban a text typewritten on onionskin paper.

Tbe Nonsites and Mirror Displacements were followed by Eartbworks.Tbe first was Asphalt Rundown (1969), a kind of performance pieceexecuted by a dump truck as it poured a load of fresh asphalt over a cliffnear Rome. In 1970, Smitkson hired bulldozers to pile earth and rocks on ashed until its roof beam collapsed. Partially Buried Woodshed, on the cam-pus of Kent State University in Ohio, was foUowed the same year hy SpiralJetty—in effect, a single-lane road that coils for 1,500 feet into Utah's GreatSalt Lake, With a few of his contemporaries, Smithson gave American artthe literal scale of the American landscape and in the process suhjected thevenerahle idea of the sublime to sbocks we still feel. Or as Anne M. Wagnerrecently put it, these artists—among them Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppen-heim and Nancy Holt—raised "a set of issues tbat bave not gone away. Theyspeak to the complex new spatialization of art since the '60s and to theresultant complication of where and what the artwork Ls."'

lecause Smithson's reputation as a radical innovator is so richly'deserved, it was a surprise to see how conventional much of his work

looked on the third floor of the Whitney. This effect is due in part to shifts

PardaUy Buried Woodshed, J970, woodshed and 20 Iruckloads of earth. Photo taken by Smithson,January 1970. All works this article © Estate of Robert Smithson/licensed by VAGA, New York.

This judiciously selected show givesa feeling of the pace, insistent butdeliberate, at which Smithson workedthrough his artistic possibilities.

inaugurated by Smithson himself, though he did not act alone. To maketheir desert Earthworks known in New York, Smithson, Heizer and othersfilled gallery walls with documentary photographs that claimed none ofthe traditional virtues of an exquisitely executed print by Ansel Adams orEdward Weston. Smithson had already employed snapshots in such worksasMonummts ofPassaic (1967) andNonsite "Line of Wreckage, Bayonne,New Jersey" (1968). As the 1970s began, photographic documentation ofthe scruffiest kind was securely ensconced at the center of contemporaiyart and has remained there ever since—though many later photographershave seen no reason to resist the blandishments of high gloss technology.

As Smithson was doing his part to supply snapshots with a place in therealm of high art, he did the same for the diagrammatic scrawl—see hisMap of the Hotel Palenque (1969) or the pencil-on paper storyboard titledSpiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake (Movie Treatment)^ 1970. Here, too, othersjoined Smithson in the expansion of esthetic possibility. Think of the pan-els from the early 1970s hy Vito Acconci, with their blend of photographsand hurriedly handwritten text. Later, Mike Kelley would push the casualscribble to new and dismal extremes, and it may be that the estheticizingof the casual note, visual and verbal, paved the way for the hiply awkwardand extensively captioned drawings of Raymond Pettibon, or the hap-hazard, handwritten scraps of paper that constitute the installations ofJoseph Grigely. Smithson's influence on younger artists has done much togive his works the look of art.

Of course Smithson, too, was influenced by predecessors, Like the binsof his Nonsites, Plmige (1966) and the "Alogon" sculptures have a closefamily resemblance to Minimalist objects by Donald Judd, Robert Mor-

ris and Sol LeWitt. Yet his likingfor diagonals gave him an affin-ity with Ronald Bladen, RohertGrosvenor and other geometricsculptors who tilted, torqued andangled their forms out of align-ment with Minimalism's rightangles. There are reminiscencesof William Blake in Smithson'searly figure drawings, and hisunbuttoned collages—KingKong, for example, from theearly 1960s-^bring to mind theraucously pasted papers of Dada.Smithson's mirrors remind me,obliquely, of Joseph Cornell's.Moreover, I detect a Cornellianresonance, however faint, insome of Smithson's maps. Manyof Smithson's early paintings areExpressionist by default, onemight say, though they are fullof arresting details. In Feet ofChrist (1961), the stigmata aresurrounded by swirling, spiralforms—a prophecy of SpiralJetty, it is tempting to say.Spirals seem to have been forSmithson what gyres werefor W. B. Yeats and vortices forWyndham Lewis.

It's King Kong, ca. 1961-63,collage, gouache and ink onpaper, 35'A by 2O'A inches. DakisJoannou Collection, Greece.

I \-\ \-\After Thought Enantiomorphic Chambers, ca. 1965, collage, pen andcolored pencil, 11 by 8'Ainches. Museu Serralves, Porto.

The vagaries of lending imposed slight variations on this retrospective ateach of its stops, I was happy to see that, unlike the other versions of theshow, the Whitney's includedv4%cw H^ (1966). This faux Minimalist pieceput sharp questions to the belief that, if sculptural form is sufficiently clearand distinct, the viewer's perceptions can be absoiutely certain—or subjectto total "control," to borrow a word from Morris's "Notes on Sculpture"(1966). In the "Alogon" series, identical forms shift, in size according toa formula that throws our sense of perspective out of whack. Plunge givesthis effect an edgy grandeur. If you look in one direction along its row of10 units, they seem to diminish too quickly, as if perspective has somehowaccelerated. Looking in the other direction, you see Plungers parts increas-ing in size, as expected. Yet they appear to move into the distance tooslowly, as if space had been compressed. Those who haven't seen this workon its home turf, in the Denver Art Museum, will have to take my word for it.My sole quibble about the Whitney installation is that it places Plunge in aninconvenient comer. One can view the piece from the angle that generatesa perspectival swoop but not from the opposite angle, which shows its partsoddly crowded up against one another.

Another work seen only at the Whitney \s,AHeap of Language (1966).A pencil drawing on graph paper, this is an arrangement of handwrittenwords that form a pyramidal shape. Geometric in outline, the pattem islinguistic with a vengeance: all its words concern language in one wayor another. One row reads: "guttural syllable monosyllable dissyllablepolysyllable prefix suffix cipher." To call this collection of words a "heap"is strange. We can imagine a heap of physical things—children's blocksor street signs—that happen to bear words, but language is somethingimmaterial. It can't be heaped up. Yes, it can, said Smithson, who assert-ed in a number of interviews that language is "a material," •' Taking words

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in the usual manner, one might say, all right, there is a material aspect tolanguage. Spoken words are vibrations in the air, printed words are depos-its of ink on a palpable page. Yet the meanings of our utterances, thetruths of true statements and falsehoods of false ones, are not ordinar-ily considered material in the way that, for example, one of Carl Andre'sslabs of lead is material.

1 take Smithson's statements about the materiality of language to bemetaphorical, which means that they are false, but only trivially so. Afterall, every metaphorical statement is false from the viewpoint of blinkeredcommon sense, John Keats's Grecian urn is not, in truth, the bride ofquietness, nor is it the foster-child of silence and slow time. Yet he gener-

Above, riew ofSmitiison works from J964-65, inciuding EnantiomorphicChambers, reconstructed 2003 (on irall, third from left), and Four-SidedVortex (on floor, right); at the Whitney Museum.

Left, top view of Four-Sided Vortex, 1965, steel and mirror, 35 by 28 by28 inches. Photo Christopher Burke.

ates astonishing meanings with this imagery, and so did Smithson withhis image of language as a material. For this image will, if we let it, giveus powerful intimations of the way our utterances—their meanings, theirtruth and their falsity—situate us as physical beings amid the events ofthe physical world. Smithson's linguistic "heap" was particularly weightyin the 1960s, when so many in the artworid were engaged by Wittgen-stein's notion of language as behavior. Smithson embraced language asan artist's medium in conscious opposition to the Greenbergian formal-ism that defined the ideal viewer as a disembodied eye focused on "pureopticality," the ethereal essence of painting, His attacks on formalistcritics and on Michael Fried, in particular, belong to the folklore of theart world,'' Yet Smithson had more formidable targets in his sights, as onegathers from remarks he made in 1969 ahout mind and matter, those twopoles of the Cartesian universe:

My work i.s Impure. It is clogged with matter. I'm for a weighty, ponderous art.There is no escape from matter. There is no escape from the physical nor isthere any escape from the mind. The two are on a constant collision course.You could say that my work is an artistic disaster. It is a quiet catastrophe ofmind and matter.-

I n the science fiction Smithson liked so much worlds can collide,but mind and matter cannot, for mind (as opposed to the brain)

is immaterial. So Smithson's "catastrophe of mind and matter" is fic-tive, a play of images with the admirable intention of prompting us to

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Mirror Displacement (Cayuga Salt Mine Project), 1969/2004, mirrors, rock salt, SI by StiO by 30 inches. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

see things in a new way.Few of us are metaphysi-cians, but most of us havethe vaguely metaphysi-cal feeling that the mindeither is or should be incharge of material things.Or, to rephrase the point,our language supplies uswith concepts that bringthe physical world undercontrol, at least to somedegree, and thereby giveit whatever intelligibil-ity it has. Though Smith-son never denied this, hestruggled from the startof his career to warn usagainst letting our con-cepts and categories turnrigid. Rather than precedethe things they structure,he said, our mental con-structs chase after tbem,desperately, trying tocatch up with the world'sendless flow of contingen-

cies.' Unless we acknowledge the mind's desperation in the face of unfore-seen incidents, fugitive particulars, obdurate facts, we simply can't knowourselves. We will have no grip on our situation. So Smithson looked forways to undermine tbe reassurances produced by our conceptual macbin-ery. He wanted to give us a sense, for example, of the way "the actualitiesof the geological process" defeat the clarities of the mapmaker's grid."

Only four years separate Smithson's first Nonsite from his last Earth-

Alogon, 1966, painted stainless steel, seven units, 35'A by 73'A by 35'A inches overaU. Whitney Museum. Photo Jerry L. Thompson.

work. Writers sometimes describe his quick development as triumphantlyprogressive, but Smitbson resisted tbe idea that art advances towardever greater clarity and value. At the end of the 1960s, a decade driven bycompeting ideas of esthetic progress, he sketched what might be calleda geography of criticism. "In the valleys of inquiry," he wrote, "traces ofart appear and disappear in sandstorms of controversy. Esthetic fatigueovercomes one in the critical desert. The asymmetrical distribution of

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'art movements' is apt to break up into floating islands on bottomlessoceans."" Art history leads nowhere.

Nonetheless, Smithson had a strong sense of Minimalism's historicalimportance, and it was in essays on the Mhiimalist object—"Donald Judd"(1965), "Entropy and the New Monuments" (1966)—that his prose attainedits immense scale and quirlQ' subtlety.'' Moreover, the blunt, uningratiatingclarity of boxes and grids by Judd, Morris and LeWitt showed Smithson theway heyond the unfocused intensity and shopworn styles of his early work.Yet he had no use for the Minimalist literalism summed up in a sloganbrandished hy the young Frank Stella; "What you see is what you see,"'"As Smithson recalled in 1973, "There was a Mud of dogma of Minimal artthat existed around the mid-Sixties that I never quite fit into, that I did nothave any desire to fit into,"" Dogmas depend on limits, and iimits of eveiykind filled him with claustrophobic unease, "You don't need systems," hesaid. "You don't need art ideas."'^ What the artist needs is a willbigness tocelebrate the world's resistance to system-making, as Smithson did by con-structing Nonsites from "convergences that couldn't converge, and polari-ties that never quite met but were in correspondence with each other."''

Smithson's rejection of "systems" and "art ideas" is awkward for criticsand art historians, for the point of their commentary is to extract perti-nent issues and ideas from works of art, and then arrange their findingsin systematic patterns that lead to defensible conclusions, Smithson,however, was leery of endpoints. His goal was to dissolve the veiy idea ofa goal. Commenting on the Mirror Di.spiacements he executed on his visitto the Yucatan in 1969, he said, "I was going from no place to no place."For him, it was a "fugitive experience" and the works that came out of it

Smithson wanted to plunge us intothe world's flow of contingencies,the swarm of irreducible particulars towhich no system of ideas is adequate.

are to be experienced hy us as "an entropic complex, a maze of orders."'*"Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" is first of all an exercise intravel writing modeled on John Lloyd Stephens's Incident of Travel inthe Yucatan (1848). In the piece, Smithson mixes recollections of hisearlier work with speculation on such matters as truth and fiction, time,space and memory. The photographs he includes remind one that the Mir-ror Displacements were a kind of performance art, and his descriptionsof the Yucatan Displacements are interwoven with esthetic commentary,invocations of Maya gods, commentaries on Atlantis and geoiogical pro-cesses, and more.

There is no way to place "Incidents of Mirror-TYavel in the Yucatan" onthe map of familiar genres, nor does this mixture of text and image point toany sharply delineated conclusions. There are oniy "contingent force[s]" ofmind and language and matter to be engaged.'^' "The point is that there isno point," Smithson declared, and so, no matter how diligently writers delveinto his themes [see sidebar], his art slips through their analytical nets. ^For there is, after all, a point to Smithson's art. He wanted to plunge us intothe world's flow of contingencies, the s-warm of irreducible particulars towhich no system of ideas, no method of analysis, is adequate.

Smithson has become an artist of particu-lar interest to writers, in part because hedid so much writing himself. His extrava-

gant metaphors, his penchant for shiftingliterary genres in mid-paragraph and his wideopen field of reference don't just invite com-mentary—they demand it, and the responsehas been voluminous. Critics and historianswho get entangled with Smithson run certainrisks. There is the temptation to take hisimages literally, to which nearly all his moreambitious commentators succumb. Thus weare offered arguments resting on the notionthat language simply is a material substance,as Smithson liked to say, or on the idea thattime is a crystalline deposit, as another ofthe artist's conceits has it. Smithson was anartist, an inventor of fictions. He threw up forgrabs everything that scholarly commentatorswant to nail down. Nonetheless, they say anynumber of valuable things in the process ofletting him slip through their fingers.

The catalogue of the current retrospec-tive, Robert Smithson (ed. Eugenie Tsai, LosAngeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art,and Berkeley, University of California Press,2004), contains, among other things, anessay by Jennifer R. Roberts on Smithson'sinterest in the Golden Spike National HistoricSite, which is 17 miles from Spiral Jetty. TheGolden Spike was driven in 1869, to com-plete the transcontinental railroad. Robertscontrasts the linear, progressive time positedby this artifact to the "additive, cumulative,and material" time that Spiral Jetty promptsus to imagine. The essay is adapted froma chapter in her Mirror-Travels: RobertSmithson and History (New Haven, YaleUniversity Press, 2004). In another of this

New Publications on Smitiisonbook's chapters, Roberts traces the interplayof crystals, mirrors and enantiomorphic pairsin Smithson's art.

Enantiomorphism is also the subject ofAnn Reynotds's contribution to the RobertSmittison catalogue. Here she digs up thesources of Smithson's knowledge of the sub-ject, and in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (ed.Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, New York, DiaArt Foundation, 2005), Reynolds writes of thedisparity between the Jetty she knew at a dis-tance, through documentation, and the Jettyshe experienced first-hand in 2004. This dis-parity generates instability, says Reynolds, anargument she elaborated at length in RobertSmittison: Learning trom New Jersey andElsewhere (reviewed in A.i.A., Oct. '03). Dia'sbook on Spiral Jetty is filled with spectacularphotographs of the work, which the founda-tion acquired in 1999. There is a memoir byBob Phillips, the boss of the crew that built theJetty, and an essay by George Baker, "TheCinema Model," which borrows David Joselit'sidea about the importance of diagrams toDada and applies it to Smithson's work in justabout all his mediums, from drawing to film.Noting diagrammatic impulses throughoutSmithson's oeuvre. Baker establishes a certaincoherence and brings into focus one of theartist's tactics for avoiding confinement, espe-cially the conceptual kind. Extendable in anydirection, diagrams encouraged Smithson'sflair for tangents and digressions.

In "Cosmic Exile: Prophetic Turns in theLife and Art of Robert Smithson," one of theessays in the Whitney catalogue, ThomasCrow argues that Smithson's oeuvre is uni-fied by "the metaphysical flights" he tookat the beginning and the end of his career.

In between, he indulged "an arch fascina-tion" with pop culture. As I see it, Smithsonabandoned metaphysics—and theology—in1964 or '65. Moreover, his fascination withB-movies, science fiction and the rest of popculture was self-conscious but not qualifiedby archness or irony. According to a list thatappears in the back of the Whitney cata-logue, Smithson's record collection rangedfrom Scarlatti to Wagner to Lesley Gore,a '60s sweetheart about whom there is nopoint in being ironic. Crow gets Smithson'sinterests and values wrong, or so I believe.Nonetheless, he makes a number of helpfulpoints, especially in his account of Smithson'sobjections to the image of the artist as anunaffected individual who simply does whatcomes naturally, to complacent expectationsof modernist progress and to unquestionedassumptions about art's superiority to thethings of ordinary iife.

In the early 1970s, it was an article ofart-world faith that artists and corporationshad nothing in common, Smithson thoughtthis was nonsense, and he was right, giventhe vigor of corporate collecting and muse-ums' dependence on corporate support. Hebelieved that artists should not only acknowl-edge their links to corporate power but findways to turn that power to the purposes ofart, as he himself wanted to do. At the timeof his death, he was negotiating with min-ing companies, trying to get permission tomake Earthworks of strip-mined mountain-sides. In Robert Smithson and the AmericanLandscape (Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004), Ron Graziani pro-vides the legal and Ideological background tothese unrealized projects, -C.R.

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Throughout his career, spirals seemto have been for Smithsonwhat gyres were for W.B. Yeatsand vortices were for Wyndham Lewis.

I ntent on freeing us from the constraints of our usual thoughts and feel-ings, Smithson was a visionary worthy of comparison to such figures as

William Blake, with his faith in the possihUity of spiritual redemption, andTS. Eliot, who thought (at least before his conversion to Anglicanism)that it was too late, that modem life had devolved into an irredeemablewasteland. Revising ?]liot, whom he deeply admired, Smithson contem-plated wastelands and the remnants of collapsed systems with a kind ofjoy. He sought out ruined landscapes in the belief that they would put himin direct contact vidth sheer, unmediated actuality. It was to bring messyparticulars under the control of absolutist generaiities that Piet Mon-drian and other visionary modernists invented their Utopian schemes. TheNonsites were the first of Smithson's "atopias": places designed to throw

our ordinary notionsof place into disarray,along with our habitualideas about space andscale and time.

The works of Blake,Eliot and Mondrian reston the great theologi-cal and metaphysicalsystems of the past.That is what we oftenfind in visionary art,and Smithson's earlyworks quiver with reli-gious feeling. The spi-ral stigmata in Feet ofChrist were precededby the concentric cir-cles of The Eye of Blood

(1960), a red, black and white quasi-abstraction that can he seen as theweeping eye of the crucified Christ or as a rose window in a time of apoca-lypse. The left, hand of Christ appears in one version of Man of Sorrow,and the right hand in the other (both 1961). The hands bear stigmata.Smithson, who had been confirmed as a Roman Catholic in 1950, intend-ed these early works as vehicles of an intensely felt religious faith. In thelatter half of the 1960s he emerged as a secular visionary exasperated by"the latent spirituality in just about ail of modernism.'"'^

Yet themes persist—the spiral, for instance, and the enantiomorphicpair. The usual way to expiain the latter (a term that refers to certaincrystal formations) is to point to our hands, which are identical, in a way,and yet do not match when one is placed on top of the other. Left handand right are mirror images. In 1965, the idea of the enantiomorphicpair migrated from the Man of Sorrow paintings to a two-part wall sculp-ture called Enantiomorphic Chambers. Each part is a box of mirroredsurfaces arranged so that they deliver no self-reflection to the viewer.You stick your head in the box and see only mirrors reflecting mirrors.The Enantiomo'rphic Chambers serve as ironic altars to the no longerbelievable metaphysics of subjectivity. Smithson's quips at the expenseof the Cartesian self are as persuasive as any professional philosopher'sarguments against that dubious entity. And an immersion in his oeuvre isan effective cure for many chronic ailments of a metaphysical nature thatone might suffer.

In 1973, the last year of his life, Smithson found a new predecessor:Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief designer of New York's Central Park.Redefining Olmsted as an artist, Smithson argued that if art is to escape

Floating Island to Travel Aroand ManhattanIsland, 1970, pencit on paper, Iif by 24 inches.Private cotlection.

from the white-walledgallery and the airlesspretensions of meta-physics, it must engagesociety. It must becomeuseful at the scale Olm-sted achieved with hisgreat metropolitan gar-den.'" At a still greaterscale are Smithson'splans for convertingstrip-mining sites intoEarthworks. Havingbegun as a young artistfilled with spiritual fer-vor, he attained matu-rity by subjecting allvarieties of belief to animpatient skepticism.Year by year, he becamemore pragmatic in thestrong sense that con-nects Smithson to Wil-liam James, John Dewey

and other anti-metaphysicians in the American grain. If Dewey, inparticular, seems too flat-footed to serve as a forebear of a visionary likeSmithson, then we need to invoke Ralph Waldo Emerson in his moredown-to-earth moods—the pragmatist Emerson who described languagenot as material but as "vehicular," a means of intellectual conveyance,and advised his readers that no work of art is essential because there areno essences for art. to deliver. The point of art. is to prompt us to stay alertto ourselves, to the world, and to the relations between the two.'"

Nonetheless, many of Smithson's commentators praise him for reveal-ing what can only be called transcendent truths about time, language, themind and much else. But for Smithson, truth is not transcendent and gen-eral. It is immediate and particular, and one does not discover it by meansof analytical systems. One finds the truth, he said, by staying alive to "theactualities of perception,"^" and the point of art is to goad us into doingthat, from moment to moment, through all the twists and turns of spaceand time he mapped in such provocative detail. D

Feet of Christ, 1961, watercolor and ink, 18by 14 inches. Courtesg James Cohan Gallery,Neu- York.

A Surd View for an Afternoon, 1970, ink on paper, 8'kby II inches.Vancouver Art Gallery.

162 October 2005

Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah (photo taken 1970), mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks and water; coil 13 by 15 by 1,500 feet. Dia Art Foundation. Photo © JEK.

1. Anne M. Wagner, "Being There: Art anri the Politics of Space," Artforum, Summer2005, p. 'm.2. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part II," first published m Artforum, October1966, excerpted in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed.Charles Harrison anri Paul Wood, Oxford. Blackwell, 200H, pp. 832-33.:J. "t^iur C(inver.sations between Dennis Wheeler anri Robert Smithson," 1969-70, in Rob-ert Smitl).wn: The Collected Writing.';, ed. Jack Fiam, Berkeley, IIniversit>- of CaliforniaPress, 1996, p. 208. See also Pau! Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for theArchives of American Art/Smithsonian Institutions," 1972, ibiri., p. 294.4. Robert Smithson, "Letter to the Editor." 1967, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writ-ititi.>i, pp, 6fi-67.

5. "Fragments of an Interview with P, A. |Patsy| Norvell," 1969, Robert Smithsm: TheCollected Wriiiug.t, p. 194.(i. Moira Roth, "Interview with Robert Smithson," 1970, Robert Smilkton, ed. EugenieTsai, Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporarj' Art, and Berkeley, University of Califor-nia Press, 2004, p. 87.7. Ibid., p. 90.8. Smithson, "Hidden Trails in Art," 1969, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings,p. 366.9. Smithson, "Donald Judd," 1965, ibid., pp. 7-9; Smithson, "Entropy and the New Monu-ments," 1966, ibid., pp. 10-23.in , Frank Stella, in Bruce Glaser. "Questions to Stella anri Judri," l%(i, Minimal Art: ACritical Anthology, ed. Gregorj Baltcock, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1968, p. 158.11. Roth, p. 93.

12. "Four Conversations," I969-70,.fio6CT-i Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 215.13. Ibid., p. 212.14. Kenneth Baker, "Talking with Robert Smithson," 1971, Robert Smithson: SpiralJetty, eds. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly. New York, Dia Art Foundation, 2005, p. 151.15. "Four Conversations," 1969-70, Robert Smithson: Tfie Collected Writings, p. 229.16. Baker, p. 150.17. Smithson, "Cultural Confinement," 1972, Robert Smithsm: The Collected Writings,p. 156.18. Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," ibid., pp. 157-71.19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," 1837, and 'The Poet," 1844, RalphWaldo Emerson.: Es.Hays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte, New York, 1983, pp. 57, 463. Seeaiso Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, Cambridge, Mass,, Harvard UniversityPress. 1992, pp. 25-27, 53.20. Smithson, "The Spiral Jetty," 1972, Robert Smith.'ion: The Collected Writings,pp. 147.

"Robert Smithson" debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Sept12-Dec. 13, 20mi It traveled to the Dallas Musnnn of Art jJan. 14-Apr. Sj and is cur-rently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York [June 23-Oct. 16J. Inconjunction with Minetta Brook, the Whitney aLso presented a realisation ofSmithscm's1970 project Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (Sept. 15-Sept 25}.

Author: Carter Ratcliff is a poet and art critic. His most recent book is Out of the Box:The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975 (AUworth).

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