Robert Irving Smithson

Artist, sculptor, photographer, writer, filmmaker

• Born: January 2, 1938
• Birthplace: Passaic, New Jersey
• Died: July 20, 1973
• Place of death: Amarillo, TX

Also known as: Robert Smithson

Significance: Robert Irving Smithson was an American artist who was one of the founders of earthworks, also called land art. Smithson is best known for creating Spiral Jetty (1970), an enormous earthwork constructed near the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Smithson died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-five but remains one of the most influential artists of the mid-twentieth century.

Background

Robert Irving Smithson was born on January 2, 1938, to Irving and Susan Duke Smithson. While born in Passaic, New Jersey, Smithson’s family moved to Clifton, New Jersey, and then to Rutherford, where his pediatrician was the famous poet, William Carlos Williams. An only child, Smithson and his parents moved each time his father changed jobs. Irving Smithson worked for a company selling auto parts but then turned to real estate and then to banking.

As a boy, Smithson was fascinated both by art and natural history. His family often drove him to New York City to his favorite place, the Museum of Natural History. In elementary school, Smithson painted a mural of a dinosaur on a hallway wall and constructed a large dinosaur out of paper. In high school, a series of large woodcuts he called Teenagers on 42nd Street landed him a scholarship to take evening classes at the Art Students League in New York City. While on the bus traveling to and from classes, Smithson became fascinated with the landscapes he passed—such as a smoldering dump and a garbage-covered meadow. Also while in high school, Smithson’s father built him a “basement museum” where he displayed his collections of fossils, shells, and insects.

After high school, Smithson joined the army for a time and worked as an artist on a base in Georgia. When he was discharged, he hitchhiked across the country, visiting the Hopi Indian Reservation and the pyramids in Mexico. Then, determined to become an artist, Smithson moved to New York City in 1957.

Life’s Work

Smithson began his artistic career as a painter but later turned to sculpting. It was while painting his first canvases that he developed the “opposition” theme that he would convey in most of his work. His paintings had antithetical religious themes.

In 1958, Smithson “re-met” artist Nancy Holt—the two first met as children while living in New Jersey. Holt, who would later become Smithson’s wife, encouraged him to use large-scale sculpture to convey his interest in natural history. In 1965, using mirrors and glass, he created Enantiomorphic Chambers. The term “enantiomorphic” refers to crystal compounds that are mirror images of each other. When viewers stand in front of the sculpture, they do not see their own reflection, but reflections of their reflection.

In 1966, Smithson began visiting the industrial sites he became aware of as he traveled to the Arts Students League of New York. He wrote essays describing what he saw and published them in major art magazines. For one of these articles, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Smithson traveled back to his birth town and wrote about the “anti-monuments” there, such as suburban sprawl and urban growth.

In 1970, Smithson began the work for which he is most famous, Spiral Jetty. With this outdoor sculpture, he became one of the founders of earthworks. The creation accomplished one of his major goals: to place work in the land instead of on the land. Spiral Jetty is an enormous coil made of crystal, rock, water, and earth. Smithson built it on the site of an abandoned oil rig near the Great Salt Lake in Utah. To spread the nearly 7,000 tons of material used to create the land art, Smithson used dump trucks and caterpillar tractors. Spiral Jetty is now completely submerged in the lake but can be viewed through Smithson’s photographs and film.

For the remainder of his life, Smithson sought to make art out of discarded land. He constructed Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) on an abandoned quarry in Emmen, the Netherlands. Smithson created this land art using two semi-circles that appear to be mirror images of each other; each is half on land and half in water. The Spiral Hill portion of the work is three-dimensional and not flat like Broken Circle. In the center of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is an ancient boulder that Smithson and his crew were unable to remove and therefore incorporated into the work. Smithson’s creation is so popular in Emmen that the people there chose to preserve it and turn the area into a park.

In 1973, Smithson began work on Amarillo Ramp in Texas. However, while on a trip to survey and photograph the site, the small plane he was traveling in crashed, killing him, the pilot, and a photographer. His wife, along with two other artists, completed the work posthumously. Before he died, Smithson was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

Impact

Decades after this death, Smithson continues to inspire artists with his landscapes and his writing. They seek to also create art that links the environment with the human condition and challenges the traditional notions of what, exactly, is considered art.

Principal Works: Sculptures

Enantiomorphic Chambers, 1965

Plunge, 1966

Terminal, 1966

Aerial Map—Proposal for Dallas—Fort Worth Regional Airport, 1967

A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey, Summer, 1968

Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust, 1968

Mirrors and Shelly Sand, 1970

Spiral Jetty, 1970

Principal Works: Drawings

St. John in the Desert, circa1960–1963

Wondering Earth Mounds and Gravel Paths, 1967

Mao of Clear Broken Glass (Atlantis), 1969

Cement Flow, 1969

Museum of the Void, 1969

Spiral Jetty in Red Walt Water, circa 1970

Unedited 16mm Takes—Emmen Holland, 1971

Towards the Development of a “Cinema Cavern,” 1971

Amarillo Ramp, 1973

Principal Works: Photographs

Monuments of Passaic, 1967

Chalk and Mirror Displacement, 1969

Hotel Palenque, 1969

First Upside Down Tree, 1969

Hypothetical Continent—Map of Broken Glass, Atlantis, 1969

Forking Island, 1971

Bingham Copper Mining Pit—Utah, Reclamation Project, 1973

Principal Works: Film

Swamp, 1969

(With Nancy Holt) Spiral Jetty, 1970

Bibliography

Holt, Nancy, ed. The Writings of Robert Smithson. New York University Press, 1979.

Reynolds, Ann. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. MIT Press, 2004.

“Robert Smithson.” The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/robert-smithson. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.

“Robert Smithson (1938–1973).” Encyclopedia of Visual Artists, www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/robert-smithson.htm. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.

“Robert Smithson.” Robertsmithson.com, www.robertsmithson.com/earthworks/spiral‗jetty.htm. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.

“Robert Smithson.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist-smithson-robert.htm. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.

Sullivan, Robert. “The Source of Robert Smithson’s Spiral.” The New Yorker, 18 June, 2014, . Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.