Robert Smithson and the Postmodernist Project

Robert Smithson, perhaps the best known of all artists in the Earthworks and Site-Specific Sculpture movement, wrote that:

One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into

stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations beak apart into deposits of gritty reason (in Kurtz, 1992, p.

Smithson's comment captured some of the essential elements of "earthwork," described by Bruce Kurtz (1992) as art forms so inextricably linked to their site and location that they cannot be separated from it.

Earthworks emerged in the second half of the 1960s because artists were concerned with the politics of the art world, including issues of power and control over art itself. In their large scale, Earthworks and other site-specific sculptures employ the dimension of time in addition to height, width, and depth. Kurtz (1992) says that Earthworks interact with the natural landscape, function within natural systems, and present no clear boundaries between the art works and the landscapes that they not so much occupy as possess. Many Earthworks are located in the western United States, linking them, according to Kurtz (1992), to the western frontier mythology, including the myth that wide open spaces foster individualism and freedom from conventions.

Indeed, Flam (1996) called for an art that took into accou

. . .
etween earth and shed, structure and sheer matter. Reynolds (2003) links this Earthwork and its location on the campus of Kent State University to the political pressures which led to the use of weapons against student protesters by National Guardsmen. Reynolds (2003) sees the pressures on artists such as Smithson to be linked directly to a societal rejection of boundaries. Reynolds (2003) argues that Smithson intended this particular work to mirror the political situation in 1970 and that Buried Wood Shed held up a prophetic mirror to the Kent State killings because Smithson's motive was to expose the boundaries imposed by oppressive forms of authority and to side with those who challenged those boundaries. Yet another of Smithson's works is called The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork). This is a three-dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet is representative of an actual site in New Jersey known as the Pine Barrens Plains (Flam, 1996). Smithson himself said that to understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between a syntactical construct and the complex of ideas allowing the former to function as a three-dimensional picture that does not look like the picture. Between the actual site
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Smithson Earthworks, Smithson Flam, Bruce Kurtz, Interestingly Kurtz, Wood Shed, Robert Smithson's, Indeed Flam, Spiral Jetty, Lake Utah, Spiral Hill, kurtz 1992, flam 1996, roberts 2000, robert smithson, reynolds 2003, according kurtz 1992, according kurtz, sanford 2004, spiral jetty, richard 1998, wood shed, art forum international, flam 1996 smithson, 2000 believes smithson, according reynolds 2003,
Approximate Word count = 2286
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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