ors and allow time and the environment to interact with artworks รป even with the potential for destruction that this implies.
Roberts (2000) says that Smithson is best known as a land or Earthworks artist with his Spiral Jetty that is located in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, providing a standard illustration of the movement in art history survey texts, Smithson worked in other media as well. Roberts (2000) believes that Smithson often executed his work in an expeditionary context, having moved away from the gallery-bound installations that characterized his early sculptural career. His important series of works titled Sites/Non-Sites retained a gallery component, partially inspired by the display practices of natural history museums. However, they took as their primary theme, the relationship between the gallery and a given peripheral site to which Smithson had traveled. Some of these forms identified by Roberts (2000) include Mirror Displacements, temporary cultural installations that were arranged by Smithson at various sites and then photographed, dismantled, and occasionally reinstalled in part or via photographs in galleries.
Another Earthwork identified by Roberts (2000) as linking Smithson's archeological and expeditionary concerns to his artistic concerns is a series of Overturned Rocks that was constructed near the ruins of Uxmal in the Yucatan. This particular installation is seen by Roberts (2000) as Smithson's most pointed critique of archeological activity. Mocking the archeologist's desire for comprehension or "leaving no stone unturned," Smithson "proposes that beneath the stones of Yucatan one will not find a historical grounding but 'the entrance to the abyss,' not the key to Maya cosmology but 'a damp cosmos of fungus and mold'" (Roberts, 2000, p. 560).
Of course, it is Spiral Jetty that is Smithson's most famous work. Constructed in 1970 of earth, mud, water, salt, and volcanic rock, this 1,500 ...