Robert Smithson and the American Landscape

by Ron Graziani
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2004
234 pp., illus. 43 b/w. Trade, $75.00
ISBN: 0521827558.

Reviewed by Amy Ione
The Diatrope Institute
PO Box 6813
Santa Rosa, Ca 95406-0813

ione@diatrope.com

Although he died in a 1973 plane crash while surveying the site of Amarillo Ramp, Robert Smithson’s art still seems amazingly current. Indeed it is as if his legacy has taken on a life of its own, due to the mutability of many of the projects he left behind. The recent emergence of his well-known Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, for example, has stimulated broad debate over whether it should be restored or allowed to follow a natural course. The types of push and pull impulses the discussions bring to mind, in general, make us wonder who was the man behind the project. Ron Graziani’s Robert Smithson and the American Landscape skilfully captures the complexity of Smithson as an artist and a legend. Surveying the impulses and ideas behind this artist’s work, the author also endeavours to place his contributions in a larger context. Thus, strictly speaking, the book is not a monograph in the narrow sense of the word.

To his credit, Graziani carefully places this body of research in terms of social history, giving a great deal of emphasis to Smithson’s mining sites and their critical reception. Although an in-depth placement of Smithson’s work in terms of the earthworks developed by his contemporaries is missing, the author does establish how Smithson’s projects, per se, formed a part of what was called the "new conservationism" in the late 1960s. This approach allows Graziani to frame this artist’s sustaining impact and provides the reader with important foundational information. We learn, for example, of his early influences (e.g., his grandfather and uncle perhaps fostered his passion for the land and the cartographical bent he shows in his drawings). Integrating Smithson’s extensive writings and interviews also allows the author to demonstrate Smithson’s significant role in establishing the cultural turn toward postmodernism. As Graziani explains, Smithson’s ideas were not just a different theoretical model and methodological approach. Rather, in his view, they were instrumental in moving art into the ‘postmodern’ mode that has produced a larger framework for interpolating art in terms of culture in general. Thus, when he combines the artist’s own words with drawings, sites, and "non-sites", we are able to get a sense of this unique artist’s keen mind and sense of humour. A Heap of Language (1966), which depicts words on graph paper that seem to form a mound, is one of the tantalizing drawings that shows this well.

Less successful is the book’s attempt to re-focus the theoretical boundaries currently framing Smithson’s art. Graziani provides a foundation in his discussion of the October 1967 letter Smithson published in Art Forum. This is one of the more effective devices used within the text. Briefly, this short letter was written in response to Michael Fried's attack on minimalism. On this occasion, Smithson claimed that Fried was "the first truly manneristic critic of ‘modernity’." He characterized this as a "ready-made parody of the war between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-classicism (theatre)." According to the author, his caustic appraisal was a part of the postmodern "attitude" that structured Smithson's artistic practice overall. Graziani further suggests we need to read it in light of Smithson’s pursuit of the picturesque-sublime. As I endeavoured to sort out the argument, however, I found the author’s focused, well-researched explanations never quite meshed. To be sure, he conveys Smithson’s sarcastic ambivalence and effectively survey’s the artist’s contributions aesthetically. More problematic were the interpretative elements.

While it is no doubt academically correct to present primary sources to aid the commentary, the extensive use of Smithson’s own words may have worked against Graziani. Instead of convincing me of Smithson’s goals, the citations reminded me of taped interviews I had seen of him a number of years ago.

Finding many of his projects fascinating, I had almost forgotten how surprised I was at that time to find so much cynicism within his personality. Consequently, although I found the book’s arguments quite compellingly presented, each time Smithson spoke for himself I revisited the disagreeable man I saw in the tapes. The problematic qualities of his corrosive "attitude" came through strongly when his writings and interviews were cited but were insufficiently critiqued. As a result Graziani did not convince me that we can assign clear values to Smithson’s work and intentions. I was reminded, instead, that the artist’s skill in using words to remain opaque was as well developed as his talent for constructing engaging artworks. Ironically, the primary sources the author used to argue his case proved to raise more questions about the thrust of the study than agreement with its thesis. In addition, the language of the book was complicated by the many acronyms the author adopted.

Reflecting on the book as a whole, it seems that Graziani might have been able to work through the ambivalence/attitude dilemma if he had endeavoured to gently place Smithson’s earthworks within the context of their own process and other land-based projects. Since Smithson’s art is still with us, although Smithson is not, some sense of how time alters all might have mitigated the young Smithson’s cynicism and offered a ground for thinking about how a mature Smithson could have "weathered". This kind of larger argument, I believe, would have given Smithson’s views more traction in the overall discussion. As Graziani points out, the artist make a case for a type of art that would consolidate tensions, challenge aesthetic theories, and rely on the conventions of the picturesque. To my mind, particularly in light of the discussion of whether or not his Spiral Jetty should be conserved, it seems that contemporary discussion of Smithson cannot be separated from the properties of nature that continue to form his art. From this perspective it is hard to see the earth medium in terms of views on the narrow framework of theoretical and picturesque Graziani provides.

A broader vantage point would have allowed us to see the fate of land-based projects in a larger sense than Smithson’s history alone permits. For example, as a recent exhibition at the Sonoma County Art Museum in California pointed out, time has altered the terrain significantly. Titled "Formations of Erasure: Earthworks and Entropy," this show revisited celebrated earthwork projects from across the United States particularly sites constructed in the 70s (e.g., Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer's Double Negative in the Nevada Desert) to aid the audience in contemplating the interesting dynamic at play between artistic intention and natural processes in these land art projects. Reading Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, I recalled this show, particularly, how the curator asked visitors to contemplate whether an earthwork's meaning can outlast a work's physical form or if nature ultimately subsumes these impermanent human interventions in its ceaseless processes of change.

These types of questions that probe and reach beyond were missing, as were ways in which we Smithson’s legacy extends into our discussions. We know, for example, that Smithson lived long enough to see Spiral Jetty completely submerged and to witness its re-emergence a few weeks later. He spoke of this without suggesting it was problematic, although many see it this way today. While the artist left the impression that environmental change was very much a part of the intention of the piece (and of his other earthworks), proposals to "crystallize" his work have incited a debate much like the kinds of critical debates Smithson liked to thrust himself into during his life. When doing so he often rejected "clean" arguments. Never one to simplify the aesthetic or context, it seems fair to say that Smithson intuitively recognized the organic nature of an earthwork, how it might relate to those who visited it, and how closely both might ultimately be linked with natural processes. All of this hovers around the Graziani book but is never fully brought into focus.

In summary, Graziani conveys that Smithson simultaneously expanded our notion of art and used his vision to reinvigorate the discussion of landscape, the picturesque, aesthetics, myth, history, and the course of civilizations. In capturing this, the author contributes to our understanding of links between economics and Smithson’s earthwork. We get a sense of this artist’s planned land-reclamation projects and how he envisioned them as a new form of public art that would bring an aesthetic sense to devastated industrial sites. In addition, after reading through the text, Graziani brings the reader to ask whether some of Smithson’s mature projects would have dwarfed the Spiral Jetty. On the other hand, the book’s approach does not sufficiently probe this artist’s intractable personality, although it runs parallel to his artworks. Finally, the book would have benefited from a more expansive integration of Smithson’s views of the picturesque and sublime with the influence of the impermanence of natural cycles on existent environmental work in general.