Outside the Box

Robert Smithson and the Earth Art Movement

Robert Smithson is perhaps best known for his seminal 1970 work Spiral Jetty which is considered one of the most recognizable works created by the artists of the Land Art movement. Smithson emerged into the art world in 1964 as a proponent of the growing Minimalist Art movement which was being driven forward by artists such as Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd. This movement derived ideas from modernism, frequently working with simple massive forms as a reaction to the perceived chaos of Abstract Expressionism. The development of Minimalism is linked to that of Conceptual Art. Both movements challenged the existing structures for making, disseminating and viewing art and argued that the importance given to the art object was misplaced and led to a rigid and elitist art world which only the privileged few could afford to enjoy.¹

The Land Art movement, was a sub-set of minimalism, which had its own dominant figures, including Smithson, his wife Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria to name a few. This movement, rejected museums and galleries by creating work that moved beyond the containment of walled spaces. Works such as Double Negative, Sun Tunnels and Roden Crater were meant to be hard to access and represented a non-commodity by being highly immobile.

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey, where he was born, and became fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in his well known series called 'non-sites' where earth and rocks were collected from a specific area and were installed in a gallery as sculptures. In Theory of Non-Sites Smithson wrote "The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site". These 'non-sites' were meant to reference the actual 'sites' from which the material was taken. Accompanied by cartographic and geological information in the form of texts, maps or photographs, the 'non-site' relayed what was to become "a skewed and incomplete dialectic-between inside and outside, visible and invisible, form and formlessness, determinacy and indeterminacy, center and periphery-between site and non-site". ²

Smithson made one of the first of his 'non-sites' series after a visit in June 1968 to the slate quarries of Bangor and Pen Argyl. His visit to the site resulted in a transformation for him. He described the visit where 'all boundaries and distinctions lost their meaning in this ocean of slate'.³