Page 58 - Studio International - October1973

Once I called Smithson an important
TWO of the poetic principle ... Poetry is artist whose art is not important, supporting a cultural prison that is out
hold on them. As a result, they end up
always a dying language but never a
dead language ... Art critics are because I liked his ideas and writings of their control. Artists themselves are
generally poets who have betrayed so much more than his sculpture. This not confined, but their output is.
The second of a series of regular their art, and instead have tried to statement was based on an object Works of art seen in "neutral" rooms
columns by Lucy Lippard turn art into a matter of reasoned focus which he himself called "galleries" ... seem to be going
discourse, and, occasionally, when understandably rejected, and in through a kind of aesthetic
July 20 : A drizzly, foggy day by the their 'truth' breaks down, they resort retrospect I find I like a surprising convalescence. They are looked upon
sea, a phone call from New York; to a poetic quote'. amount of the work : the entropic as so many inanimate invalids,
'I've got some bad news'. I brace 'Rundowns' or flows, the site waiting for critics to pronounce them
myself. 'Bob Smithson was killed in a He may have been explaining his own selections, photo-marker and map curable or incurable. The function of
plane crash'. Solid disbelief. Flashes constant urge to write (he published pieces, sometimes the mirrors, maybe the warden-curator is to separate art
of an old friend, often an adversary, 21 articles and 6 interviews and left the Spiral Jetty, which I have never from the rest of society. Next comes
but finally very much a friend. I babble several unpublished typescripts) seen. However, I still think of his art integration. Once the work of art is
the things one babbles. I hang up. It when he quoted Giacommetti : 'It's primarily in two-dimensional terms. totally neutralized, ineffective,
hits me. I cry. We wander dazedly out hard for me to shut up. It's the Dialectic or no dialectic, the abstracted, safe, and politically
on to the mudflats to the sandbar and delirium that comes from the sculptural image always suffered in lobotomized it is ready to be
sit down there in the fog. The tide impossibility of really accomplishing comparison to the mental image and consumed by society... I am not
comes in around us. It starts to rain anything'. He may have been referring to his own descriptions of it, I don't interested in art works that suggest
again. Bob was always talking about to his own early work—the Hollywood think he ever found the three- "process" within the metaphysical
the 'primal ooze'. metal-flecked formica reliefs and dimensional counterpart of the limits of the neutral room ... Confined
mirrorstructures—when he quoted Ken expansiveness of his ideas, except process is no process at all. It would
'Like the map of a prehistoric island I Kelman on 'the reduction of ultimate when on site, in the 'site selections', be better to disclose the confinement
built on quicksand in Alfred, NY. The experience to brilliant chromatic which were his best art, and rather than make illusions of freedom'.
map was made of rock. It sank slowly. surface; Thanatos in Chrome— ironically the most potentially
No sites exist at all. They are lost in artificial death'. Certainly he was infinite. But it is indicative of When I realized Bob Smithson was
time ... Most people feel anxiety when describing his own writing when he Smithson's courage, his conviction, dead I thought how unfair it was to
they confront this vastness of geology wrote about language 'covering' or his self-confidence, that it never take away the only 'famous' artist who
or the very non-structured nature of rather than 'discovering' :'In the occurred to him to limit his art to the seemed committed to moving his art
my sites. I am exhilarated by it ... I'm illusory babels of language an artist maps and photographs which best out of 'cultural confinement'.
suspicious of science. Heidegger might advance specifically to get lost, expressed the ideas. He needed to Toward the end of his life he was 1)
says that Nothingness is inaccessible and to intoxicate himself in dizzying make things, needed to create even if gloomy, maybe sometimes bitter,
to science ... A sense of the Earth as a syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of he called it 'decreation' ; given the about the prospects of changing
map undergoing disruption leads the meaning, strange corridors of history, choice, he constructed sculpture in anything and 2) working his ass off to
artist to the realization that nothing is unexpected echoes, unknown the landscape, while the site replace the old values with new ones
certain or formal. Language itself humours, or voids of knowledge... selections were of the landscape. by persuading the strip miners,
becomes mountains of symbolic but this quest is risky, full of landlords of abandoned quarries and
debris'. bottomless fictions and endless 'For too long the artist has been gravel pits, the owners of all those
architectures and counter- estranged from his own "time". sites 'disrupted by industry, reckless
It was as a writer that I was most architectures ... at the end, if there Critics, by focusing on the "art urbanization, or nature's own
affected by Smithson, though is an end, are perhaps only object", deprive the artist of any devastation', to let him recycle their
emulating him was out of the question. meaningless reverberations'. existence in the world of both mind spoils into his own kind of change and
I envied him his immersion in 'the We used to argue (it sounds idiotic in and matter. The mental procedure of decay, which would take place out of
sedimentation of the mind', those retrospect) about finity versus the artist which takes place in time is History, in Time. Such a recycling is
'oceanic' pages into which he infinity, Borges versus Beckett, disowned, so that a commodity value typical of his ambivalence about the
plunged with such disregard for logic mirrors and horizons ... I longed can be maintained by a system future, which interested him greatly
and fact and then emerged, romantically and unashamed for independent of the artist ... By though he saw it as a rerun of the
unexpectedly, with so much infinity, while Bob stated separating art from the "primary past. He was not a pessimist, despite
meaning. I envied him the physicality, unequivocally 'All legitimate art deals process", the artist is cheated in more his emphasis on entropy, energy
the ponderous flow of his words. I with limits. Fraudulent art feels it has ways than one. Separate "things", drain, exhaustion, death, his intense
guess I envied him the fact that no limits. The trick is to locate those with beginnings and endings are dislike of the myths of rebirth and
as a writer he also made art, had elusive limits'. We were both mere convenient fictions; there is progress, or utopias. He was, in fact,
something to tie it all down to, was in preoccupied with horizons. When I only a disintegrating order that an optimist, a gloomy and practical,
touch with his ideas, or 'down to executed, via his instructions, a piece transcends the limits of rational even visionary optimist.
earth', and could therefore be such a for a show in 1969 (400 square separations ... Many would like to
'visual' writer. Because for all his snapshots of horizons— 'empty, forget time altogether, because it 'As long as art is thought of as
emotionalism, for all the mysticism plain, vacant, common, vacuous, contains the "death principle" (every creation, it will be the same old story.
that he, like Ad Reinhardt, was drawn ordinary, blank, dull, level beaches, authentic artist knows this)'. Here we go again, creating objects,
to and repelled by, Smithson was unoccupied uninhabited deserted creating systems, building a better
correct in saying he was no romantic. fields, scanty lots, houseless, typical, So he made objects. His art was, tomorrow. I posit there is no tomorrow,
average, void, sandbars, remote lakes, finally, too finite. The immense range nothing but a gap, a yawning gap. That
'History breaks down into fabulous distant etc.'), I was pleased that he of his geological time-sense— his seems sort of tragic, but what
lies, that reveal nothing but liked the results, particularly since involvement in pre-and-post-history, immediately relieves it is irony,
copies of copies. There is there wasn't a flat spot in Seattle. 'places where remote futures meet which gives you a sense
no order outside the mandala remote pasts' — was cross-sectioned of humour. It is that cosmic
itself ... One's mind and the earth are 'A horizon is something else other most effectively in those pieces that sense of humour that makes it all
in a constant state of erosion, mental than a horizon ; it is closedness in referred out, rather than in the tolerable. Everything just vanishes.
rivers wear away abstract banks, openness, it is an enchanted region prettily contained and 'imposed' The sites are receding into the
brain waves undermine cliffs of where down is up. Space can be nonsites in the galleries. Yet he was nonsites and the nonsites are receding
thought, ideas decompose into approached, but time is far away. vitally aware of this and kept moving back to the sites'.
stones of unknowing, and conceptual Time is devoid of objects when one further out. Herein lies the real
crystallizations break apart into displaces all destinations ... The poignancy of his position. I say of his
deposits of gritty reason ... Look at mirror itself is not subject to duration, position because he was aware of it. ' Robert Smithson (1938-1973)
any word long enough and you will because it is an ongoing abstraction Actually, it is the position, pathetically was killed on 20 July in the crash of
a private plane while surveying the
see it open up into a series of faults, that is always available and timeless. so, of most artists making art today
site of a new earthwork in Amarillo,
into a terrain of particles each The reflections, on the other hand, are and very few are aware of it.
Texas. His wife, the artist Nancy
containing its own void. This fleeting instances that evade measure.
Holt, is completing the piece.
discomforting language of Space is the remains, or corpse, of 'Artists are expected to fit into
All quotations included here
fragmentation offers no easy gestalt time; it has dimensions. "Objects" fraudulent categories. Some artists are from Smithson's writings,
solution ; the certainties of dialectic are "sham space", the excrement of imagine they've got a hold on this and from interviews with him by
discourse are hurled into the erosion thought and language'. apparatus, which in fact has got a John Perreault and Patsey Norvell.
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