Robert Smithson (1938-1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty-a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake-is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century.
Since the 1979 publication of The Writings of Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson's significance as a spokesman for a generation of artists has been widely acknowledged and the importance of his thinking to contemporary artists and art critics continues to grow.
Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987.
This publication catalogs the body of Smithson's slideworks of temporary objects in chonological order - most of them have never been shown nor published before. Excerpts from his texts alternate with color images.
Thirty years after his untimely death, Robert Smithson (1938-1973) remains one of the most influential artists of his generation. His complex ideas took root in many forms, including drawings, projects, proposals, sculpture, earthworks, films, and critical writings. Although made in a brief span from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, Smithson's provocative works redefined the language of sculpture.
