Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere - Book Review

By Ann Reynolds, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2003; 364 pages, $39.95.

In 1973, Robert Smithson planned an earthwork for a site near Amarillo, Tex. To reconnoiter the site from the air, he went up in a small plane, which crashed, killing him, the pilot and a photographer. Fourteen years later, his widow, the artist Nancy Holt, donated his papers and library to the Archives of American Art. This is a vast trove of "preparatory sketches, drafts, models, and cited texts" as well as "magazines, tourist pamphlets, postcards, books, and records"--to quote Ann Reynolds, a professor of art and art history at the University of Texas, Austin, who has made a long trek through the Smithson archives and written a book about her journey. She also looked through the archives of the Dwan Gallery at the Bard Center Center for Curatorial Studies and the photographic holdings of the Smithson estate, at the James Cohan Gallery. Much of Smithson's art is the product of travel and nearly all of it is about movement through space and time, so Reynolds's approach is fitting. I disagree with her understanding of Smithson, yet her sympathy for her subject is so acute that she makes any number of illuminating comparisons and connections.

Among the treasures she turned up in the Smithson archives is a photograph of a print by a 19th-century illustrator named T.L. Dawes. Titled Mining on the Comstock (1876), it shows a cluster of industrial buildings and, beneath them, a cutaway view of a multistory mine. Though Reynolds makes no note of it, this layered, post-and-lintel structure has a close resemblance to a lattice by Sol LeWitt--just the sort of form Smithson at once admired (because LeWitt and the other Minimalists extricated art firm the Expressionist pretensions of the 1950s) and found oppressive (the Minimalists promulgated closed systems that were all too comfortably at home in the enclosure of a gallery space). Smithson wanted to break through every boundary, spatial and temporal, so it must have delighted him to discover a "Minimalist" structure in a picture of the old West.

Reynolds links this picture of Mining on the Comstock to Smithson's Cayuga Salt Mine Project (1969), which makes self-evident sense. Less obvious is the possibility she raises that his Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) "represents in miniature" the generic structure of a mine. As Reynolds says, "Mines ... are buried buildings or three-dimensional structures." The Woodshed, an aboveground building half covered with earth, "merely reverses the terms or the construction." Smithson made a specialty of such reversals. With his "mirror displacements," gridded arrays of mirrors in landscapes, he brought images of sky and clouds down to earth. Of the mirror works the artist executed on his trip to the Yucatan Peninsula in 1969, Reynolds says, "It is as if Smithson has created a fold, crease, or weave in the space to displace the sky onto the ground."

She then quotes an ironic comment from "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," the artist's diary of his trip: "Oh, for the days of pure walls and pure floors. Flatness was nowhere to be found." Of course it was to escape the confines of art-world purity and flatness that Smithson went to the Yucatan. In New York, his head echoed with the voices of his betes noires--Clement Greenberg, Robert Morris and others who talked of dubious absolutes, Realities with a capital "R." In the Yucatan, he heard the voices of local gods, among them Chalchiuhtlcue, who reassured him, "The true fiction eradicates the false reality." Smithson's account appeared in Artforum, accompanied by his photographs of the nine mirror-displacements he performed on his journey. In the pages of an art magazine, says Reynolds, these images confound "two different views of three-dimensional space, the ground and the sky, and two types of physical and cultural space, Mexico and Artforum." This sounds right, a close echo of Smithson's comments on travel in general and the Yucatan expedition in particular.

As Reynolds notes, Partially Buried Woodshed offers "two independent experiences of' collapse." First came the process of heaping earth on the shed until its roof beam cracked. Next will come the slow, entropic dissolution of all distinctions between earth and shed, structure and sheer matter. Having threaded her way through these intricacies, Reynolds moves on to political matters. Smithson built--or unbuilt--Partially Buried Woodshed an the campus of Kent State University in January 1970. The following May, National Guardsmen fired on an antiwar demonstration at Kent State and killed four students. Seeing a connection between the Shed and the killings, Reynolds says that, in the Vietnam War era

boundaries of all kinds were increasingly subject to pressure and collapse. Ina 1970 interview, Smithson remarked: "Boundaries are essentially political in their basis." For Smithson, then, to render these boundaries visible in all their complexity is to act politically.... Whether intentional or not, the pressure that Smithson articulates in Partially Buried Woodshed was mirrored in the threatened collapse of political and educational boundaries in the developing crisis at Kent State.

Reynolds seems to believe that Smithson intended his work of art to mirror the political situation in 1970. She offers no proof and yet I trust her intuition here, partly because it matches mine but mostly because her immersion in the Smithson archives was so complete and her entanglement with his sensibility so lively, even passionate. There is no room here to list even the highlights of her long journey through the art and archives of an artist who had a knack for the startling image, the charged phrase and the meaning-laden artifact--and who threw nothing away. Obsessed by patterns of analogy, Smithson moved from one quirky formal or structural resemblance to the next. Missing none of these analogical connections, Reynolds notices whenever a motif reappears, revamped, and she often brings in fascinating bits of background--for example, Smithson's attempt to be included in "The Responsive Eye," an exhibition of Op art organized by William Seitz for the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. His art, it turned out, wasn't Op enough.

Though she mentions Spiral Jetty (1970), Reynolds has more to say about the disjunctive structure of Smithson's Spiral Jetty film, and almost nothing to say about his other earthworks. Yet this book doesn't feel incomplete. Her treatment of the earlier works weaves such a dense and allusive web of commentary that the earthworks seem present by implication, for they tattled to extremes Smithson's abiding interests in analogy, structural breakdown and entropy. The trouble is that Reynolds doesn't know what to make of these interests, for they run counter to her own, which are those of a professional art historian.

When she suggests that Partially Buried Woodshed held a prophetic mirror up to the Kent State killings and all the violence of that period, she naturally implies that Smithson's motive was constructive: to expose the "boundaries" imposed by oppressive forms of authority and to side with those who challenged those boundaries. Throughout her book, she praises Smithson for challenging our "visual habits," demystifying the "experience of art," and exposing the "artifice" and the "limits" that delude and confine us. And we are to understand that Smithson did all this in the spirit of a progressive, right-thinking artist who enlisted--along with progressive, right-thinking art theorists and art historians--in the great army of liberators and antiauthoritarians whose generals are the leading deconstructivists and the heroes of the Frankfurt School. Reynolds often follows her interests into fascinating byways of Smithson's art, but when she wants to say what it means, what value it has, she always returns to the wide, well-trodden path of standard art theory. So she never quite sees that Smithson was against oppression but made no common cause with progressives and liberators.

What annoyed Smithson about authority in its modern forms, whether conservative or liberal, was its relentless optimism: obey our standards of rationality and you will be happy. But Smithson saw no hope for happiness in the modern world. Like many before him--Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Nietzsche (on certain readings) and T.S. Eliot, one of Smithson's favorite writers--he understood modernity as a disaster. Maybe some transcendent, redeeming truth was available in earlier times, but now there is only empty rationalism and hollow idealism: structures of deception that will, over time, disintegrate. In Smithson's universe, entropy is the only real authority. He exposed artifice and unacknowledged limits to thought and feeling not to liberate us but to mock us: see how duplicitous, how flimsy, they are, your precious structures of reason and truth and morality.

Progressives want to free us from the oppressive present so that we can find our way, fairly soon, to a better future. Happiness awaits us. Smithson wanted to show us that we live amid signs of the ultimate, entropic future. Nothing but nothingness awaits us, and to offer intimations of this melancholy truth is the only legitimate purpose for art. Though I don't share Smithson's ideas about modernity or the purpose of art, I believe that his pessimism, in all its strangely witty forms, made him one of the leading figures of postwar American art. As a respectable academic, Reynolds can't fully acknowledge the bitter, even cruel source of Smithson's power. She must maintain the pretense that, if Smithson is a major artist, he must have had a good attitude. But she was drawn, at least in part, to his incorrigibly bad attitude, and from that affinity has come a useful and thoroughly interesting book.

Author: Carter Ratcliff is a New York-based poet and critic whose most recent book is Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-75 (Allworth Press).

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