Reflections on Smithson (#1)

Any critic who says he is concerned with “self,” implies that art is in some way united with “character,” or “personality,” or “individuality.” Self-criticism never is concerned with art, but only with criticizing the self. Art is not self.

—Robert Smithson

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a ‘picture’ forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger.

—Djuna Barnes

            From roughly 1965 until 1972, Robert Smithson exuded an enigmatic gravity in the American art world, and his writings are as substantial as his visual work: his Non-Sites, his language art, and his earthworks, including the seminal Spiral Jetty.  Along with these aesthetic monoliths, Smithson produced an impressive collection of essays, reviews, responses, think-pieces, and poetry.  He commented on his peers’ works, and on critical interventions like Michael Fried’s controversial “Art and Objecthood.”  Taken as a whole, his Collected Writings represent a significant body of work and contribution to the development of visual aesthetics after World War II, a time when artistic creation was undergoing a profound and unprecedented transformation.  Breaking away from conventional bounds of framing and institutionalism, postwar art expanded itself, formally and thematically, into new and unstable ecologies.

            At the time of his death, Smithson was arguably at the height of his career, having completed his Spiral Jetty in 1970 and at the time working on ambitious plans for new artistic sites.  The scope of his visions was not wholly unparalleled; Michael Heizer’s ongoing project, City, is of an even greater scale than any of Smithson’s completed works (Heizer started the project in 1972, the year Smithson died).  But the scope of his speculative imaginings remains largely unchallenged, or unchallenged until recently.  Put simply, Smithson lamented the calcifying conventions that obstructed artistic creativity—the demands of the museum, the geometrical banality of framing, and the sterility of timelessness.  For Smithson, paintings hanging in museums partook of a dull temporality, carving a window out of time in which they sat unchanging throughout entire lifespans of spectators.  The Mona Lisa may be historically significant, but its aesthetic value is one of trivial cultural praise.  It dies for centuries while people live.  Where’s the art in that?

            Smithson wanted to know why an artwork shouldn’t be temporally and spatially extended, why it had to be fixed in place as a painting or sculpture.  It’s clear that such limitations respond to our interests not as artists but as consumers.  We want the work to stay put so we can enjoy it, and we want it in a museum so we can authenticate its value.  It’s easier to enjoy art that way, to peruse it at our leisure.  But why the hell sure art be easy?  Why should it cater to our comfort?  Inquiring minds want to know, and we pose it to our culture.  Smithson’s art was a response to this delimiting and stultifying reproduction of the aesthetic commodity.  Instead of images or objects that hung neatly on a wall, Smithson demanded that we get off our asses and travel.

Figure 1: Spiral Jetty (R. Smithson, 1970)

You can’t see the Spiral Jetty in a museum.  You need to drive to Utah, fill up a spare gas tank and keep it in your trunk so you can refill on your way, since there aren’t any stations at the site.  You need to bring food, water, and a pair of boots in case the lake rises—which it currently hasn’t, thanks to a local drought.  And that’s another key aspect of Smithson’s work: it’s not immune to the climate.  It doesn’t enjoy the calm, air-conditioned peacefulness of MoMA or the Met.  It’s geographical, it changes with the earth.  It evolves with the strata.  Works like Spiral Jetty are art precisely because they’re exposed to time and place, because they’re subject to nonhuman ecologies.  Smithson wanted art to live, wanted it to breathe and choke, to absorb and shrivel, soak, shake, and salivate.  Art can exist on scales vaster than empires, and more slow.  It’s not bound to human perception.

“There’s no reason one shouldn’t look at art through a telescope,” Smithson once wrote.  Can planets be art?  Can supernovas?  Galaxies?  This may not have been his exact point, but the sentiment remains: art can be the size of a planet, it can have the lifespan of a star, the expanse of galaxies.  Art isn’t the reflection or expression of human selfhood, identity, or genius.  It’s not here for our pleasure or gratification.  It’s neither the sign of our accomplishments nor the measure of our worth.  It doesn’t stand the test of time, for a thing that stands the test of time is eternally dead, idealized, abstracted from its history.  Rather, art is the flux of time, corruption and decay.  It’s an alien form that sinks away from us, signals its becoming with things not-us.  Art is nonhumanity, non-self, refracted through a momentary human glimpse into the onrushing fold, the dolly-zoom of death.

Figure 2: Blind in the Valley of the Suicides (R. Smithson, 1962)