Robert Smithson

Land artist, born in Passaic, New Jersey, USA. He studied at the Art Students' League (1955–6) and the Brooklyn Museum School. He took up Minimal Art in the 1960s, but from c.1966 began to exhibit his ‘non-sites’ - maps of sites he had visited, together with samples of rocks and soil. He is best known for such earthworks as the ‘Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake, Utah’ (1970). He was killed in a plane crash while taking photographs of one of his earthworks in Texas.

Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 - July 20, 1973) was an American artist famous for his land art.

Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League. His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines" (New York Times 06.24.05), science fiction, and early Pop Art. His new work abandoned the preoccupation with the body that had been common in his earlier work. As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying mathematical impersonality to art that he outlined in essays and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum and for a period was better known as a critic than as an artist.

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. In September 1968, Smithson published the essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" in Artforum that promoted the work of the first wave of land art artist and in 1969 he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts of entropy gained from his readings of William S.

Writing remained a critical aspect of Smithson's artwork as well, best exemplified by the essay, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan", published in Artforum in September 1969. Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work.

The journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist, and his non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a particular location, as well as the geological artifacts displaced from those sites.

As well as works of art, Smithson produced a good deal of theoretical and critical writing, including the 2D paper work A Heap of Language, which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. A site was a work located in a specific outdoor location, while a non-site was a work which could be displayed in any suitable space, such as an art gallery. Spiral Jetty is an example of a sited work, while Smithson's non-site pieces frequently consist of photographs of a particular location, often exhibited alongside some material (such as stones or soil) removed from that location.

On July 20, 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash, while surveying sites for his work Amarillo Ramp in Texas.

Despite his early death, and relatively few surviving major works, Smithson has a cult following amongst many contemporary artists. In recent years, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Vik Muniz and Mike Nelson have all made homages to Smithson's works.