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Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. - book reviews
Art Journal, Summer, 1996 by Suzaan Boettger
With these five publications, Robert Smithson's complaint about "earth projects" - "To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched" - is definitely no longer true. Sure, there is still some "muddy thinking," but these siftings through the sedimentation of what we now call land art more often produce "conceptual crystallizations."(1) Each of these authors offers a useful viewpoint onto the sculptural terrain that since the mid-1960s has produced large-scale, exterior, site-specific environments made in, with, or in reference to, the earth. Designing the Earth by the critic David Bourdon, who knew and wrote about earthworkers in the 1960s, takes an archaeological approach, unearthing the ways prehistoric villages and previous civilizations have dug in and piled up soil to produce shelters, sanctuaries, and resources, before recounting the contemporary evolution of those forms in earthworks, land art, and urban public art. Sculpting with the Environment, edited by one who does so himself, Baile Oakes, champions ecological enlightenment and provides a compendium of recent environmentally sensitive projects. Gilles A. Tiberghien's Land Art and Gary Shapiro's Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel illustrate the risks and benefits of contemporary philosophers' increasing invasion of art history, here snatching the corpus of earth art for philosophic discourse. Tiberghien's massive tome (12 by 10 1/2 inches), a translation of his 1993 French edition, accommodates his copious visual documentation and broad themes, whereas the unconventional smallness (8 by 6 1/2 inches) of Shapiro's volume belies the thoroughness of his penetration of a single artist's thinking. The last two might be read in tandem with the primary material itself: Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, in which editor Jack Flam brings together a panoply of this innovator's texts, from the didactic to the poetic.
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Thus the five authors' voices are pitched toward different, albeit overlapping, visually attuned readerships. In 1969 Bourdon wrote about "earthworks" or "dirt art" for Life,(2) and for the most part he has adopted the magazine's traditional journalistic format of recessive reportage and prominent photographs; the fact that the book's pictures are all likewise black and white lends it an aura of an older album. Bourdon's descriptions are generally matter-of-fact, the images striking (a number are by either of the well-known aerial photographers Marilyn Bridges or George Gerster). He groups summary explanations of earthen constructions, excavations, and carved living rock by function in six chapters ("Shelter," "Commerce," "Defense," "Tombs," "Sacred Places," and "Land Art"). This thematic structure elucidates the forms' meanings more clearly than the elaborate historical and geographical sequences in the only similar book, Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe's Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day,(3) which slights contemporary art. At the same time, Bourdon's ecumenical mixing of hermetic high art, vernacular, and utilitarian genres reintegrates arbitrary categories.
Yet it is in the final chapter that Bourdon offers the most engaged, and thus engaging, narrative. No doubt this was stimulated by his personal acquaintance with earthworks' "ground breakers." Asserting the "pervasive influence" of Carl Andre's minimal works' horizontal orientation (p. 210), Bourdon also emphasizes Smithson's intellectual dominance at Max's Kansas City and praises new approaches to public art by Andy Goldsworthy and Vito Acconci. It's conspicuous, then, when he shatters this smooth approbation with a dig such as calling Christo an "entrepreneur" (p. 220) and Robert Morris's Observatory's "obvious allusions to ancient megalithic monuments . . . somewhat heavy-handed and pedantic" (p. 218). Yet overall, one can savor the large pages of this book for the lively patterns of mounds and furrows on the earth's surface, and appreciate the rich duotone sheen of the printing, beautifully enhanced by the book's well-designed, deep blue-green cover and jacket and its clear blocks of informative text.
In Oakes's Sculpting with the Environment, the word "earth" is always capitalized. The first line of his foreword describes the book's purview as "past and current public art projects that help us understand our relationship to our biosphere - Earth" (p. 1). Thus the author immediately establishes both a specific thematic orientation and the fact that this contradicts the broader implications of the title, even given its cryptic pun "A Natural Dialogue." (What is an unnatural dialogue?) Smithson leased land from the federal government and moved 6,650 tons of indigenous material on the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake to make his Spiral Jetty. He did this in April 1970, the same month of the first celebration of Earth Day. That juxtaposition certainly demonstrates a relationship to our biosphere, but none of these five authors and editors address such cultural or social dialogues. In Oakes's book, none of the original earthworkers are even represented; among the artists' pages, the "past" to which he refers seems to go back about fifteen years. The book effectively contextualizes Oakes's own work with that of thirty-four more accomplished artists, ranging from the well known (Nancy Holt, Charles Ross) to the should-be-better-known (Douglas Hollis, Jody Pinto, et al.), all of whom ostensibly enact a reverential attitude toward "Nature." Works by twenty-three of these artists, including Oakes, are on view in the exhibition of the same name he curated being circulated by the International Sculpture Center through 1997.
