Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. - book reviews

The danger for writers outside the discipline focusing on a single artist is that they may not know what is idiosyncratic to the subject or common among contemporaries, and Shapiro's presentation occasionally suffers from this. Smithson's "reject[ion of] the pastoral aesthetics of the garden" (p. 115) was not unique. He was "a," not "the," "pioneer of earthworks," nor was he the "precursor of . . . Christo and [Michael] Heizer" (p. 21). Each of them came to land art through separate artistic, intellectual, and historical routes. Despite these reservations, this small volume, with its soft paper jacket and stunning cover design of black swirl against luminous olive, suggesting Smithson's Spiral by starlight, is a pleasure to read and to hold.

Finally, to read all about it in the artist's own words, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings brings together all those from the long out-of-print Writings of Robert Smithson,(10) from Eugenie Tsai's exhibition catalogue Robert Smithson Unearthed,(11) plus additional material from disparate publications and thirty previously unpublished texts (articles, essays, poetry). The book is part of the Documents of Twentieth Century Art series founded in 1944 by Robert Motherwell, edited since 1979 by Jack Flam, and published since 1995 by the University of California Press.

Whereas Shapiro's monograph addresses Smithson's verbalized ideas almost exclusively, Flam's introduction to the writings emphasizes Smithson's expansion of "the usual definition of what 'being an artist' entailed . . . as an ongoing process that involved an engagement with both abstract ideas and specific material presences" (p. xvii). This was characteristic rather than atypical in the highly conceptualized art of the mid-1960s, but for the autodidactic Smithson this "reciprocal interaction" (p. xiii) played across unusually wide-ranging literary and artistic genres, resulting in an idiosyncratic polyphony. Flam provides an astute preamble to what he so aptly terms Smithson's "intensely distilled philosophical rumination" (p. xiv), covering considerations of time schemes, the commerce of art, humanist ideology, etc. Yet in his conclusion, Flam pulls back by asserting the distinction, especially questionable for this figure, of Smithson's identity as "above all a practicing artist rather than a theorist" (p. xxv). This position recalls Shapiro's quandary of what an artist is, and demonstrates the multiple identities Smithson's texts evoke.(12)

While not containing every scribble Holt (Smithson's widow) generously deposited as the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers at the Archives of American Art, this publication is nevertheless a relief for those of us who regularly troll those papers' miles of microfilm; it will undoubtedly inspire another round of Smithson reevaluations and will provide canon fodder for innumerable term papers.(13)

The almost simultaneous recent publication of these five books demonstrates the strong desire among writers to survey and to articulate artists' language of the soil. By focusing on aesthetically sculpted earth, on art amplifying the perception of nature, and on the writings of one of this genre's major artists, this confluence of publications manifests an increasing attention to the environment in our cultural consciousness. Through their presentations of artists' constructions of nature, these heaps of language in the vicinity of land art offer something for almost any desire to mentally and pictorially experience the earth.