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

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Carter Ratcliff

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.