Chapter 5

Robert Smithson: In Search of a New Paradigm for Sculptural Space

Theoretician of the Earth Art Movement

Critical interpretations of the movement moved between depreciatory attacks on its ambivalence in striving for a true change of the art system and its intrusion upon the environment to its echoing the growing interest in world ecology.[172] Smithson’s own writing has contributed much to a critical and scholarly assessment of his work in a larger context, and in this respect (only), his position was similar to Hans Haacke’s. Only Lawrence Alloway initially put forward the possibility of a systems approach in his art, albeit in general terms. Alloway followed Smithson’s artistic career closely, and in his excellent article “Robert Smithson’s Development” he analyzed the systems aspect of the artist’s work as follows: “The translation of a concept of a work of art is typical of Smithson’s interest in the relationships of art and the world as opposed to an art isolated by its internal relationships. ... Site and nonsite constitute a collection of relationships among variables. The site is identified by information supplied by the artist in the form of maps, photographs, analogical subjects (bins and trays cued by the original lay of the land), rock samples and verbal captions. The nonsite, by this accumulation of references, acts as signifier of the absent site.”[173]

During the seventies Smithson’s work was mainly discussed in terms of his contribution to the Earth Art movement, both as artist and theoretician, in which his wide influence was recognized but only vaguely defined. One may speculate whether his premature death in 1973, while flying over Amarillo Ramp (a work in progress) did not contribute to the Smithson myth. However, not until Robert Hobbs’ publication in 1981, in which he set out to analyze a number of works as representations of the entropy law as Smithson interpreted it, was there a close reading of the thought-out layering of materials, location, and its environmental history.[174]

Robert Smithson had his first exhibition of paintings in 1959 in New York City, where he lived until his death in 1973. The first artists who brought natural materials into the exhibition space - Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Walter De Maria, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, among others, and also Robert Smithson - initially sought to express their discontent with the existing state-of-the-art system. Smithson’s writings and statements leave no doubt about his intentions.[175] Between 1968 and 1973, his work changed dramatically, from minimalist objects toward a use of materials which was characterized by him as “decreating, de-naturalizing, de-differentiating, de-composing, and re-assembling.” From there, he moved into the environment altogether, while the formal elements were increasingly simplified, although growing ever more complex in content. The experimentation with new artistic means to expand art’s boundaries became a search for a new function of art and a different role for the artist. Although his premature death prevented the further continuation of his ideas concerning land reclamation, herein lies a major distinction between him and his colleague earth artists, none of whom have pursued the consequences moving outdoors entailed. If we accept Hobbs’ approach, it would mean that, even if Smithson still stands firmly with one foot in Earth Art, his work could also be interpreted as being of an “organized complexity” that evolved from this search for a new context for art.

Smithson’s critical reviews are an early clue. Not only did he suggest another type of art analysis, which would involve an interdisciplinary approach, in which the art object is perceived in a broader context, beyond a linear chronological time model, but he also noted the relevance of language as a principal mode of communication, whereby the syntax of art became an aesthetic mode of communication. The ideas of art as communication and art as information were relatively new at the time, and had entered the art discussion via linguistic theories, which in turn derived some of their ideas from the information and communication theories..[176] In the 1940s, the word information had gained new scientific meaning. The concept of information was defined mathematically to satisfy the needs of engineers and communication experts. It was Claude Shannon from Bell Telephone Laboratories who had suggested a relationship between the laws of entropy, of energy and information in a mathematical equation (1948).[177] That Smithson was indeed familiar with these concepts is certain, since he referred to them in an interview later on, in which he said: “In information theory you have another kind of entropy. The more information you have the higher the degree of entropy, so that one piece of information tends to cancel out the other. The economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen has gone so far as to say that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not only a physical law but linked to economics. ... One might say the whole energy crisis is a form of entropy.”[178]

Another source was George Kubler’s The Shape of Time - Remarks on the History of Things (1962), a book highly popular with artists at the time. Apparently Kubler’s book was on the shelves of virtually every artist. For him both stylistic and iconographical approaches were too limited to explain the developments in art. So was the individual biography. He also denounced the use of biological and physical metaphors, common in art-historical language, as not really appropriate, and suggested that a terminology derived from physics might be better suited.[179] The separation of art and science was obsolete for Kubler, in that this separation was based on a distinction between the fine arts and the applied arts, which was no longer functional, whose consequence was that similar processes in art and science had not been looked at from the same historical perspective. George Kubler perceived art as part of the history of things. Kubler’s proposition included both artifacts and art works, both unique objects and replicas, tools as well as ideas and literary means of expression, all materials made by human hand, ruled by related concepts that were developed over a certain period of time. He was convinced that one could read a “shape of time” from the totality of all these forms. Thus, he thought to move beyond the art-historical treatment of the visual arts as a typical Western phenomenon, to define the intercultural aspects. Instead of developments separated from each other by well-defined time-bound stylistic non-functional characteristics, he proposed to reformulate the notion of art to comprise all artifacts - as things - made by mankind, whenever or wherever.

This is an important distinction, because intercultural characteristics are not necessarily bound to a chronological linear periodicity, since similar phenomena can reappear at different times in different places. George Kubler was also interested in the new ideas that were introduced by linguistic structural analysis, which in turn was influenced by current ideas concerning the notion of the message in information and communication theories. For example, he discussed art in terms of a signal, transmitted by a sender and received by a receiver. Because a signal is always received with delay, a relais, there is a certain amount of deformation in the way the signal is finally received as information. Certain is that Kubler’s ideas about art, in opposing the prevalent definition of art and existing art-historical methods, in proposing an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach, although general, attracted those artists who wanted to leave the existing boundaries of art. For Kubler, our material innovations were all things, whether they were art works, artifacts, or man-made environments, which could be subjected to the same interpretation. He asked himself: what happens to these things in the course of time, what kind of value system do we apply to things from the past? These thoughts also interested artists working to create non-objects, non-precious works of art.

Art as Entropic Phenomenon

A much discussed topic in the fields Smithson was interested in were the workings of the entropy law. It is fair to say that the notion of entropy runs as a major thread throughout Robert Smithson’s artistic oeuvre. His writing is permeated with the concepts and vocabulary of this law.[181] It confirms his familiarity with the concepts of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, current at the time as well as their relationship to the new thoughts that were being developed in related sciences such as natural physics. Entropy had become associated with the “running down of the universe,” with an ever-increasing loss of energy, a condition which would ultimately lead to its heat death. Smithson did not share the fatalistic conclusion that the earth was nearing its end, but he did share the point of view that, everything being entropic, meaning subject to entropy, “one’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion.” For him nature was for ever developing and changing, never finished, so that “if the work has sufficient physicality, any kind of natural change would tend to enhance the work. Geology has its own kind of entropy, that has to do with sediment mixtures. Sediment plays a part in my work. Unlike Buckminster Fuller, I’m interested in collaborating with entropy. Someday I would like to compile all the different entropies. All the classifications would lose their grid.”[182]

Smithson introduced the term entropy in his first major article, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), as a sort of critical metaphor for the condition of Minimal Art forms. According to the artist, these “monuments” were symbolic for entropy at work. Made of artificial materials, such as plastics, chrome, light, etc., instead of natural materials, such as marble, granite or other kinds of rock, these works, according to Smithson, were involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. He held the opinion that these artists had created an art that could be interpreted as a visible analog for the second law of thermodynamics, which stipulates that in the “ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all encompassing sameness.”[183] It is not relevant whether Smithson’s interpretation is right or wrong. Relevant is that the artist ascribed to art the same entropic properties as to everything else on earth, and that this approach allowed him to perceive art in a new contextual mode: since art was subject to the law of entropy, which made it a function of time and space, it should be perceived as dynamic instead of motionless. This served as a starting point and a theoretical foundation of his future works. Unfortunately, the notion of entropy has turned out to be one of the most confusing and misconstrued concepts, and in terms of Smithson’s art one has to look at the knowledge he could have had and the ideas that were current at that time.

Smithson’s sculptures of these years (1966-1967) almost always consisted of geometrical arrangements and superficially appeared minimalistic. However, their mathematical proportions relied on crystalline forms, such as the hexagon. Ice crystals are such hexagonals, and in terms of entropy, one might say that ice can be seen as water’s entropic state: energy in its most reduced state. Smithson’s Alogons, made in 1966, can probably already be read as testimonies of entropy. For the understanding of these works it is important to recall that in crystallography the concepts of entropy were and still are highly relevant.[184] The study of entropy, which is, among other things, concerned with energy transformation and transmission of information, implied the study of concepts already introduced: open and closed systems, randomness and disorder versus order and geometry, indeterminacy and uncertainty versus determinacy and certainty, and time and space. As said before, in contrast to the so-called mechanistic world view, all these aspects are now considered interrelated and interdependent. Therefore these words were introduced into art writing at the time to describe the kind of work that deals with notions of growth and decay, hence exchange of energy.

In order to systematize his view, Smithson developed the theory for which he became most known: the Site/Nonsite dialectic. It dealt with these aspects in pairs, two variables functioning as each other’s opposites.[185] Smithson’s intent had always been to move away from the formal criticism of the sixties, which looks at the object as an isolated thing. The Site/Nonsite dialectic indeed appeared to have all the characteristics of a totally new direction in art. With the Site/Nonsite idea, he had created a physical and conceptual set of relationships that he visualized with works that were partially outside (site-related), partially inside (room, gallery related). This is particularly apparent in a series of mirror and glass works, called Strata (1968-1969). The glass pieces were arranged according to geometric principles, and looked highly ordered, and structured. Contrary to its appearance, though, the non-visual molecular structure of glass is random, based on a non-order principle, while the molecular structure of crystals is regular. This contrast is dealt with in many books on crystallography, so that we may assume that Smithson made a reference to the dichotomy between the visual and non-visual aspects here, i.e. to the distinction between appearance and reality.[186] A close reading of some of the mirror and mica works, made also in 1968 and 1969, brings to the fore the same concerns. For example, Untitled (mica and glass, destroyed) consisted of alternating layers of glass and mica, whereby the artist created a visual structure that showed a perfect regularity in the composition of the glass sheets, alternated with random looking mica pieces. Actually, the molecular structure of glass is neither crystalline nor regular, and the seemingly irregular mica has a neat molecular arrangement. Again, the artist played upon the contradictions that often exist between the external world and its internal composition Smithson himself referred to the discrepancies that can exist between the reality of the visible and the invisible in his article “Entropy and the New Monuments.”

The same concepts underlay the Cayuga Salt Mine Project, defined as a Site/Nonsite project, conceived for the Earth Art exhibition in Ithaca, New York 1969. This Mirror Displacement originally was to connect the Cayuga Salt Mine with the indoor museum space. In the mine Smithson had placed eight mirrors. Another eight mirrors were evenly spaced between the mine and the exhibition space, called Mirror Trail. Salt of the mine was brought into the gallery. On the walls there was a display of geological maps of the area, photographs of the mirrors in the mine and those of the trail to the museum. Here the salt served as a container for the mirrors, instead of the containers holding the material. Again, Smithson played on the material and formal contradictions that existed between the visible and the invisible, between order and disorder, between reality and appearance. Although salt has an amorphous appearance, it has a regular molecular structure. Glass, on the other hand, looks regular but does not have a regular molecular arrangement. Elements of crystalline structures are applied to a system of mapping that connects the outdoor space with the indoor space and artwork. Although concepts of space and scale, time and history, perceptions of a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional reality, are treated as related opposites, they also constitute a complex of layers that may be compared to a network whose extensions are interdependent. These extensions did not remain within the boundaries of the work itself but were extended to outside territory, i.e. context. The terrain could be the actual site where he placed a mark, photographed it, and subsequently removed it. It could be the dialogue between an interior and exterior site. It could be the site at large, its geographical, geological, historical, economic setting, and so forth.

A simple description and interpretation of the visual structure of the works described above would not have explained much. The non-visual references to crystalline structures and the implications of entropy are equally important. As explained, entropy is a mathematical expression describing disorder. To put it differently, it is a function of the organization of a system. Thus, one may deduce that the artist conscientiously thought out all these variables, connecting them with the idea of ordering which art also is. Smithson himself has explained his view in general words: “An artist in a sense does not differentiate experience into objects. Everything is a field or a maze, and you get that maze, serially, in the salt mine in that one goes from point to point. The seriality bifurcates: some paths go somewhere, some don’t. You just follow and what you’re left with is like a network or a series of points and then these points can be built into conceptual structures... I am using a mirror because the mirror in a sense is both the physical mirror and the reflection: the mirror as a concept and abstraction; then the mirror as a fact within the mirror of the concept. So that’s a departure from the other kind of contained, scattering idea. But still the bi-polar unity between the two places is kept. Here the site/nonsite becomes encompassed by the mirror as a concept - mirroring, the mirror being a dialectic. ... The route to the site is very indeterminate. It’s important because it’s an abyss between the abstraction and the site; a kind of oblivion... A trail is more of a physical thing. These are all variables, indeterminate elements which will attempt to determine the route from the museum to the mine. I’ll designate points on a line and stabilize the chaos between the two points. ... There’s no order outside the order of the material. I don’t think you can escape the primacy of the rectangle. I always see myself thrown back to the rectangle. That’s where my things don’t offer any kind of freedom in terms of endless vistas or infinite possibilities. There’s no exit, no road to utopia, no great beyond in terms of exhibition space. I see it as an inevitability; of going toward the fringes, toward the broken, the entropic”[187] (italics my emphasis). As said before, the key terminology used by Smithson to circumscribe the direction he was moving in, common in physics, mathematics and systems theory. This means that Smithson recognized similar systems at work in disciplines as different as crystallography, cartography and art.[188]

In his most renowned work, the Spiral Jetty (Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970), the time-space continuum is introduced in all its entropic ramifications. The spiral itself, being the dominant formal element, implies this. Apart from the many cosmic and symbolic meanings of the spiral, which are certainly referred to, in the context of Robert Smithson’s work the meaning of the spiralling form should first be sought in the realm of crystallography. The artist had already used it in an earlier piece called Gyrostasis.[189] The concept of gyrostasis refers to a mode of crystal extension, known as screw dislocation, a geometric mathematical ordering of the hexagonals that eventually spiral around a void. This means that there is no single vanishing point. Since the Renaissance, the universal focal point had been accepted as the three-dimensional rendering of spatial representation, as the representation of reality. The spiralling form included the notion of a “pointless vanishing point,” which became for Smithson a valid method to visualize a reality hitherto invisible, but just as real. This in itself would not be that interesting, had it not been related to the idea to break through the known toward a new way of seeing, whereby the old concepts of absolute space (and time) were left behind. For Smithson it implied a new vision of reality: the reality as we view it is anthropocentric, it is a mental construct, a conceptual framework. It was on this level that his art and the scientific concepts he applied were connected.[190] The Spiral Jetty is an art work that functions as a system of interlocking elements. It can only be understood if one takes into account all the different aspects of the surrounding environment - the external conditions - as well as the invisible structures, and finally the spectator him- or herself. The spiral turns left instead of right, and is asymmetrical: the salt crystals that grow on the banks of the piece have an asymmetrical molecular structure. Also, salt crystals are said to have some connection with ‘being’ and ‘matter,’ in that they may assume a living as well as a crystalline appearance. Salt Lake is a dead sea, it has reached it most entropic state, as Smithson would say. The entropy law is the force that governs this work. Time, space, the macroscopic and microscopic, the living and dead elements, together are all interrelated elements of the Spiral Jetty. Finally, the work is constantly subject to change: it grows and erodes; when the water level of the sea rises, it disappears under water. Spiral Jetty was under water for a while indeed, and has recently reappeared above the surface. These changes, however, are only partially determinate. Smithson foresaw the kind of change as part of the earth’s entropic processes, but how exactly they would take place was left to and ruled by chance and indeterminacy. To experience the work the viewer had to ‘enter’ it and follow the spiral track to the end and return. Although the experience of the public seems not to have been much on Smithson’s mind, viewer participation became an important aspect of much outdoor sculpture. The development of the piece and its construction, as well as the making of the film about the building of the work, are described in detail by Smithson himself in an article.[191] These concerns were far removed from those of Minimalism which was principally interested in reducing form to its physical essence, as well as the initial Earth Art ideas, rather being related to those concepts in the sciences that dealt with an interpretation of things, whether organic or inorganic, whether part of an open or closed system, as sets of relationships in action.

Concluding, one can say that entropy is made visible in his art and writing as a major force that governs all matter and living things on earth. Since the entropy law is not an isolated phenomenon, but connects time and thus history, its characteristics offered Smithson the possibility to use this concept to develop a mode of art that has to be perceived in terms of relationships. Smithson himself has said so much: “Looking at the nature of the park [Central Park], or its history and our perceptions of it, we are first presented with an endless maze of relations and interconnections, in which nothing remains what or where it is, as a-thing-itself, but the whole park changes like day and night, in and out, dark and light - a carefully designed clump of bushes can also be a mugger’s hideout. The reason the potential dialectic inherent in the picturesque broke down was because the natural processes were viewed in isolation as so many classifications, detached from physical inter-connection, and finally replaced by mental representations of a finished absolute ideal.”[192]

Smithson's Attitude Toward the Land

While these works have tied Robert Smithson firmly to the Earth Art movement, he himself was obviously looking for another context. This is corroborated by the ideas on land reclamation that he had begun to develop in the early seventies. This aspect of his activities has not been given much attention, probably because none of the proposals resulted in a tangible work. Earlier, Smithson had already offered his services as artist-consultant to an architects/engineers firm. In “Towards the Development of an Air-Terminal Site,” he described his position and the process he became involved in, “not as an architect or engineer, but simply as an artist. The discussions do not operate on any presupposed notion of art, engineering or architecture.”[193] Although the project ultimately fell through, it instigated Smithson to develop some of his ideas on the possible function of an art outside the gallery and museum system, when he envisioned that the artist could play an important role in reshaping the earth, in reclaiming a landscape that had been drained of its energy, devastated and ruined by the methods used by (strip) mining companies. [194] In 1971, soon after he had completed Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (Sonsbeek 71, Arnhem, NL), he drafted his first land reclamation statement in which he called for the recycling of natural resources through Earth Art: “Across the country there are many mining areas, disused quarries, and polluted lakes and rivers. One practical solution for the utilization of such devastated places would be land and water re-cycling in terms of ‘earth art’... a dialectic between land reclamation and mining usage must be established. The artist and the miner must become conscious of themselves as natural agents. Economics, when abstracted from the world, is blind to natural processes. Art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist. ... Art can help to provide the needed dialectic between them. A lesson can be learned from the Indian cliff dwellings and earth works mounds. Here we see nature and necessity in consort.”[195]

Smithson’s correspondence proves that he spent most of 1972 in contacting mining companies and such to find corporate support for his land reclamation ideas.[196] Only a commission from Charles Melby of Minerals Engineering Company and a proposal Lake Crescents - Forest Park South received promises of funding, although the timing seemed perfect, as other environmentalists and those who fought for the ecological cause were receiving favorable public attention. But Robert Hobbs has suggested that the corporations concerned preferred to maintain a low profile in the midst of the political battle. Also, Smithson’s proposals may not have been quitewhat they had in mind themselves. A brochure of Hanna Coal Company “decrees that the land will be restored to its maximum usefulness - a flourishing area, treed and grassy, providing income from cattle and lumber, recreational lakes, even ski runs.” Answered Hobbs correctly in my view: “Smithson might well have asked himself, as the managers of Hanna Coal may have asked themselves: where is the need for Earth Art in the recreational paradise Hanna is promising?”[197]

When Robert Smithson moved his activities outdoors, away from the gallery system, he expanded the terrain of art not only physically. He moved into other systems on organizational and institutional, economic and political levels. From the sole painter or sculptor in his or her studio, the artist now had to work on a team. As artist-consultant, he worked with architects and engineers, among others. The construction of the Spiral Jetty became similar to the execution of a building project: it involved setting up contracts for the lease of the land, finding the financing, hiring the construction crews, supervising the construction, handling publicity, and so forth. Collaborating with other disciplines also meant that one had to be open to other people’s advice or ideas. In addition, he became a developer, manager, and supervisor. That the economics involved in this type of project and environmental art were also of a completely different scale, is obvious. Smithson did not necessarily intend to assume the position of a manager or contractor. Yet the nature of this new type of art required a different role for the artist, a role which has been accepted by the ‘second generation’ of artists working in the field of public art.

Ecology and Technology