Robert Smithson Earth Art Analysis
A Comparative Look at Robert Smithson’s Earth Art and 1960s Minimalism
By Marcus Pearson
05/25/10
While walking through the Guggenheim Museum you walk past several different works of art. A nice painting here, a cool sculpture there, some interesting lights, it’s all pretty neat. You then walk into a room with two seemingly opposite types of art. On one side of the room you see a rock pile and a few pictures of some big rocks. The other side has some odd looking sculptures and several paintings that don’t look like much at all. You think that maybe the curator of the museum got mixed up and had his gardening supplies delivered to the boring shaped room of the museum instead of his house.
You ask the guard what was going on in this particular room. He says that on one side is the Earth Art of Robert Smithson and on the other is several examples of Minimalism art. You are still confused of why the two pieces are in the same room so you ask him to explain the relationship. He says that on the surface they might appear to have no similarities but they in fact have many. He directs you to an essay written by a Western Oregon University undergrad named Marcus Pearson. . . …show more content…
Although Robert Smithson was a very influential Earthwork artist, he did not begin his career working with 3 dimensional objects.
Smithson started his career painting. He painted throughout high school in the New Jersey public schools and while studying at the Art Students League while taking night classes. At 18, in 1956 he attended the Brooklyn Museum School after he served in the army for a short while. The next year he moved to New York City and was in the center of the art world. During these early years he produced primarily homoerotic work, making collages out of clippings that he got from beefcake magazines, sci fi, and some early Pop Art. His first paintings were Abstract Expressionist in
character.
Smithson had a particular interest in natural history as a boy and visited the New York Museum of Natural History quite often. Nancy Holt (whom he would later marry) encouraged him to pursue his interests though his art, much like she did with biology. Smithson began to collect samples from different locations and create sculptures. “He gathered things like sponges and chemical samples which he then displayed in an art format to demonstrate that art is an inert substance based in nature that can be organized and structured into meaningful relationships.” (http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-smithson) A clear example of this type of art be seen in one of his later works, Corner Mirror with Coral (fig. 1). This piece also demonstrates the use of mirrors which Smithson used frequently in his early career. One of his first works with mirrors was Enantiomorphic Chambers (fig. 2). He experiments with the viewer’s perception of the work, by turning the mirrors at odd angles so they do not reflect the viewer. Instead you see reflections of reflections, showing an illusion without in fact being one. The term Enantiomorphic used in the name means, “a pair of crystals, molecules, or compounds that are mirror images of each other but are not identical, and that rotate the plane of polarized light equally, but in opposite directions.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/enantiomorphic) This is simply seen in his work as there are two parts that look the same but are not identical, with mirrors reflecting in opposite directions. It is easy to see he put a tremendous amount of thought into each piece he created. He continued to work with mirrors throughout his career. During the mid 1960s Smithson, submitted several works to galleries which he called “non-sites”. These works were rocks, dirt, sticks and other organic from certain places around the globe that he gathered and occasionally placed in geometric boxes, or arranged in piles on the floors with mirrors. With these arrangements of the collected materials, he often provided an aerial map of the actual site along with pictures from the ground. All of these aspects added to the viewer being able to connect with the site and the process the artist went through to get these materials. These non-sites were Smithson’s first step into Earth art (Fig 3 & 4). Smithson believed that the permanence of his work was not important. For him, it was more about the concept than the actual work itself. He took a trip to Yucatan, Mexico and took several pictures of 12 small mirrors he had brought with him. He spread them out on the ground in one location, took a picture and dismantled his work to move to the next location. He called this work Mirror Displacements. (Fig. 5) “The mirrors broke up and distorted the world around them, becoming both solid and void, object and reflection, positive and negative shape.” (http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-smithson) As he traveled from place to place, collecting materials and setting up his art, he wrote many essays on art theory and what art should be. Eventually Smithson grew frustrated with the galleries. “I began to see things in a more relational way,” he explained in an interview. “I had to question where the works were, what they were about. The very construction of the gallery with its neutral white rooms became questionable. So I became interested in bringing attention to the abstractness of the gallery as a room…it became a preoccupation with place.” (Baker, 103) He also wrote about his discontent with the galleries in his essays.
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world….Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement. (Baker, 106) This idea of fine art as merchandise was seen earlier in the ‘60s with artists like Claus Oldenburg’s The Store and in Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life Series. Like Oldenburg, Smithson decided to move out of the gallery and into a place more suited for his art. Like other Earth artists of the time he moved out into the environment to produce large works surrounded by a natural landscape. Another Earth artist, Michael Heizer, stated, “The museums and collections are stuffed, the floors are sagging, but real space exists.”(Beardsley, 13) The environment became an important element of the art. The new monuments of Earth Art were much more massive than their urban counterparts. Spanning across miles of desert this new form of art focused on negative space, awareness of your size, and the idea you are no longer looking at a painting that is a re-presentation of nature. This was nature. It was the earth made into different forms, and even though the pieces of art might be giant in comparison to our scale, they will never be truly large in relation to the surrounding basins and ranges. And it is here in this “unraped, peaceful, religious space” that the parts come together to make an environment in which you are the center. (Beardsley, 13) The works that Smithson made outside of the museum were impressive. Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake of Utah was one of his first works, and one of the most well known. (Fig. 6) Spiral Jetty is composed of 1,500 linear feet of black basalt, limestone rocks, and earth. The spiral extends out from the shoreline in an area of the lake rarely visited because it is an abandoned oil drilling facility. The shape of the spiral itself has many meanings. It is an image of evolution, a symbol for growth or destruction and a classical form of the moon’s orbit. It is both an expanding and contracting force, like a whirlpool. (http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-smithson)
A year after Spiral Jetty, Smithson created Broken Circle and Spiral Hill (Figures 7&8) for the exhibition, Sonsbeek 71, in the Netherlands. He felt that the Dutch landscape was too cultivated and asked to work at an exhausted sand quarry in Holland. He turned the old quarry into a recreational area with a large pond. He had a semi-circle edged out of the shore and created the Broken Circle. He used this work as a platform to make a statement about recycling land that has been used for industrial purposes and turning them into Earth Art. (Beardsley, 23) While Robert Smithson was creating his works of Earth art in the late 60s early 70s another form of art was reaching its climax. This art known as Minimalism is something that spanned across all mediums of art. Painting, sculpture, film, dance, music, lifestyles and almost everything could be minimalist in character. This is because Minimalism isn’t just one style of art, or a specific pattern. Minimalism is a theory, a movement, a culmination of art theory that seems to have finally reached its peak. Minimal artists are very intellectual people who believe they found the answer to the timeless question of, “What is art?” Art up until about the 1860s was strictly gauged on how well it represented nature and how accurate and aesthetically pleasing it was. However, around the 1860s, artists began to abstract their works by experimenting with light, color and shapes. As you move through time you begin to see works become more and more surreal in character, until artists were no longer producing works that were recognizable forms found in nature. Splashes of paint, lines of color, odd shapes with no connection to the outside world dominated canvases and gallery spaces. The idea of this movement called Abstract Expressionism was to tap into the subconscious. “Art as a landscape of the unconscious, the artist as explorer, the painting as a mirror of the unique sensibility of the artist… with each new canvas the latest episode in a personal epic.” (Strickland, 40) This attitude toward art can be seen in many of Jackson Pollock’s works, such as Lavender Mist (Fig 9). It is very colorful and physical. You can almost see Pollock working with cans of paint and sticks, flipping paint here and there, very natural and textural.
Those involved in the Minimalist movement felt the bright, gestural works of the Abstract Expressionists were personal soap operas, not art for the masses. They were looking not only to continue the process of abstraction in search of art, but also to build upon it and be better than what came before. “In its simplest definition Minimalism is a style distinguished by severity of means, clarity of form, and simplicity of structure and texture.” (Strickland, 4) According to renowned critic, Clemente Greenburg, who was the leading voice in the Abstract Expression era, painting needed to be true to painting. It’s not suppose to try and be anything other than what it is, a 2 dimensional medium represented by paint on canvas. It needed to assert the surface. In past generations the artist was a focal point of the art, you could see them in their work. This changed with Minimalism by removing the marks of the artist so the viewer was only presented with the art.
When presented with Minimalist works like that of Ad Reinhardt, or Donald Judd (Fig 10&11) people might have trouble accepting them as art because it is not what they have been conditioned to perceive as fine art. The process of making art can be broken down into two phases; work and decision. The first, being the actual application of paint to canvas, bending of metal, hacking of stone, which is usually what most people recognize when they look at a piece of art. The second, decision, is what can make or break a work. Deciding when to stop and when to keep going will lead to criticisms of overdone or lacking depth. In the Ready-makes of Duchamp like the Fountain, (Fig 12) or any form of art that directly depends on preexisting material, the decision is the phase of work that is isolated and celebrated by the culture. (Battcock, 396)
These phases are often thought of in the context of construction, but to put them in the opposite we begin to see how they influence abstraction. Distortion of an image can be destructive but at the same time creative. The decision to dismantle a cluttered image to deliver a non convoluted picture to the viewer is the largest part of abstract work. Often times the “pre-image” is still recognizable, but in Minimalism the destruction is so complete that no underlying scene is left. (Battcock, 396) By bringing the art to simple shapes and removing the artist from the work, it allows the viewer to experience the art themselves. It no longer becomes what the art says to you, but what you bring to the art. The piece isn’t a painting that looks like a landscape, it is a painting that is just a painting; “art-as-art”.
Films by Andy Warhol Sleep and Empire are considered the first minimalist films. Sleep filmed over 6 hours of a man sleeping and Empire an 8 hour film of the Empire State Building. While watching these films you were eerily aware that you are watching a film, unlike most films which try to make you forget that you are watching a movie, and also of your almost voyeuristic presence. In the same way that these films and minimalist paintings make you aware of yourself, sculptures attempt to do the same. “In previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of minimalist art is of an object in a situation-- one that virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”(Battcock, 125) The scale of each piece was very deliberate. When questioned about his piece, Die, (Fig 13) Tony Smith had this to say:
Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument.
Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making an object.
The size of his Die invited the observer to approach and explore it, to knock on it, peek over it, press up against it, and experience it. People have their own experiences with certain shapes. For example, a square might offer different memories to different viewers. This is why the eye of the beholder is so important to Minimalism. The aim of the artist is to take art off of its pedestal and bring it to the general public, making it more accessible. According to Donald Judd, “to be art something just has to be interesting”. The use of the grid and the repetition of objects made you question the value of it. Was it any more or any less precious that a single shape? Did it matter it a well known artist created it or if I did it? The grid is an artistic pattern that has been used in many different styles of art and used in Minimalism it can have many different meanings, and depending on the sympathies of the viewer.
At first Robert Smithson’s work might not appear to be Minimalist. They’re large and don’t remove the mark of the artist. They are very natural and the object doesn’t appear to be abstract. But when you take a closer look you see that Smithson’s Earth works have many Minimalist elements to them. His Site works are primarily simple shapes (a spiral, circle, or grid) much like Minimal artists used. The shapes were open to interpretation by the observer. A spiral could invoke the image of a whirlpool to someone or could symbolize growth and destruction depending in your own personal relationship with the shape. Bringing art to the people and letting them bring their unique experience to the piece was a key part of Minimalism as well as Smithson’s Earth Art.
Another important element that is a part of both Minimalism and Earth art is the scale of the object. The size of an object makes you very aware of your size in comparison to it, or your scale. Smithson’s large outdoor pieces force you to walk around them and physically interact with them. The fact there is no gallery room means you can back-up as much as you want to view the piece as if it were smaller than your thumb or to walk around in it and be surrounded by its space. This is very similar to ideas presented by Tony Smith and other Minimalist sculpture artists.
Many times pieces of art contain a certain quality called repetition within them. Although not easily identifiable, repetition can be seen in both types of work. While it is clear in Minimalism, Donald Judd’s Untitled (Fig. 11) of 1990 is a prime example of this, the repetition in Earth art is slightly beneath the surface. The grids of Mirror Displacements (Fig. 5), the circles in the spirals of Spiral Hill and Spiral Jetty (Fig. 6&8), all of the rocks that it took to create these monumental structures are all forms of repetition. Even though the rocks may be small in comparison to the scale of art, they all come together piece by piece to form one giant monument. Also, the open space of Earth art makes you aware of the negative space in the works. Just like in Minimalism, when there is not a lot of paint to draw your attention, you tend to notice the negative space. Smithson’s Broken Circle (Fig. 7) deals heavily with negative and positive space, having one side of the circle filled with sand and the other open to water.
While the similarities between Minimalism and Smithson’s Earth Art are many, there are still many ways in which they differ. For one, Earth Art is not Minimalism. Even though it has many characteristics of Minimalism it is not considered a Minimalist sculpture. Many art works after the Minimalist era, borrow heavily from the ideas. This is what is known as the “minimalist hangover”. Minimalism was such an influential movement that everything during the movement and immediately after had aspects of Minimalism in it. This is the case with Smithson’s works as well.
Smithson wasn’t trying to accomplish the same things as Minimal artists when he moved out of the galleries and into the environment. During the late 1960s, the American social scene was in dishevel. There were movements for gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, an unpopular war, and while all of this was going on there were the environmentalists. “Art had to be radical. It had to become American.” (Beardsley, 13) In an era of space exploration and social discourse artists felt that art needed to look new, nonconformist, and non complacent. Environmentalists were concerned about the environment, landscapes, resources and ecosystems. Against loggers, mining companies, oil drilling, and anything that would destroy the earth they sought to seek out solutions to these problems in any way possible. Artists found that the best way to do this was to make art in the environment. Robert Smithson was one of the best to do this. He built Spiral Jetty on an old oil drilling site and Broken Circle and Spiral Hill on a dried up sand quarry. He once said, “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 recycling in terms of ‘Earth Art.’” (Beardsley, 23) He called this land reclamation, and reached out to several mining companies to work out a contract so that he could build monuments on their work sites.
Robert Smithson was a great earth artist whose life was sadly cut short before he could construct all that he had dreams for. He died in 1973 at the age of 35 while flying over the location of his work, Amarillo Ramp that his wife and friends would later finish. Like other earth artists of the time he used organic materials and let the art speak for itself. Rocks inside the museum along with mirrors and large works outside of the gallery space using all organic matter defined what the artist was. Using Minimalist characteristics he added more theory to his work. Though not everyone agrees that these traits add up to a Minimalist design, as one critic stated, “What Smithson’s Spiral Jetty has to do with Minimalism is beyond me.” (Strickland, 9) But this aspect is what makes the art so interesting; it isn’t only this or strictly that. Art can be a culmination and a dismantling. What one person sees doesn’t always have to be what the other sees. So, I invite you to decide for yourself if Smithson’s Earth Art in fact does relate to Minimalism or if it is independent. What matters the most in the end however is, whatever you decide, it is art.
By Marcus Pearson
05/25/10
While walking through the Guggenheim Museum you walk past several different works of art. A nice painting here, a cool sculpture there, some interesting lights, it’s all pretty neat. You then walk into a room with two seemingly opposite types of art. On one side of the room you see a rock pile and a few pictures of some big rocks. The other side has some odd looking sculptures and several paintings that don’t look like much at all. You think that maybe the curator of the museum got mixed up and had his gardening supplies delivered to the boring shaped room of the museum instead of his house.
You ask the guard what was going on in this particular room. He says that on one side is the Earth Art of Robert Smithson and on the other is several examples of Minimalism art. You are still confused of why the two pieces are in the same room so you ask him to explain the relationship. He says that on the surface they might appear to have no similarities but they in fact have many. He directs you to an essay written by a Western Oregon University undergrad named Marcus Pearson. . . …show more content…
Although Robert Smithson was a very influential Earthwork artist, he did not begin his career working with 3 dimensional objects.
Smithson started his career painting. He painted throughout high school in the New Jersey public schools and while studying at the Art Students League while taking night classes. At 18, in 1956 he attended the Brooklyn Museum School after he served in the army for a short while. The next year he moved to New York City and was in the center of the art world. During these early years he produced primarily homoerotic work, making collages out of clippings that he got from beefcake magazines, sci fi, and some early Pop Art. His first paintings were Abstract Expressionist in
character.
Smithson had a particular interest in natural history as a boy and visited the New York Museum of Natural History quite often. Nancy Holt (whom he would later marry) encouraged him to pursue his interests though his art, much like she did with biology. Smithson began to collect samples from different locations and create sculptures. “He gathered things like sponges and chemical samples which he then displayed in an art format to demonstrate that art is an inert substance based in nature that can be organized and structured into meaningful relationships.” (http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-smithson) A clear example of this type of art be seen in one of his later works, Corner Mirror with Coral (fig. 1). This piece also demonstrates the use of mirrors which Smithson used frequently in his early career. One of his first works with mirrors was Enantiomorphic Chambers (fig. 2). He experiments with the viewer’s perception of the work, by turning the mirrors at odd angles so they do not reflect the viewer. Instead you see reflections of reflections, showing an illusion without in fact being one. The term Enantiomorphic used in the name means, “a pair of crystals, molecules, or compounds that are mirror images of each other but are not identical, and that rotate the plane of polarized light equally, but in opposite directions.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/enantiomorphic) This is simply seen in his work as there are two parts that look the same but are not identical, with mirrors reflecting in opposite directions. It is easy to see he put a tremendous amount of thought into each piece he created. He continued to work with mirrors throughout his career. During the mid 1960s Smithson, submitted several works to galleries which he called “non-sites”. These works were rocks, dirt, sticks and other organic from certain places around the globe that he gathered and occasionally placed in geometric boxes, or arranged in piles on the floors with mirrors. With these arrangements of the collected materials, he often provided an aerial map of the actual site along with pictures from the ground. All of these aspects added to the viewer being able to connect with the site and the process the artist went through to get these materials. These non-sites were Smithson’s first step into Earth art (Fig 3 & 4). Smithson believed that the permanence of his work was not important. For him, it was more about the concept than the actual work itself. He took a trip to Yucatan, Mexico and took several pictures of 12 small mirrors he had brought with him. He spread them out on the ground in one location, took a picture and dismantled his work to move to the next location. He called this work Mirror Displacements. (Fig. 5) “The mirrors broke up and distorted the world around them, becoming both solid and void, object and reflection, positive and negative shape.” (http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-smithson) As he traveled from place to place, collecting materials and setting up his art, he wrote many essays on art theory and what art should be. Eventually Smithson grew frustrated with the galleries. “I began to see things in a more relational way,” he explained in an interview. “I had to question where the works were, what they were about. The very construction of the gallery with its neutral white rooms became questionable. So I became interested in bringing attention to the abstractness of the gallery as a room…it became a preoccupation with place.” (Baker, 103) He also wrote about his discontent with the galleries in his essays.
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world….Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement. (Baker, 106) This idea of fine art as merchandise was seen earlier in the ‘60s with artists like Claus Oldenburg’s The Store and in Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life Series. Like Oldenburg, Smithson decided to move out of the gallery and into a place more suited for his art. Like other Earth artists of the time he moved out into the environment to produce large works surrounded by a natural landscape. Another Earth artist, Michael Heizer, stated, “The museums and collections are stuffed, the floors are sagging, but real space exists.”(Beardsley, 13) The environment became an important element of the art. The new monuments of Earth Art were much more massive than their urban counterparts. Spanning across miles of desert this new form of art focused on negative space, awareness of your size, and the idea you are no longer looking at a painting that is a re-presentation of nature. This was nature. It was the earth made into different forms, and even though the pieces of art might be giant in comparison to our scale, they will never be truly large in relation to the surrounding basins and ranges. And it is here in this “unraped, peaceful, religious space” that the parts come together to make an environment in which you are the center. (Beardsley, 13) The works that Smithson made outside of the museum were impressive. Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake of Utah was one of his first works, and one of the most well known. (Fig. 6) Spiral Jetty is composed of 1,500 linear feet of black basalt, limestone rocks, and earth. The spiral extends out from the shoreline in an area of the lake rarely visited because it is an abandoned oil drilling facility. The shape of the spiral itself has many meanings. It is an image of evolution, a symbol for growth or destruction and a classical form of the moon’s orbit. It is both an expanding and contracting force, like a whirlpool. (http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-smithson)
A year after Spiral Jetty, Smithson created Broken Circle and Spiral Hill (Figures 7&8) for the exhibition, Sonsbeek 71, in the Netherlands. He felt that the Dutch landscape was too cultivated and asked to work at an exhausted sand quarry in Holland. He turned the old quarry into a recreational area with a large pond. He had a semi-circle edged out of the shore and created the Broken Circle. He used this work as a platform to make a statement about recycling land that has been used for industrial purposes and turning them into Earth Art. (Beardsley, 23) While Robert Smithson was creating his works of Earth art in the late 60s early 70s another form of art was reaching its climax. This art known as Minimalism is something that spanned across all mediums of art. Painting, sculpture, film, dance, music, lifestyles and almost everything could be minimalist in character. This is because Minimalism isn’t just one style of art, or a specific pattern. Minimalism is a theory, a movement, a culmination of art theory that seems to have finally reached its peak. Minimal artists are very intellectual people who believe they found the answer to the timeless question of, “What is art?” Art up until about the 1860s was strictly gauged on how well it represented nature and how accurate and aesthetically pleasing it was. However, around the 1860s, artists began to abstract their works by experimenting with light, color and shapes. As you move through time you begin to see works become more and more surreal in character, until artists were no longer producing works that were recognizable forms found in nature. Splashes of paint, lines of color, odd shapes with no connection to the outside world dominated canvases and gallery spaces. The idea of this movement called Abstract Expressionism was to tap into the subconscious. “Art as a landscape of the unconscious, the artist as explorer, the painting as a mirror of the unique sensibility of the artist… with each new canvas the latest episode in a personal epic.” (Strickland, 40) This attitude toward art can be seen in many of Jackson Pollock’s works, such as Lavender Mist (Fig 9). It is very colorful and physical. You can almost see Pollock working with cans of paint and sticks, flipping paint here and there, very natural and textural.
Those involved in the Minimalist movement felt the bright, gestural works of the Abstract Expressionists were personal soap operas, not art for the masses. They were looking not only to continue the process of abstraction in search of art, but also to build upon it and be better than what came before. “In its simplest definition Minimalism is a style distinguished by severity of means, clarity of form, and simplicity of structure and texture.” (Strickland, 4) According to renowned critic, Clemente Greenburg, who was the leading voice in the Abstract Expression era, painting needed to be true to painting. It’s not suppose to try and be anything other than what it is, a 2 dimensional medium represented by paint on canvas. It needed to assert the surface. In past generations the artist was a focal point of the art, you could see them in their work. This changed with Minimalism by removing the marks of the artist so the viewer was only presented with the art.
When presented with Minimalist works like that of Ad Reinhardt, or Donald Judd (Fig 10&11) people might have trouble accepting them as art because it is not what they have been conditioned to perceive as fine art. The process of making art can be broken down into two phases; work and decision. The first, being the actual application of paint to canvas, bending of metal, hacking of stone, which is usually what most people recognize when they look at a piece of art. The second, decision, is what can make or break a work. Deciding when to stop and when to keep going will lead to criticisms of overdone or lacking depth. In the Ready-makes of Duchamp like the Fountain, (Fig 12) or any form of art that directly depends on preexisting material, the decision is the phase of work that is isolated and celebrated by the culture. (Battcock, 396)
These phases are often thought of in the context of construction, but to put them in the opposite we begin to see how they influence abstraction. Distortion of an image can be destructive but at the same time creative. The decision to dismantle a cluttered image to deliver a non convoluted picture to the viewer is the largest part of abstract work. Often times the “pre-image” is still recognizable, but in Minimalism the destruction is so complete that no underlying scene is left. (Battcock, 396) By bringing the art to simple shapes and removing the artist from the work, it allows the viewer to experience the art themselves. It no longer becomes what the art says to you, but what you bring to the art. The piece isn’t a painting that looks like a landscape, it is a painting that is just a painting; “art-as-art”.
Films by Andy Warhol Sleep and Empire are considered the first minimalist films. Sleep filmed over 6 hours of a man sleeping and Empire an 8 hour film of the Empire State Building. While watching these films you were eerily aware that you are watching a film, unlike most films which try to make you forget that you are watching a movie, and also of your almost voyeuristic presence. In the same way that these films and minimalist paintings make you aware of yourself, sculptures attempt to do the same. “In previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of minimalist art is of an object in a situation-- one that virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”(Battcock, 125) The scale of each piece was very deliberate. When questioned about his piece, Die, (Fig 13) Tony Smith had this to say:
Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument.
Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making an object.
The size of his Die invited the observer to approach and explore it, to knock on it, peek over it, press up against it, and experience it. People have their own experiences with certain shapes. For example, a square might offer different memories to different viewers. This is why the eye of the beholder is so important to Minimalism. The aim of the artist is to take art off of its pedestal and bring it to the general public, making it more accessible. According to Donald Judd, “to be art something just has to be interesting”. The use of the grid and the repetition of objects made you question the value of it. Was it any more or any less precious that a single shape? Did it matter it a well known artist created it or if I did it? The grid is an artistic pattern that has been used in many different styles of art and used in Minimalism it can have many different meanings, and depending on the sympathies of the viewer.
At first Robert Smithson’s work might not appear to be Minimalist. They’re large and don’t remove the mark of the artist. They are very natural and the object doesn’t appear to be abstract. But when you take a closer look you see that Smithson’s Earth works have many Minimalist elements to them. His Site works are primarily simple shapes (a spiral, circle, or grid) much like Minimal artists used. The shapes were open to interpretation by the observer. A spiral could invoke the image of a whirlpool to someone or could symbolize growth and destruction depending in your own personal relationship with the shape. Bringing art to the people and letting them bring their unique experience to the piece was a key part of Minimalism as well as Smithson’s Earth Art.
Another important element that is a part of both Minimalism and Earth art is the scale of the object. The size of an object makes you very aware of your size in comparison to it, or your scale. Smithson’s large outdoor pieces force you to walk around them and physically interact with them. The fact there is no gallery room means you can back-up as much as you want to view the piece as if it were smaller than your thumb or to walk around in it and be surrounded by its space. This is very similar to ideas presented by Tony Smith and other Minimalist sculpture artists.
Many times pieces of art contain a certain quality called repetition within them. Although not easily identifiable, repetition can be seen in both types of work. While it is clear in Minimalism, Donald Judd’s Untitled (Fig. 11) of 1990 is a prime example of this, the repetition in Earth art is slightly beneath the surface. The grids of Mirror Displacements (Fig. 5), the circles in the spirals of Spiral Hill and Spiral Jetty (Fig. 6&8), all of the rocks that it took to create these monumental structures are all forms of repetition. Even though the rocks may be small in comparison to the scale of art, they all come together piece by piece to form one giant monument. Also, the open space of Earth art makes you aware of the negative space in the works. Just like in Minimalism, when there is not a lot of paint to draw your attention, you tend to notice the negative space. Smithson’s Broken Circle (Fig. 7) deals heavily with negative and positive space, having one side of the circle filled with sand and the other open to water.
While the similarities between Minimalism and Smithson’s Earth Art are many, there are still many ways in which they differ. For one, Earth Art is not Minimalism. Even though it has many characteristics of Minimalism it is not considered a Minimalist sculpture. Many art works after the Minimalist era, borrow heavily from the ideas. This is what is known as the “minimalist hangover”. Minimalism was such an influential movement that everything during the movement and immediately after had aspects of Minimalism in it. This is the case with Smithson’s works as well.
Smithson wasn’t trying to accomplish the same things as Minimal artists when he moved out of the galleries and into the environment. During the late 1960s, the American social scene was in dishevel. There were movements for gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, an unpopular war, and while all of this was going on there were the environmentalists. “Art had to be radical. It had to become American.” (Beardsley, 13) In an era of space exploration and social discourse artists felt that art needed to look new, nonconformist, and non complacent. Environmentalists were concerned about the environment, landscapes, resources and ecosystems. Against loggers, mining companies, oil drilling, and anything that would destroy the earth they sought to seek out solutions to these problems in any way possible. Artists found that the best way to do this was to make art in the environment. Robert Smithson was one of the best to do this. He built Spiral Jetty on an old oil drilling site and Broken Circle and Spiral Hill on a dried up sand quarry. He once said, “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 recycling in terms of ‘Earth Art.’” (Beardsley, 23) He called this land reclamation, and reached out to several mining companies to work out a contract so that he could build monuments on their work sites.
Robert Smithson was a great earth artist whose life was sadly cut short before he could construct all that he had dreams for. He died in 1973 at the age of 35 while flying over the location of his work, Amarillo Ramp that his wife and friends would later finish. Like other earth artists of the time he used organic materials and let the art speak for itself. Rocks inside the museum along with mirrors and large works outside of the gallery space using all organic matter defined what the artist was. Using Minimalist characteristics he added more theory to his work. Though not everyone agrees that these traits add up to a Minimalist design, as one critic stated, “What Smithson’s Spiral Jetty has to do with Minimalism is beyond me.” (Strickland, 9) But this aspect is what makes the art so interesting; it isn’t only this or strictly that. Art can be a culmination and a dismantling. What one person sees doesn’t always have to be what the other sees. So, I invite you to decide for yourself if Smithson’s Earth Art in fact does relate to Minimalism or if it is independent. What matters the most in the end however is, whatever you decide, it is art.