Unnatural fact: the fictions of Robert Smithson
Field of representation
Relationship between art histories and the ways in which art histories are reported upon
Mass media / being a field of representation, or territory, that includes direct experience, or the ‘being there’, of everyday life.
Informs the position of the artist constructing representations in a field of representation
leads not just towards a discussion of texts as a means of occupying this territory of representation but towards the discussion of what is meant by textual practice.
Smithson’s fictions
a. reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s novel
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1994)
b. demonstrate the nature of a conception of fieldwork that ‘muddies’ the distinction between real and non-real, or site and non-site
c. re-negotiated and re-interpreted as being somewhere between accident
and hoax
d. Novel = incomplete/ uncertainty
imaginary travel, adventure, Plot lines are left incomplete, characters disappear and personalities warp in
and out of recognition.
e. This mistaken machination of the narrator appears to organize the very nature of the narrative and, as with Smithson’s writing, guides the nature of its operation
f. Writing, memory, experience and truth are each intensely fictionalized in the
manner of a throwaway hoax
2. Poe and Smithson
a. Both authors arrange a fiction of the mediated
i. a decoy embodying the ‘reception
of truth’
b. Both authors are preoccupied by a fiction of seeing or, more to the point, not seeing
c. Magazine publishing, authorship, and documentation are each used in order
to textualize the perennial hoax
i. At the centre of the fiction there
‘exists’ an experience defined only
in terms of its irrevocable lack or
absence.
This absence defines the suspect legibility
that impacts radically upon the text
d. ‘The imaginary and the factual, the fantastic and the verisimilar’ (as before) blend into a ‘poetics of geography’ (as before) that explode the field defined in
terms of a distinction between the real
and the unreal, the site and the non-site.’
e.
f. ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ are muddied according to a ‘course of hazards, a double path made up of signs, photographs and maps that belong to both sides of the dialectic at once’; both are present and absent at the same time’ (as before).
g.
h. the map – a textual matter rather than the ‘non-place’ figured in the arguments of Marc Augé
Sites as non-sites
Site - a location outside the gallery
Nonsite - a body of objects and documentation inside the gallery
The Spiral Jetty, the non-site is born out of an enigmatic sense of material experience.
‘Dialectic of Site and Non-Site
reference points that fail to correspond
problematic binary of ‘field’ and ‘representation’
Carroll’s ‘absolute blank’
Framed in terms of an irrevocable absence as a site of disappearance or ‘blank’, coordinates such as ‘place’ and ‘no place’ form a collapsible binary (‘an equation as clear as mud’) in which the non-site can only ever exist as a hoax, a mistaken machination of an uninhabitable (un-representable) ‘site’.
Artaud: non-correspondence and the text
Smithson’s failed correspondence
Antonin Artaud (key citation)
Artaud’s work is framed by two series of letters:
those of his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1923–4
his letters, written not long before his death, from the asylum in Rodez where he is held for much of the Occupation.
letter writing as a means of examining himself and the non-correspondence of writing
Smithson’s work, experience and representation are inseparable to such an extent that the author writes in correspondence with the absence of The Spiral Jetty.
‘something that fails to exist’ (Blanchot 1982)
Smithson exploit this paradox of non-correspondence
positioning his textual material in opposition to the experience or ‘materialization’ of his earthworks. It is here that he locates the cultural production of art. Landscapes, like texts, Smithson appears to be saying, materialize in the matter of reading.
White, D. (2008) ‘Unnatural fact: the fiction of Robert Smithson ’, Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6d88/d4dd466555db444310e7b61b13c72b83a2a0.pdf
Focused on the ways in which science fiction was employed within certain phases of Smithson’s career
Smithson possessed a pessimism informed by a certain vision of the future gleaned from dystopic science fiction
Smithson’s work: an awareness of its dependence not only on culture but on language for helping to give its objects meaning, purpose, and even shape.
Smithson employs tactics of extreme perspective, non-human chronology, and irrational visual languages as drawn from science-fiction sources that are based on real and non-real occurrences.
tactics and their association with science fiction lead us to consider how science fiction is helpful in terms of grappling with the visual representation of advanced notions of time, space, and/or speed.
while not always based in fact, is based in a desire for lucidity
express what once may have been inexpressible
➜ Incorporation of such science-fiction-type ideas offered Smithson a more nuanced critique of Modernist paradigms of exhibition and production
➜ Smithson that is experimenting : notions of time and space,
⬥ oppose and reveal same spatio-temporal parameters - governing the gallery and the art market
Entropy
process referring to the natural tendency of energy to disperse toward equilibrium over time
Time and Space
works bend, distort, and/or stop time altogether displays familiarity with a wide array of science-fictional pontification on the passage of time
Juxtaposition
Smithson’s treatment of landscape conjures up and juxtaposes ideas of:
outer space × mundane settings on Earth
remote terrestrial settings × desolate states of mind
mysterious monolithic geometry × the distant future.
Photo works
Newly discovered positives for his project changed the identity and understanding of his original negatives
Smithson’s fascination with entropy and its manifestation within the landscape, offering salient thoughts on foreign realms
“or Smithson outer space became equated with the nonspace of the future, and of a certain mental state—one that had little to do with feeling or thinking, but rather... about nonthinking and nonfeeling, a depressing blankness, a vacuity at the heart of being.”
Conclusion:
Smithson art practice is an example of a contemporary strain of nihilism
Smithson’s interest in science fiction is representative of his desire to know and actualize that which is beyond a strictly anthropocentric understanding of the universe.
Science fiction factors into Smithson’s late-career output mainly as a result of his continued fascination with entropy
Robert Smithson coming to terms with contemporary life.
Science fiction = ability to imagine numerous other presents and near-futures, is another, and one which deserves renewed interest for its seemingly powerful ability to turn imagination into reality
Creighton, A.J, (2014) "Robert Smithson in Space: Science Fiction in the Gallery and Beyond", Art History Theses & Dissertations. 1. Available at: http://scholar.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=arth_gradetds
Robert Smithson and Entropy
(Creighton also cited in his thesis)
A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, A Cinematic Atopia (1971)
New Jersey" (1967)
Other References
Saxon, E. (2013) ‘Science Fictional Transcendentalism in the Work of Robert Smithson’, Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, School of Art, Art History and Design. 43, August. Available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=artstudents
Holt Smithson Foundation http://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/
Reynolds, A. ‘Robert Smithson Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere’, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/robert-smithson
Boettger, S. (2018) ‘Digging into Aldiss’s Earthworks and Smithson’s “Earthworks”’, art journal, June 7. Available at: https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=9939
Cumming, P. and Smithson, R. (1972) Oral history interview with Robert Smithson, Archive of American Art, July 14-19 Available at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-smithson-12013#transcript
Mr Burgher’s Art Fact. ‘Robert Smithson’. Available at: http://burgher-art-facts.tripod.com/smithson.html
Moderna Museet. ‘About Robert Smithson’, Available at: https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/robert-smithson/about-robert-smithson/
Cultural Confinement - Robert Smithson. Available at: http://theoria.art-zoo.com/cultural-confinement-robert-smithson/
Art Monthly, (2005) ‘Robert Smithson Now’, October, Available at; https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/robert-smithson-now-by-joseph-masheck-october-2005
Schjeldahl, P. (1973) ‘Robert Smithson: He Made Fantasies as Real as Mountains’, The New York Times, August 12. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/08/12/archives/robert-smithson-he-made-fantasies-as-real-as-mountains.html
Sullivan, R. (2014) ‘The Source of Robert Smithson’s Spiral’, The New Yorker, June 18. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-source-of-robert-smithsons-spiral
The Art Story. Robert Smithson. Available at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/smithson-robert/life-and-legacy/
Rodgers, P. (2004) ‘Robert Smithson & Marcel Duchamp’, September, Available at: https://paulrodgers9w.com/september-2004-robert-smithson-marcel-duchamp
Prikule, L. (2009) ‘Robert Smithson and Nomadism’, Studija, Available at: http://studija.lv/en/?parent=484
Takac, B. (2019) ‘Swirling Into the Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson’, Widewalls, March 24. Available at: https://www.widewalls.ch/spiral-jetty-robert-smithson-utah/
Kandel, S. (1995) ‘The Non-site of Theory’, Frieze, May 7. Available at: https://frieze.com/article/non-site-theory
Jones, C. A. (2002) ‘The Ambiguous Status of Art and Artist in the Postmodern Frame’, Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 41, Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20167554.pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_expensive%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A3b287db0097b081af5847855dc80b800
Jones, C.A. ‘Robert Smithson's Suppressed "Pre-conscious" Works: Intentionality and Art Historical (Re ) construction’, Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-011-4006-5_111
Nagel, A. (2013). ‘Robert Smithson removed from the source’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, (63/64), 285-288. Retrieved from
Herwitz, D. (1998). ‘Reviewed Work: Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel by Gary Shapiro’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,56(1), 78-80. doi:10.2307/431956 Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/431956.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ab942d731601462c48261a94c9d01260b
Wiśniewski, M. ‘The Vagaries of Imagination: Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams’, View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, Available at: http://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/the-vagaries-of-imagination
The making of James Agee. Available at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6036&context=utk_graddiss
Comentarios