Smithson’s work goes far beyond the scope of the current discussion. Before taking his sculpture out-of-doors, he brought the outside in to the gallery with his “non-sites”. This man was serious about his dialectics. He also functioned as a sort of cosmic prophet of entropy, locating his work in the epic scale of geologic time. Ultimately, he was “martyred” for his art, dying in a plane crash while taking aerial photos of his last project, the Amarillo Ramp.

His writings may pose some difficulty today, as they are often couched in terms of art criticism and polemics. There are allusions to arguments that have been long-forgotten, except by an aging corner of the art world and a few scholars. Even so, his wide-ranging rambles through the intellectual landscape are a necessary accompaniment to his works in the “real” landscape, and he can’t be fully understood without recourse to these texts, and to his Spiral Jetty film. Working on these three vectors he became a true multi-media artist, and a landmark for postmodernism. From art to pop culture, from science to science-fiction, from haughty philosophy to humor, he crossed boundaries, and acted as a prophet of their eventual collapse.

His official website is here.
Unfortunately, his estate is typically over-protective of his legacy, to the point of failure when it comes to propagating his writings. I guess they want to sell the book. There is a sampling of his essays, but it does not include the Olmsted piece, nor the other most important texts, like The Monuments of Passaic, A Sedimentation of the Mind, or even the Spiral Jetty essay. To read these you’ll have to get Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. You might find it in a library, or a bookstore with a serious art section, and of course you can order it online.





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