Smithson in LA, NYC

I reviewed the Robert Smithson retro twice: Once for the WSJ (which didn't use it) and once for Bloomberg. A couple weeks ago I posted what I wrote for the WSJ about visiting the Jetty. Here's a put-'em-both-together. It reads a little shmooshed because, well, it is.

A few days before I saw the Robert Smithson retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I prepared myself for the show by studying a book of Smithson's writings. Smithson's essays are so widely revered in art circles that they are required reading for nearly every art student in America. My little study session seemed like an excellent idea.

After seeing the Smithson exhibit, I realized it was a stupid idea. I had fallen into the art historical trap of revisiting an artist through his words, rather than through his art. Fortunately, curator Eugenie Tsai (who was assisted by Cornelia Butler) did not make my mistake. Her Smithson retrospective, titled Robert Smithson, is one of the finest shows I have seen all year (I wrote that in 2004). It exhibits Smithson the artist -- and leaves Smithson's mediocre philosophical ramblings to mediocre philosophers. Best of all, Tsai's exhibit rescues Smithson from the reluctant compliment, "one of the most important artists of the 20th century," and allows his work to make the case for him as one of the best.

Smithson was the major early figure of the earthworks movement that redefined art as something that could exist outside an art gallery. Feeling that traditional art media (such as painting) were inadequate for showing work that would last, Smithson made his best art out of steel, mirrors, rock and chalk. For Smithson, 'lasting' was a matter of context: He didn't want his art to share a lifespan with museums, he wanted his work's endurance to be measured against the time frame of geologic processes.

One of the triumphs of Smithson's art, and of MOCA's presentation of it, is that it proves conceptual art can be as exciting to look at as any other kind of art. Smithson understood that no matter how high-minded the idea behind an artwork, it must be fun to look at, it must be visually engaging. If a viewer doesn't like looking at a work of art, they'll never think about the ideas behind it. 
 
The show includes some rarely seen early drawings and paintings, many fine examples of Smithson's 'nonsites,' which brought earth and rock into art galleries, a video of Smithson's explorations of Mono Lake, a 30-minute documentary about Smithson's buried building on the Kent State campus, and a number of sculptures in which Smithson explores systems of progression.

Smithson (1938-1973) was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and like many suburban kids was fascinated by New York. At the time the art world didn’t require a college degree for admission, so Smithson worked his way into the scene by writing poetry, befriending artists, and publishing both acute criticism and meandering essays. In the mid-60s, Smithson began to make the work for which he is best known: sculpture made from sheet metal, conceptual drawings, and ultimately art placed directly in the wide-open landscape. He died in a plane crash while examining the site for a land art in Amarillo, Texas.

Nearly every room in Smithson reveals the artist’s fascination with entropy (those maudlin philosphical ramblings deal with entropy too). Instead of applying his interest in long-term decay to civilizations, he applied it to suburban American life. In 1967 Smithson took a series of photographs called Monuments of Passaic which showed how buildings and structures in his hometown were aging, positioning them as contemporary monumental ruins.

Smithson also explored how we see what we see. Painters have long used mirrors or other reflective surfaces to play with perspective in painting –- Henri Matisse used them to put himself in his drawings, right next to his nude models, for example  -- but Smithson took the idea one step further. In Mirrors and Shelly Sand, a long pile of sand and pebbles is spread out over 28 feet of gallery floor. Fifty mirrors are placed in the sand, equidistant, throughout the length of the gallery. Looking at the piece, it’s not immediately clear where the actual sand ends, and where the reflection of sand begins.

There are a couple of minor gaps in the show. Smithson's finest indoor sculpture, Gyrostasis, is not in the exhibit. (The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden refused to loan it, citing conservation concerns.) And the earthwork project on which Smithson was working when he died in a 1973 plane crash, Amarillo Ramp, isn't represented at all. (Tsai told me that the drawings available to her weren't good enough for inclusion in the show.)