Robert Smithson

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Robert Smithson (* 2. January 1938 in Passaic , New Jersey ; † 20th July 1973 in Texas ) was an American painter and land art - artists .

Life

Smithson began his artistic training as a high school student at the age of fifteen with a degree at the Art Students League in New York , which he continued when he studied at the Brooklyn Museum School in 1956 . After his military service, he traveled through the USA to Mexico in 1957 . During this time he drew and painted pictures in the style of abstract expressionism . In 1961 he went to Rome , where he became interested in psychology, religion and Byzantine art. In 1963 Robert Smithson married the artist Nancy Holt . His work changed after 1964, he continued to draw, but he now saw himself as a sculptor . He constructed his objects in the landscape with mirrors, broken glass, neon tubes, asphalt and stones. He constructed objects ( nonsites ) in galleries from elements of his art sites in the landscape .

On July 20, 1973, Robert Smithson was fatally injured in a plane crash over Amarillo Ramp in Texas at the age of 35.

plant

Between 1965 and 1966 he met a number of minimalist artists. With some of these artists, such as Carl Andre , Dan Graham , Donald Judd , Sol LeWitt , Richard Long , Robert Morris and Claes Oldenburg , he went on excursions in New Jersey. During these excursions and on trips to Nevada and California, he began to collect material for his nonsites , collages of earth and stones from a certain area, which he, sometimes combined with glass or mirror glass, as sculptures in art galleries, preferably initially near Virginia Dwan in New York.

In 1968 he traveled to Germany, where he and Bernd Becher visited the Ruhr area. In the same year he published his essay A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects in the Artforum , which deals with principles of Land Art . In 1969 he began to create Land Art works of art, the concept of which was influenced by his reading of William S. Burroughs and the science fiction author J. G. Ballard . In March 1969 he took part in Harald Szeemann 's “legendary” exhibition Live in your head: When Attitudes become Form at the Bern Kunsthalle . The exhibition then traveled from the Kunsthalle Bern to the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Also in 1969 he made the video East Coast, West Coast with Nancy Holt . In the same year he traveled to England, where he visited Stonehenge and other archaeologically interesting places. In January 1970, he built his man-made ruin, Partially Buried Woodshed, on the Kent State University campus , a half-buried shed that is now overgrown with grass.

Spiral Jetty , Utah

That same year he began work on the Spiral Jetty in Utah , his most famous work. The still-existing Spiral Jetty is a 500-meter-long spiral made of stones, earth, salt and red algae that Smithson created in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The work of art consists of a shallow dam that emanates from the shore of the lake and then rolls up in an anti-clockwise spiral. Smithson constructed the object in extremely low water, but usually the spiral is flooded and only visible from the plane. The creation of this work of art is documented in a film that Smithson made with Bob Fiore and Barbara Jarvis.

In 1972 Robert Smithson participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the Individual Mythologies : Video department .

Posthumous exhibitions

Broken Circle and Spiral Hill , Emmen

In 1982 Smithson's works were shown in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale . In the same year the first retrospective took place, which was organized by the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris . As a result, his work has been exhibited in museums and major galleries in Copenhagen, New York, Washington, Lucerne, London and others. The second retrospective was shown from 1992 to 1994 in Marseille, Brussels and Valencia.

On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the work Broken Circle and Spiral Hill from 1971 to 2011 in Emmen, the Netherlands, the Centrum Beeldende Kunst Emmen organized a large-scale exhibition in autumn 2011, for which the video on the work started by Nancy Holt in 1971 was completed with a Dutch team in 2011 has been.

Art theory

Smithson has dealt with questions of art theory over and over again throughout his artistic career. In his writings he deals with the relationship between the work of art and its environment, where he developed his theories about sites and nonsites . Sites is what he calls works that have been produced for a very specific location, while nonsites can be found anywhere, for example in a gallery or museum. An example of a site is the Spiral Jetty , while nonsites can consist of photographs that are exhibited in a gallery and in the immediate vicinity of which there are things or elements that come from the photographed places, such as stones, shells or sand.

Smithson's published art reviews and art theoretical works were edited by his wife Nancy Holt, unpublished works later by Eugenie Tsai. Smithson had his first solo exhibition in 1959, but the early work was not extensively exhibited and known until 1985.

Fonts

  • Nancy Holt (Ed.): The writings of Robert Smithson. New York University Press, New York 1979, ISBN 0-8147-3395-6 .
  • Eugenie Tsai: Robert Smithson unearthed, Drawings, collages, writings. Columbia University Press, New York 1991, ISBN 0-231-07258-9 .
  • Eva Schmidt, Kai Voeckler (Ed.): Robert Smithson - Collected writings. König, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-88375-388-2 .
  • Eva Schmidt (ed.): Robert Smithson: The invention of the landscape . Exhibition catalog Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, March 4 to May 28, 2012, Snoeck Verlag, 2012
  • Ingrid Commandeur and Trudy van Riemsdijk-Zandee: Robert Smithson: Art in Continual Movement . Alauda Publications, Amsterdam (2012), ISBN 978-90-815314-8-1, review sehepunkte

Web links

Commons : Robert Smithson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Harald Szeemann (curator): Live in your head. When Attitudes Become Form. Works-Concepts-Processes-Situation-Information. When attitudes become form. Works-concepts-processes-situations-information , exhibition catalog, Kunsthalle Bern, 1969. Inside: uncounted sheet (2 pages): SMITHSON, Robert: solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, own writings, magazines: years 1966–1969
  2. Kunsthalle Basel (ed.): "With by through because towards despite" ( Memento of August 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on July 31, 2010
  3. ^ Robert Smithson in Emmen - Broken Circle / Spiral Hill Revisited (1971-2011) . Video, exhibition with catalog, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Emmen, September 17 to November 27, 2011 (accessed: March 26, 2012)
  4. ^ Robert Smithson. The Invention of Landscape, Broken Circle / Spiral Hill & Film , Museum for Contemporary Art Siegen, March 4 to May 28, 2012
  5. ^ Eva Schmidt (ed.): Robert Smithson: The invention of the landscape . Exhibition catalog Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, ed. by Eva Schmidt, Snoeck Verlag, 2012
  6. In the orig. Two more images - Passaic was S's place of birth