Safran

de Niverville 1 Barbara Safran de Niverville Peter Rostovsky, Faculty Advisor 01 September 2012 A Dialectic of Nature: Robert Smithson Robert Smithsons innovative body of artwork leads us to re-evaluate our ideas of

nature1 and art in the landscape. His thought-provoking and pithy texts bend the meanings of words into fresh metaphors. Critical and distrustful of art world institutions, Smithson developed unconventional, and inventive ways of working with the natural environment, where he created his iconic earthworks and launched a new genre of art in the documentation of his impermanent projects. Smithson wrote in Cultural Confinement: I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. . . . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and the sacred. Dialectics have nothing to do with such things. I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are - nature as both sunny and stormy. Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature is not a condition of the ideal. Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished. . . . (155)

1. See Soper p. 15 for a common definition of nature, defined as everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity.

Safran de Niverville 2 The cultural notions of nature as a separate, sublime domain have become so

familiar to us,2 that we are often unaware of their influence on our attitudes. Smithson rejected these ideas as artificial, cultural creations. He sought to eliminate traditional attitudes and projections onto nature and approach it from a different angle. Instead, a keen interest in philosophy, geology and natural history formed a constant background for his work. His earthwork projects were conceived to become integral parts of eroding and changing land. (Flam xx-xxi) He wrote about . . . humble or degraded sites left in the wake of mining operations . . .(offering) . . . more of a challenge to art, and a greater possibility for being in solitude. Inspired by Frederick Law Olmsteads transformation of industrial wasteland into what is now Central Park in New York City, Smithson preferred locales of exhausted and abandoned land for his mega projects, where he could retrieve and change them into aesthetic statements. (Smithson, Olmstead 158, 166) Broken Circle-Spiral Hill was constructed in a quarry near Emmen, Holland in 1971.

Smithson realized his concern for recycling a mining site into an artwork with this project. The quarry had been abandoned and it was slated to be returned to the residents of the area. The people of Emmen voted to keep and maintain the work after its completion, gratifying Smithsons concern that art should be a necessary part of society. (Flam xxvii) Environmental anthropologist Emilio Moran wrote in 2006: One of the challenges before us is how to re-conceptualize the interactions between people and nature. One step forward is to think organically, as organisms-in-nature, bringing our own versions of meaning to it in 2. In Western culture, the ideas of nature are perceived in opposition to culture, a dichotomy between people and the physical environment. See Moran pp. 7-8 and 24.

Safran de Niverville 3 accordance with our histories. Dichotomous thinking led us to think of people as apart from nature, and charged with controlling nature for human purposes and crucially, as distinct from the inherent dynamics of the earth system itself. (8) The Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake, Utah, exemplifies Smithsons re-

conceptualizing approach to his work: As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. . . . No sense worrying about classifications and categories, there were none. On the site, Smithson described the sun burning crimson through his eyelids; the color of the red algae circulating in the heart of the lake saturated his sight. . . . My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. . . . My movie would end in sunstroke. . . . The red and pink tints, the seeming rotation of the spiral and the dizzying effect of brilliant sunlight off the surface of the salt lake left Smithson with a churning stomach. (Smithson, The Spiral Jetty 146 -148) During the construction of Spiral Jetty, Smithson recorded and recreated these effects with maps, diagrams, drawings, and film. (Reynolds 222-30) He wrote about artists using photography in new ways: It appears that abstraction and nature are merging in art, and that the synthesizer is the camera. (Smithson, Cameras Eye, 374) The notion of entropy and the disintegration of structures became central to his

work. He said in an interview, The main objective is to make something massive and physical enough that it can interact with those things (climate and its changes) and go through all kinds of modifications. . . .I am interested in collaborating with entropy. . . wreckage is more interesting than structure . . . (Flam 256-57) Smithson stated in an

Safran de Niverville 4 interview that entropy contradicts the usual notion of a mechanistic world view. . . . Its a condition thats irreversible.3 He spoke of closed systems which deteriorate and eventually break apart. (Flam 301) Ann Reynolds describes the physical alterations made by Smithson and other earth artists as relatively negligible when viewed in relation to the vast scale of their contexts and what entropy would do to them over time. (232) Robert Smithsons dialectic of nature used the terms site and non-site. The site

was a large-scale, physical fraction of the earth, and the non-site was a compressed, cartographic abstraction or model of this fraction. Both functioned as equally important components of Smithsons body of work. (Reynolds 197-98) The site was subject to weather and erosion, while the non-site existed as documentation in photographs, charts, film and written texts long after the original site project had collapsed. Jack Flam comments that Smithsons works showed a . . . desire to fuse the abstract

and the specific, and a similar passion for intensely distilled philosophical rumination, (which) informs much of his work. (xiv) As an artist, I am challenging myself to create this kind of dialectic between abstraction and specificity in one piece of work. The tension between humanitys desire to frame and control nature and the resistant vitality of natures components present an engaging duality to work with. I am looking towards artists like Robert Smithson to help me develop a theoretical base for my work where nature is both sunny and stormy, where it is not a condition of the ideal.4 (Smithson, Cultural 3. See the interview with Allison Sky in Flam p. 301. 4. I would like my work to move beyond the romantic, idealized notions of

landscape in Western culture, which have led us to erroneously view the natural

Safran de Niverville 5 Confinement, 155) Suggesting entropy, an important concept in Smithsons work, adds another layer of meaning to my work. It is ever present as a continuum of simultaneous phases; energy is used and transformed by minute plants and organisms as well as by whole ecosystems. The influence of an artists philosophical discourse during the creation of artwork is

paramount. Robert Smithson executed all of his projects within the parameters of his conceptual framework. Anything arbitrary occurred through natural forces acting on the raw materials he used. Smithson was able to predict some of the effects which would take place, but other times, the finished projects could surprise him. About the Spiral Jetty he wrote: Here is a reinforcement and prolongation of spirals that reverberates up and down space and time. . . . Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event. The curved reality of sense perception operates in and out of the straight abstractions of the mind. (Smithson, The Spiral Jetty 147) As an artist, I am in the process of developing my own artistic framework, both

materially and philosophically. Studying Robert Smithsons work has given me insight into the relationship between the conceptual and the physical aspects of artwork. The underlying theoretical or philosophical basis is what links the artists production together, regardless of the forms or media used. Robert Smithson utilized whatever media would environment as separate from ourselves. See Adams 65-82, Moran 57-73 and Erzen 95- 100.

Safran de Niverville 6 succeed in expressing his ideas, creating earthworks, drawings, diagrams, films, essays, interviews, notes and a revolutionary way of looking at land.

Safran de Niverville 7 Works Cited Adams, W. M. No Land Apart: Nature, Culture, Landscape. Ed. Sarah Pilgrim and Jules Pretty. Nature and Culture. New York, NY: Earthscan, 2010. 65 82. Print. Erzen, Jale. Aesthetics: Counter-Nature or Second-Nature? Svobodov, Hana, ed. Cultural Aspects of Landscape. Wageningen, Netherlands: Pudoc,1990. 95-100. Print.

Moran, Emilio F. People and Nature. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 55 73. Print. Smithson, Robert. Entropy and the New Monuments. Ed. Jack Flam. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkley: U of California P, 1996. 10-23. Print. ---. A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. 68 -74. ---. The Spiral Jetty. 143-153. ---. Cultural Confinement. 154-156. ---. Frederic Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape. 157-171. ---. Art Through the Cameras Eye. 371-375. Reynolds, Ann. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2003. Print.

Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995. Print.