Robert Smithson
1938–1973
While remembered chiefly for his pioneering earthworks, Robert Smithson’s earliest artistic endeavors, created between 1957 and 1963, were two-dimensional— paintings, drawings, woodcuts, and collages that often suggested mythological, literary, or religious themes. By the mid- 1960s Smithson started producing his first mature works—principally sculptures and theoretical writings—which consistently challenged ideas about what materials may constitute art, where it could be located, and how its relationship to institutions might be configured.
In 1968 Smithson began to make what he called “non-sites”: works in which natural materials such as rocks, sand, and gravel—from an outdoor geographic or geological “site”—were transferred, contained, and presented indoors, in a gallery or museum. Non-site (Palisades— Edgewater, N.J.) consists of a slatted aluminum box filled with rocks salvaged from an area near a former trolley line in the artist’s native New Jersey. “Instead of putting a work of art on some land, some land is put into the work of art,” he wrote in the sculpture’s component text panel. This particular site interested Smithson for its illustration of a central preoccupation of his art: the thermodynamic principle of entropy, or the tendency of any system to lose energy over time. “What was once a straight track has become a path of rocky crags—the site has lost its system.” Smithson’s fascination with entropy also underpins his earthworks, large-scale, site-specific interventions in the natural environment, some of which were under way when he died in a plane crash at age thirty-five.
Introduction
Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty (1970).
Wikidata identifier
Q328341
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 9, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, conceptual artist, essayist, painter, photographer, sculptor, writer
ULAN identifier
500015753
Names
Robert Smithson, Robert I. Smithson
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 9, 2025.
