ART REVIEW : Bracing Look From Artist’s Eye : Robert Smithson’s ‘Photo Works’ at LACMA assembles objects using photos or camera-based imagery. It’s a view firmly fixed on culture.

“Photography,” artist Robert Smithson once said, “makes nature obsolete.”

A wonderfully bracing sense of what he had in mind will be found in “Robert Smithson: Photo Works,” which opened Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Smithson, who died tragically young in a 1973 airplane crash when he was 35, had been a pioneer among sculptors who considered the actual landscape to be both the raw material and the physical site of their art. However, he was never a moony-eyed romantic, atavistically yearning for some lost natural paradise.

Instead, Smithson kept his marvelously perceptive eye firmly fixed on culture, not nature. He may have been an inventor of the genre of landscape sculpture that soon came to be called Earthworks, and certainly he was voracious in studying anthropology, sociology and assorted sciences. But never did he confuse the difference between being a scientist and being an artist. Smithson committed his intellectual resources to the making of art, which is where he placed his considerable talents and his equally considerable faith.

More than 50 objects that incorporate photographs or camera-based imagery have been assembled for the exhibition, including half a dozen commercially produced art magazines from the late 1960s and early 1970s in which Smithson, a gifted and prolific writer, published a number of widely influential illustrated essays. With equal accuracy, these essays could be described as photo layouts featuring extended captions--which begins to give some sense of the inseparable, interlocking dialectic at the heart of his artistic vision.

The show also includes a wry 1969 videotape, made with his wife, sculptor Nancy Holt, in which she challenges him to defend his claim to be an artist; a tape recording of a very funny, 1969 university lecture about a trip to the great archeological site of Palenque, Mexico, complete with synchronized slides that show only the dilapidated hotel in which he stayed and a projected videotape of a powerfully evocative 1970 film, made with Robert Fiore, about the construction of “Spiral Jetty,” the artist’s most famous Earthwork and a site long since submerged beneath the risen waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

LACMA curator Robert Sobieszek, who also wrote the insightful catalogue that accompanies the show, has grouped works from about 1961 to 1973 in four galleries that loosely follow a chronological order. The show begins with three eccentric collages that have been drawn and painted on. Essentially juvenilia, they nonetheless stake out conceptual terrain that would soon be elaborated in extraordinary ways: science fiction merges with paleontology, sexiness with creepiness, handmade marking with machine fabrication. All three incorporate mundane photographs, clipped from published sources.

Smithson’s period of mature production was quite brief--just about half a dozen years, beginning with two brilliant essays-with-photos published in 1966--but his endeavor was immediately influential on a host of artists working in New York and on students and others at the numerous schools where he lectured. Since a posthumous retrospective traveled widely in 1981, his art has been shown extensively in Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, LACMA’s is the first show to zero in on the way he used images made with the camera.

Make no mistake: Smithson is not a photographer in the traditional sense of the word. He’s an artist, one who simply chose to use the camera--along with earth-moving equipment, crayons, dirt, a typewriter and lots of other materials and tools. An insular conception of photography-as-art is beside his point.

The exhibition is convincing, however, in its demonstration of the way in which photographs were important to him and to the aesthetic he was elaborating. He knew that, as a circumstance of modern perception, photographs had changed the world.

In fact, it’s the “not art” quality of photography that seems to have attracted Smithson most. Some technically beautiful pictures are in the show, such as a sequence of 27 gelatin-silver prints of slag heaps at a German steel mill. (They’re as elegantly operatic as anything by Anselm Kiefer.) More common, though, are routine pictures--dumb snapshots--like those of patterned brick-and-plaster work on Art Deco buildings dating from the 1930s.

“Ultramoderne,” as this 1967 group of eight negative photostat-prints is called, bluntly records a historical conception of futuristic optimism. Printing the architectural images as negatives disrupts the casual possibility of regarding them as a rosy romp with nostalgia.

Instead, the Space-Age promises of the architectural style are irradiated with doubt. For the future they promised in the 1930s--decade of the artist’s birth--is here, now. Smithson’s negatives allude to a darker reality, one that seems appropriate to the convulsive era in which his pictures were made.

For Smithson, the camera is principally a way to point: Look over here, his photographs say, not over there. When you look, you don’t see a Big Event, the Main Action or a Center of Attention, which is what most photographs attempt to record (or, to manufacture).

Instead, you typically see the margin or periphery--the pattern on an ordinary building you pass everyday; the ignominious slag heap at the heroic steel mill; the run-down dump of a hotel at the fabulous temple site in Mexico.

Like the negatives that make a photographic positive possible, these peripheral situations are what allow for the ostensibly big events. They’re the woebegone New Jersey that creates the possibility of spectacular New York--as is poignantly implied by two dozen photographs dubbed the “Monuments of Passaic” (1967).

In Passaic, sewage pipes gushing muck into a river are the metaphorical equivalent of the fountains at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Industrial ruins and urban decay are transformed into sites--and sights--of touchingly pathetic grandeur.

Smithson doesn’t pretend that a photograph provides the same experience as “being there.” Photographs contain their own experiences, which is part of what he meant by distinguishing between landscape photographs and nature. The illusionistic confusion between absence and presence in a photograph becomes a subject of “Overturned Rocks” (1969), in which pictures of rocks are paired with pictures of the holes left when the rocks are removed. In these intimate landscape photographs, the absence of the landscape is disconcertingly present, occupying the pictorial field.

“Robert Smithson: Photo Works” has been organized on the occasion of LACMA’s acquisition of a 1970 photo-based work by the artist, bearing the ponderous title “Torn Photograph From the Second Stop (Rubble). Second Mountain of 6 Stops on a Section.” Slightly more than 21 inches square, the photolithographic print hones in on rubble-strewn ground: sticks, stones, twigs, pieces of board, sand--the landscape gone to ruin.

The print, which lies flat in a vitrine, has been rudely torn into four pieces, like the quadrants of a map--the exquisite and exquisitely cared for photographic print of the fine art tradition also gone to ruin. It’s a wonderful addition to the museum’s collection, and a very good excuse for this engaging show.

* LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Nov. 28. Closed Mon. and Tues.