MOCA Presents Major New Retrospective of Robert Smithson

“Robert Smithson” is the first comprehensive American retrospective of Robert Smithson’s (1938-1973) complex and highly influential career. This major exhibition begins its national tour in Los Angeles on Sept. 12 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at California Plaza, at 250 S. Grand Ave. in Los Angeles, and remains on view through Dec. 13.

Best known as the creator of “Spiral Jetty” (1970), a 1,500-foot-long and 15-foot-wide rock coil that stretches into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, American artist Smithson has long been acknowledged as one of the pioneers of earthworks - monumental structures that are inseparable from remote outdoor sites.

Smithson died in a plane crash at the age of 35.

Straddling the movements of land art and minimalism, Smithson had a profound impact on contemporary art and the cultural landscape in the 1960s, and he remains influential today. Smithson’s revolutionary ideas positioned art as existing beyond the walls of the museum in the form of writing and film, and even in the landscape itself. Smithson’s oeuvre as an artist and writer defied convention, and he produced works that could not be easily categorized. He utilized nontraditional art materials, such as language, mirrors, maps, dump trucks, abandoned quarries, hotels, contractors, and earth, to produce his sculptures, photographs, films, and earthworks.

Organized for MOCA by Eugenie Tsai, MOCA Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow, in association with MOCA Curator Connie Butler, the exhibition features over 150 works, including paintings, works on paper, essays, photographs, objects, and films from 1955 to 1973. Exploring Smithson’s work within the context of the artistic climate of the late 1960s as well as ensuing decades, the exhibition also considers the interrelationships of Smithson’s complete artistic output, from the earliest figurative sketches to his famed earthworks.

“Robert Smithson has long been acknowledged as a pioneer of earthworks,” said Tsai. “This exhibition presents less familiar aspects of his work, thus providing a more complete view of his multi-faceted practice. The conceptual continuity of his paintings, sculpture, film, photographs, and writings emerges, illuminating the remarkable relevance of his ideas to artists working today.”

Robert Smithson examines four specific themes: landscape, language, the monument, and the site, each resonating throughout different periods of the artist’s career. The exhibition also traces the development of the artist’s fascination with nature’s tendency to increasing disorder or randomness-entropy-and with the entropic landscape, from the barren apocalyptic horizon found in his 1960s poetry to his choice of Rozel Point, site of Spiral Jetty. These disrupted and displaced landscapes are simultaneously evocative of the primordial past as well as the science-fiction future.

Smithson began an exploration of the monument and its meaning when he wrote Entropy and the New Monuments (1966) in response to the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. Smithson’s experiments with sites and mapping began in 1966, when he was commissioned to do a project for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. His use of topographic maps from that project led him to develop a small but focused body of works based on maps and mapping. The last section of the exhibition is devoted to site, a concept that grew out of Smithson’s work on the Dallas Airport project and expanded to encompass art institutions, notably museums.

Work from the early years of Smithson’s career (1955-63) provides a deeper understanding of his diverse practice. His vision of the entropic landscape and view of language as material can be identified in examples of his early writings, drawings and other work with religious and pop-culture motifs. Despite the obvious stylistic disparity, a strong conceptual continuity can be seen running from the earlier works on paper through the later writings, objects and earthworks.

Faceted mirrored wall and floor structures represent his initial foray into sculpture in 1964. His sculptures utilize repetitive, modular or polygonal forms based on crystals - structures produced through a loss of energy - and fabricated with materials including mirrorized plastic, mirrored and clear glass, and steel. Key works from 1966 include “Alogon No. 1,” “Plunge,” “Glass Stratum,” “Proposal for a Monument at Anartica” and “Terminal.”

The theme of entropy also ran throughout Smithson’s art and writings and he explored these ideas of decay and renewal, and chaos and order with his nonsites and earthworks. The nonsite is a map, a “landmarker,” constructed primarily from natural materials the artist chose from remote, unpopulated areas or the ruins of collapsed buildings. The materials from this site were brought into the gallery and placed in constructed bins with maps.

Several important nonsites from 1968 to 1969, such as A Nonsite Franklin, New Jersey (1968), Mono Lake Non-Site (Cinders Near Black Point) (1968), Nonsite: Line of Wreckage (Bayonne New Jersey) (1968), and Nonsite, Essen Soil and Mirrors (1969), are featured in the exhibition. Asphalt Rundown (1969) represents one of his earliest earthworks sited in a quarry. Partially Buried Woodshed, (1970) was a piece Smithson created during an invitational arts festival at Kent State University in Ohio. He located an abandoned woodshed onsite and poured earth onto the structure until it cracked. This work is a prime example of Smithson’s visualization of entropy and time. Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971) near the small town of Emmen, the Netherlands, are represented by film documentation as well as related drawings. A film featuring newly compiled footage from Partially Buried Woodshed and Mica Spread will be shown for the first time.

Smithson envisioned a number of large-scale works in abandoned mines that would materialize over time out of waste products found on the sites. These ambitious projects, which he was unable to bring to fruition during his lifetime, remain in the form of drawings.

Following MOCA’s presentation in Los Angeles, the exhibition will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art from Jan. 14 to April 3 and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in summer 2005.

Art Talks are informal discussions on current exhibitions led by arts professionals. The talks take place in the exhibition galleries unless otherwise noted. Attendance is free with museum admission, and no reservations are required.