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  • Catastrophe Theories
  • Caroline Jones
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. $24.95 (paper).
Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel. Gary Shapiro. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. $34.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

There is no escape from the physical nor is there any escape from the mind. The two are in a constant collision course. You might say that my work is like an artistic disaster. It is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.

—Robert Smithson, 1969

Careening to maturity in the early 1960s, the American artist Robert Smithson entered an artworld of energetic complexity. On the one hand, there was an ossifying Clement Greenberg, whose view of a teleological and linear modernism was intended to culminate with dire Hegelian logic in the painters of the New York School. On the other hand, there was a restless mass of younger artists eager to position themselves as next in line, generating divergent styles that critics struggled to group and name: Minimalism, Pop, Op, Specific Objects, Earthworks, Conceptualism. Were these “-isms” the last proliferative blooms of a decadent modernism, or signs of its renewed vitality? Were they, as Greenberg claimed, merely commodified simulacra that masked the true inheritors of the modernist line (which he would soon “discover” in Color Field painting), or did they constitute manifestations of modernism’s newest shadow, postmodernism?

Robert Smithson took his time staking out a position, but when he did, it was a compelling one. His dialectical sensibility—formed in the same autodidactic way as Clement Greenberg’s—found a way out of Greenberg’s limited telos, and the “quiet catastrophe” theories he developed as part of his work are both poetic and extraordinarily powerful. 1 Critiquing [End Page 166] the linear focus of teleological modernism itself (with its roots in both Western scopic regimes and Hegelian philosophies of history), Smithson argued for a vision that was peripheral, distracted, and dispersed, and called for a sense of vast duration that would collapse the prehistoric into the posthistoric (rendering modern history a mere fold in the strata of geological time). His practice assumed an authorship (and spectatorial relation) elastic enough to encourage collaboration, appropriation, and the dissolution of ego. In most circles, he is now considered a crucial contributor to critical postmodernism as it was articulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York.

Smithson has only become more interesting since his accidental death in an airplane crash (while surveying a site) in 1973. Spurred in part by the persistent curiosity of contemporary artists such as Peter Halley, a few shows of Smithson’s early work were mounted in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, peaking with Eugenie Tsai’s important Robert Smithson Unearthed (1991). This exposure of early material was followed by single-media monographs such as Robert Sobieszek’s Robert Smithson: Photo Works (1993) and the edited volume Robert Smithson: Zeichnungen aus dem Nachlass (1989 [Drawings from his archive]). Most recently, international retrospective exhibitions with thick catalogues, epitomized by the 1994 Spanish/French editions of Robert Smithson . . . El Paisaje Entropico / Le paysage entropique (Robert Smithson . . . the entropic landscape), have continued the seemingly inexhaustible outpouring of unknown work from the late artist’s estate.

While they motivate the market interest in Smithson, the objects alone would never have been enough to secure this artist’s importance. His writings established him as a crucial voice, one known for its sardonic wit, theoretical reach, and mind-blowing metaphors (who else would speak of Minimalism’s “fossilized sexuality”?) 2 The long modernist tradition of the artist-interpreter dyad (Paul Cézanne/Émile Bernard, Pablo Picasso/D. H. Kahnweiler, Jackson Pollock/Clement Greenberg) was broken with the appearance of this gangly science nerd from New Jersey—for Smithson’s strange objects had their best exegete in Smithson himself.

There is a growing sense in the artworld that Smithson’s discursive projects may have constituted his most powerful art—a particularly compelling argument in the case of Smithson’s best-known icon, the intermittently material but always influential Spiral Jetty). 3 Sometimes simple essays, these projects were more often elaborately laid out graphic structures in which chunks of...

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