Mirror-Travels

About this book

"Robert Smithson (1938-1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty - a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake - is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century. Less well known is the fact that the Jetty lies just a few miles from the Golden Spike National Historic Site, location of the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad almost exactly a century earlier. The connection between the Spiral Jetty and the Golden Spike is but one facet of an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithson's work." "Mirror-Travels presents the first thorough investigation of Smithson's encounter with this and other histories as it focuses on the artist's idea of history itself. Spanning Smithson's career, from his little-known early religious paintings to his canonical earthworks of the 1970s, the book argues that Smithson's experiments with memory and temporality, along with his concern with what he called "continuance" - a form of historical connection to the past - cannot be properly understood without attending closely to the specific histories of the sites he engaged. Offering a critical analysis of Smithson's view of time, it provides comprehensive case studies of three of his most influential projects: "The Monuments of Passaic," a sardonic tour of a decaying New Jersey city conducted in the wake of the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act; "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," a textual-sculptural-photographic travelogue that coincided with a series of revolutionary discoveries about Maya history; and the Spiral Jetty."--BOOK JACKET.