Designer of the Month: Robert Smithson

Week 2: Nonsites

As I discussed last week, Robert Smithson's career was all about redefining boundaries. Whether it was refusing to limit himself to just one style or helping to expand the boundaries of the art world with both his art and writing, Smithson wanted to do it all. It was around 1964-65 that he began to consider himself an artist, and 1965-66 that he expanded his definition of self to include writer as well. "I think I started doing works then that were mature," Smithson explains, "I would say that prior to the 1964-65 period I was in a kind of groping, investigating period."[1] Of his writing, Smithson says "that started in 1965-66. But it was a self-taught situation. After about five years of thrashing around on my own, I started to pull my thoughts together and was able to begin writing."[2] Smithson's earliest works were paintings and drawings, many of which adopted religious imagery that grew out of his fascination with what Smithson thought if as "the facade of Catholicism," which soon grew into collages and later, mixed-media works and sculpture.[3] In an 1966 article entitled "Entropy and the New Monuments," Smithson addressed this issue of new large-scale sculpture, drawing on the vantage points of science fiction, monuments, entropy (a favorite topic of Smithson's), and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.[4] Sculpture was, in fact, the direction that his work was taking as it moved not only into the realm of three-dimensions, but eventually out of the gallery all together.[5] But in 1966, the movement out of the gallery was yet to come.

Robert Smithson, Gravel Mirrors with Cracks and Dust, 1968. Photograph by Florian Holzherr. Courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation.

Radical in both idea and constriction, the Nonsite was constructed primarily from natural materials taken from either remote, unpopulated areas or the ruins of a collapsed building, brought into the gallery space, and then either placed in constructed bins, with maps, or situated within formations of mirrors.[6] While the former were indicative of Smithson's first Nonsites, the latter were incorporated with the idea that "the mirror reflects the blank surface in the suburbs of the mind."[7] As Elyse Goldberg explains in the introduction to website of The Estate of Robert Smithson:

The Nonsites, created a dialectic between the outdoors and indoors, and were examples of Smithson's explorations into sight and its simile - site, displacement and location. Literal and allegorical, the Nonsites confounded the illusion of materiality and order. The mirrors functioned to order and displace, to add and subtract, while the sediments, displaced from its original site, blur distinctions between outdoors and indoors as well as refer the viewer back to the site where the materials were originally collected.[8]

 "Earthworks," Dwan Gallery, New York, 1968.[9]

Smithson's first Nonsite that was actually referred to as such was A Nonsite (Pine Barrens, New Jersey) (1968), in which a blue hexagonal base supports small bins that diminish in size as they approach the center of the base, with the bins filled with sand from the small airport that the title refers to, all of which is accompanied by an aerial photograph/map of the site.[10] So where, exactly, did Smithson's idea for the Nonsite evolve from? Smithson says that he owes the inspiration for these works to his time as "artist-consultant" for the engineering and architecture firm of Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton, who hired him to work with them on design proposals for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport in 1966.[11] As Smithson explains of the connection between this project and his later Nonsites:

I did a large spiral, triangular system that sort of just spun out and could only be seen from an airplane. I was sort of interested in the dialogue between the indoor and the outdoor and was on my own, after getting involved in it this way, I developed a method or dialectic that involved what I call site and nonsite. The site, in a sense, is the physical raw reality - the earth or the ground that we are really not aware of when we are in an interior room or studio or something like that - and so I decided that I would set limits in terms of this dialogue (it's a back and forth rhythm that goes between indoors and outdoors), and as a result I went and instead of putting something on the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer land indoors, to the nonsite, which is in an abstract container.[12]

Smithson continued to expand on the idea of the Nonsite in other works, creating close to a dozen of them in 1968, and taking his inspiration from locations as diverse as New Jersey, the Western US and Europe, a number of which were shown at Smithson's solo show at the Dwan Gallery in early 1969.[13]


[1] Eugenie Tsai, "Robert Smithson: Plotting A Line From Passaic, New Jersey, To Amarillo, Texas," Robert Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 12.

[2] Ibid., 12.

[3] Ibid., 15, 19.

[4] Ibid., 21.

[5] Ibid., 21.

[6] Elyse Goldberg, "Introduction: About Robert Smithson," The Estate of Robert Smithson online, http://www.robertsmithson.com/introduction/introduction.htm, (accessed January 6, 2011).

[7] Eugenie Tsai, "Robert Smithson: Plotting A Line From Passaic, New Jersey, To Amarillo, Texas," Robert Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 26.

[8] Elyse Goldberg, "Introduction: About Robert Smithson," The Estate of Robert Smithson online, http://www.robertsmithson.com/introduction/introduction.htm, (accessed January 6, 2011).

[9] Eugenie Tsai, "Robert Smithson: Plotting A Line From Passaic, New Jersey, To Amarillo, Texas," Robert Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 27.

[10] Ibid., 25.

[11] Ibid., 24.

[12] Ibid., 26.

[13] Ibid., 26.