Robert Smithson and the American Landscape

Robert Smithson and the American Landscape is a social history of the artist’s earthworks and their critical reception. Providing a close analysis of Smithson’s own writings and art works, Ron Graziani demonstrates how his earthworks were part of an aesthetic and civic fault line that ruptured in the 1960s. Smithson’s humanized environments were a powerful indictment of modernist sense of art and nature. Moreover, Graziani shows how Smithson’s earthworks formed part of what was called the ‘new conservationism’ in the late 1960s and how they gave material form to the contradictions of a sociological issue that was inseparable from its economic legacy.

• Provides context of the social history of the mining industry and the ecological movement in the 1960s • Close readings of specific artworks • Critical analysis of postmodern theory

Introduction: Grounding art history; 1. Blasted landscapes; 2. Prospecting for culture; (n)onsite inspections; 3. An aesthetic foreman in the mining industry; 4. Lunar pastures; Conclusion: Nature with class.