The museum world of 2005, alas, is no better prepared than it would have been in the 1970s to find an exhibitional format commensurate with Smithson's stature and adequate to his achievement, although he is recognized as one of the most important artists of his time. After all, Smithson's mature work was never intended to be shown in a museum, and indeed much of it is impossible to be shown there except in the form of documentation. What is described as the "first comprehensive American retrospective of Robert Smithson's complex and highly influential body of work," on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 23, is inevitably a fairly entropic aggregation of sculptures in the "primary structures" mode; of juvenilia; of projects sketched out on graph paper, with cryptic notations like pirate maps; of documentary photographs and films of what I will designate his "unmuseumable" works; and examples of what Smithson called "non-sites"--sculptures that sought to overcome the distinction between indoors and outdoors, by bringing what Smithson calls the "focal point" of a site indoors. This meant bringing indoors a group of stones, or some seashells, or even what looks like gravel, and regimenting it by means of shaped containers in various configurations. Often the containers make use of mirrors, so that we see the shells or whatever reflected, giving the viewer some sense of the site from which they have been abstracted. Sometimes the non-site has the look of a gravel pile regularly punctuated with mirrors.

The film Smithson made of Spiral Jetty, projected in one of the galleries, is well worth watching. A critic once wrote that Spiral Jetty was the film, as if the truckloads of boulders were pushed into Great Salt Lake for the sake of being filmed. But films are easy to see. It is, I think, built into Smithson's concept that his monument should be difficult to access--that it would require something of an ordeal to reach Rozel Point and look out over the salt-clad boulders, like the Indians in Mark Tansey's painting.

The show's catalogue makes few concessions to readers unfamiliar with the extensive art-historical literature devoted to the artist. The papers are by members of the A-list of Smithson specialists, writing chiefly if not exclusively for one another. I have no objections to such publications, which are contributions to scholarship of a kind the museum has a duty to support. But they leave the ordinary visitor high and dry. Visitors wander among the non-sites, peer at the drawings, point out doodled spirals to one another, puzzle over the maps, sit on benches in darkened galleries to see the films and wonder what anything has to do with anything else. In my view, Spiral Jetty was the breakthrough work in the epic that was Smithson's journey as an artist. That is why his writing about it is so ecstatic. Everything before it was a kind of search.

The Whitney show succeeds, I think, in projecting a portrait of the artist as a restless demiurge whose basic genre was the monument, though none of his monuments can fit the space at the disposal of curators. The museum ought to be saluted for celebrating a figure who sought to invalidate the premises on which the idea of that institution rests. I would add that Smithson has become the beau idéal of young artists, more than Picasso, more than Duchamp the kind of figure they aspire to be--anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective. In that respect the show tells us something about where we are. Spiral Jetty is a critique of modern life as entropy. The rest belongs to the scholars.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.