Robert Smithson at the Whitney

Robert Smithson at the Whitney

A retrospective of Smithson's work is currently on view at the Whitney. There is a lot of growth throughout the progress of the development of his work despite his short life span. His most interesting pieces are his Mirror Pieces which are various mirrors installed with smatterings of shells, sand and rocks. The effect is the creation of an endless kaleidoscopic view of the material.

Smithson's most famous piece, the Spiral Jetty in Utah is documented with Smithson's drafts and plans. There is a video piece of the Spiral Jetty, which at first seems like a documentary of the Spiral Jetty, but is actually an autonomous video piece with the Spiral Jetty as the focus, and is meant to be viewed as an independent piece as opposed to a traditional documentary video.

During the docent tour, the issue of the conservation of Smithson's earth art was raised. Should earth art be conserved? Should it be maintained in order to ensure that it retains the state it was created as? Or should the work be left alone to evolve?

Questions were raised regarding the issue of whether the Spiral Jetty's rocks should be refreshed or left as is, to emerge and re-emerge despite the rising of the waters of the salt lakes.

The first response to the aforementioned issues would be that the answer regarding the preservation or the action to not preserve Earth Art should be decided by the artist who creates the work. Smithson never left a formal response to whether the Spiral Jetty should be preserved or not. The Spiral Jetty has actually been submerged by the water of the Salt Lakes and has recently re-emerged coated with salt crystals.

Earth Art should not be maintained because the natural evolution of the work that is a result of natural elements that occur within the site becomes part of the work, and actually creates a physical dialogue between the Earth work and the environment.

My favorite line from the docent tour was Smithson's method of defining entropy is a vivid image that elegantly explains the concept:
Entropy is like a sandbox where there are two colors of sands separated into two areas, one black and one white. Ask a kid to run around the sandbox in a clockwise manner, and this causes the sand to turn gray because the black and white sand mixes together. However, you cannot ask the kid to run counterclockwise to reverse the mixture of sand. This is entropy.