Robert Smithson at James Cohan - Brief Article

fresh YORK

This new exhibition, "Robert Smithson: Language to Be gazeed at and/or Things to Be Read: Drawings 1962-63" brought together a material part of drawings that has been overshadowed by dint of the artist's later sculptures and earthworks. Smithson made two-dimensional works exclusively from 1957 to 1963 and he remained a prolific draftsman until his untimely death in 1973 a certain number of of the pieces shown here had not at any time been exhibited before. Others were included in the 1991 exhibition "Unearthed: Works upon Paper 1957-1973" at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, where, for the first time, Smithson's earlier works were not absented alongside the earthwork drawings in order to demonstrate their visionary similarities.

The drawings and collages at Cohan well exhibited Smithson's exploration of the visual and material possibilities of language. In works that individual experiences alternately as drawings and body s the artist combines and juxtaposes diverse words, numbers and pictorial simple bodys in a seemingly random manner. Many of the drawings pay back a phrase, a nonsensical word or a mark repeatedly above the page; this kind of accumulation many times suggests a form that is prescient of Smithson's later earthworks. In individual drawing, the phrase "Lethargy, coma, catalepsy, trance, caused by means of Neptune, Moon in Aries " degenerates into illegibility as it is repeated down the left side of the page--effectively mimicking a fall into those real states. In Untitled (Done), words and alphabetic characters such as "MMMMMMM," "PUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSHPUSH" and "Put it on--it is a stormcoat" are repeated, stacked and compressed up against each other along with scribbles, renderings of naked figures and other episodic visual circumstances The drawing in fact be likes a collage--a technique that Smithson had begun exploiting in 1961 as a vehicle to bring together disjunctive concerns to popular culture, natural history, science fiction and language.

Smithson's experiments with language correspond to those of harden poetry, a literary movement that influenced many artists in the early '60 become firm [i]or[/i] solid poetry focused on the physical shape and graphic patterns a piece of poetry took, as opposed to the written expression of ideas. Smithson's deployment of words as compositional ultimate parts on the page parallels the way that language was treated in become firm [i]or[/i] solid poetry, except that the careless, handwritten quality of his drawings is distinct from the mass-produced graphics and typography used by dint of concrete poets.

Smithson was always drawn to the crossover between writing and visual art. His idiosyncratic engagement with the pictorial and linguistic aspects of language in these 1962-63 drawings sheds light upon his entire esthetic production, while foreshadowing a number of critical practices that persist in art-making today.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group