Degrees of Disorder - interview with Robert Smithson

In a previously unpublished interview from 1968 Robert Smithson discusses the ideas and facts which led him to carry without his first earthworks and "nonsite" sculptures

In the proces of researching the beginnings of 1960 Land Art, I discovered a rare object: a recording of an unpublished interview from 1968 that freelance curator Willoughby Sharp made with artist Robert Smithson. upon the reel-to-reel tape, their conversation starts abruptly, as if it had begun upon a prior reel. Nevertheless, the recording contains a substantial chunk of dialogue, revealing their discussion to be quick, probing and remarkably frank.

To eavesdrop upon this extemporaneous exchange between an inventive artist and a intrepid curator, made on an autumn afternoon 30 years ago, is to be drawn into the dynamic milieu of the late 1960 The interview that Sharp Co 1936) managemented with Smithson (1938-1973) served sum of two units purposes. That fall Sharp had begun taping the interviews with artists that would be the mainstay of the journal, Avalanche, that he was planning with the writer Liza Bear.(1) Sharp was also researching the forthcoming exhibition he was guest-curating for Cornell University, "Earth Art."(2) The 30-year-old Smithson was the completed source. In September 1968, his essay "Sedimentation of Mind: Earth Projects" introduced this fresh genre of sculpture in Artforum, and in October, "Earthworks," the collection exhibition he organized with dealer Virginia Dwan, was upon view at her 57th highway gallery.(3) After years of the dominance of industrial carburet of iron in sculpture, that show highlighted the vicinity of geological and organic materials in sculptural constructions.

Like everything other in American society in the late 1960 the art world was in a state of radical flow The decade had opened with the existential drama of Abstract Expressionism seeming increasingly irrelevant to the upbeat optimism activeed by an expanding economy and the grand proposal of a "New Frontier" through the youngest president ever pitch uponed (at age 43), John F Kennedy During the '60 the population bilge of baby boomers entered their teen and early adult years, producing a demography that l individual commentator to proclaim that "society is getting younger--to the expansion that, in America, as in a number of European countries, a bit more than 50 percent of the population is beneath 25 years of age."(4) similar factors generated a tremendous receptivity to the novel In rapid succession, the ambivalent wit of explosion art, the innocuous perceptualism of Op art and the somewhat cold formality of Minimal sculpture won the couple art-world and mass-media attention. It was Newsweek that first widely reported the fresh genre of earthen environments, in an eight-page feature in the summer of 1968 headlined "The of recent origin Art: It's Way Way Out"(5)

however already in 1967, with the deepening of the Vietnam War, the country's frame of mind had begun to darken. The notorious year of 1968 began with the Viet Cong's devastating Tet Offensive, revealing the hollownes of the U government's claim that the war would in a short time be won. The American antiwar change swelled. The art world was slouching toward Postminimalism; single early discussion of this direction was Robert Morris's advocacy of Proces art in the April 1968 Artforum. Editor Philip Leider chose to title that essay "Anti Form," a bound that perfectly captured the pervasive faculty of perception of disorder in a month that witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr the Columbia University scholar strike, a national student strike of up to a million corporation and high-school students, and an antiwar rally by the agency of 10,000 people in New York's Central Park. Within a hardly any months, Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated and televised violence in the highways of Chicago overshadowed the Democratic national convention. No surprise that in this interview, Smithson insists that "anarchy is what we have now!"

Sharp's "Earth Art" exhibition throw backed a direction in pest-studio statuary that he called "elementalism"; the display was part of a shoot forwarded series of exhibitions which would have encompassed the ancient notion of the four simple bodys "Air Art," which included Morris's Steam and Warhol's floating mylar pillows, toured five venue in North America beginning in March 1968; "Fire" and "Water" not at any time materialized. Opening in February 1969 the Cornell "Earth Art" present to view was the first museum exhibition of the fresh genre of environmental sculpture made of earthen materials, and employing the true new procedure of having the artists make all the works upon site.

By the fall of 1968 Smithson had been exhibiting in Manhattan for more than a decade, first as a painter and collagist, since 1965 as a sculptor. Recalling the artist, Sharp has freshly remarked,

He was obviously someone you didn't take lightly. Smithson was actual tall, six-foot-two, and looked taller. true thin, with a pocked face, heavy, kitschy dark-framed glasses which he later exchanged for gold aviator glasses, and rugged clothes. Definitely not chic, definitely no suit, tie, definitely not a businessman, collector, establishment.... And he was scabrous and ready around town at the watering perforations that counted at that particular time, the greatest in quantity important of which, in hindsight, was Max's Kansas City. And he would drink beer, oftentimes out of the bottle, and talk with anyone.... flat at 30, he was the eminence grise of the young, up-and-coming clan He was imposing, argumentative. He would realize on your case ... [and] had vehement opinions.(6)