Robert Smithson is one of the most enigmatic artists of the late 20th century. In 1970 he created Spiral Jetty, a snail-like coil of heaped stones that extends far out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This modern monument in the middle of nowhere (for years it vanished under the lake, only to resurface in recent decades; to actually see it is an epic quest) is one of the very few artworks of our age that most people would instantly and unerringly call a masterpiece.
When Smithson built Spiral Jetty, he reinvented the stone age. Its mysterious marking of the landscape deliberately resembles the prehistoric architecture of neolithic Britain, the banks of Avebury and sarsens of Stonehenge. It also has forebears in the Americas, from the Nazca lines of Peru to Ohio’s Serpent Mound. This neo-primitivism lives on in art, from James Turrell’s continuing bid to turn Roden Crater in Arizona into an astral observatory (or temple) to Olafur Eliasson’s current efforts to place 12 huge lumps of Arctic ice in the heart of Paris.
Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973, while working on a new piece of land art in Amarillo, Texas. He left a legacy that is perfect in its inscrutability: a spiralling monument as confounding as the coils of fossil ammonites were to pre-Darwinian eyes.
Yet a new exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery in New York reveals the rich humanity of Smithson – it shows where he came from. It fleshes out this visionary with the startling revelation of his early work.
Robert Smithson started out as a pop artist on the art scene in early 1960s New York. His first works are dazzling, comic, riotous cartoons of sex and symbolism. Smithson was to become a romantic of American nature, but he began as a very urban artist who pastiched porn and mocked Americana. The colourful pop art in the new exhibition mixes collage and drawing, desire and decoration. A photo of the Medici Venus poses among sketches of bikers; Giorgione’s Reclining Venus basks nakedly at the heart of a psychedelic starburst; Native American warriors are juxtaposed with women in stockings.
It’s all so ... 1960s. These hilarious, superabundant works of art are like a lusty marriage between Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen montages and Robert Crumb’s explicit comic books.
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How did the artist who drew these fantastic New York frolics become a maker of monuments in the wilderness?
Smithson emerges here as a character of his time, deeply involved in the 60s cultural revolution that embraced hedonism, personal freedom and what Andy Warhol called “all the great modern things”. But that revolution moved fast. In these early works up to 1964, Smithson is an ironic consumer of big-city pleasures. By the later 60s, hippy culture was embracing nature. In 1967, Bob Dylan and the Band were recording raw folk-rock in a retreat near Woodstock. In the year Smithson made Spiral Jetty, Joni Mitchell recorded her eco-pop classic Big Yellow Taxi and Neil Young released his melancholic rustic musings on After the Goldrush.
After the Goldrush – it says it all. The enthusiastic consumerism of pop art gives way to the romance of land art just as pop gives way to psychedelic country rock at the end of the 1960s.
Robert Smithson’s short creative life is an American epic, the story of a visionary who got out of the city to find the truth in the vast horizons of the west.
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