Smithson's Spiral Jetty set in Great Salt Lake, Utah. Created 1970

Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973) was an American artist famous for his land art. Image File history File links Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty (1970) Location: Great Salt Lake, Utah. ... Image File history File links Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty (1970) Location: Great Salt Lake, Utah. ... Satellite Photo of the Great Salt Lake as it looked in the summer of 2003 The Great Salt Lake as seen looking north towards Antelope Island from Sunset Beach Great Salt Lake is an endorheic saline lake in northern Utah, much saltier than the ocean. ... 1970 (MCMLXX in Roman) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1973 (MCMLXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday. ... Artist is a descriptive term applied to a person who engages in an activity deemed to be an art. ... Land art or earth art is a form of art which came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s primarily concerned with the natural environment. ...

Smithson was born in New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League. His early exhibited works were influenced by science fiction and Pop Art using collage. He primarily identified himself as a painter during this time, but after a 3 year hiatus from the art world, Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of minimalism, his works using glass sheet and neon to explore visual refraction and mirroring, in particular the sculpture "Enantiamorphic Chambers". Crystalline structures and the concept of Entropy became of particular interest to him, and inform a number of sculptures completed during this period, including "Alogon". Smithson became affiliated with artists who were identified with the Minimalist or Primary Structures movement, such as Nancy Holt (whom he married), Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt. As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying mathematical impersonality to art that he outlined in essays and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum and for a period was better known as a critic than as an artist. He eventually joined the Dwan Gallery, whose owner Virginia Dwan was an enthusiastic supporter of his work. Official language(s) None defined, English de facto Capital Trenton Largest city Newark Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 47th 22,608 km² 110 km 240 km 14. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... House I, created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1996, is designed to be an optical illusion. ... Collage (From the French, coller, to stick) is the assemblage of different forms creating a new whole. ... For the Nintendo 64 emulator, see 1964 (Emulator). ... This article is about on art and design. ... Robert Morris (b. ... Four-Sided Pyramid, created by LeWitt in 1997, stands in the scupture garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Sol LeWitt (born 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut) is a conceptual artist and painter. ... Artforum is an American contemporary art magazine, based in New York. ...

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dumper trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in the series of 'Non-sites' in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass. In September 1968 Smithson published the essay 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects' in Artforum that promoted the work of the first wave of land art artist and in 1969 began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts of entropy gained from his readings of William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard. Writing remained a critical aspect of Smithson's artwork as well, best exemplified by the essay, "Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan", also published in "Artforum" in September 1968, which documents a series of temporary sculptures made with mirrors at particular locations around the Yucatan peninsula. Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work. The journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist, and his Non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a particular location, as well as the geological artifacts displaced from those sites. In 1970 at Kent State University Smithson created "Partially Buried Woodshed" to illustrate geographical time consuming human history. His most famous work is Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1500 feet long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, salt and red algae. It was entirely submerged by rising lake waters for several years, but has since re-emerged. 1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... Land art or earth art is a form of art which came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s primarily concerned with the natural environment. ... The thermodynamic entropy S, often simply called the entropy in the context of thermodynamics, is a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work. ... William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, essayist, social critic and spoken word performer. ... James Graham Ballard (born November 18, 1930 in Shanghai) is a British novelist. ... Kent State University (also known as Kent State or KSU) is an institution of higher learning located in Kent, Ohio, which is about 40 miles southeast of Cleveland, and 12 miles from Akron, Ohio. ... Spiral Jetty, as seen from Rozel Point Spiral Jetty, considered to be the masterpiece of American sculptor Robert Smithson, is the name of an earthwork sculpture built in 1970. ... Satellite Photo of the Great Salt Lake as it looked in the summer of 2003 The Great Salt Lake as seen looking north towards Antelope Island from Sunset Beach Great Salt Lake is an endorheic saline lake in northern Utah, much saltier than the ocean. ... Official language(s) English Capital Salt Lake City Largest city Salt Lake City Area  - Total  - Width  - Length  - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 13th 219,887 km² 435 km 565 km 3. ... A magnified crystal of salt In chemistry, salt is a term used for ionic compounds composed of positively charged cations and negatively charged anions, so that the product is neutral and without a net charge. ... Classes Florideophyceae Bangiophyceae Cyanidiophyceae The red algae (Rhodophyta, pronounced /ˈrəʊdÉ™(ÊŠ)ËŒfʌɪtÉ™/) are a large group of mostly multicellular, marine algae, including many notable seaweeds. ...

As well as works of art, Smithson produced a good deal of theoretical and critical writing, including the 2D work A Heap of Language, which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. His more theoretical writing is concerned with the relationship of a piece of art to its environment, he developed his concept of sites and non-sites. A site was a work located in a specific outdoor location, while a non-site was a work which could be displayed in any suitable space, such as an art gallery. Spiral Jetty is an example of a sited work, while Smithson's non-site pieces frequently consist of photographs of a particular location, often exhibited alongside some material (such as stones or soil) removed from that location. An art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily paintings, illustrations, and sculpture. ...

On July 20, 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash, while surveying sites for his work Amarillo Ramp in Texas. Official language(s) None. ...

Despite his early death and relatively few surviving major works Smithson has a cult following amongst many contemporary artists. In recent years Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Vik Muniz and Mike Nelson have all made homages to Smithson's works. Tacita Dean (1965- ) is a British visual artist. ... Vik Muniz is an avant-garde artist who experiments with novel media. ...

External link

• http://www.robertsmithson.com
• Pictures of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
• Smithson Sightings Short essay on Smithson by Timothy Don of 3 Quarks Daily