Robert Smithson – The Collected Writings The Collected Writings

"An argument could be made that Robert Smithson is at least as important as a thinker and critic as he is as an artist, and in the art history of the Seventies, his words are certain to be returned to and returned to. He is one of those figures whose thought at once defines and transcends his own time."--Arthur C. Danto, author of "Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the poster child for the antiformalist Earth Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A coil of earth, salt, and stone that Smithson built into Great Salt Lake, Utah, the piece is a tribute to the movement's scale and engineering as well as to its visionary union of art and nature. Smithson's questioning of the conventional attitudes of art and culture did not stop with the creation of objects and images; he was committed to exploring of attitudes and ideas as a critical component of his work. A revised and expanded version of The Writings of Robert Smithson, this book is a charged combination of articles and images in which the author demystifies the distinction between theory and practice.