Editing Robert Smithson (section)

===Later work===
====Non-sites====
In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of [[dump truck]]s excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity.<ref name="writings" /> 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. Works from this period include ''Eight-Part Piece (Cayuga Salt Mine Project)'' (1969) and ''Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis)'' (1969).<ref name="Hobbs" /> 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]] artists, and in 1969 he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts gained from his readings of [[William S. Burroughs]], [[J. G. Ballard]], and [[George Kubler]].<ref name="writings" /> 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.<ref name="Roberts">{{cite book |last1=Roberts |first1=Jennifer L. |title=Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History |date=2004 |publisher=Yale University Press |location=New Haven |isbn=0-300-09497-3}}</ref><ref name="writings" /> Of these travels, several on-site works were produced including Mirror Displacements<ref name="Hobbs" /> a series of photographs that illustrated his essay "Incidents of Mirror Travels in the Yucatan" (1969).<ref name="writings" />

====Writings====
Smithson produced theoretical and critical writing in addition to visual art. In addition to essays his  writings included visual-text formats such as the 2D paper work ''A Heap of Language'', which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. In his essay ''Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan'' Smithson documents a series of temporary sculptures made with mirrors at particular locations around the [[Yucatan Peninsula]].<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1969 }},</ref> Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern with the [[wikt:Temporal|temporal]] as a cornerstone of his work.<ref name="Getty symposium">{{cite web |last1=Martin |first1=Timothy D. |title=Robert Smithson and the Anglo-American Picturesque |url=https://www.getty.edu/museum/symposia/pdf_stark/stark_tmartin.pdf |publisher=Getty (2011) |access-date=June 11, 2019}}</ref>

Other theoretical writings explore the relationship of a piece of art to its environment, from which 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.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://chrismcauliffe.com.au/sightnon-sight-robert-smithson-and-photography-1997/|title=Sight/non-sight: Robert Smithson and photography, 1997 {{!}} Chris McAuliffe|date=June 28, 2014 |language=en-US|access-date=March 16, 2019}}</ref>

As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying the [[Dialectic]]al method and [[generative art|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. Some of Smithson's later writings recovered 18th- and 19th-century conceptions of [[landscape architecture]] which influenced the pivotal earthwork explorations which characterized his later work. He eventually joined the Dwan Gallery, whose owner [[Virginia Dwan]] was an enthusiastic supporter of his work.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/artist/oral-history/virginia-dwan|title=Virginia Dwan|date=September 16, 2016|website=Robert Rauschenberg Foundation|language=en|access-date=March 16, 2019}}</ref> In the late 1960s Smithson's work was published in [[0 to 9 Magazine|0 to 9 magazine]], an avant-garde publication which experimented with language and meaning-making.

====Frederick Law Olmsted's influence====
Smithson's interest in the [[wikt:Temporal|temporal]] is explored in his writings in part through the recovery of the ideas of the [[picturesque]]. His essay ''[[Frederick Law Olmsted]] and the Dialectical Landscape'' was written in 1973 after Smithson had seen an exhibition curated by [[Elizabeth Barlow Rogers]] at the [[Whitney Museum]] entitled ''Frederick Law Olmsted's New York'' as the cultural and temporal context for the creation of his late-19th-century design for Central Park.<ref name="writings" /><ref name="Getty symposium" /> In examining the photographs of the land set aside to become Central Park, Smithson saw the barren landscape that had been degraded by humans before Olmsted constructed the complex 'naturalistic' landscape that was viscerally apparent to New Yorkers in the 1970s. Smithson was interested in challenging the prevalent conception of [[Central Park]] as an outdated 19th-century picturesque aesthetic in landscape architecture that had a static relationship within the continuously evolving urban fabric of New York City. In studying the writings of 18th- and 19th-century picturesque treatise writers Gilpin, Price, Knight and Whately, Smithson recovers issues of site specificity and human intervention as dialectic landscape layers, experiential multiplicity, and the value of deformations manifest in the picturesque landscape.<ref name="Getty symposium" /> Smithson further implies in this essay that what distinguishes the picturesque is that it is based on real land.<ref name="auto">{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 160 }}.</ref> For Smithson, a park exists as "a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region".<ref name="auto"/> Smithson was interested in [[Central Park]] as a landscape which by the 1970s had weathered and grown as Olmsted's creation, and was layered with new evidence of human intervention.<ref name="writings" />

{{blockquote|Now the Ramble has grown up into an urban jungle, and lurking in its thickets are "hoods, hobos, hustlers, and homosexuals," and other estranged creatures of the city{{nbsp}}.... Walking east, I passed [[graffiti]] on boulders{{nbsp}}... On the base of [[Cleopatra's Needle (New York City)|the Obelisk]] along with the hieroglyphs there are also graffiti.{{nbsp}}... In the spillway that pours out of the Wollman Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket half-submerged in the water. Further down, the spillway becomes a brook choked with mud and tin cans. The mud then spews under the [[Gapstow Bridge]] to become a muddy slough that inundates a good part of The Pond, leaving the rest of The Pond aswirl with oil slicks, sludge, and Dixie cups.<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | pp = 169–170 }}.</ref>}}

In revisiting the 18th- and early 19th-century treatises of the picturesque, which Olmsted interpreted in his practice, Smithson exposes threads of an anti-aesthetic anti-formalist logic and a theoretical framework of the picturesque that addressed the [[dialectic]] between the physical landscape and its temporal context. By re-interpreting and re-valuing these treatises, Smithson was able to broaden the temporal and intellectual context for his own work, and to offer renewed meaning for Central Park as an important work of [[modern art]] and landscape architecture.<ref name="Getty symposium" />

====Industrial ruins and disrupted landscapes====
While Smithson did not find "beauty" in the evidence of abuse and neglect, he did see the state of things as demonstrative of the continually transforming relationships between humans and landscape. He claimed, "the best sites for 'earth art' are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, or nature's own devastation."<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 165}}.</ref> Smithson became particularly interested in the notion of industrial decay within the spectrum of anti-aesthetic [[wikt:dynamic|dynamic]] relationships which he saw present in the picturesque landscape.  In his proposal to make [[process art]] out of the dredging of The Pond in Central Park, Smithson sought to insert himself into the dynamic evolution of the park.<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 170 }}.</ref> While in earlier 18th-century formal characterizations of the [[pastoral]] and the [[wikt:sublime|sublime]], something like a "gash in the ground" or pile of rocks, if encountered by a "leveling improver", as described by Price, would have been smoothed over and the area terraformed into a more aesthetically pleasing contour.<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 159 }}</ref> For Smithson, it was not necessary that the disruption become a visual aspect of a landscape; by his anti-formalist logic, more important was the temporal scar worked over by natural or human intervention. He saw parallels to Olmsted's Central Park as a "sylvan" green overlay on the depleted landscape that preceded his Central Park <ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 158 }}.</ref> Defending himself against allegations that he and other earth artists "cut and gouge the land like Army engineers", Smithson, in his own essay, charges that one of such opinions "failed to recognize the possibility of a direct organic manipulation of the land.." and would "turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscapes".<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 163 }}.</ref>