Robert Smithson
The great artist Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, was most known for his land art, including the Spiral Jetty. His writings have become an important part of his oeuvre, particularly in describing sites versus non-sites. I found a series of long interviews between Smithson and Paul Cummings from 1972 - an excerpt is below:
CUMMINGS: I’m curious also, about your interest in religion and theology since it was mentioned in so many kinds of oblique ways on the other side of the tape. Did you have a very strict religious upbringing?
SMITHSON: No. Actually, I was very skeptical even through high school. In high school they thought I was a Communist and an atheist, which I was actually. That problem always seemed to come up. In fact, while I was still going to high school, my friend Danny Donahue and did a joint project, a tape recording for a psychology class. And it was essentially a questioning of the premises of religion drawn mainly from Freud and H.G. Wells.
CUMMINGS: That’s good combination.
SMITHSON: I guess I was always interested in origins and primordial beginnings, you know, the archetypal nature of things. And I guess this was always haunting me all the way until about 1959 and 1960 when I got interested in. Catholicism through T.S. Eliot and through that range of thinking. T.E. Hulme sort of led me to an interest in the Byzantine and in notions of abstraction as a kind of counterpoint to the Humanism of the late Renaissance. I was interested I guess in a kind of iconic imagery that I felt was lurking or buried under a lot of a abstractions at the time.
CUMMINGS: In Pollock.
SMITHSON: Yes. Buried in Pollock and in de Kooning and in Newman, and to that extent still is. My first attempts were in the area of painting. But even in the Artists Gallery show there were paintings carrying titles like White Dinosaur, which I think carries through right now, a similar kind of preoccupation. But I hadn’t developed a conscious idea of abstractions. I was still really wrestling with a kind of anthropomorphic imagery. Then when I when to Rome I was exposed to all the church architecture and I enjoyed all the labyrinthine passageways, the sort of dusty decrepitude of the whole thing. It’s probably a kind of very romantic discovery, that whole world. Prior to the trip to Rome I had just faced the New York art worked and what was developing there. So my trip to Rome was sort of an encounter with European history as a nightmare, you know.
