We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Robert Smithson's Environmental History.
- Authors
Menard, Andrew
- Abstract
Robert Smithson's relationship to nineteenth-century landscape has long been under-theorized. This article attempts to foreground it as an aspect of environmentalism. One of Smithson's most emblematic themes was entropy--that is, the prospect of landscape steadily rising, not falling, into ruin. As a way of identifying space with a 'discarded idea of time,' entropy can be seen as a historical category. Thus it is easy to see why Smithson might have been fascinated by the various mining and industrial sites that were gradually depleted and abandoned during the nineteenth-century. It is equally easy to see why an 'ecological despair' prompted him to distance himself from the many literary historians, art historians, and environmentalists who responded to the industrial sprawl of the 1950s and 60s by harking back to the nineteenth-century landscape as some sort of pristine or pastoral paradise. Smithson emphatically resisted this nostalgic or elegiac ideal by picturing a fully engineered space that remains as relevant to environmental thought today as it did then.
- Subjects
SMITHSON, Robert, 1938-1973; LAND art; AMERICAN artists; ECOLOGICAL art; THEMES in art; INDUSTRIAL sites
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2014, Vol 37, Issue 3, p285
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/kcu018