Catalogue printed on the occasion of the exhibition 'Robert Smithson in Texas' at the Dallas Museum of Art, November 24, 2013 - April 27, 2014

Publisher Description

An examination of the interplay between cultural context and artistic practice in the work of Robert Smithson. Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps more consistently and thoroughly than any time before or since. In Robert Smithson, Ann Reynolds elucidates the complexity of Smithson's work and thought by placing them in their historical context, a context greatly enhanced by the vast archival materials that Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1987. The archive provides Reynolds with the remnants of Smithson's working life—magazines, postcards from other artists, notebooks, and perhaps most important, his library—from which she reconstructs the physical and conceptual world that Smithson inhabited. Reynolds explores the relation of Smithson's art-making, thinking about art-making, writing, and interaction with other artists to the articulated ideology and discreet assumptions that determined the parameters of artistic practice of the time. A central focus of Reynolds's analysis is Smithson's fascination with the blind spots at the center of established ways of seeing and thinking about culture. For Smithson, New Jersey was such a blind spot, and he returned there again and again—alone and with fellow artists—to make art that, through its location alone, undermined assumptions about what and, more important, where, art should be. For those who guarded the integrity of the established art world, New Jersey was "elsewhere"; but for Smithson, "elsewheres" were the defining, if often forgotten, locations on the map of contemporary culture.

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most important artists of his generation, produced sculpture, drawings, photographs, films, and paintings in addition to the writings collected here.

More than any other decade, the sixties capture our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King Jr. declaring “I have a dream!” or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels, the revolutionary sixties resonates around the world: China’s communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets, calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War. In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

In 1912, at age 24, Georgia O’Keeffe boarded a train in Virginia and headed west, to the prairies of the Texas Panhandle, to take a position as art teacher for the newly organized Amarillo Public Schools. Subsequently she would join the faculty at what was then West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University). Already a thoroughly independent-minded woman, she maintained an active correspondence with her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and other friends back east during the years she lived in Texas. Amy Von Lintel brings to readers the collected O’Keeffe correspondence and added commentary and analysis, shining fresh light on a period of the artist’s life she characterizes as “some of the least appreciated in the vast O’Keeffe scholarship,” but also as “a time when she discovered her own voice as a young, successful, and independent woman . . . a dedicated faculty member at a brand-new college . . . a vibrant social butterfly . . . a progressive woman who spoke her mind and fought for her beliefs to be heard.” Although selected paintings by O’Keeffe that support the narrative are featured, this work focuses on O’Keeffe’s words. By doing so, Von Lintel aims to allow the artist’s voice to “emerge as a powerful witness of her own life, but also of western America in a pivotal moment of its development.” The result is an important new examination of one of our most beloved artists during a time when she was in the process of discovering her future identity.

Newly available in paperback, this landmark volume is the definitive study of the work of visionary American artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014). Since the late 1960s, Holt’s wide-ranging production has included Land art—particularly the monumental Sun Tunnels (1973–76)—as well as significant projects in sculpture, installation, photography, film, and video. A comprehensive representation of Holt’s working process in both word and image, Alena J. Williams’s momentous publication illuminates the artist’s interest in physical space and reveals how the geographic variety and boundlessness of the American landscape afforded her numerous opportunities to develop large-scale projects beyond the confines of New York City’s gallery walls. Contributions by a distinguished group of writers—including Pamela M. Lee, Lucy R. Lippard, Ines Schaber, and Matthew Coolidge—chart Holt’s fascinating trajectory from her initial experiments with sound, light, and industrial materials to major site interventions and environmental sculpture. James Meyer’s valuable interview with Holt and Julia Alderson’s illustrated chronology expand our knowledge of this groundbreaking artist and the crucial contexts in which she worked. More than twenty original writings by the artist and a rare selection of her concrete poetry, documentary photographs, and preparatory drawings reveal Holt’s revolutionary concepts of space, time, optics, and scale.

Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. Spiral Jetta is a chronicle of this journey. A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks of the 1970s and the 1980s—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, and the contemporary art mecca of Marfa, Texas. Armed with spotty directions, no compass, and less-than-desert-appropriate clothing, she found most of what she was looking for and then some. “I was never quite sure what Hogan was looking for when she set out . . . or indeed whether she found it. But I loved the ride. In Spiral Jetta, an unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book, art doesn’t magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing.”—Tom Vanderbilt, New YorkTimes Book Review “The reader emerges enlightened and even delighted. . . . Casually scrutinizing the artistic works . . . while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingeniously engaging travelogue-cum-art history.”—Atlantic “Smart and unexpectedly hilarious.”—Kevin Nance, ChicagoSun-Times “One of the funniest and most entertaining road trips to be published in quite some time.”—June Sawyers, ChicagoTribune “Hogan ruminates on how the work affects our sense of time, space, size, and scale. She is at her best when she reexamines the precepts of modernism in the changing light of New Mexico, and shows how the human body is meant to be a participant in these grand constructions.”—New Yorker

" Art & Place is an extraordinary collection of site–specific art in the Americas. Featuring hundreds of powerful art works in 60 cities – from Albuquerque to Boston and Baja to Rio de Janeiro – the book is both an informative guide and a virtual bucket list of outstanding art destinations. Conceived and developed by Phaidon editors, Art & Place covers carving, painting, murals, frescos, earthworks, land art, and more. Each of the works has a dedicated entry pairing gorgeous, large‐format images with in‐depth descriptions. Maps pinpoint the sites’ locations while specially commissioned plans reveal some of the more complex layouts. The book is organized geographically, offering fresh juxtapositions among familiar art works, such as Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, alongside lesser-known revelations, such as Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brazil. Whether in the mountains, at the heart of a city, or on a remote island, the works in Art & Place are all inextricably linked with their environment. This is art to experience in an immersive way, presented together in a single book for the first time. "