![]() In the year Smithson made Spiral Jetty, Joni Mitchell recorded her eco-pop classic Big Yellow Taxi and Neil Young released his melancholic rustic musings on After the Goldrush.Īfter the Goldrush – it says it all. In 1967, Bob Dylan and the Band were recording raw folk-rock in a retreat near Woodstock. By the later 60s, hippy culture was embracing nature. In these early works up to 1964, Smithson is an ironic consumer of big-city pleasures. Smithson emerges here as a character of his time, deeply involved in the 60s cultural revolution that embraced hedonism, personal freedom and what Andy Warhol called “all the great modern things”. How did the artist who drew these fantastic New York frolics become a maker of monuments in the wilderness? These hilarious, superabundant works of art are like a lusty marriage between Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen montages and Robert Crumb’s explicit comic books. A photo of the Medici Venus poses among sketches of bikers Giorgione’s Reclining Venus basks nakedly at the heart of a psychedelic starburst Native American warriors are juxtaposed with women in stockings. The colourful pop art in the new exhibition mixes collage and drawing, desire and decoration. Smithson was to become a romantic of American nature, but he began as a very urban artist who pastiched porn and mocked Americana. His first works are dazzling, comic, riotous cartoons of sex and symbolism. Robert Smithson started out as a pop artist on the art scene in early 1960s New York. Photograph: Adam Reich/© Holt-Smithson Foundation/VAGA/James Cohan This neo-primitivism lives on in art, from James Turrell’s continuing bid to turn Roden Crater in Arizona into an astral observatory (or temple) to Olafur Eliasson’s current efforts to place 12 huge lumps of Arctic ice in the heart of Paris. It also has forebears in the Americas, from the Nazca lines of Peru to Ohio’s Serpent Mound. Its mysterious marking of the landscape deliberately resembles the prehistoric architecture of neolithic Britain, the banks of Avebury and sarsens of Stonehenge. When Smithson built Spiral Jetty, he reinvented the stone age. This modern monument in the middle of nowhere (for years it vanished under the lake, only to resurface in recent decades to actually see it is an epic quest) is one of the very few artworks of our age that most people would instantly and unerringly call a masterpiece. In 1970 he created Spiral Jetty, a snail-like coil of heaped stones that extends far out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. ![]() Robert Smithson is one of the most enigmatic artists of the late 20th century.
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