I happened to stumble upon the estate website of artist Robert Smithson the other day. His work and writings have had a huge influence on my thoughts regarding the nature of art, but more specifically in respect to human appropriation of the landscape and our tendency to immortalize monuments. I thought I'd share some of the essays of his which I found particularly insightful. The first, Entropy And The New Monuments, is a critical look at the function of Modern architecture, which "instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments...seems to cause us to forget the future." The second, Cultural Confinement (originally published in Artforum in 1972), explores the rigidity of the gallery/museum model of exhibition.
Corner Mirror with Coral. 1969
Work © Robert Smithson
