It's Art, But Is It Photography? Robert Smithson's - Uturn.org

B: [Those silky blue eyes scan the
horizon.] Yes. The desert fits the film
frame, the screen. It seems meant for framing.
Ah, my mind works better in the
desert. It becomes a tabula rasa eager for
new impressions. The simplest shape has
enormous power.
A: Smithson remarked that ‘The mind is
always being hurled toward the outer edge
into intractable trajectories that lead to
vertigo.’
B: That from Smithson’s essay “A
Museum of Language?”
A: Uh-huh. Here at the center, this Jetty is
less intelligible than when it is seen from Spiral Jetty (contact prints) Robert Smithson
a distance, and ‘that distance’—as Craig
Owens observes in his nineteen seventy-nine essay “Earthwords”—’is most often achieved
by imposing a text between viewer and work.’ This is the case even with those industrial
wastelands Smithson was drawn to—from Passaic, New Jersey to Oberhausen, Germany
—and which he obsessively photographed. The more dangerous the waste, the more heroic
it will become.
B: [Ignores the remark.] Think of those classic American Westerns, pardner. Look at us
here. Figures with dusty boots in open space. A place of hesitations. Textures. It’s what
Westerns are all about, right? Mountain man, Jim Bridger, was the first white man to see
this place. In 1825, I believe. But they didn’t have photography to memorialize the event,
provide evidence. [Despite his sunglasses, he turns slightly to avoid the direct sunlight.]
A: People didn’t take the first-hand descriptions of Yellowstone area as truthful until in the
late-nineteenth century William Henry Jackson gave them photographic evidence. Later the
area was declared a National Park. In a reversal of type of subject, Smithson documents
dystopic, wasted landscapes, but in hopes of redeeming them.
B: And, like Jackson’s images, Smithson’s photographs were framed as art. On the one
hand, Smithson’s photo works are documents of those trashed landscapes, and on the other,
they are art. In modernist photo historian Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography
separate chapters reenforce the difference between ‘art photography’ and ‘documentary
photography.’ Smithson’s and other conceptualists’ photo works certainly challenge
reductive, traditional pigeonholes. Craig Owens says this due to Smithson’s use of
allegory which ‘marks the dissolution of the boundaries between the arts.’
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