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

eturn of what was repressed during modernism’s heyday. The fashion now is the postmodern
allegorical mode.
A Heap of Language (pencil, 1966) Robert Smithson
A: Sure. I think Smithson writes that ‘My sense of language is that is is matter and not ideas,
and that ‘Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures.’
Okay. So maybe that’s the real influence of Smithson and similar artists from the sixties and
seventies. They opened up photography to a more demotic, semiotic-oriented practice.
B: There is even a sense of Smithson’s influence in the recent work of Mark Dion, his
various “Digs,” where detritus and ephemera are dug up and catalogued in the same gallery
space where they were eventually displayed. The visual field becomes a textual one.
A: Shades of Smithson’s Sites/Nonsites. Same kind of breakdown of boundaries between
the gallery and its surrounding context.
B: I would go on to say Smithson’s work opened photographic practice to a ‘new mimesis’
in which the text-image mimes the object of study—the landscape-text—of those banal
industrialscapes. [Beams, as he always does when he lapses into jargon.]
A: [Attempts to clarify the issue.] You mean, those industrialscapes are already texts,
having been worked by techno-cultural forces; that Smithson’s working of those sites in
various ways, from Earthworks to photo works, mimics what had already been done to
them? A sort of superimposing of Smithson’s text upon the already-written-landscape?
[Finishes his Scotch, leans forward to refill his drink; B obliges.]
B: Smithson’s text-images are parasitic upon the host text, the man-altered landscape. So
I guess what you said gets to the crux of matter. Smithson’s works perform a ‘deconstruction’
accomplished by borrowing the aspects of those ‘host’ industrialscapes. A
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