Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and elsewhere.
Item
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Title
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Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and elsewhere.
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Identifier
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AAI9510710
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identifier
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9510710
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Creator
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Reynolds, Ann Morris.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rosalind Krauss
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History
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Abstract
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This dissertation provides a study of the early sculpture and writings of Robert Smithson, bracketed by his mirrored wall reliefs of 1963/64 and his 1967 article "The Monuments of Passaic." In this work, Smithson consistently addresses the relationship between perception and visual expectations, and how conventions shape this relationship.;In the first section of the dissertation, I analyze two types of sculpture executed by Smithson during the mid-1960s: his serial sculpture and enantiomorphs. I identify the perceptual paradigms--linear perspective and transparency--he seeks to undermine, both through the design of these works and what he has to say about them, and how his critiques address the larger contemporary discourse on both abstraction and perception in general during this period. Specifically, I consider E. H. Gombrich's 1960 Art and Illusion, Clement Greenberg's 1961 Art and Culture, M. D. Vernon's 1962 The Psychology of Perception, and William Seitz's 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye.".;The second half of the dissertation is devoted to a discussion of Smithson's 1966-67 work and writings about New Jersey, particularly his two published essays, "The Crystal Land" and "The Monuments of Passaic." Smithson and many of his contemporaries considered areas outside Manhattan the true "elsewheres" of the New York art world. But the assumption that culture was equivalent to a particular place--New York, Chicago, Los Angeles--or to particular spaces within these cities seemed increasingly untenable by the mid sixties. This uncertainty led to an analysis of the process of aesthetic and even general visual encounter outside the culturally predefined. Smithson recognized that the increasing tension he felt between his method of ordering his experiences of New Jersey and his personal awareness of the actual landscape that spread before him was not merely the result of the place, but of the terms of his own "art world" expectations. Using new tools--maps and the camera--he once again manipulates the conventional elements of linear perspective--orthagonals and vanishing points--in order to slow down rather than pass over this landscape of his own childhood. Through these activities, Smithson demonstrates what it means to occupy a cultural "vanishing point.".
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
