Robert Smithson. The invention of Landscape

Upon the news of Robert Smithson’s untimely death, Michael Kimmelman, editor of The New York Times, summarily declared the artist – born in Rutherford New Jersey and perished at the age of thirty-five in a plane crash in 1973 whilst working on a new piece – to be the »James Dean of Art«. A certain parallelism aside, the appellation is due to the ­phenomenal effect of Robert Smithson’s site-specific earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah that Kimmelman called an »icon of Americana«. And in his artistic and theoretical work, Robert Smithson was concerned with ­nothing less than fundamentals of this sort – Postminimalism, Land Art and artistic self-perception. In this way, Spiral Jetty has become legend through the eponymous film that oscillates between fiction and documentation.