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Artist or Maker: Robert Smithson (1938-1973)
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Provenance: John Weber Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner, 1987
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Exhibited: Athens, Athens School of Fine Arts, Everything That's Interesting is New: The Dakis Joannou Collection, January-April 1996, p. 250 (illustrated).
Oslo, The National Museum of Contemporary Art; Stockholm, Modern Museum, and Copenhagen, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Robert Smithson Retrospective-Works 1955-1973, February 1999-January 2000, p. 184, pl. 77 (illustrated in color).
Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; The Dallas Museum of Art; and New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Smithson, September 2004-October 2005, p. 120 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: Property from the Collection of Dakis Joannou
Both a major figure of the 1960s and an important influence today, Robert Smithson's oeuvre originated, or was a part of, the breakthroughs in Minimal and Conceptual Art, site-specific Earthworks, as well as the use of photography in Contemporary art. Since his untimely death in a plane crash in Tecovas Lake Texas, Smithson's achievement has been often cited, but seldom seen, which has recently been rectified by a major traveling retrospective.
Consisting of angular structure brightly painted yellow, filled in with reflective surfaces, Untitled, 1964 is an enigmatic sculpture, one that looks like a futuristic object or perhaps more accurately, what someone in the 1960s might think a futuristic object would look like. Smithson loved science-fiction and he created many works, including collages and drawings with space exploration as the theme.
Untitled, 1964 from a group of seminal early works which at the time were associated with Minimal sculpture along the lines of Donald Judd. And indeed, they were included in the 1966 exhibitions, Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Structure at the Finch College Museum of Art and the breakthrough Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum of Art in New York. His first solo exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in 1966 included many of his reductive sculptural works, and one critic called him "the spokesman for the so-called 'minimal sculptors' (J. Siegel, as quoted in Robert Smithson, New York, 2004, p. 21).
For Smithson, his sculptures were distinct from artists like Judd and Andre, stating "the earlier works that I was involved in really were not Minimal in that sense. They're really related more to crystalline notions of abstraction. There was a tendency toward abstraction but I never thought of isolating my objects in any particular way" (R. Smithson, Robert Smithson, New York, 2004, p. 84). This was in contrast to Judd, whose "specific objects" were meant to be completely self-referential. Smithson wanted his sculpture to engage architecture, "to the point that they 'undermined' the interior structure of the room (E. Tsai, ibid, p. 19).
Smithson was not interested in geometry--rather, these sculptures grew out of his fascination with natural elements, such as rock forms, and crystals. He had taken a trip to the Great Notch Quarry and was deeply moved, "The walls of the quarry did look dangerous. Cracked, decomposition, disintegration, rock creep, debris slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence" (R. Smithson, ibid, p. 20).
