Tilbury Rundown; Displacing Smithson (2012), GCGCA(i)

Displacing Smithson

Floating Island, Manhattan

21 Jun - 22 Sep 2012

Displacing Smithson attempts to rediscover the critical meaning of the work of conceptual artist Robert Smithson, who became widely known for his ‘earthwork’ Spiral Jetty (1970).

Smithson's work has been received primarily within the terms of a debate about the meaning and possibilities of 'sculpture’. From Robert Hobbs, who organised the first major retrospective of his work at Cornell University in 1980 - symptomatically titled ‘Robert Smithson: Sculpture' - who claimed that ‘Smithson's major contribution as an artist was to enlarge the realm of sculptural space’, to similar claims made by the foremost American theorist of sculpture in the 1970s, Rosalind E. Krauss (prior to her semiotic turn in 1977 when she left her job as associate editor of Artforum and went to found October), for whom Smithson's ‘Spiral Jetty’ is emblematic of work being made at the time constituting a 'new syntax for sculpture', marking ‘the transformation of sculpture from a static, idealised medium to a temporal and material one.’

(Smithson Critical Reception Rundown 1): 'Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is': Displacing Smithson (2012), GCGCA(i)

CCCUCC (Centre for Curating Unrelated to Critical Categories); Displacing Smithson (2012), GCGCA(i)

However the terms of this earlier critical reception of Smithson's work flies in the face of Smithson's explicit rejection of the medium-specific modernist formalism that Krauss was extending in order to save Greenberg's medium-specific modernist formalist project (’Sculpture in the Expanded Field’).

The Ghost of Krauss; Displacing Smithson (2012), GCGCA(i)

Demonstrating how dominant forms of reception can fatally restrict our understanding (and experience) of art presenting his oeuvre instead as a bewildering chain reaction of creative practices and forms that continue to defy existing conceptions of what art is; from the displacements of materials at his ‘sites’ and ‘non-sites’, to magazine works, slide-lectures and extended architectural projects. (His work was also accompanied by extensive writings and interviews, the full critical significance of which for current practices remains to be explored.)

(Smithson Critical Reception Rundown 2): 'A road that goes forward and backward between things and places that are elsewhere. You might even say that the road is nowhere in particular. The disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture': Displacing Smithson (2012), GCGCA(i)

Staged on Floating Island (the realisation of a project never realised during Smithsons’s lifetime) amongst earth, rocks and native trees and shrubs, on a barge being towed by a tugboat around the island of Manhattan, ‘Smithson’ is displaced as he is currently critically received or understood (demonstrating how dominant forms of reception can fatally restrict our understanding (and experience) of art), instead presenting his oeuvre instead as a bewildering chain reaction of creative practices and forms that continue to defy existing conceptions of what art is; from the displacements of materials at his ‘sites’ and ‘non-sites’, to magazine works, slide-lectures and extended architectural projects. 

1968-2018: The Gradual Erosion of Politics from Art on the Hypothetical Island of Art + Politics; Displacing Smithson (2012), GCGCA(i)