The films created by the legendary artists move beyond pure documentation, adding layers of context and revealing insights into their respective practices.
Robert Smithson
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Robert Smithson’s Experiments in Entropy
Revisiting Smithson’s earthworks “Spiral Jetty” and “Partially Buried Woodshed,” which have dramatically changed 50 years later.
Posted inFilm
A Rediscovered Nancy Holt Documentary From 1970
The short documentary Utah Sequences, previously thought to be lost, purely displays Nancy Holt’s vision of time and place.
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Nancy Holt Brilliantly Emerges from the Shadows
In 2018, she became the first female Land artist in the Dia Art Foundation’s collection, but it has taken decades for Holt to gain recognition. A new exhibition argues she was truly an artistic innovator.
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A Pastel Portrait of Spiral Jetty and Its Environs
Spencer Finch, “Great Salt Lake and Vicinity” (2017), commissioned by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (all photos courtesy UMFA) In describing the surrounding landscape of Spiral Jetty in a 1972 essay, Robert Smithson gives us ample descriptions of color, from the “deposits of black basalt” to “shallow pinkish water” to his sublime view of “a […]
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When Art Refuses to Let Go
Delirious at the Met Breuer is an exhibition filled with beautiful but comparatively polite works by habitually transgressive artists.
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How Can Ecological Artists Move Beyond Aesthetic Gestures?
If art is to be relevant to the environment, it needs to move beyond an art context to engage with the land itself.
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As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, “Spiral Jetty” May Be Marooned
The lake that hosts Robert Smithson’s landmark earthwork is desiccating at an alarming rate.
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The Met Breuer Traces the Unfinished to the Deliberately Incomplete in Western Art
At a press preview earlier this month, Sheena Wagstaff, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chairwoman for modern and contemporary art, said that “arguably only the Met” could put on a show like Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.
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Robert Smithson’s Sacred and Profane Pop
Pop, an exhibition currently on view at James Cohan’s new Grand Street location, explores a more obscure phase of Robert Smithson’s tragically brief career: his figurative engagement with popular culture.
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A Documentary Mines the Stories of Three Pioneers of Land Art
In his new documentary, Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, filmmaker and art historian James Crump digs beneath the surface to explore the personal lives, artworks, and historical treatment of three land artists: Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smithson.
Posted inArt
Seeing Glass Boxes and Shards at Dia:Beacon
At Dia:Beacon there is an installation by Fred Sandback, a series of giant shapes formed from brightly colored string.