Robert Smithson. Selección de escritos (Robert Smithson. Selected writings)

Robert Smithson was one of the most revolutionary artists of the 20th century. His great work, Spiral Jetty, built in Great Salt Lake, Utah, contains the spirit of some of the greatest monuments of past civilizations, being contemporary in concept and execution. Smithson was a prolific and original writer whose views profoundly affected the course of contemporary art. This Selection of Writings brings together texts published by the artist in magazines such as Artforum, Arts International and Arts of Environment, between 1966 and 1973. His peculiar capacity for analysis, his critical approach to art and the social, cultural or economic dynamics generated around it, make his writings both intrinsic and independent to his artistic creation. Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey in 1938 and died in 1973 in Amarillo, Texas, in a tragic plane crash. A year earlier, he wrote: “I am not interested in works of art that suggest a ‘process’ within the metaphysical limits of a neutral room. There is no freedom in such behavioral games. The artist who behaves like a B.F. Skinner rat, who does ‘difficult tricks’ must be avoided. A contained process is not – in any way – a process. I am inclined towards an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements. As they exist in everyday life, independently of the representation”.