Word: smithson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hero, Charles Smithson, a young model of Victorian gentility redeemed by intelligence and irony, is an amateur naturalist and a postulant for the new faith of evolution. But he is still pledged to old pieties through his engagement to the shallow daughter of a rich London merchant. Fowles' strategy is to bring the contradictions of Charles' situation-and, by implication, of the Victorian age-to a crisis...
...artists find the concept so irresistible. Dennis Oppenheim displays a photograph of a giant nebula made out of aluminum chips that he sprinkled on a field out side New Haven, Conn. Michael Heizer shows a photograph of five holes he dug in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. Robert Smithson exhibits his Non-Site, five trapezoidal woodbins filled with chunks of ore, plus an aerial photograph of the mines in Franklin, N.J., whence they came. This is meant to allow the viewer to contemplate the fact that "140 minerals" are found in the earth of Franklin...
...Nothingness Isn't Negative." Two artists who master the minimum: Tony Smith, 54, whose 11-ft.-high Amaryllis is a black steel construction that bends like the Japanese art of origami, or paper folding, and Robert Smithson, 28, whose Alogon, also of black steel, cantilevers from the wall like a sawtooth set of staggered boxes. Their works are as unsettling as a spastic octopus sculpted by Michelangelo might have been...
Modular, faintly suggestive of children's blocks, Smith's and Smithson's sculptures seem like statements in the vocabulary of boxy, urban housing. Yet in accentuating the negative, they make symbolism out of skeletal form. "Art needs more thought and less manual dexterity," says Smithson. "Nothingness isn't negative-the drive to reach the moon is a preoccupation with desolate nothingness. But it's involved with the idea of exploration." Their search is to find poetry in emptiness...