Word: smithson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unusual but not unprecedented for a nation to be represented at the Biennale by an artist who's no longer living. Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, was the U.S. representative nine years later. All the same, the choice of a dead artist denies the important Biennale spotlight to a living one. Before and after his death, but especially after, Gonzalez-Torres' work was widely circulated around the museum world. But it was a brief life, a relatively small output, and it's been seen quite a bit. So there's no sense of surprise...
...addition to more than 550 photographs (nearly half in color), essays by art historians chart the changes in sculpture from traditional men on horseback to imposing abstractions that are set against desolate landscapes or take up acres and even miles. Examples include Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah and Christo's 24˝-mile-long nylon Running Fence in California. These and more familiar pieces by Auguste Rodin, Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder are investigated with intellectual rigor and inviting illustrations...
...work as a kind of debasement of painting itself. And according to some scholars, this material quality is one of the most art-historically significant qualities of his work. It is the quality most influental on the next generation of American artists, for example Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson. (Warhol explicitly exaggerated the base connotations of Pollock’s painting in his so called “Piss Paintings,” which he made by urinating onto—and thereby oxidizing—canvasses that had been coverd in metallic pigments. Smithson explored similar ideas...
...soon are remote, most of the terrorism experts consulted by TIME agree. For starters, it takes a lot more money to build, research or steal a weapon of mass destruction than to hijack a plane or unleash a truck bomb. It also takes a lot more brainpower. Says Amy Smithson, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the Henry Stimson Center in Washington: "I can sit here and dream up thousands of nightmare scenarios, but there are a lot of technical and logistical hurdles that stand between us and those scenarios...
...Tokyo in 1995, killed only a dozen people. One reason is that the delivery method was crude: cultists dropped plastic bags of sarin (smuggled in lunch boxes and soft-drink containers) on a subway platform and pierced them with umbrella tips. Also the amounts were relatively small. Says Smithson: "Any bozo can make a chemical agent in a beaker, but producing tons and tons is difficult." Aum Shinrikyo tried to make the stuff in bulk, recruiting scientists and spending at least $10 million, but it failed...