Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson: Corner Mirror with Coral

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 270
Smithson's three mirrors in a corner create a structure both lucid and elusive: as each mirror reflects the space around it, it multiplies the reflections in the other mirrors, creating an image with the symmetry of a crystal. Mirrors appear often in Smithson's art, as do fragments of the natural world—here, there are pieces of coral piled in the angle where the mirrors meet. Smithson also combined mirrors with heaps of sand, gravel, and other rocks, matching nature's brute rubble with its precise visual twin. (The delicacy of the lacy pink coral is unusual in his work.)

The pairing of matter and reflection corresponds to another duality:

on the one hand, unshaped shards of stone or reef; on the other, art,

culpture, and the indoor space of the gallery.

One of the earthworks artists of the 1960s and 1970s, in other pieces smithson manipulated the natural landscape, sometimes simply and temporarily, through mirrors, sometimes drastically, with a bulldozer. Corner Mirror with Coral relates to his "Non-Sites," indoor works containing substances from an outdoor site elsewhere. Both cerebral and powerfully material, his art shows a fascination with entropy, the tendency of all structures and energies to lose their integrity. In this work a perfect form—the mirrors make three sides of a cube—is made illogical and illusory, for the coral seems to float in midair.

Surreal Landscapes

Surrel Landscapes

Link to Robert Smith and Land art video - how the jetty was constructed



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTx4Pp4aPXA

Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is located on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Using black basalt rocks and earth from the site, the artist created a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that stretches out counter-clockwise into the translucent red water. Spiral Jetty was acquired by Dia Art Foundation as a gift from the Estate of the artist in 1999.
http://www.spiraljetty.org/


http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/land-art.htm



Although this is an inspirational piece questions could be raised about the pollution in the water and the effect that the jetty had on marine life and the ecological system. Nature normally changes itself over a long period of time where the impact of change on the environemnt is slow and absrobed through the process or through natural disaters which cause drastic changes to a place or space which can have a detrimental effect. By creating such large pieces of land art it is certain to effect the natural process of things.


Whilst undertaking a recent project about surrealism I was experimetning with changes in the landscape and was looking to create images which could be linked with the aftermath of destruction or devastation due to fire or nuclear fall out. Using photoshop to manipulate the images I was able to change the environment thjat I had photographed without actually causing any major destruction to the naturally beautiful place.

This series of images are meant to interpret new life coming from devastation and the clear blue water is meant to symbolise fresh start.


This image is similar to that of Smithson who photographed the effect that the spiral jetty had caused in the water. The pollution was caused by the stones which coloured the water red.







My surreal landscapes are inspired by by both Robert Smithson and Simon Norfolk http://www.habitusmag.com/index.php?id=41&section=article