"American sculptor, painter, and writer. In his brief professional life Robert Smithson originated a new genre, Earthworks, which led to ensuing forms of Land art and equally influentially, wrote pungent essays. As Andy Warhol exemplifies the United States’ expansive, driven commercial optimism of the early 1960s, Smithson’s oeuvre makes him the icon of the abject Post-minimalist, anti-Establishment, Vietnam War era of the late 1960s through early 1970s...
...In a Dwan Gallery solo show (January 1968), Smithson presented his first Nonsite, (which he then also termed an ‘indoor earthwork’) as a dialectical reference to a specific ‘site’: Pine Barrens, New Jersey. Its design of six series of low bins of progressive heights that radiated from a hexagonal plate was taken from that of a desolate non-commercial airfield in an area of stunted trees demonstrates his anti-idealist attraction to marginal, deteriorated states. His prominent writings and presence in the New York art world stimulated others to work in earth, a move newly fashionable with the emerging social mood of environmentalism. The quasi-movement débuted in the Earthworks exhibition he and Dwan organized in October 1968...
...Leasing the land from the State, and fiscally aided by Dwan, in April 1970 Smithson supervised construction of a rock and dirt path (c. 457 m long and c. 4.6 m wide) extending into the shallow bay, the Spiral Jetty. Smithson’s film The Spiral Jetty shows him running its length to what he metaphorized as a ‘unicellular beginning’; a trek that art world pilgrims to this most-visited of the Earthworks sites follow."
Boettger, S. (1996-08-01). Smithson, Robert. Grove Art Online.Retrieved 19 Mar. 2018, from http://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000079366.
...In a Dwan Gallery solo show (January 1968), Smithson presented his first Nonsite, (which he then also termed an ‘indoor earthwork’) as a dialectical reference to a specific ‘site’: Pine Barrens, New Jersey. Its design of six series of low bins of progressive heights that radiated from a hexagonal plate was taken from that of a desolate non-commercial airfield in an area of stunted trees demonstrates his anti-idealist attraction to marginal, deteriorated states. His prominent writings and presence in the New York art world stimulated others to work in earth, a move newly fashionable with the emerging social mood of environmentalism. The quasi-movement débuted in the Earthworks exhibition he and Dwan organized in October 1968...
...Leasing the land from the State, and fiscally aided by Dwan, in April 1970 Smithson supervised construction of a rock and dirt path (c. 457 m long and c. 4.6 m wide) extending into the shallow bay, the Spiral Jetty. Smithson’s film The Spiral Jetty shows him running its length to what he metaphorized as a ‘unicellular beginning’; a trek that art world pilgrims to this most-visited of the Earthworks sites follow."
Boettger, S. (1996-08-01). Smithson, Robert. Grove Art Online.Retrieved 19 Mar. 2018, from http://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000079366.