Golden Age Smithson

Guest lecture by Lytle Shaw.

Abandoning the hot/cool opposition prominent in late 1960s art practice, Robert Smithson proposes instead in "A Sedimentation of the Mind" that artists explore a more fundamental contrast between the wet and the dry: "The wet mind enjoys 'pools and stains' of paint. 'Paint' itself appears to be a kind of liquefaction. Such wet eyes love to look on melting, dissolving, soaking surfaces." Beginning with how Smithson developed new ways to think about wet matter both within his own art and within color field painting (which often sought to repress its materiality), this lecture will then turn to the artist's one Dutch earthwork—"Broken Circle/Spiral Hill" (1971)—as a microcosm of the concerns explored by the first great “wet” artists, seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters. Like Smithson in his Dutch earthwork, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and Jan van Goyen developed a vocabulary organized around land reclamation and its threats—from dike breaks and swamps to mud puddles and ground abrasion. But rather than see these painters merely as evoking their country’s rise from the muck, the lecture seeks to demonstrate how they found ways, in their paint handling, to reenact the low-level drama of Dutch land reclamation, moving ultimately from Smithson’s liquefaction to liquefacture.

About

Lytle Shaw’s books include Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), The Moiré Effect (2012), Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (2013), Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018) and New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (2021). His museum publications include essays on Robert Smithson, Gerard Byrne, Zoe Leonard, and the Royal Art Lodge. Shaw is professor of English at New York University, a faculty member at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick, and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine.