Robert Smithson and the American Landscape

This volume comprises a social history of Robert Smithson’s earthworks and their critical reception. In his analysis of the artist’s personal writings and art works, Ron Graziani demonstrates how the earthworks were part of an aesthetic and civic fault line that ruptured in the 1960s. Moreover, Graziani reveals how Smithson’s earthworks formed part of the “new conservationism” in the late 1960s and how it gave material form to the contradictions of a sociological issue, inseparable from its economic legacy.

Provides context of the social history of the mining industry and the ecological movement in the 1960s
Close readings of specific artworks
Critical analysis of postmodern theory