Harold Smithson News Today

Robert Smithson, the pioneering land artist, repeatedly said that his art was a clear distillation of his essential self, and should be free of any bi

Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson. By Suzaan Boettger. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 440 pages.ASTONISHINGLY, it has taken fifty years since his death for a “life” of Robert Smithson to emerge. Then again, the endlessly polysemous nature of Smithson’s art, the vertiginous heap of writing on him already out there, and his own profound ambivalence toward the very enterprise of history—collective and personal—make him a rather daunting subject. The prospective Smit...