Robert Smithson: Abstract Cartography

In 1966 Smithson was part of a symposium at Yale University, where he discussed the idea of the city as a crystalline network. In the audience was a representative of the architectural consulting firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton who was working on a proposal for a new Texas regional airport between Dallas and Fort Worth. Right after the talk, Smithson was invited to join the team in “trying to figure out what an airport is. I invented this job for myself as artist-consultant.” He set about the task by studying maps, surveys, reports, specifications, and construction models. Smithson saw the potential airport as a universe resting “on a firmament of statistics;” and he considered the vast terminal site as a crystal network.

An autodidact, Smithson's interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science fiction, popular culture and language spiral through his work. From his landmark earthworks to his 'quasi-minimalist' sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and ecologically charged earthworks, Smithson's ideas are profoundly urgent for our times. By exploring the conceptual and physical boundaries of landscape Smithson raised questions about our place in the world, their relevance heightened as the dangers of global warming move ever closer.

Although the scheme did not come to fruition, seeing art from the air consolidated a new interest in mapping, perspective, and scale for Smithson. If one can travel high enough, our planet can be seen in its completeness, an island in the ocean of the universe. Smithson cut existing maps into fragments, shifted their projections, layered them, altered scale using photostats of progressive sizes, and explored the distorting perspectives of longitude and latitude. In the sculpture Shift (1967) these projections are applied to three-dimensions, leading to a collapsed system and a slide into entropy, charted in careful drawings.

Abstract Cartography presents in the North Gallery a wall of maps, a collection of charted conceptual islands and continents, and the film Mono Lake (1968/2004), made with Nancy Holt. Mono Lake is concerned with a journey and destination. It documents Smithson, Holt, and Michael Heizer as the three artists explore one of the oldest lakes in North America on July 28, 1968. They are seen on the road, rustling maps and consulting rock hounding guides, and Smithson gathers from the site material for Mono Lake Nonsite (Cinders Near Black Point) (1968). Smithson’s Nonsites are three-dimensional maps of matter. He described them as “indoor earthworks;” they bring material from site into the museum—the Nonsite—with the travel between the two points creating “a vast metaphor” that is as abstract as the maps we use to locate ourselves. Abstract Cartography includes a rarely seen photowork for the 1968-69 Double Nonsite, California and Nevada.

Smithson noted that “the map has exercised a fascination over the minds of artists,” referring to himself and writers important to him.  He pointed to Jorge Luis Borges and Lewis Carroll who described maps as fictions, approximations of reality, interpretations always pointing elsewhere. Cartographers drop a grid on to the globe to fix its surface into neat parcels to contain information—a logical system that is also entirely abstract—while geological surveyors build layers to represent the surface of the Earth. Smithson applied these methods to his radical rethinking of sculpture, pulling the maps apart to rethink place and cartographic communication. Considering cartography as an abstraction of landscape, Smithson mapped his ideas on to airports, ruins, swamps, industrial sites, suburbs, and the edges of landmasses to make entropy visible and rethink how scale, site, and sculpture can be understood.

A selection of writings by Robert Smithson, along with portraits and images of artwork from Abstract Cartography, is available in an illustrated newspaper as a part of the exhibition. These essays reveal the underlying concepts behind his artistic process during the late 60s and early 70s; the extent of the substantial and varied research applied to the artist's works; and the impetus for creating aerial art.  

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