That area of terror

Abstract

New Jersey artist Robert Smithson reveled in sites untouched by civilization: ‘I like landscapes that suggest prehistory’, he told an interviewer in 1973, just before his tragic death. ‘I was always interested in origins and primordial beginnings’. Augur of ecological collapse, Smithson maintained a strange connection to Northern Europe. Broken Circle / Spiral Hill (1971) – now meekly dissolving in a sand pit outside of Emmen – survives as the artist’s most famous ‘land reclamation’ project and the sole earthwork he completed outside of the United States. The Drenthe piece stands as a harbinger of what the artist may have achieved with his – not unproblematic – fusion of culture and land management: ‘With my work in the quarry I somehow re-organized a disrupted situation’. Smithson wrote of Broken Circle, ‘Holland [sic] is (…) completely cultivated and so much an earthwork itself’. Broken Circle, for its sake, extended Smithson’s dismantling of the bordered, overtly retinal artwork. And this, vaguely Duchampian, notion extended to the work’s material ontology.