"Robert Smithson (1938-1973), an artist of paramount importance in postwar America, created radical new perspectives for landscape architecture, photography, art criticism, and site-specific installation. His Spiral Jetty - a 1,500-foot-long coil of rock built in 1970 at the edge of the Great Salt Lake - is widely appreciated as one of the most significant art projects of the twentieth century. Less well known is the fact that the Jetty lies just a few miles from the Golden Spike National Historic Site, location of the completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad almost exactly a century earlier. The connection between the Spiral Jetty and the Golden Spike is but one facet of an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithson's work." "Mirror-Travels presents the first thorough investigation of Smithson's encounter with this and other histories as it focuses on the artist's idea of history itself. Spanning Smithson's career, from his little-known early religious paintings to his canonical earthworks of the 1970s, the book argues that Smithson's experiments with memory and temporality, along with his concern with what he called "continuance"
For young readers
Book data: Open Library