Anodyne
Monday, October 18, 2004
 
Rackstraw Downes on Robert Smithson (among many other things)

"Smithson was a very brilliant polemicist for what he was doing. He died very young, and that was very sad because obviously he was an extremely daring and free-spirited man. He was not held back by any constraints; he tried all sorts of wild things. That’s very important, to have such people around. He broke a lot of ice, and I have a great deal of respect for that. My connection to Smithson came when I started working in New Jersey, where Smithson came from. In New Jersey you see what he would have called entropy very much at work with things which he considered wasted or used up. I have a slightly different idea: I think there’s a certain hypocrisy in our attitude to landscape. We give it a role in our mental construction of the world, that it is somehow pure and outside us and separate from us and over there, and we’re over here, and what we do is impure compared to nature, or dirty, or somehow that we’re not worthy of nature. Alternatively, there is a view that man is the center of everything and measure of everything and therefore we’re greater than nature. For me, we’re part of it. I can’t paint a landscape without some notion of man being in there."
- posted by cjb @ 5:22 PM


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