If there’s an artist who can be considered pivotal to our times, it is Robert Smithson. It was Smithson who, through the late 60s and early 70s, provided a huge shift in perspective for experience and knowledge in the new world.
He stabilised the post-War psychosis by shifting the focus of life from the human, the social, and the historical, to the cosmic. He brought together the play between recording machines, wandering, and psychosis, things I have referred to in my first three pieces, in his Land Art work to create new reasons to live creatively. Our times are replete with Smithson’s legacy in many registers—installation and site-specific art that define the contemporary, but above all, ecology, as we understand it in our times.
In an essay, Smithson wrote about a trip he made to his hometown of Passaic near New York in 1967. He recounts how he realised in a flash while watching construction sites that any moment in human history is but a layer in the stratigraphy of earth’s long histories.
This includes the monumental, hubristic moment of industrial modernity as well. These layers are all defined by a basic set of technologies that have not changed since the cosmos began.
A new context
Smithson’s guiding light was glass, his journey recounted through his encounter with glass/ silica in various forms—the mirrors in the car, the windows of parked cars, the window of a diner... All human history seen as a passage of technological memes preserved as stratigraphic layers, all technology nature-miming a basic code via mirrors in silica excavated from earth. The essay is marked by aimless wandering and in the wandering, the world is reassembled from the shards of shattered perception to produce a new context for life—the cosmos.
Land Artists like Smithson and fellow-travellers such as his wife Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris and Michael Heizer, amongst others, would make cosmic workings the code of their art. They would create gnomic earthworks such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a deconstructed Zen mandala consisting of a 450-metre-long spiral made of earth, salt, basalt and water, on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. New sculpture would look like this, a cosmic message scrawled across the face of the earth now appropriated as artist’s canvas. The art studio/ gallery was now a cosmic bonsai.
With the Land Art-IT connect, the psychosis of sci-fi dystopia flips over into a new Utopia.
The Land Artists, mostly sculptors by training, belonged to American Minimalist and Conceptual Art styles. They reduced artwork to the extent of doing away with the artwork itself. What mattered was only the concept underlying it in the artist’s head, a prime example of which was John Cage’s 4’33”, which was, well, 4’33” of silence.
But there was something else driving this new minimalism: information technology. Almost all Land Artists participated in the Art+Technology Lab run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art between 1967 and 1971, sponsored by a consortium of corporations who were laying out the first public infrastructure for the global IT networks we now live in.
Minimalism is key
What connects Land Art to public computation? The answer is energy/ resource routed through space research. Underlying all three was minimalism: that of cosmic energies, art and knowledge as code.
They came together under the overall minimalism of ergonomics or labour-saving technologies that have ruled science, media and policy from the 1960s onwards. Ergonomics, in turn, is harnessed towards a single aim: to simplify material life to the minimal, even to a hi-tech primitivism of sorts, in order to expand the consciousness of the individual. Land Art gave us a picture of futuristic primitive living off the earth in a rational use of energies powered by AI (Artificial Intelligence). In the process, one solved the key historical problem of energy use in population growth, the root of all human conflict. And minimalism saved the ecology.
With the Land Art-IT connect, the psychosis of sci-fi dystopia flips over into a new Utopia. Landscape made desolate by global wars becomes the source of a new knowledge order. Psychosis that in one part led to drugs was elsewhere leading to Space Age thought. Smithson’s unconscious canny would project his wanderings on earth to those of countercultural hippies and divert that space towards a new knowledge order.
Computation in Expanded Cinema would draw in the psychosis of the violent use of recording machines by the young. In short, all symptoms of trauma in history that were social, cultural and human were appropriated towards technologies of the virtual, culminating in the modern, where all social reality is virtualised in the new Utopia.
The Land Artists realised the new Utopia needed a new heroic reference point to replace the older frame of history: this was the cosmos. It is for this that public computation turned to artists for help in setting up its show. It is not just that art makes computation humane and even entertaining. Artistic intuition also grasps in an expansive vision the context for human life that science knows it must account for but cannot for one reason or the other.
The author is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at JNU. When not ordering food on various apps, he is writing about cinema and art.
